Wollstonecraft on the Rights of Woman

Original Quote

"I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves."

— Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Chapter 4

Author

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 - 1797) was an English writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights whose work represents one of the foundational moments in the history of feminist thought. Born in London to a family of declining fortunes, Wollstonecraft received little formal education but educated herself through reading, observation, and intellectual association. She worked as a lady's companion, governess, and schoolteacher before establishing herself as a writer, and her early experiences of the economic precarity and educational deprivation imposed on women shaped the philosophical arguments that would make her famous.

Wollstonecraft's intellectual career was embedded in the radical Enlightenment circles of late eighteenth-century London. She was associated with the publisher Joseph Johnson, whose house served as a meeting place for Dissenting intellectuals, political radicals, and reformers. She wrote on education, on the conduct of women, and on the political upheavals of her time, including the French Revolution, which she championed in A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) — a passionate response to Edmund Burke's critique of the Revolution. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), her most influential work, extended the Enlightenment language of natural rights to women, arguing that women are rational beings whose subordination is not natural but artificial — the product of inadequate education and systematic cultural degradation.

Wollstonecraft's personal life was as unconventional as her philosophy. She had a daughter, Fanny Imlay, with the American adventurer Gilbert Imlay, and later married the philosopher William Godwin, with whom she had a daughter, Mary — who would become Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. Wollstonecraft died of complications from childbirth at the age of thirty-eight, cutting short a career that had already produced some of the most provocative and influential arguments for women's equality in the history of Western thought.

Source

The quote appears in Chapter 4 of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, titled "The State of Degradation to Which Woman Is Reduced by Various Causes." In this chapter, Wollstonecraft examines the cultural and educational forces that have rendered women what she calls "spaniels" and "toys" — creatures bred for frivolity, dependence, and the pleasure of men. She argues that women's apparent inferiority in reason, virtue, and accomplishment is not natural but produced by a system that denies them education, independence, and the exercise of their rational faculties.

The immediate context of the quote is Wollstonecraft's discussion of power and its relationship to gender. She has been arguing that the current system gives men power over women — legal, economic, social, and physical power — and that this power corrupts both parties: it makes men tyrannical and women manipulative, because women must use indirect means to influence a world in which they have no direct authority. The quote comes as Wollstonecraft clarifies what she is and is not demanding. She is not demanding that women be given power over men — that would simply reverse the hierarchy and reproduce the same corruption in mirror image. She is demanding that women be given power over themselves: the power of rational self-governance, economic independence, educational opportunity, and moral agency that Enlightenment thought had identified as the birthright of every human being.

Historical Context

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published in 1792, at the high tide of Enlightenment radicalism and in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution. The language of natural rights — articulated by Locke in the seventeenth century and given revolutionary force by the American and French declarations — had established the principle that all human beings possess inherent rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Wollstonecraft's genius was to recognize that this language, if taken seriously, applied to women as much as to men. The "rights of man" were not the rights of males; they were the rights of humanity, and their denial to women was a violation of the very principles on which the Enlightenment had been built.

The intellectual context of the Vindication included the conduct-book tradition — the popular literature that instructed women in the arts of pleasing men, maintaining domestic virtue, and accepting their subordinate station. Wollstonecraft explicitly attacked this tradition, arguing that it corrupted women by teaching them to value beauty, delicacy, and compliance over reason, strength, and virtue. She also engaged with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose Emile (1762) had advocated a radically different education for Sophie (the female counterpart to Emile) than for Emile himself — an education designed to make Sophie pleasing and subservient rather than rational and autonomous. Wollstonecraft devoted an entire chapter to refuting Rousseau's account of women's education, arguing that it instantiated the very degradation that Enlightenment principles should condemn.

The political context was equally charged. The French Revolution had raised the question of who counts as a citizen — and the answer, in both France and England, was emphatically male. Olympe de Gouges's Declaration of the Rights of Woman (1791) had made the same argument as Wollstonecraft on the other side of the Channel, and de Gouges would be guillotined in 1793 for her political temerity. Wollstonecraft's Vindication was part of a broader movement of women's political assertion that the revolutionary moment had made possible and that the revolutionary settlement would subsequently suppress.

Philosophical Interpretation

The quote's philosophical significance lies in its precise redefinition of what equality demands. Wollstonecraft does not seek power over men — she does not advocate matriarchy, or the reversal of gender hierarchy, or the domination of women over men. What she seeks is self-determination: the power of rational self-governance that Enlightenment thought had identified as the essence of human dignity. This is a crucial distinction, because it locates the wrong of women's subordination not in the identity of the ruler but in the fact of being ruled. The problem is not that men rule rather than women; the problem is that any human being should be ruled by another rather than by their own reason.

This position has deep philosophical roots. It draws on the Kantian conception of autonomy as the capacity to legislate moral law for oneself — to be governed not by inclination, authority, or external compulsion but by one's own rational understanding of what duty requires. Wollstonecraft extends this Kantian insight to women: if autonomy is the essence of human dignity, and if women are human beings, then women must be granted the conditions of autonomy — education, economic independence, legal standing, and the freedom to exercise their rational faculties. To deny women these conditions is not merely to disadvantage them practically but to deny their humanity, to reduce them from persons to things — from ends in themselves to means for the pleasure and convenience of others.

The quote also articulates a sophisticated understanding of power. Power over others — whether exercised by men over women or by women over men — is corrupting, because it treats other human beings as instruments rather than as ends. Power over oneself — self-governance, self-discipline, the rational ordering of one's own life — is the only form of power that is consistent with human dignity, because it is the power that a rational being exercises over itself rather than over another. Wollstonecraft's distinction between these two forms of power allows her to advocate for women's empowerment without advocating for domination, and to ground women's rights in the same Enlightenment principles that grounded the rights of all human beings.

The educational dimension of Wollstonecraft's argument is inseparable from her account of power. Women cannot exercise power over themselves — cannot be autonomous, rational, self-governing — unless they are educated. The denial of education is the denial of the precondition of autonomy, and it is this denial that Wollstonecraft identifies as the root of women's degradation. Women appear frivolous, irrational, and dependent not because they are naturally so but because they have been systematically denied the education that would develop their rational capacities. The remedy is not to accept women's apparent nature and accommodate it but to change the conditions that have produced that appearance — to educate women as rational beings and to allow the natural equality of human faculties to manifest itself.

Related Concepts

• Equality — The central concept of the quote: Wollstonecraft's demand that women be granted the same rights, education, and opportunities as men, grounded in the Enlightenment principle that all human beings possess equal rational and moral capacities.
• Purpose — The quote implies that women, like men, are entitled to determine their own purpose — to direct their own lives through the exercise of reason rather than having their purpose defined by others.
• Dignity — The philosophical foundation of Wollstonecraft's argument: the inherent, non-negotiable worth of every human being that grounds the right to self-governance and the demand that no person be treated as a means to another's ends.

Learning Path

1. Begin with Equality to understand the Enlightenment principle that Wollstonecraft extends to women — the claim that all human beings possess equal rational and moral capacities and are therefore entitled to equal rights, education, and opportunities.
2. Study Purpose to explore the dimension of self-determination that the quote implies — the right of every person to direct their own life through the exercise of reason rather than having their path determined by others.
3. Examine Dignity to understand the philosophical foundation of Wollstonecraft's argument — the inherent worth of every human being that grounds the demand for self-governance and the rejection of domination.
4. Reflect on how Wollstonecraft's insight connects to the broader inquiry into purpose and life's questions, and consider how the wisdom gathered in Understanding Yourself applies to the project of self-governance that the quote demands.
5. Consider the contemporary relevance of Wollstonecraft's distinction between power over others and power over oneself, and the ongoing struggle to create social, economic, and educational conditions that allow all persons — regardless of gender — to exercise the rational self-governance that the Enlightenment identified as the essence of human dignity.