Life & Wisdom Quote by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

There is acid in the phrase "slavish bondage": it drags the cozy Victorian ideal of filial duty into the language of captivity, daring the reader to hear obedience as something closer to coercion than virtue. Shelley is not scolding parents so much as indicting a culture that sanctifies their authority until it becomes an internal prison. The target is "slavish" devotion, the kind of loyalty that doesn’t just respect guidance but substitutes it for judgment.

The verb choice matters. "Cramps" is bodily, almost medical, suggesting atrophy from disuse. It implies that the mind has faculties the way a body has limbs: meant to stretch, strain, and grow strong through independent motion. Dependence becomes not merely an ethical problem but a developmental one. The subtext is political, too: a society built on hierarchy reproduces itself first inside the household. If you train children to obey without reasoning, you don’t get moral citizens; you get compliant subjects.

In Shelley's orbit, that argument carries extra voltage. She grows out of Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminist critique of domestic tyranny and the education systems that keep women ornamental and men unreflective. Read alongside the Romantic era’s suspicion of inherited authority - and in the long shadow of revolution and reaction - the line becomes a compact manifesto for self-making. It’s also a warning about how "care" can curdle into control. The most effective bondage is the one that calls itself love, then quietly narrows the imagination until nothing else feels possible.