"However novel it may appear, I shall venture the assertion, that, until women assume the place in society which good sense and good feeling alike assign to them, human improvement must advance but feebly"
About this Quote
Progress is throttled, Frances Wright argues, not by a shortage of genius or industry but by a structural insult: the deliberate misplacement of half the population. The sentence moves like a polemic dressed in manners. She opens with “However novel it may appear,” anticipating the eye-roll of polite society and naming its complacency before it can speak. Then comes the calculated bravado of “I shall venture the assertion,” a phrase that performs the risk she’s taking. In an era when women’s public speech itself was treated as transgression, even the grammar carries a raised chin.
Wright’s real trick is in her appeal to “good sense and good feeling.” She refuses to pitch women’s rights as a niche grievance or a sentimental plea. Instead, she frames it as the joint verdict of reason and empathy, a two-pronged standard that exposes her opponents as either irrational or cold. “Assume the place in society” is deliberately double-edged: it implies women’s agency, but it also indicts the gatekeeping that has kept that “place” from being available. The kicker is “human improvement must advance but feebly,” a Victorian-era mic drop. Women’s inequality isn’t just unjust; it’s inefficient, a drag on progress itself.
Context matters: Wright was a transatlantic reformer in the early 19th century, speaking into a culture that celebrated republican liberty while treating female independence as destabilizing. Her intent is not only to defend women, but to embarrass modernity into living up to its own self-image.
Wright’s real trick is in her appeal to “good sense and good feeling.” She refuses to pitch women’s rights as a niche grievance or a sentimental plea. Instead, she frames it as the joint verdict of reason and empathy, a two-pronged standard that exposes her opponents as either irrational or cold. “Assume the place in society” is deliberately double-edged: it implies women’s agency, but it also indicts the gatekeeping that has kept that “place” from being available. The kicker is “human improvement must advance but feebly,” a Victorian-era mic drop. Women’s inequality isn’t just unjust; it’s inefficient, a drag on progress itself.
Context matters: Wright was a transatlantic reformer in the early 19th century, speaking into a culture that celebrated republican liberty while treating female independence as destabilizing. Her intent is not only to defend women, but to embarrass modernity into living up to its own self-image.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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