Love Quote by Mary Wollstonecraft

Wollstonecraft pulls off a radical sleight of hand: she grants affection and companionship to men, then surgically denies them authority. “I love my man as my fellow” is a deliberately disarming opening, the kind that slips past the era’s reflexive defensiveness. But the sentence immediately tightens into a rebuttal of patriarchal power: the “scepter” is named like a prop from monarchy, then punctured with “real, or usurped,” a jab that treats male dominance as either inherited theater or outright theft. She’s not negotiating for kinder masters; she’s questioning the legitimacy of mastery itself.

The pivot is her core move: if any “homage” is owed, it’s owed to “the reason of an individual,” not to sex, rank, or custom. That clause recodes submission as something voluntarily, rationally chosen - a temporary deference to an argument, not a permanent deference to a person. It’s Enlightenment language deployed as a battering ram against domestic tyranny: if reason is the standard by which political authority is judged, then the household can’t be exempt just because tradition says so.

Context matters. Writing in the 1790s, in the wake of revolutionary debates about rights and sovereignty, Wollstonecraft is calling out a culture that can speak passionately about liberty while quietly running a mini-monarchy at home. The subtext is crisp: if men demand to be treated as citizens rather than subjects, they cannot keep insisting women remain subjects in private. Equality begins not with sentiment, but with refusing the crown - even when it’s disguised as love.