Education Quote by Mary Wollstonecraft

Wollstonecraft doesn’t ask a polite question; she lays a trap. “If women be educated for dependence” is phrased like a conditional, but it’s really an indictment of a whole social machine: upbringing as a technology for producing compliance. The line’s force comes from how quickly it moves from the domestic to the political. “Dependence” isn’t framed as romance or protection; it’s a training regimen to “act according to the will of another fallible being.” Fallible is the key knife-twist. If men are ordinary, error-prone humans, why should women be raised to treat male authority as moral law?

The subtext is that obedience is not neutral. “Submit, right or wrong, to power” names the scandal: deference becomes a habit that can sanctify cruelty and stupidity alike. Wollstonecraft is writing in the wake of Enlightenment promises and revolutionary rhetoric, when “reason” and “rights” were circulating as universal ideals that somehow kept stopping at the parlor door. She’s exposing that contradiction with a slippery-slope question: once you teach submission as virtue, what principle limits it? If “right or wrong” doesn’t matter, then neither does conscience, nor justice, nor even the stability of the society that relies on women as moral educators of children.

Contextually, this is the argument of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman sharpened into a single sentence: education is destiny disguised as etiquette. Wollstonecraft’s intent is not simply to elevate women; it’s to deny tyranny its favorite alibi, the idea that dependence is “natural” when it has been carefully manufactured.