Education Quote by Mary Wollstonecraft

Wollstonecraft is smuggling a radical idea into a sentence that sounds almost like a truism: if people are formed by “opinions and manners,” then inequality isn’t nature’s verdict, it’s society’s handiwork. The line refuses the favorite alibi of her era (and ours) that women’s supposed limitations are innate. Instead, she points the finger at the social ecosystem: the everyday expectations, rituals, and rewards that teach people who they’re allowed to become.

The phrasing does quiet rhetorical work. “Must be educated” makes socialization feel compulsory, not optional, and “in a great degree” preempts the rebuttal that individual character explains everything. Education here isn’t just books and tutors; it’s the constant curriculum of approval and shame. “Opinions and manners” pairs ideology with etiquette, collapsing the distance between lofty beliefs and small behaviors. A society can preach virtue while training women in performance, dependence, and deference; it can call that “feminine” and then pretend it’s destiny.

Context sharpens the edge. Writing in the wake of Enlightenment talk about rights and reason, Wollstonecraft saw how universal principles were being selectively applied. Her broader project in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is to expose the feedback loop: women are denied serious education, then blamed for being “frivolous,” then pushed deeper into the very manners that produce frivolity. The intent isn’t merely descriptive. It’s an argument for responsibility: if society authors the script, society can rewrite it.