"Slavery to monarchs and ministers, which the world will be long freeing itself from, and whose deadly grasp stops the progress of the human mind, is not yet abolished"
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Monarchy and ministerial rule aren’t just bad politics for Wollstonecraft; they’re a technology of mental captivity. The opening phrase, “Slavery to monarchs and ministers,” is a deliberate provocation from a writer who lived in the age of revolutions and counterrevolutions, when “liberty” was being loudly advertised while hierarchy stayed stubbornly intact. By yoking deference to crowns and cabinets to the language of slavery, she performs a rhetorical jailbreak: obedience stops looking like tradition or stability and starts reading as coerced submission.
The real target is subtler than any one king. “Deadly grasp” suggests something parasitic and intimate, a power that doesn’t merely restrict bodies but colonizes thought, “stops the progress of the human mind.” That’s classic Wollstonecraft: oppression is not only a set of laws but a pedagogy. People are trained into smallness - taught to admire rank, to outsource moral judgment, to confuse loyalty with virtue. The “world will be long freeing itself from” carries a bracing impatience with reformist timelines. She’s warning that political change without psychological emancipation is a costume swap, not a revolution.
Context sharpens the edge. Writing in the late 18th century, amid debates ignited by the French Revolution and the British establishment’s anxious backlash, Wollstonecraft is pressing the Enlightenment’s promise to its logical end. If reason is the measure of human dignity, then any system demanding automatic reverence is an assault on the mind itself. The sentence refuses comfort: abolition isn’t a moment; it’s a long, contested unlearning.
The real target is subtler than any one king. “Deadly grasp” suggests something parasitic and intimate, a power that doesn’t merely restrict bodies but colonizes thought, “stops the progress of the human mind.” That’s classic Wollstonecraft: oppression is not only a set of laws but a pedagogy. People are trained into smallness - taught to admire rank, to outsource moral judgment, to confuse loyalty with virtue. The “world will be long freeing itself from” carries a bracing impatience with reformist timelines. She’s warning that political change without psychological emancipation is a costume swap, not a revolution.
Context sharpens the edge. Writing in the late 18th century, amid debates ignited by the French Revolution and the British establishment’s anxious backlash, Wollstonecraft is pressing the Enlightenment’s promise to its logical end. If reason is the measure of human dignity, then any system demanding automatic reverence is an assault on the mind itself. The sentence refuses comfort: abolition isn’t a moment; it’s a long, contested unlearning.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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