"Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience"
About this Quote
Wollstonecraft isn’t asking for women to be treated more gently; she’s threatening a whole social operating system. The line is engineered like a lever: “strengthen” sounds innocuous, even agreeable, until you realize the proposed method is “enlarging” the mind - education, intellectual range, civic literacy. Then comes the payload: blind obedience doesn’t get softened or negotiated away; it ends. Not reformed. Ended.
The intent is surgical. Wollstonecraft targets the root mechanism that keeps women compliant: not temperament, not “nature,” but enforced smallness. “Blind” is doing heavy work here, implying obedience that’s less virtue than sensory deprivation. If you deny someone knowledge, you can call their submission moral. Give them mental breadth and the moral costume falls apart.
The subtext is almost accusatory toward the era’s dominant ideal of femininity. Eighteenth-century Britain marketed female “virtue” as delicacy and dependence, a kind of socially approved weakness. Wollstonecraft flips the script: what’s praised as virtue is actually a political technology, training women to defer to fathers, husbands, clergy, custom. Her remedy isn’t rebellion for its own sake; it’s competence. An “enlarged” mind can evaluate, choose, consent - all the things obedience conveniently bypasses.
Context matters: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman lands amid the aftershocks of the French Revolution, when “rights” were the fashionable noun and women were still expected to clap politely from the balcony. Wollstonecraft insists that a society built on reason can’t keep half its population in cultivated ignorance without exposing itself as a fraud.
The intent is surgical. Wollstonecraft targets the root mechanism that keeps women compliant: not temperament, not “nature,” but enforced smallness. “Blind” is doing heavy work here, implying obedience that’s less virtue than sensory deprivation. If you deny someone knowledge, you can call their submission moral. Give them mental breadth and the moral costume falls apart.
The subtext is almost accusatory toward the era’s dominant ideal of femininity. Eighteenth-century Britain marketed female “virtue” as delicacy and dependence, a kind of socially approved weakness. Wollstonecraft flips the script: what’s praised as virtue is actually a political technology, training women to defer to fathers, husbands, clergy, custom. Her remedy isn’t rebellion for its own sake; it’s competence. An “enlarged” mind can evaluate, choose, consent - all the things obedience conveniently bypasses.
Context matters: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman lands amid the aftershocks of the French Revolution, when “rights” were the fashionable noun and women were still expected to clap politely from the balcony. Wollstonecraft insists that a society built on reason can’t keep half its population in cultivated ignorance without exposing itself as a fraud.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
|---|---|
| Source | A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1792. |
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