"Surely it is time to examine into the meaning of words and the nature of things, and to arrive at simple facts, not received upon the dictum of learned authorities, but upon attentive personal observation of what is passing around us"
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Impatience radiates off this sentence: not the dreamy kind, but the reformer’s refusal to keep living under other people’s definitions. Wright isn’t politely requesting a seminar on epistemology; she’s issuing a democratic challenge to the knowledge economy of her day, when “learned authorities” (clergy, elite educators, inherited thinkers) functioned as a kind of gatekeeping priesthood. Her opening “Surely” performs a rhetorical shove: if you disagree, you’re the one being unreasonable.
The phrase “meaning of words” is the tell. Wright understands that power lives in vocabulary before it lives in laws. Who gets to define “virtue,” “nature,” “woman,” “labor,” “freedom”? In the early 19th century, those definitions were routinely weaponized to justify hierarchy while pretending it was common sense. By pairing words with “the nature of things,” she stitches language to material reality: stop arguing from inherited labels and start checking what actually happens to bodies, wages, prisons, schools, marriages.
Her alternative method is pointedly modern: “simple facts” earned through “attentive personal observation.” That’s not just empiricism; it’s a politics of self-trust. She’s inviting ordinary people to treat their lived experience as legitimate data, not anecdote. The subtext is anti-deference: if authorities have been wrong - or self-serving - then obedience becomes a moral failure, not a virtue.
Contextually, this is the activist’s toolkit in sentence form: dismantle the prestige of tradition, re-anchor truth in the visible world, and make skepticism feel like civic duty rather than insolence.
The phrase “meaning of words” is the tell. Wright understands that power lives in vocabulary before it lives in laws. Who gets to define “virtue,” “nature,” “woman,” “labor,” “freedom”? In the early 19th century, those definitions were routinely weaponized to justify hierarchy while pretending it was common sense. By pairing words with “the nature of things,” she stitches language to material reality: stop arguing from inherited labels and start checking what actually happens to bodies, wages, prisons, schools, marriages.
Her alternative method is pointedly modern: “simple facts” earned through “attentive personal observation.” That’s not just empiricism; it’s a politics of self-trust. She’s inviting ordinary people to treat their lived experience as legitimate data, not anecdote. The subtext is anti-deference: if authorities have been wrong - or self-serving - then obedience becomes a moral failure, not a virtue.
Contextually, this is the activist’s toolkit in sentence form: dismantle the prestige of tradition, re-anchor truth in the visible world, and make skepticism feel like civic duty rather than insolence.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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