Love & Passion Quote by Mary Wollstonecraft

Wollstonecraft cuts straight through the sugar-coating of “politeness” and shows the bruise underneath. What looks like chivalry, she argues, is a social technology: a way of keeping women small while making men feel large. The phrase “trivial attentions” is doing pointed work. It’s not that women are denied attention; they’re flooded with the wrong kind, the kind that substitutes compliments and courtesies for rights, education, and autonomy. A bouquet becomes a gag.

Her real target is the self-congratulating masculinity of her era. “Men think it manly” exposes how gender roles reproduce themselves through performance: men rehearse superiority by offering women protection, praise, and deference that quietly presumes female weakness. The subtext is brutal: the transaction isn’t generosity; it’s governance. Women are invited to accept a flattering cage, and refusal reads as ingratitude.

The line lands in the context of the late Enlightenment, when revolutions were redefining “the rights of man” while leaving women conspicuously outside the new political imagination. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Wollstonecraft argues that sentimentality and “feminine” refinement aren’t natural virtues but cultivated dependencies. Her rhetorical move is to reframe courtesy as degradation - “systematically,” not accidentally - and to indict men for mistaking domination for honor. It’s an early, incisive diagnosis of benevolent sexism: power that smiles while it pushes.