Life & Wisdom Quote by Mary Wollstonecraft

Wollstonecraft’s sentence cuts with the kind of moral impatience that comes from watching a society manufacture “nature” out of neglect. She refuses the flattering myth of feminine delicacy and replaces it with an indictment: women “seldom” have meaningful work, and when you deny people purpose, their interior life has nowhere to go but louder. “Employment” here isn’t just wages; it’s intellectual occupation, the sustained use of attention that gives feelings a frame instead of letting them run the household.

The phrasing is surgical. “Little cares” and “vain pursuits” aren’t neutral hobbies; they’re the sanctioned distractions of a domestic culture that keeps women busy without letting them become powerful. “Frittering away” implies not relaxation but waste, a system designed to drain “strength of mind” the way a slow leak empties a vessel. Even “organs” carries an Enlightenment-era materialism: she’s arguing that habits and social arrangements reshape the body’s capacities, not merely the soul’s.

The sting lands in the final clause: reduced to “objects of sense.” That’s not a compliment about sensuality; it’s a description of a person forced into being looked at, appraised, consumed. Wollstonecraft is writing in the revolutionary afterglow of the 1790s, when “rights” were being debated as if they belonged to mankind by default. Her subtext is blunt: if women appear frivolous, emotional, decorative, it’s because the culture has made decoration their job. Give them real work and real education, and the so-called “nature” evaporates.