Mary Wollstonecraft on the Rights of Women

Quote

"I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves."

— Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Chapter 4 (1792)

Historical Context

Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, in the white heat of the French Revolution, as a direct sequel to her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), which had defended the revolution against Edmund Burke. The second Vindication was the first great work of feminist philosophy in English: it argued, against the entire weight of tradition, that women are not naturally inferior to men but are made inferior by education and social expectation, and that the subordination of women is a moral and political injustice. The book was written in extraordinary haste — it took her six weeks — and it bears the marks of urgency: it is a manifesto, an argument, and a polemic in one.

The intellectual context was the Enlightenment language of rights. If, as the revolutionaries proclaimed, all men are born free and equal and endowed with rights, then the question pressed itself: why not women? Wollstonecraft's opponents answered that women's nature fitted them for domesticity and dependence. Her reply is the argument of the book: the "nature" of women that such writers described was the product of a corrupt education, the systematic training of women in weakness, vanity, and submission. The famous sentence — "I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves" — is aimed at two enemies at once: the traditionalists who feared that women's emancipation meant female domination, and the fashionable women of her own day who wielded the only power allowed them, the covert power of manipulation and seduction. Wollstonecraft wanted neither. She wanted women to be self-governing persons, capable of reason and independence.

Philosophical Interpretation

The sentence is a definition of the end Wollstonecraft sought. She distinguishes two kinds of power: power over others, and power over oneself. The first — domination, whether by force or by manipulation — she rejects as an evil for both the dominated and the dominator. The second — self-government, autonomy — is the end she proposes for women. The distinction is the heart of her philosophy: the aim of women's emancipation is not to invert the hierarchy of the sexes but to abolish the hierarchy altogether, replacing dependence with independence and making women the authors of their own lives.

The argument for this end is twofold. The first part is educational: women are denied the education that would develop their reason, and are instead trained in "accomplishments" that cultivate vanity and weakness. Because reason is the mark of humanity and the ground of virtue, the denial of education to women is the denial of their humanity — it makes them creatures of sentiment and appearance rather than moral agents. The second part is political: a society that makes women dependent corrupts them, because dependence is incompatible with virtue. The woman who must please to survive cannot be honest; the woman who is confined to the domestic sphere is denied the cultivation of the public virtues. Injustice, Wollstonecraft argues, degrades both the oppressed and the oppressor: men are corrupted by arbitrary power, women by arbitrary dependence.

The sentence is therefore not merely a slogan but the conclusion of an argument about the conditions of moral agency. To be virtuous is to act on principles one can justify; this requires reason, which requires education; and it requires the independence that allows one to act on one's own judgment. Wollstonecraft's claim that women should have power over themselves is the demand that women be admitted to the moral and political community as full persons — the same demand that the French Revolution had made for men. It is the philosophical foundation of the long struggle for women's education, suffrage, and equality, and it remains the clearest statement of what the end of that struggle is: not the reversal of domination but its abolition.

Related Concepts

The sentence states the end of Wollstonecraft's feminism: women's independence and autonomy rather than power over men. It rests on her argument that education is the ground of virtue and reason, and on the Enlightenment doctrine of natural rights extended to women. The passage engages the concepts of equality, self-government, and the corruption of dependence, and it anticipates the modern ideal of self-determination and the critique of paternalism. Wollstonecraft's argument connects the ethics of virtue to the political philosophy of rights, and it stands at the head of the tradition that runs from her through the suffragists to contemporary feminism.

Learning Path

Begin with the site's answer on what justice is and the site's answer on what ethics is, to see the moral framework of Wollstonecraft's argument. Then explore the discussions of freedom and of political philosophy, and the analysis of natural rights in the tradition of John Locke and the Social Contract. Compare Wollstonecraft's ideal of self-government with the Kantian ideal of autonomy in Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, and follow her legacy in the modern philosophy of equality and the ethics of care.