England, 1759–1797
Mary Wollstonecraft
Enlightenment thinker whose A Vindication of the Rights of Woman argued that women's supposed inferiority was the product of denied education, not of nature.
Mary Wollstonecraft in 2 lines
Every Mary Wollstonecraft passage in thinkr's library, with the theme each one speaks to.
“I do not wish women to have power over men, but over themselves.”
“Virtue can only flourish among equals.”
Where Mary Wollstonecraft lands on a hard choice
Quotation is the easy part. The harder test is what a position does when it meets a situation where every option costs something.
Someone who shaped you turns out to have done real harm.
You are refusing to let achievement launder conduct. The cost is throwing out understanding that took you years to acquire.
A child asks a question and the true answer will frighten them.
You are refusing to train someone to expect managed reality. The risk is honesty timed for your conscience rather than their readiness.
People consistently expect less of you than you are.
You are letting the work correct the estimate. The risk is a life spent addressing an audience that was never paying attention.
You are paid more than someone who does more than you.
You are refusing to let an arrangement stand because it favours you. The risk is a gesture that costs them their leverage, not yours.
Reading Mary Wollstonecraft today
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in 1759–1797, from England — a world with different assumptions about authority, death and what a life is for. That distance is useful rather than a problem: it is what lets the ideas cut against assumptions you did not know you were making.
In thinkr, Mary Wollstonecraft is one of 44 thinkers you can put a real question to, and the answers come back in that thinker's own voice and commitments rather than as a neutral summary. The 2 passages above are what the app draws on.
Working at roughly the same time
- Arthur Schopenhauer — Germany, 1788–1860
- Baruch Spinoza — Netherlands, 1632–1677
- Bertrand Russell — UK, 1872–1970
- Carl Jung — Switzerland, 1875–1961
- David Hume — Scotland, 1711–1776
- Friedrich Nietzsche — Germany, 1844–1900
Argues the same cases
David Hume, Bertrand Russell, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir, Immanuel Kant take positions on the same dilemmas as Mary Wollstonecraft, which is usually where the disagreements become concrete.