Mary Wollstonecraft, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
It is grounded in it, and I will not have the ground quietly dug out from under the house. Reason, as I hold it, is the simple power of improvement, of discerning truth, and the nature of reason must be the same in all if it be an emanation of divinity, the tie that connects the creature with the Creator.1 From that follows the whole of what I ask for women.
Can a soul be stamped with the heavenly image that is not perfected by the exercise of its own reason?1 Milton's Eve is adorned to delight man, "that with honour he may love," and meanwhile the soul of woman is denied this distinction, with man ever placed between her and reason, so that she is made to see through a gross medium and take things on trust.1
Say that she has reason, and she was not created merely as the solace of man; the sexual should not destroy the human character.1 The argument from the soul is the one I return to when the others are pressed. If woman be allowed an immortal soul, she must have as the employment of life an understanding to improve.2 Deny her the understanding and you must say that she was born only to procreate and rot.2
Nor does the flatterer's compromise rescue her: man was made to reason, woman to feel, and together they make a perfect whole. I ask what sensibility is. Dr. Johnson defines it as quickness of sensation, delicacy, and the definition gives me no idea but of an exquisitely polished instinct. I discern not a trace of the image of God in sensation or in matter; refined seventy times seven, they are still material, nor will fire ever make lead gold.2
This is the objection to the doctrine of the complementary sexes, and it is a theological objection before it is anything else. Now, does it stand without Him? Part of it does. Much of what I say about the effects of dependence on character, the cunning, the vanity, the ruined judgment of the creature trained to please, is an argument from consequences, and any observer may test it by looking at the women and the nations that such an education has made.
The same reasoning serves against those who would keep the poor from reading, lest it take them out of the station nature assigned them: make a man a brute and expect to see him turn ferocious beast; without knowledge there can be no morality, and ignorance is a frail base for virtue.2 That is as plain to an atheist as to a bishop. But what the consequences cannot supply is the claim that her reason is owed its cultivation as a right, and not as a convenience to the household or the state.
That claim rests on what she is for. If the only answer is that an educated woman makes a better wife and mother, then her education is a means to another's ends, which is precisely the footing on which Rousseau placed it. I rest it on her destination, on the perfectibility of reason as the very stamina of immortality, which is why I find in every moral difficulty that baffles the profoundest thinking an argument for the soul's survival.1
A reader who removes God must find another ground for that "owed," and I do not say it cannot be found; I say I did not find it, and that I will not have my case improved by having its foundation taken out and its conclusion kept.34
Reason is given to every human creature so that it may know God and become more like Him; the soul is immortal and is perfected by the exercise of reason and virtue; and a being so made and so destined cannot be the property or the plaything of another without blasphemy against the Maker. If women have souls, they must be educated for eternity, and an education for pleasing a husband is an education for nothing.
Rousseau and Milton made woman for man; she answers that both were made for God, and that the subjection of one to the other is a usurpation of His place. The argument does not depend on a church; it depends on a Creator who is reason and goodness, and she will not have Him taken out of it.5678
Reason is, consequentially, the simple power of improvement; or, more properly speaking, of discerning truth.... the nature of reason must be the same in all, if it be an emanation of divinity, the tie that connects the creature with the Creator; for, can that soul be stamped with the heavenly image, that is not perfected by the exercise of its own reason?A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Without knowledge there can be no morality! Ignorance is a frail base for virtue!A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Reason is, consequentially, the simple power of improvement; or, more properly speaking, of discerning truth.A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
I discern not a trace of the image of God in either sensation or matter. Refined seventy times seven, they are still material; intellect dwells not there; nor will fire ever make lead gold!A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Thus Milton describes our first frail mother; though when he tells us that women are formed for softness and sweet attractive grace, I cannot comprehend his meaning, unless, in the true Mahometan strain, he meant to deprive us of souls, and insinuate that we were beings only designed by sweet attractive grace, and docile blind obedience, to gratify the senses of man when he can no longer soar on the wing of…A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
But I must be more explicit. With respect to the culture of the heart, it is unanimously allowed that sex is out of the question; but the line of subordination in the mental powers is never to be passed over.A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
In the same strain have I heard men argue against instructing the poor; for many are the forms that aristocracy assumes. "Teach them to read and write," say they, "and you take them out of the station assigned them by nature." An eloquent Frenchman, has answered them; I will borrow his sentiments.A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
But an immortal soul, not restrained by mechanical laws, and struggling to free itself from the shackles of matter, contributes to, instead of disturbing, the order of creation, when, co-operating with the Father of spirits, it tries to govern itself by the invariable rule that, in a degree, before which our imagination faints, the universe is regulated.A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
The ground of the whole argument in the texts and the part most readers now leave out; whether the equality survives the removal is the live question between her secular and her theist interpreters.