Quotation
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“Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience.”
Mary Wollstonecraft · Enlightenment feminism · Enlightenment · 1792
What does it mean?
Obedience that is blind is, on her argument, the product of a narrowed mind, and enlarging the mind is how that kind of obedience comes to an end. The usual reading takes the sentence as the programme of the book in one stroke: education, serious books, and a rational standard that does not change with the audience's sex. A rival reading hears a promise that knowledge automatically produces independence, smoother than her own account of how deeply the narrowing goes. The sentence is her English, from chapter 2.
Did Mary Wollstonecraft really say this?
The library’s label is Well attested. Her own English, from chapter 2 of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 'The Prevailing Opinion of a Sexual Character Discussed'. The sentence states the programme: enlarge the female mind, and blind obedience ends. The wording is secure.
Where it comes from
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, chapter 2
Approximate date: 1792.
How to use it
If the aim is less blind following, in a training course in Cardiff or in one's own reading, the tool she trusts is a larger mind, not a louder order to think for oneself. Enlargement is concrete: different books, harder questions, and standards that do not shift when the reader is a woman. A pep talk at the end of a thin syllabus is not yet the enlargement; The chapter is a demand aimed at institutions, not only at individual nerve.
A mindset reading
Enlargement here is not a feeling of being inspired. It is a change in what the mind can examine, so that obedience has to survive reasons rather than habit and flattery. She thinks the female mind has been shaped to adorn a cage, and that strengthening it ends the blindness of the obedience that cage requires; Quoting the line without the education that would make it true repeats the sham she is attacking.
Understand the philosophy
She writes inside the Enlightenment demand that reason be allowed to do its work, and she extends that demand to women, showing how often the Enlightenment had stopped short. The key term is enlargement, the strengthening of a mind by giving it a wider field, set against an education in beauty, dependence, and pleasing. Blind obedience is the political result she expects from the narrower curriculum. Chapter 2 states the programme; The chapters try to earn it; The English is hers.
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- society
FAQ
What does it mean?
Obedience that is blind is, on her argument, the product of a narrowed mind, and enlarging the mind is how that kind of obedience comes to an end. The usual reading takes the sentence as the programme of the book in one stroke: education, serious books, and a rational standard that does not change with the audience's sex. A rival reading hears a promise that knowledge automatically produces independence, smoother than her own account of how deeply the narrowing goes. The sentence is her English, from chapter 2.
Did Mary Wollstonecraft really say this?
Well attested. Her own English, from chapter 2 of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 'The Prevailing Opinion of a Sexual Character Discussed'. The sentence states the programme: enlarge the female mind, and blind obedience ends. The wording is secure.
Which work is it in?
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, chapter 2 Approximate date: 1792.