It would be an endless task to trace the variety of meannesses, cares, and sorrows into which women are plunged by the prevailing opinion that they were created rather to feel than reason, and that all the power they obtain must be obtained by their charms and weakness.

This sentence comes from Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminist polemic *A Vindication of the Rights of Woman* (1792), written amid the intellectual ferment of the French Revolution and British debates over “rights.” Wollstonecraft argues that women’s apparent “nature” is largely the product of education and social expectation. In the work she attacks conduct-book culture and the ideal of feminine delicacy promoted by writers such as Rousseau and popular moralists, contending that training women to seek influence through beauty and submissiveness leaves them dependent and morally stunted. The remark appears in her broader case that women should be educated to cultivate reason and virtue, not merely sensibility and charm.

Wollstonecraft claims that a society which defines women as creatures of feeling rather than reason condemns them to a life of petty anxieties and real suffering. If women are taught that their only “power” lies in attractiveness and performed weakness, they must compete for approval, manipulate rather than act freely, and remain economically and intellectually dependent. The “endless task” suggests the pervasiveness of these harms: they ramify through private life (marriage, motherhood, reputation) and public morality alike. The quote is central to her Enlightenment argument that rational education is not unfeminine but the precondition for genuine virtue and equal citizenship.