Make women rational creatures, and free citizens, and they will quickly become good wives - that is, if men do not neglect the duties of husbands and fathers.

This line comes from Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 feminist treatise written amid the political ferment of the French Revolution and British debates about “rights.” Responding to thinkers such as Rousseau and to conduct-book ideals that trained women for pleasing dependence, Wollstonecraft argues that women are not naturally frivolous but are made so by an education that prizes beauty and obedience over reason. She insists that women should be educated as rational beings and recognized as citizens with civic responsibilities. The remark also pointedly turns the moral lens on men, arguing that reform in women’s condition requires men to fulfill their own domestic and parental duties.

Wollstonecraft rejects the claim that women’s emancipation would undermine marriage. Instead, she argues that rational education and civic freedom would improve domestic life by producing partners capable of virtue, judgment, and mutual respect rather than childish dependence. The phrase “good wives” is deliberately qualified: women can flourish in marriage only if men also practice the virtues they demand—constancy, responsibility, and active fatherhood. The quote thus links private morality to public citizenship: a just society requires both sexes to be treated as moral agents, and it holds men accountable for the power they wield within the family as well as in the state.