My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.

This sentence appears in Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 feminist treatise *A Vindication of the Rights of Woman*, written amid the ferment of the French Revolution and British debates about “rights” and education. Wollstonecraft argues against social conventions and educational practices that trained women to be pleasing, dependent, and childlike rather than intellectually and morally autonomous. Addressing both male writers who idealized feminine “graces” and women who had been shaped by such expectations, she frames her project as a deliberate refusal to flatter. The remark functions as a methodological declaration: she will speak to women as adults capable of reason, virtue, and self-support, not as ornamental beings needing perpetual guidance.

Wollstonecraft insists that genuine respect requires treating women as rational agents rather than indulging in compliments that reinforce dependence. “Fascinating graces” names the culturally rewarded performance of femininity—charm, delicacy, submissiveness—that can win approval but at the cost of intellectual development and moral independence. By likening women’s social position to “perpetual childhood,” she exposes how paternalism masquerades as admiration: flattery becomes a tool that keeps women unprepared to “stand alone.” The line encapsulates her broader claim that equality begins with education and with the recognition that women, like men, must cultivate reason and virtue to be fully human and fully responsible citizens.