Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

Mary Wollstonecraft wrote this line in the midst of her late‑eighteenth‑century critique of women’s education and socialization in Britain. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), composed during the revolutionary ferment of the 1790s, she argues that girls are trained from childhood to value appearance and charm over reason, virtue, and independence. The “gilt cage” image reflects her view that polite society flatters women with admiration and luxury while simultaneously confining them to narrow domestic and decorative roles. The passage appears as part of her broader attack on conduct‑book ideals and on educational practices that cultivate dependency rather than intellectual and moral agency.

The sentence compresses Wollstonecraft’s central claim that social conditioning deforms character. If a woman is taught that beauty is her “sceptre,” she is encouraged to rule only through pleasing others, not through judgment or principle. Over time, the mind “shapes itself to the body”: identity becomes organized around physical display, and intellectual life is reduced to self‑presentation. The “gilt cage” suggests a prison made attractive—comfort and praise masking constraint. “Only seeks to adorn its prison” implies that, lacking real freedom, the energies that might have gone into learning or civic virtue are redirected into ornamentation. The critique targets both the system that confines women and the internalized habits it produces.