Till women are more rationally educated, the progress in human virtue and improvement in knowledge must receive continual checks.

Mary Wollstonecraft wrote this line in the early phase of modern feminist political thought, arguing during the Enlightenment that women’s subordination was sustained less by “nature” than by deficient education. In late-18th-century Britain, women of the middle and upper classes were often trained for “accomplishments” and dependence rather than rigorous intellectual development. Wollstonecraft, responding to contemporary educational theorists and to the political language of rights circulating after the French Revolution, contended that society’s moral and intellectual advancement could not proceed while half the population was kept in ignorance. The remark appears in her polemical treatise advocating national education and women’s civic equality.

The sentence links women’s education directly to the collective fate of “human virtue” and “improvement in knowledge.” Wollstonecraft’s claim is structural: if women are denied rational cultivation, they cannot fully exercise moral agency, and their constrained roles (as mothers, companions, and citizens-in-waiting) will transmit weakness and prejudice through families and institutions. “Continual checks” suggests recurring setbacks—progress may begin, but it will be repeatedly stalled because the social order reproduces itself through poorly educated women. The quote thus reframes women’s education from a private benefit to a public necessity, making gender equality a prerequisite for Enlightenment ideals of reason and moral progress.