Women are degraded by the propensity to enjoy the present moment, and, at last, despise the freedom which they have not sufficient virtue to struggle to attain.

This sentence comes from Mary Wollstonecraft’s polemical treatise arguing for women’s rational education and civic equality in late-18th-century Britain. Writing amid Enlightenment debates about “natural” gender roles and in the wake of the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft attacks the social training that encourages women to cultivate charm, dependence, and immediate pleasures rather than intellectual and moral autonomy. The remark appears in her critique of how women are shaped by a culture that rewards superficiality and submission, leaving them ill-prepared to claim genuine liberty. It is part of her broader case that women’s apparent “weakness” is produced by institutions and upbringing, not innate incapacity.

Wollstonecraft argues that a society that teaches women to prize immediate gratification—comfort, admiration, and social approval—ultimately diminishes them. The “present moment” stands for a life oriented toward transient pleasures and external validation rather than long-term self-command. Her sharper claim is that habituated dependence can become internalized: if one is not educated to develop “virtue” (moral strength, reason, self-discipline), one may come to scorn freedoms that require effort and responsibility to secure. The line is less a condemnation of women than an indictment of a culture that denies them the education and conditions needed to pursue autonomy, then blames them for lacking it.