Women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government.

This line comes from Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), written in the wake of the French Revolution and amid British debates over “rights,” representation, and the legitimacy of government by consent. Wollstonecraft, already known for A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), extends the revolutionary language of citizenship to women, arguing that women are treated as dependents while still being subject to laws and political decisions. Her broader project links women’s political exclusion to their restricted education and economic dependence, insisting that a rational, virtuous republic requires women to be educated as citizens rather than trained for ornamental “femininity.”

Wollstonecraft frames women’s political exclusion as a form of arbitrary rule: women are governed by laws and policies yet denied any “direct share” in making them. By invoking representation, she borrows a central principle of eighteenth-century liberal and republican thought—government should rest on consent and accountable deliberation—and exposes a contradiction in societies that champion liberty while excluding half the population. The claim is not merely about voting or officeholding; it is also a moral argument that citizenship and virtue are cultivated through participation and responsibility. In this way, the sentence ties women’s rights to the health and legitimacy of the polity itself.