C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Mary Wollstonecraft
As a sex, women are habitually indolent; and everything tends to make them so.
Modesty is the graceful, calm virtue of maturity; bashfulness the charm of vivacious youth.
Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience; but as blind obedience is ever sought for by power, tyrants and sensualists are in the right when they endeavor to keep women in the dark, because the former only want slaves, and the latter a plaything.
Women, sometimes boasting of their weakness, cunningly obtain power by playing on the weakness of men. And they may well glory in their illicit sway; for, like Turkish bashaws, they have more real power than their masters.