Date: 1788
"Their minds were shackled with a set of notions concerning propriety, the fitness of things for the world's eye, trammels which always hamper weak people."
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: 1788
"He had been the slave of beauty, the captive of sense; love he ne'er had felt; the mind never rivetted the chain, nor had the purity of it made the body appear lovely in his eyes."
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: 1788
"On Eloquence, prevailing art! / Whose force can chain the list'ning heart; / The throb of Sympathy inspire, / And kindle every great desire; / With magic energy controul / And reign the sov'reign of the soul!"
preview | full record— Williams, Helen Maria (1759-1827)
Date: December 1790
"The imperfection of all modern governments must, without waiting to repeat the trite remark, that all human institutions are unavoidably imperfect, in a great measure have arisen from this simple circumstance, that the constitution, if such an heterogeneous mass deserve that name, was settled in...
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: 1792
"More noble than the sycophant, whose art / Must heap with taudry flowers thy hated shrine; / I envy not the meed thou canst impart / To crown his service--while, tho' Pride combine / With Fraud to crush me--my unfetter'd heart / Still to the Mountain Nymph may offer mine."
preview | full record— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)
Date: 1792
"Thus degraded, her reason, her misty reason! is employed rather to burnish than to snap her chains."
preview | full record— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)
Date: 1793, 1806
"Does Liberty with barbarous fetters bind / Her first-born hope, the freedom of the mind?"
preview | full record— Robinson [Née Darby], Mary [Perdita] (1758-1800)
Date: 1793
"For what is sleep, but temporary death; / Sealing up all the windows of the soul, / And binding ev'ry thought in torpid chains?"
preview | full record— Robinson [Née Darby], Mary [Perdita] (1758-1800)
Date: 1793
"But, most of all, [the mind is subject] to that lov'd voice, whose thrill, / Rushing impetuous through each throbbing vein, / Dilates the wond'ring mind, and frees its pow'rs / From the cold chains of icy apathy / To all the vast extremes of bliss and pain!"
preview | full record— Robinson [Née Darby], Mary [Perdita] (1758-1800)
Date: 1793
"Of all bondage, mental bondage is surely the most fatal; the absurd despotism which has hitherto, with more than gothic barbarity, enslaved the female mind, the enervating and degrading system of manners by which the understandings of women have been chained down to frivolity and trifles, have i...
preview | full record— Hays, Mary (1760-1843)