The Mother of Feminism Wants You to Get Stronger

Mary Wollstonecraft, 18th-century author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, saw physical weakness as part of women’s oppression.

Jul 18, 2025

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Before gyms. Before weight rooms. Before Zumba and Curves and Jane Fonda aerobics. Before basketball and the modern Olympics. Before Victorianism and the Cult of True Womanhood. Before all of this, a 33-year-old, unmarried, childless Mary Wollstonecraft sat down to write about women’s rights. The right to pursue physical strength featured prominently in her argument.

Born April 27, 1759, in London, Mary Wollstonecraft lived at a time when women were accessories to society and first sons got everything: inheritances, land, education. She was the second of five children and the oldest daughter, but her older brother was the only child nursed by her mother and the only one to receive a full education. Even her younger brother was overlooked. Her alcoholic father was abusive and irresponsible with the family finances. Her mother was weak and beholden to her husband’s whims; she looked to her first son for emotional solace and lashed out at her other children. Mary was often on the receiving end of her mother’s wrath and, it seems, from the beginning had a clear-eyed view of the injustice of her position.

Why should an accident of birth, in terms of family, time period, and sex, leave her with less? Why should she be overlooked and neglected in favor of a brother who just happened to be the firstborn male?

The laws of primogeniture, the structural reason for this favoritism, offended her, but the injustice extended beyond that. As a child, she saw her mother’s dependence on her father, her inability to do anything to provide for herself. As a young woman, she saw this same dependence among her sisters and peers. Her sister Eliza married an ill-fit match and, after bearing her first child, her mental health fell apart. Her husband blamed her mental state on her personality and likely suggested they have sex to help, because as Janet Todd wrote in Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life, “In medical manuals female hysteria was often ascribed to sexual fear or abstinence.” Before long, Mary helped Eliza escape the marriage, leaving the baby behind because it was legally bound to the father. The marriage that was assumed would provide stability for the rest of her sister’s life had proven the opposite. She was better off on her own.

This dependence on men and the failing health of women around her stirred thoughts and convictions in Mary. Her mother, always something of an invalid, died early. Her best friend died days after childbirth. Her own health was frequently poor. Was this the result of expectations on her class? The sedentary lifestyle of English society? Or was it specific to women, due to their unique biology?

Mary was living in the middle of the Enlightenment, which fostered the idea that reason, or the ability to think things through, was a distinct part of what made humans human. However, for many philosophers, this didn’t apply to women. Many 18th-century philosophers saw educating women and girls as a pointless endeavor. To them, women were all feelings, no logic. They ought to be educated on things that appealed to the senses and social crowds — learn to be pretty and do pretty things — but don’t waste their time or attention on things that are hard.

These ideas were the natural outflow of the same philosophers’ embrace of the notion that women were inherently weak. Many at this time were heavily influenced by ancient Greece and Rome, thanks to 12th-century translations of classical texts that brought Aristotle and others back into intellectual consciousness during the Renaissance. They also inherited interpretations of biblical texts — from Genesis through 1 Peter, where the apostle tells husbands to give honor to their wives “as unto the weaker vessel” — that saw women as physically, emotionally, and morally weak. While Aristotle convinced 18th-century male philosophers that women were malformed men, a lesser version of the supposed male standard, scripture had long been used to make women’s bodies and their apparent lesser strength into walking metaphors of women’s greater vulnerability to sin, as well as melancholy and other difficult emotional or mental states.

“In earlier times, women’s social subjugation was extrapolated from scripture with its implication of the cursed, dirty female body and its contaminating blood. In the late eighteenth century inequality was grounded on women’s nervous physique,” Todd wrote.

Using these ideas, philosophers of Wollstonecraft’s day argued that women because of their weak constitutions couldn’t handle more taxing on their systems, and thus shouldn’t participate in rigorous education. In fact, it would be better for them to let their minds and bodies rest at all times, as much as possible. Reserve their energy for what women were really for: bearing children. Outside the swirling thought world of philosophers, the wasting away disease of consumption (aka tuberculosis) shaped beauty standards in the late 18th century. Women of higher classes wanted to look sickly and frail. Wollstonecraft wrote of an acquaintance who bragged about her fragility as if it were some sort of achievement.

Naturally, this approach didn’t put women in a healthy position to bear children. Obstetrics was not yet a science and the groundwork for modern medicine was just being laid, so we can’t claim that lack of exercise is the sole reason so many of Mary Wollstonecraft’s peers met their fates after giving birth, but knowing what we know now about exercise’s benefits for pregnant women, it likely played a part.

These detrimental effects on women’s health and the health of their offspring may have influenced Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau when he wrote Emile, a treatise on education that set forth his thoughts on gender dynamics. In Emile, Rousseau gave a less rigorous physical and intellectual education to the main character’s future wife Sophie, because: “When once it is proved that men and women are and ought to be unlike in constitution and temperament, it follows that their education must be different.” As historian Jan Todd (no relation) wrote in her book Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful:

Where Emile’s physical training was expected to instill the desirable attributes of strength, autonomy, and independent thinking, Sophie exercised because it enhanced her physical appeal to Emile. The more attractive women were, Rousseau reasoned, the more men would wish to mate with them, and the stronger the family would be. A eugenicist at heart, Rousseau claimed, “Women should not be strong like men, but for them, so that their sons may be strong.” From Rousseau’s narrow perspective, woman’s potential was limited to a sheltered, hidden life as man’s companion and mate. … Rousseau feared the exaggerated delicacy he saw developing among some upper-class women because he believed it would lead to effeminacy in their male offspring.

Still, the physical education he supported for women had limits. Women were not to surpass men, but to live in service of them. “To please, to be useful to us, to make us love and esteem them, to console us, to render our lives easy and agreeable: these are the duties of women at all times, and what they should be taught in their infancy,” Rousseau wrote.

When Wollstonecraft sat down to write A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, Rousseau was her primary intellectual opponent, but she also attacked the cultural expectations of weakness, agreeableness, and delicacy that many of her peers adhered to. She completed the new work, a follow-up to her defense of the French Revolution entitled A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in six weeks, sending chapters as they were finished to her publisher to be typeset. The resulting volume called for women to be able to pursue their potential intellectually, morally, and physically — all of which Wollstonecraft saw as connected.

Her argument focused on women as moral beings capable of developing virtue. Because virtue is expressed through choice, Wollstonecraft argued, women ought to be allowed full access to the things (namely, education) that could help them develop their ability to discern right from wrong. She brought exercise and the pursuit of physical strength into the discussion because she saw women use their weakness in service of their chosen vices: “Women,” she wrote, “sometimes boast of their weakness, cunningly obtaining power by playing on the weakness of men [likely alluding to lust] … but virtue is sacrificed to temporary gratifications, and the respectability of life to the triumph of an hour.”

While she admitted that women were weaker and men were stronger physically, she did not see any reason for women to make themselves more weak or to limit their physical accomplishments to superficial beauty that could win a man’s fickle affection:

In the government of the physical world it is observable that the female in point of strength is, in general, inferior to the male. This is the law of nature; and it does not appear to be suspended or abrogated in favour of woman. … But not content with this natural pre-eminence, men endeavour to sink us still lower, merely to render us alluring objects for a moment. … Nature has given woman a weaker frame than man; but, to ensure her husband’s affections, must a wife, who by the exercise of her mind and body whilst she was discharging the duties of a daughter, wife, and mother, has allowed her constitution to retain its natural strength, and her nerves a healthy tone, is she, I say, to condescend to use art and feign a sickly delicacy in order to secure her husband’s affection?

Wollstonecraft directly confronted the idea that women ought to shrink themselves — whether by shutting their mouths or letting their bodies waste away — in order to avoid repelling men. She saw her peers’ pursuit of beauty and delicacy as frivolous and stupid. This may have been because her mother’s own cultivated weakness did nothing to protect her from the rampages of her alcoholic husband, or because she perhaps saw her sister shrink herself during engagement and marriage only for things to get worse once her child came.

What use was male favor if it could disappear in a moment? Be a whole person, you can practically hear her pleading with other women as she argued with male philosophers about womankind. Her base-level argument in Vindication is the same core argument of modern feminism: that women are people too and ought to be treated as such. Wollstonecraft was convinced that limitations on women prevented them from fulfilling their potential.

“I may be accused of arrogance; still I must declare what I firmly believe,” she wrote, “that all the writers who have written on the subject of female education and manners from Rousseau to Dr. Gregory [a Scottish moralist who encouraged women in his work A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters not to show how educated they were in case it would hurt their marriage prospects], have contributed to render women more artificial, weak characters, than they would otherwise have been; and, consequently, more useless members of society.”

By pursuing strength, women would be able to better care for themselves, rather than being solely dependent on the men in their lives, and they would also have more to offer society at large.

Wollstonecraft supported her argument in favor of women’s strength by calling attention to the natural world, where “every young creature requires almost continual exercise,” and pointing out that exercise would enhance both women’s physical beauty and their ability to carry out their duties as wives and mothers. But her interest in women’s strength had more to do with increasing their independence than helping them fulfill Rousseau’s fantasies as beings who existed purely to serve and please men.

“Men have superiour strength of body; but were it not for mistaken notions of beauty, women would acquire sufficient [strength] to enable them to earn their own subsistence, the true definition of independence; and to bear those bodily inconveniencies and exertions that are requisite to strengthen the mind,” she wrote. “Let us then, by being allowed to take the same exercise as boys, not only during infancy, but youth, arrive at perfection of body, that we may know how far the natural superiority of man extends.”

Wollstonecraft saw her world as one that treated women like exotic birds: “Confined then in cages like the feathered race, they [women] have nothing to do but to plume themselves, and stalk with mock majesty from perch to perch.” The focus on superficial appearance rather than personal character, she said, damaged individual women and society as a whole by hampering the development of moral people. She saw women spend their formative years on worthless pursuits, “meanwhile strength of body and mind are sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty” — all in pursuit of the one thing that could set women up for life, “the only way women can rise in the world — by marriage.” But Wollstonecraft, through the lives of her mother, her sister, her best friend, had seen the promise of marriage as a lie.

Women could live a better way, if only they were allowed the opportunity to develop themselves.

Vindication had little immediate effects in England and elsewhere, though individual women were moved by it. The book only sold between 1,500 and 3,000 copies in its first five years in print and did not gain a following to spread its ideas, according to Janet Todd. What effects it may have had were bemoaned.

“A ‘mother’ wrote to the Ladies Monthly Museum to lament that her four daughters had been corrupted by the book: one lost her ‘softness’ and indulged in horse-racing, fox-hunting and betting; a second had taken up Latin and Greek; a third was scientifically dissecting her pets; and a fourth was challenging men to duels,” wrote Todd.

Meanwhile, Thomas Taylor, a neoplatonist who translated the complete works of Aristotle and Plato into English, wrote a response to both Wollstonecraft’s work and Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man that made a mockery of their arguments for human rights. His response, Vindication of the Rights of Brutes, extended liberty to animals, with vegetables and minerals to follow. It included “unsavoury anecdotes of animal-woman copulation,” explained Todd. Because of course: “The rights of woman must lead to sexual chaos, while, in an unhierarchical world, women would always be violated.”1

Wollstonecraft’s work enjoyed a better reception in America. “In Massachusetts, John Adams’s sister-in-law Elizabeth demanded a copy from Abigail while she was in London,” wrote Diane Jacobs in Her Own Woman: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft.

Though the book’s initial impacts were small, flip ahead 233 years and — despite remaining gender inequities globally and upheaval across the West — we are living in a world that Mary Wollstonecraft would marvel at. Women’s economic independence may be the greatest it has ever been. In the West, we are generally not dependent on male favor to make a living or have a home or clothes on our backs. While certainly women are still subject to abuse and exploitation, we are not bound to men by social and legal structures in the way we were even half a century ago.

But we haven’t left all the cages that Wollstonecraft identified, even if the doors are open.

The fixation on superficial appearance that she denounced in the late 18th century hasn’t gone the way of the horse and carriage. If anything, it’s gotten worse. Technological advancements — from photography to television to the internet to social media and the smartphone — have fed a culture that was preoccupied with appearance back when the only way to know what you looked like was via a pool of water, a mercury-backed mirror, or a painter’s portrait that took days to complete. Today, new beauty products are released every month, representing a nearly $300 billion global industry in 2023, while cosmetic procedures like botox, fillers, and Brazilian butt lifts drove a $112 billion market in 2022 with expectations to triple by 2030. What women have gained in economic independence is doubly taxed by what we spend on unnecessary matters of appearance. We may be mostly free of male domination when it comes to our finances (set aside the gender wage gap for a moment), but we’re not free of the male gaze, whether the beauty standard of this instant is what men actually find attractive or not.

If Wollstonecraft were to visit our world today, she’d probably be stunned by how many women intentionally exercise,2 but I think she’d also be surprised to see how many women exercise for the same reason that women of her day spent hours on fainting couches: to preserve an appearance of delicacy, rather than to pursue strength. SkinnyTok and the idea that women should exercise in order to reduce how much space they occupy would be out of the question to Wollstonecraft. Holding back in the gym because you don’t want to get “too big” or “too strong”, because you don’t want to scare off a potential partner, would sound foolish to her.

“But should it be proved that woman is naturally weaker than man, whence does it follow that it is natural for her to labour to become still weaker than nature intended her to be?” she wrote.

At the same time, she would likely empathize with us. Her own life showed how hard it is to swim against the current of patriarchy. After the release of Vindication, she fell in love with Gilbert Imlay. He fathered her first child but refused to marry her and soon left. Wollstonecraft wrote letters begging for his return and followed after him around Europe. His rejection drove her to attempt suicide twice, revealing the same dependence on male favor that she reviled in Vindication.

Later, she formed a relationship with philosopher William Godwin. They married when she was four months pregnant with their daughter, Mary (later Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein). Though the marriage was uniquely equal, it didn’t last long. Ten days after their daughter was born, Wollstonecraft died, leaving to the imagination what their marriage may have looked like with the new life they’d created.

“I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body,” she wrote in Vindication. But an endeavor is never a guarantee of achievement. It’s not easy to pursue mental or physical strength when there are structural obstacles, legal and physical bullies, people out there who don’t want us to be more than we are, or our own insecurities and vulnerabilities that get in our way and hold us back. But the obstacles we face today are nothing compared to what Wollstonecraft and her peers were up against. As much as our social norms and stigmas may parallel the things that relegated 18th-century women of society to delicate activities that wouldn’t make their faces flush, we have the right to challenge and defy today’s norms.

Our rights are also a responsibility — to ourselves, those around us, and those to come. If we want the world to be better for women, we have a role to play. Chances are, we won’t make positive change by using exercise to shrink ourselves. In 1792, Wollstonecraft wanted women to grow stronger. Today, she’d probably want the same thing. So go ahead, make Mary Wollstonecraft proud, and exercise your right to pursue strength.

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