“In this style, argue tyrants of every denomination, from the weak king to the weak father of a family; they are all eager to crush reason; yet always assert that they usurp its throne only to be useful. Do you not act a similar part, when you force all women, by denying them civil and political rights, to remain immured in their families groping in the dark? for surely, Sir, you will not assert, that a duty can be binding which is not founded on reason?” These eloquent words were written by a courageous and iconoclastic woman named Mary Wollstonecraft in her inflammatory pamphlet, Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792).
Just over half the world population is female; until relatively recently that huge piece of humanity had almost no rights or freedoms. That trend continued until the idea of feminism was brought forwards. Until some brave and intelligent women fought to change the way the world saw their sex.
In our modern times, we take it for granted that women have the same rights as men. In our culture women are equal. They have the right to vote, own property, choose when to have children, and be paid the same wages as a man for the same work. These equalities were not always there; and perhaps would still not be there if not for many brave women throughout the last two and a half centuries who lit the fire of equality of the sexes. In today’s blog post I will be focusing on one of the earliest and most eloquent of those women. A woman who became the inspiration for an entire movement.
Mary Wollstonecraft is widely regarded as the grandmother of feminism. She bravely published one of the first ever feminist writings, Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Though she died at the young age of 38 through complications of childbirth, her works were the defining influence on the suffragette movement that culminated in the right of women to vote. She also was an outspoken supporter of the education of women.
She had an unquestionable effect on feminists throughout history and although she did not live to see it, she was the spark that started the fire of women’s rights that tore through the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Education, the vote, equality in the workplace, and independence; all these fruits of the feminist movement would have brought Mary Wollstonecraft to tears. She was a pioneer, a radical, and an idealist. There is no doubt in my mind that the life, works, and ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft gave birth to modern feminism and changed the world.
