Celebrating Women’s History Month: March 17

Honoring Mary Wollstonecraft

Today I would like to honor and pay tribute to Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft was one of the earliest women’s rights activists; to call her a feminist would be anachronistic, but she certainly fits all of the 20th century ideals of feminism. Wollstonecraft grew up in 18th Century England, where it was customary not to educate women.  Wollstonecraft drafted what is now revered as a seminal treatise of the women’s rights movement: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in 1792.  Wollstonecraft did not pull any punches in her attempts to battle misogyny, she forged ahead:

to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonimous [sic] with epithets of weakness.

I also find this excerpt from Part I particularly germane to the current House of Representatives in the United States, over 200 years after the publication:

Men, in general, seem to employ their reason to justify prejudices, which they have imbibed, they cannot trace how, rather than to root them out. The mind must be strong that resolutely forms its own principles; for a kind of intellectual cowardice prevails which makes many men shrink from the task, or only do it by halves. Yet the imperfect conclusions thus drawn, are frequently very plausible, because they are built on partial experience, on just, though narrow, views.

If you have not read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, I strongly encourage you to do so. Read it for a sense of history, but read it also for an understanding of the origins of prejudice and the impacts of institutionalized discrimination. Of course, I fear that Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, and most of the GOP have probably never even heard of our Mary Wollstonecraft.