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| title | aliases | tags | |
|---|---|---|---|
| mary-woolstonecraft |
|
Known as the "original feminist"
Lived during the renaissance with other such as voltaire and burke. She was born into a conservative household, with a drunk wifebeater for a dad. She often tried to protect her mother from him. This founded her need to protect other women.
She became a personal tutor for a family with four young girls. Each of them grew up to be successful woman.
At the time of her birth women were had almost slaves. Even the most progressive thinkers of the time had very misogynistic views. For example Rosseau said:
"the whole education of women ought ot be relative to men, to please them, to be useful to them, to make themselves loved and honoured by them, to educate them when young, to care for them when grown, to counsel them to console them, and to make life agreeable and sweet to them, these are the duties of women at all times, and should be taught to them from their infancy"
This sounds a lot like slavery. Women are percieved as mentally and physically inferior to men. It was this kind of thinking that Woolstonecraft was trying to abolish. She said:
"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 endevour to keep women in the dark, because the former only wants slaves and the latter a plaything"
Here she is saying the system that oppresses women is like a tyrant. She was the first to consider the idea that equality should be for both men and women (wow), thus starting the pursuit of true equality.
The current cultural conventions are constantly changing. These changes usually occur is bursts as revolutions. Some progressive thinker points out a glaring injustice, then change occurs.
Woolstonecraft dared to question the cultural conventions of her time. This leads to the questions: What social conventtions exists today, that we aren't questioning? Who is the tyrant now? How are we being conditioned? It is inevitable that future generations will look back at us as barbarians, in the same way we view earlier generations.
Acknowlegding how arbitrary our current norms are is freeing.