The rest of this article concerns a British legislative matter but I didn't see anything else today marking the 250th anniversary of her birth. Wife of William Godwin (founder of modern anarchism), mother of Mary Shelley(author of Frankenstien).
Posted on 04/27/2009 11:23:33 AM PDT by Borges
This weekend, I celebrated the 250th anniversary of the birth of Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the mothers of western feminism, by eating a cake baked entirely by men. This subversive culinary event was organised by the Unitarian chapel on Newington Green, north London, which Wollstonecraft attended as a young woman, coming into contact with the group of rational dissenters, led by Richard Price, who were to inform and inspire her radical political ideas.
Wollstonecraft applied the emerging arguments of liberalism, which insisted that social status should be determined by individual ability and skill rather than birth, to women. Her landmark text, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, written in 1798, eight years after she first came to the chapel, argued that since women have equal powers of reason to men, they should be granted equal rights. Furthermore, a society that violates women's rights to liberty, equality and justice was wasting women's skills and abilities. "Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it," she wrote, "and there will be an end to blind obedience."
Many of her arguments, while clearly imbued with 18th-century spirit and a level of moralising that can at times make for uncomfortable reading, have a contemporary ring and the work of the former Equal Opportunities Commission – now part of the Equality and Human Rights Commission – is a clear descendant of Wollstonecraft's ideal of absolute sexual equality: equal education, equal employment, equal pay.
(Excerpt) Read more at u.tv ...
The rest of this article concerns a British legislative matter but I didn't see anything else today marking the 250th anniversary of her birth. Wife of William Godwin (founder of modern anarchism), mother of Mary Shelley(author of Frankenstien).
interesting conjunction of theories here(anarchism, Frankenstein)...
“Wollstonecraft applied the emerging arguments of liberalism, which insisted that social status should be determined by individual ability and skill rather than birth”
A concept which has nothing to do with today’s “liberalism”.
Yep, "Equality of Opportunity" has become "Equality of Outcome."
“...since women have equal powers of reason to men, they should be granted equal rights.”
Equal? Perhaps, but not the same.
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