Hello Everyone!
Today is the the anniversary of the death of Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of modern feminism. Since this is the anniversary of her death it should also be mentioned that in dying she would orphan her ten day old second daughter. Mary Shelley who would launch the genre of modern science fiction with the publication of her book "Frankenstein".
One thing you hear from a lot of conservative writers is that women's liberation was pretty much just a byproduct of technology one way or another. Even the Vatican claimed that the washing machine did more to liberate women than the pill, just a few months ago. Basically there is a tendency in many quarters to discount the role feminism had in the ways society has changed. But they aren't really looking at what sort of things have at one time or another been "crazy feminist causes". Nor do many of them understand what feminism actually is and was.
One thing that this post won't deal with in any depth are the contributions of women to society. Certainly enough has already been said about the roles female labor has always played in society, and the number of women who have despite it all managed to become rulers, writers, poets, scientists, doctors, teachers, artists, or inventors. Frankly, I'm assuming that many of my readers already know about them.
This post is not concerned so much about the contributions of women, but the contributions of feminism to modern society.
Many people do not know that Mary Wollstonecraft was the first writer to radically argue that universal public education should be mandatory with no regard to sex or social class. She felt that ages four through nine should be the first ages in which it ought to be tried on state supported compulsory basis. At the time it was a nearly unheard of idea, even among the intellectuals who supported the French and American Revolutions among other things. So there you have it, once state sponsored early elementary school was once a feminist cause. Of course, the movements for the vote would gain current in the 19th and early 20th century. But Mary Wollstonecraft was not just about "empowering" women politically. First and foremost, she wanted to make the women of her society human, something most of them had not been allowed to aspire to. And to get most of humanity-not just women-out of a horrific ignorance which if it had continued, would have rendered most of our modern world impossible. Another idea which was introduced by very early feminists such as Wollstonecraft, was the notion that the right to vote or participate in civic affairs should be based on adult citizenship and by demonstrating the capacity for reason and conscience (which she claimed contrary to the accepted wisdom of her time women could develop) rather than being seeing suffrage as a sort of property-indeed in many places the right to vote was dependent on owning property.
For this reason strong ties between suffragette movements and abolitionist movements were no accident.
The issue of family planning was advanced heavily by feminist movements, and as a result also changed the human condition is many ways. For example in the past, when Malthus talked about the possibility of their not being enough land to feed the world's people someday the only options on the table were infanticide, abortion, draconian sexual and marital codes, or simply allowing large numbers of people die in local disasters and famines. But now, when we think of population as an issue the first thing that comes into most peoples' minds are relatively safe modern contraceptives. Obviously medicine and science were an important part of this advancement. However, much of the applied research was lobbied for by feminist groups, much as Margaret Sanger had sought to enlist various scientists to develop the birth control pill. Even the research however, would have done little good if feminists had not sought both to legalize it and change its imagine from something used by prostitutes, to something that was OK for respectable people.
So there you have it. There are three major changes in our society, even most anti-feminists take for granted these days.
Beyond that Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter, in many ways shaped modern imaginations, by inventing science fiction. In an interesting coincidence one early forward to the book "Frankenstein", Mary Shelley mentioned the research of a Professor Darwin-the father of Charles Darwin. But despite all that, our society labels science fiction as "geek boys' adventure stories" despite the fact it has made modern sensibilities so different from what they were before science fiction was invented. Basically this genre did nothing less than give people a form of fictional literature that could serve as a sort of ground for thought experiments about how certain technologies and/or social changes would affect the society. And people of various stripes could read it, come up with their own ideas about how realistic the author's version was, and if they thought they could do better write their own. Without it our how understanding about society would likely have been quite different. How often do work of science fiction and the whole language that has grown out of them, come up in political debates (ei Big Brother's Watching, Brave New World, or even "Frankencrops".)? Could we imagine how the modern world would look without any of those touchstones or references?
I've always found it ironic that science fiction has long been regarded as primarily the province of men and boys, when it was invented by a woman. And that on top of that when Mary Shelley wrote "Frankenstein", romance writers were almost exclusively men. Men who almost always used male pen names, if not necessarily their own names, unlike the male romance writers of today who almost always take on female pen names. And throughout the early 20th century most female science fiction writers took on male pen names. In one famous case Alice Sheldon, writing under the pen name "James Tiptree", decided to came out of the closet after some of her stories had been described in magazines as "robustly masculine" and even a classic example of what science fiction would loose if women continued to enter the field.
But life is full of little ironies. Such as the fact that in the 18th century reading and writing were thought to be only fit for males. But today some would argue (fortunately few of them are actual teachers) that girls should be the ones who learn by reading quietly and by rote handwriting excercises, while the boys should get the hands-on experiments and fields trips.
Say Goodnight Readers!!
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