“from 1820s on, dozens of women publicized radical feminist convictions in writing and actions. They addressed controversial issues such as prostitution, slavery, capitalism, and war. Some dared to address audiences in person, defying the convention against women speaking in public. They bucked tradition in other ways. By retaining their own names when they married or refusing to vow obedience to their husbands, by demanding the right to divorce or to choose single motherhood, or by proposing that women and men dress alike and share responsibility for housework and child care. Women wrote petitions, held demonstrations, edited feminist newspapers, organized strikes, tried to vote and even ran for public office.” (LeGates, p.153)
To top off this impressive list of advancements some women of the era even cotended that women constitute a separate, oppressed group, started the first activist movements, a whole hundred years before the Feminist movement took full bloom. These small initial steps toward emancipation were witness across the breadth of Western Civilization, with nations such as England, the United States, France and Germany seeing most developments. In the other book perused for this research, namely Women Imagine Change… written by Eugenia C. DeLamotte, Natania Meeker, Jean F. O’Barr, we see several more examples of such close associations between broader political developments and notions of gender self-assertion (DeLamotte, et. al, p.25). An interesting fact about this comprehensive piece of scholarship is that it dates the first conceptions of feminist ideas to more than two millennia from now.
Works Cited:
Eugenia C. DeLamotte, Natania Meeker, Jean F. O’Barr, Women Imagine Change: A Global Anthology of Women’s Resistance from 600 B.C.E. to Present, Published by Routledge, 1997, 518 pages.
Marlene LeGates, In Their Time: A History of Feminism in Western Society, Published by Routledge, 2001, ISBN 0415930987, 9780415930987, 406 pages