This issue of Ceres Magazine reviews only a handful of famous feminists such as Mary Wollstonecraft, George Sand and Flora Tristan. But there are many great women and men who have contributed to the advancement of women’s rights. Let’s not forget that if Wollstonecraft remains the “mother of feminism,” she came before the Romantic Era, which this issue is about. Only a few women fell in both categories as feminists and Romantic authors. Novelist, playwright, literary critic, journalist and me-moirist George Sand fits this description, though she always denied her involvement with feminist move-ments. Adopting the style of a Romantic artist, Sand not only challenged traditional views of women, she also condemned marriage and encouraged passion in women.
Then, we said nothing about feminism in the United States during the same period, as we kept our theme in the context of emerging Romanticism in Europe—a movement that started in Germany and spread mainly through literature, with works such as Madame de Staël's De l’Allemagne. However, we will examine feminism in United States during the same period in one of our future issues of Ceres.
Louise-Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun "Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat" 1782
National Gallery, London, England. PD.
70 | Ceres Magazine | Spring 2016
It was of the utmost importance to begin this journey with Mary Wollstonecraft as she opened the door to new concepts that were revolutionary, and often seen as outrageous at the time. Writers, political activists, socialists, philosophers, and women’s rights advocates built on these ideas, either distilling them in novels, or demanding immediate radical changes through actions or literary work.
Therefore, our section on “What We Have Learned” will be a short review of a few other great feminists of the time we did not cover in this issue instead of a recap of the stories and history we have shared with you.
We know that feminism and social movements emerged in an attempt to promote new ideas and rights across national boundaries. It all started in England, with the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792, amid chaos. The French Revolution (1789-1799)
was in its third year of political upheaval, and the Age of Enlightenment, which reconsidered everything from family, to politics, to education, and even religion, was at its highest.
When most people believed women were intellectually inferior to men, Wollstonecraft argued that this inequality could be erased by equal access to education. Subsequent feminists, such as French Socialist Flora Tristan praised Wollstonecraft and constructed a new argument that their inequality was a social problem. By liberating women and providing the same education and training for both men and women, it would emancipate the working class by providing equal employment opportunities for all.
In parallel, during the 1830’s, social movements based on ideas resembling Wollstonecraft’s
views developed in the United States, too. Women abolitionists launched campaigns against discrimination, promoted women’s right to control their own bodies, along with demand for higher education. French philosopher and influential early socialist thinker—later associated with "utopian socialism”—Charles Fourier (1772-1837) believed in cooperative communities (the utopian communities), and that future social progress would occur "in proportion to the advance of women toward liberty.” To him a waste of talent was a waste of resource. The United States saw a few of those communities created during the 1830’s and 40’s.
Englishwoman Frances Wright (1795-1852) adopted
What we
have learned