Mary Wollstonecraft

About a hundred years before the feminist movement took off, there was Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft's book, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, is one of the very earliest feminist texts. In it she derides both the male treatment of women, and the women's treatment of themselves.

Her argument, at its core, is a) that women are purposely educated in such a way as to be kept 'childlike', narrowminded and beautiful, with that being all they know and b) that were they educated the same way as men, there would be no difference. Today her arguments are proven; women have just as much right to any job as men including army service, and girls today tend to perform better in school.

But going back to the 18th Century, when men still dominated, her ideas were radical. She said that women were ruled by their beauty, peaking at the age of 20 when they were most beautiful, while men who work and philosophise don't reach their peak until 30. Women must marry upwards to advance in status and wealth and be, as such, pretty birds in a cage for their husband. This is the sum of their entire lives, ruled by their youthful beauty and over with their first son and old age.

They are also childlike, she states, being unable to control their tempers or themselves. And thus they are inadequate mothers, as you wouldn't want a child to raise a child.. She also argues that men, despite displaying affection and polite, are actually condescending. They may treat women like royalty but scoff at the thought of a woman leading them.

Her answer to this female weakness is education. Wollstonecraft says that all a woman is taught is how to be beautiful, and as such that is all she knows. But were they educated as men are, then they would be equal to men, both physically and mentally.

Wollstonecraft was ahead of her time (by about a hundred years). Of course, we know today that what she says is by and large a truth. Today, with no discrimination between the genders in education, there is little difference between a man and a woman, and there is evidence to suggest girls perform better than boys in education (I put some of it down to self-fulfilling prophecy; when people keep pushing statistics like that in your face, it doesn't exactly fill a kid with scholarly passion).