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).

Rousseau

The Romantic era came after the Enlightenment, the age of empiricism. There is a simple and large difference between the two lines of thought: where enlightenment philosophy and empiricism relies on logic and the literal, romanticism is a thing of emotions and idealism. Subjectivity over objectivity.

Rousseau is the fundamental Romantic philosopher. He eschewed the enlightenment philosophies and thought little of the greatness of Man. He saw what he regarded a beautiful innocence in nature and simplicity, respecting the 'noble savage' and holding that the theoretical state of nature was a decent state of being. Having said that, he also realised that humans have come too far along the path of civilisation to ever return to that state of nature, when we were most like animals.

His theory was that the state of nature (theoretical as it may be) was interrupted when one man first fooled another man that a patch of land belongs to him. Personally, I disagree with him on this, for the simple fact that there are territorial animals. Dogs, for example, claim their land by marking it with their urine and will continue to defend it from other dogs, but they have nothing close to resembling what we might call civilisation. We are territorial by nature as by having territory we preserve ourselves. In a state of nature, for example, this territory might include a fruit tree or a grassy plain where animals graze. It is in our interest to keep others from acquiring these assets, so that we might survive - and survival is inherently selfish. Then again, there are nomadic tribes which we might not call civilised, such as the indigenous North Americans or Arabian bedouins. These people, while they have a culture and a society between themselves, believe the land to be a communal possession of everyone, with their only property being their animals, clothes, tools and tents. So perhaps I'm not really making much of a point here...

Still, having said that, I would say that civilisation began when large numbers of people came together, and the surplus of food was enough that they could do other things than focus constantly on their survival. As far as I'm aware (and my awareness extends to a documentary I watched on iPlayer a few months ago), this is the commonly held view of the birth of civilisation, as the people naturally congregated together and formed the first cities in ancient Babylon. But perhaps I'm taking Rousseau's words too literally. Perhaps, all he is saying is that the selfishness of ownership is the 'original sin', as such, of civilisation.