Items26The creator’s order
  1. 1Mary AstellMary AstellA High Church Tory who defended monarchy, Astell turned Locke's arguments against him. In the 1706 preface to Some Reflections upon Marriage she asked: "If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?" Her answer was not revolution but education, including a proposed women's…0i
  2. 2Olympe de GougesOlympe de GougesBorn 7 May 1748De Gouges answered the French Revolution's Declaration of the Rights of Man with her own Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen (1791), rewriting it article by article: "Woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights." She added that if women can mount the scaffold,…0i
  3. 3Mary WollstonecraftMary WollstonecraftBorn 27 Apr 1759Read Wollstonecraft against Rousseau, the thinker she most admired and most attacked. Émile had argued that girls should be educated only to please men; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) replied that the "weakness" Rousseau described was the product of that very education, and that women…0i
  4. 4Harriet Taylor MillHarriet Taylor MillBorn 8 Oct 1807Taylor Mill's essay The Enfranchisement of Women (1851) went further than her husband John Stuart Mill's later The Subjection of Women: she argued that married women should be free to work outside the home and earn their own income, while he assumed most would choose domestic life. Reading the two…0i
  5. 5Anna J. CooperAnna J. CooperBorn 10 Aug 1858Born into slavery in North Carolina, Cooper became a Washington school principal and, at 66, earned a doctorate at the Sorbonne. A Voice from the South (1892) argued that Black women faced both a "woman question" and a "race problem", and that white suffragists and Black male leaders each ignored…0i
  6. 6Charlotte Perkins GilmanCharlotte Perkins GilmanBorn 3 Jul 1860Gilman moved the argument from votes to money. Women and Economics (1898) claimed that women's economic dependence on husbands, not any natural difference, shaped their characters, and proposed kitchenless homes, professional cooking and shared childcare so wives could earn. Her utopian novel…0i
  7. 7Emma GoldmanEmma GoldmanBorn 27 Jun 1869Goldman thought the suffrage campaign was a distraction. Her essays "Woman Suffrage" and "The Tragedy of Woman's Emancipation" (1910s) argued that the vote would not free women any more than it had freed men, and that real liberation meant freedom from marriage, the church and the state, including…0i
  8. 8Virginia WoolfVirginia WoolfBorn 25 Jan 1882A Room of One's Own (1929) is the famous one, arguing that women's creative achievement depended on money and space of their own. The more political book is Three Guineas (1938), which links the exclusion of women from universities and professions to militarism and fascism, and refuses to join…0i
  9. 9Simone de BeauvoirSimone de BeauvoirBorn 9 Jan 1908The Second Sex (1949) supplied the movement's core idea: "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." Using existentialist philosophy, Beauvoir argued that men have defined themselves as the human norm and women as the "Other", so femininity is a situation imposed rather than a nature. Later…0i
  10. 10Betty FriedanBetty FriedanBorn 4 Feb 1921The Feminine Mystique (1963) named "the problem that has no name": the dissatisfaction of educated suburban housewives told that domesticity should fulfil them. Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women in 1966 to win equal employment and legal rights, the model of liberal reform…0i