In Part I we learned about ancient and medieval women writing about love and sexual politics. In this second part, we take a look at women who were a little more political, a little more philosophical, and a little braver than their predecessors. The women below were lucky enough to be educated enough to write, and we are lucky to be able to read what they wrote.
Aphra Behn
Dragged out of obscurity by uber-writer and feminist Virginia Woolf in a Room of One’s Own, Aphra Behn, like Christine de Pizan, was one of the first females to support herself via writing. Behn was a journalist, dramatist, and novelist of Restoration England. She was also, by her own accounts, a spy after the manner of Mata Hari, working for the English and spying on the Dutch. After Dryden, Behn was the second most popular dramatist of the Restoration Era.
Two things should be noted about Behn: she wrote with a sense of self-awareness hithertofore unseen (except perhaps with the Occitanian troubaritz–see Part I) and she is credited, by some scholars of literature, with writing, or at least contributing early on, to the emerging genre of the seventeenth century—the novel. Indeed Behn’s study of slavery in Surinam, Oroonoko, has of late displaced Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe as the first English novel.
Maria Edgeworth
Ms. Edgeworth was an Anglo-Irish lass who made her literary mark at the beginning of the nineteenth century. An unabashed independent thinker, her first published work was Letters for Literary Ladies. In these letters, she often complained about the lack of women in the math and sciences: “In which of the useful arts, in which of the exact sciences, have we been assisted by female sagacity or penetration? – I should be glad to see a list of discoveries, of inventions, of observations, evincing patient research, of truths established upon actual experiment, or deduced by just reasoning from previous principles.”
Later on in that same letter, Edgeworth bemoans the bad rap that females get, “I should not refer you to the scandalous chronicles of modern times… where female influence and female depravity are synonymous terms.”
Not into feminism? Ok, consider, then Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, a thinly veiled satire that rails against British absentee landlordism over the Irish and its deleterious effects. Castle Rackrent is also considered one of the first regional and historical novels.
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, had a mother and her name was Mary Wollstonecraft. Her most famous work, for which she was simultaneously praised and vilified, was A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which called for many things but mostly called for equal access to education for women. Wollstonecraft appealed to her male readers in this treatise, arguing that an educated woman would make a better life-companion than one who is engaged in frivolous pursuits. Vindication and Wollstonecraft’s other works were conspicuously ignored after it came to light that Wollstonecraft had attempted suicide, had a child out of wedlock, and was engaged in numerous love affairs.
Wollstonecraft was rediscovered during the feminist movement and has been at center stage since. Besides Vindication, her Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, a travelogue, also provide compelling reading of a woman in crisis.
Abigail Adams
Perhaps the most well-known of all authors in this list, Ms. Adams was the second First Lady of the White House. Her letters to her husband, John Adams, begin during the Revolutionary War and are a snapshot of how drastically the political landscape changed in just a few decades’ time. The letters provide a personal, political, and national history. Abigail corresponded with three presidents: John Adams, her husband; John Quincy Adams, her son; and Thomas Jefferson, her friend. How many writers can say that?
Anonymous
Anonymous means unknown. How many anonymous works were written by women but whose names were left off, for fear of repercussions? How many manuscripts from the Middle Ages were perhaps written by an educated noblewoman or female member of the church? How many unsigned poems or novellas could claim female authorship? We’ll never know. But what we do know is that women can, and always will, write. Amen.
Tracey McCormick is Managing Editor at GreatHistory.com.
Related Articles |
Women Writers of the Past Four Hundred Years « SheSpoke. Find out what she said said:
[...] Past Four Hundred Years Posted by shespoke under Rants, writing I’ve published Part II of a two-part series on women writers from the past 2500 years. Read Part I here. [...]
March 25th, 2009 at 9:34 pm
Elijah said:
I think I remember reading how Wollstonecraft heavily influenced Aaron Burr who was known as an early advocate of women’s issues.
October 4th, 2009 at 2:47 pm