Beginning as early as the late 1700’s, literature provides us with several examples of works that have one recurring central theme. The theme is one of equality for women, an equality that is essential to the survival of humanity. It also includes the idea that a proper education is necessary in order to support this equality. With little access to an education, three outstanding and intelligent women writers reveal to society, and to men, just exactly how accomplished a “learned lady” (Greenblatt 5) can be. From Mary Wollstonecraft to Virginia Woolf, female literary geniuses state their cases regarding these issues throughout the centuries, and propose that society will benefit when women are afforded equality and respect, by way of …show more content…
During a time full of transformations in Britain’s political and social structure, at least for men (Greenblatt 1017-1019), she gives sound reason as to why women must be educated. “Your most unreasoning animal is the most unmanageable of creatures” (Eliot 1358), she tells us, in the ongoing argument for equal rights. Born in an annus mirabilis (Greenblatt 1353), or a miracle year, this champion of women’s rights compares the earlier works of Wollstonecraft to those of an American essayist of her own time, Margaret Fuller (1355, n. 1). Her opening comments compare Margaret Fuller’s words, in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, to those of Mary Wollstonecraft, in Rights of Woman (Eliot 1356), in a revealing portrayal of how little change has taken place for women, despite the ongoing adaptations in the rest of society (1017-1041). Fuller, like Wollstonecraft, she says, asks for the “removal of unjust laws and artificial restrictions” (Eliot 1356), to “disencumber her of the Parasitic forms that…drag her down” (1356). She says that “every important idea in the Rights of Woman” (1356), except for one, “reappears in Margaret Fuller’s essay” (1356) and agrees with both women that foolish and uneducated women have excessive control over men and their decisions (1357). With her own definition of herself as a historian …show more content…
She says that a society is a group of people, who, for specific purposes, must work together towards a common cause, but that women are still not a part of that society, as it is “an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth” (Woolf 2007). When asked how she would prevent war (2706), she states, in “From Three Guineas” that there would be no war to prevent if women were not “locked in the…house without share in the many societies of which (man’s) society is composed” (Woolf 2707). As women are expected to “maintain an attitude of indifference” (2708) and not allowed to bear arms (2708), she says it would be quite easy to avoid a war. Since women have no country, but in fact, are owned by the country (2708-2709), there is no need to fight for any patriotic reason, and since the country does not protect women, there is no need to protect it, as well (2709). With no need to “impose ‘our’ civilization or ‘our’ dominion” (2710), on others, Ms. Woolf tells this man that the “secret Society of Outsiders would help…to prevent war and to ensure freedom”