Women's Rights before Suffragettes by Diane Scott Lewis

Celebrate Women's History Month

I once had a critique group where the only male member protested my female character's feminist-like qualities. She was eighteenth-century and women didn't demand their rights until the twentieth-century, so he insisted.

Suffragettes 1914

I had to explain how wrong he was.

Most people don't realize that women have been asking for rights for centuries.
I see it in book reviews all the time: the spunky heroine behaves in too modern a manner.

However, history if full of such women, if you look for them.

Aphra Behn was a writer, playwright and translator who lived in England in the 1600s. She championed the rights for women to speak their minds. She was also one of the first Englishwomen to earn a living by her own writing. She became the inspiration for future female authors. Charles II appreciated her intelligence and used her as a spy in Antwerp.
Her first play, The Forc'd Marriage, in 1670, criticized women being forced into often unhappy or cruel arranged marriages.


Behn

Mary Astell, another Englishwoman, advocated equal education for women. She's been called the first English feminist and insisted that women were just as rational as men. And deserving of a similar education. In 1694, her book Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest put forth plans for an all female college where women could expand their minds. This at a time when most women weren't allowed to attend any college. She also wrote about the dangers of women being pushed into bad marriage choices.



Astell

Mary Wollstonecroft lived in the later eighteenth century, and was the mother of Mary Shelly (who wrote "Frankenstein").
Wollstonecroft advocated for equal education for women, writing two books on the subject. Her 1792 "Vindication of the Rights of Woman" put forth that women weren't naturally inferior to men, they just suffered from inadequate education. Today she's revered as a founding feminist philosopher.

Wollstonecroft

Women could also be as brave as men. Many participated in the American Revolution dressed as males. Deborah Sampson Gannet fought with Washington’s army dressed as a soldier. Sampson enlisted in 1782 with the 4th Massachusetts, as Robert Shurtleff. She achieved the rank of corporal in the battle of White Plains, and sustained injuries twice. Upon discovery of her sex, she was honorably discharged. And received a pension!

My heroine, Rowena, in "Her Vanquished Land" fights as a man during the American Revolution--but on the British side. She decodes messages for a mysterious Welshman. Soon, their relationship evolves even as the war might destroy them.

So my strong women are not anachronistic. History has kept most of them out of the history books.

Purchase Her Vanquished Land and my other novels at BWL
For more info on me and my books, check out my website: Dianescottlewis

Diane Scott Lewis lives in Western Pennsylvania with her husband and one naughty puppy.

Diane Scott Lewis, the flummoxed author-on early women's rights!

On Women’s Rights, gasp, prior to the 20th century:

Back in my naïve days as a fledgling author, I joined critique groups to better polish my historical novels. My story, which took place in 1815, had a young woman who tried to stand up for herself in a typical male-dominated environment. I researched, and was surprised how many women advocated for "women’s rights" in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

But the man in my group objected, saying women never asked for rights until the twentieth century. What did he think we were doing all those centuries when most of us had minds of our own?

I found many people shared this narrow view.

When I came across an actual treatise on a female who sought her due in the seventeenth century, a woman now forgotten by time, I had to blog about her.

Mary Astell, a school teacher from Newcastle upon Tyne, England, published Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest, in 1694.

She was born in in 1666 to an upper middle-class family. Her father was a royalist Anglican who managed a coal company. As a woman, she received no formal education, as the culture of the time felt girls didn’t require any learning outside of the domestic realm. Fortunately for Mary, starting at the age of eight, she received an informal education from her uncle. Her uncle, an ex-clergyman, was affiliated with the Cambridge based philosophical school which based its teachings around radical philosophers such as Aristotle, Plato, and Pythagoras. Heady stuff for what was called, the feeble brains of women.

Mary’s father died when she was twelve, leaving her without a dowry. Her family’s limited finances were invested in her brother’s higher education and Mary and her mother were forced to move in with her aunt. After the death of her mother and aunt, Mary moved to Chelsea, London in 1688 where she was lucky enough to make the acquaintance of a circle of influential and literary women. These women helped Mary with the development and publication of her treatise.
Mary Astell was one of the first Englishwomen to advocate that women were as rational as men, and just as deserving of education. Her Serious Proposal presented a plan for an all-female college where women could pursue a life of the mind. In 1700, Mary published another work: Some Reflections upon Marriage. She warned, in witty prose, of the dangers to females "...of an ill Education and unequal Marriage." She urged women to make better matrimonial choices because a disparity in intelligence and character may lead to misery. Marriage should be based on lasting friendship rather than short-lived attraction.

She was known to debate freely with both men and women, and particularly for her groundbreaking methods of negotiating the position of women in society by engaging in philosophical debate rather than basing her arguments in historical evidence as had previously been attempted. One of her famous quotes stated: "If all Men are born Free, why are all Women born Slaves?"

Mary withdrew from public life in 1709 and founded a charity school for girls in Chelsea. She died in 1731, a few months after a mastectomy to remove a cancerous breast.
So when reviewers—or readers—criticize a novel for promoting a heroine who acts "before her time" remember that women have been seeking liberation for centuries.

Resources: "Astell, Mary." Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2011.

My current release, Ring of Stone, called a "true historical epic" depicts strong women in the eighteenth century, one who strives to become a physician before women were allowed, and uncovers shocking secrets in a small Cornish village.

Visit my website for information on my novels:

http://www.dianescottlewis.org