The Changing Status of Women in Britain

This scratch manifesto of women's lib and precursor of its modern counterparts was itself hardly revolutionary, if considered with reference to the Terror, the revolutions of 1848 in Europe, the bloodbaths that sop up so often been proxies for revolutions ever since, and indeed what the women's suffrage action in England had become about a century later. however it can be considered first in a regular (though sometimes tenuous) line of presentation of advocacy meant to articulate a specifically female point of view in common discourse. To be sure, oppositional advocacy was thither to meet it and remains there now, but the voices of whom Wollstonecraft's was the first of lasting relevance to the modern dot put one over not been completely suppressed.

Greer speaks indirectly to the challenge of characterizing the lieu of British women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when she observes that Wollstonecraft considered deceit a "secondary sex characteristic of the female mind," though the requisite of women's deceit was attributed to the consequences of female degradation. It can be inferred that Wollstonecraft no little than Greer would have wished to diminish the cause of equal social stand up for women, but the double vision of women as being or wishing to be perceived straightforwardly as clement beings, as against the image of a being peculiarly and particularly female, has been a persistent and difficult factor of analysis of women's issues

in that respect was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some ruinous fear. . . . The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and odious . . . I closed my eyes in a unenrgetic ecstasy and waited--waited with beating heart."

Gluck, Susan B. Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War, and Social Change. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987.

MacKinnon, Catherine A. " exit and Dominance: On Sex Discrimination." Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and the Law. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. 32-45.

Greer, Germaine. The Female Eunuch. new(a) York: Bantam, 1971.

[Y]ou had better make up your mind at once to be uninteresting as long as you live, to all except the companion of your home. . . . [Y]ou may have more talent, with higher attainments, and you may also have been generally more admired, but this has nothing whatever to do with your position as a woman, which is, and must be, inferior to his as a man.

For . . . Victorian feminists, marriage and family were the primary human relationships. . . . [T]he whim of the family was very nearly sacrosanct, and that idea implied that men and women had distinctive natures and virtues which ricochet them together in a complex relationship of rights, duties, and if they were fortunate, love.

Hints of the New Woman were to be found in the premodern period as well. Weigel notes the emergence of the "woman's novel" between 1815 (the year of Napoleon's defeat) and 1848 (the year of the first Communist League meeting in London and of a several political revolutions on the Continent), suggesting a social latent hostility in the literary content:

Weigel, Sigrid. "Double Focus: On the History of Women's Writing." Feminist Aesthetics. Ed. Gisela Ecker. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985.

Jack the Ripper did not exhaust the late Victorian discourse of women's social position. Extended, maybe unexpected trea
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