Welcome to Breaking Down Patriarchy. I'm Amy McPhee Allabest. During our last episode, we discussed Olimp Degouge and her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen.

We learned how Deguze was accused of treason and beheaded, and her work never really took off in France or elsewhere, as evidenced by the fact that if you say the name

Olimp de Guz, most people will not have heard of her. However, there was a woman in England

writing at the very same time on the very same subject. This was the famous Mary Woolstonecraft,

and her book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, with strictures on political and

moral subjects, is one of the most famous and influential works on this subject in history.

Before we start, I want to introduce my reading partner today, Megan Cahoon Alder. Hi, Megan.

Hi, Amy. So I want to start with a couple of background topics as we launch our discussion.

If you look up a vindication of the rights of woman just on Wikipedia, the first sentence describes Mary Wollstonecraft as an 18th century British proto-feminist.

The second sentence describes her book as one of the earliest works of feminist

philosophy. Okay, so by now listeners know that word definitions are really important to me.

And so we're going to pause here really quickly and talk about the word feminist. So first of all,

using the terms feminism or feminist can be controversial among historians

when applied to people before the term was used. So the Oxford English Dictionary lists 1852

as the year of the first appearance of the word feminist and 1895 for the word feminism. Quote,

feminism, the advocacy of women's rights on the basis of the equality of the sexes, end quote. And if you look up Oxford reference, there's an

expansion of the definition, a portion of which reads, quote, the approach to social life, philosophy,

and ethics that commits itself to correcting biases leading to the subordination of women,

end quote. So those are the definitions that we will be working with when that word comes up

anywhere on this episode or any other episode of breaking down

patriarchy. And I think it's interesting for today's discussion that Woolstonecraft is

described in retrospect as a proto-feminist, proto, of course, meaning the earliest or a precursor

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