Feminism: From Ancient Rome to the Women’s March

Dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster chose feminism as its 2017 Word of the Year, in response to both the massive Women’s Marches in American cities over the weekend following President Donald Trump’s inauguration and the scores of women who came forward to out famous and influential men for past and present sexual predation. Although many are exposed to the word in classroom discussions of women’s rights movements, feminism has a much longer history than the familiar push for women’s suffrage during the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the “second wave” feminism of the 1960s and ’70s.

The earliest evidence of a display that would today be called feminist came in ancient Rome during the 3rd century BCE, when a group of women barricaded the Forum in an attempt to force consul Marcus Porcius Cato to repeal laws that limited women’s use of expensive goods. However, this was an isolated incident, and the first notable feminist thinker, French philosopher Christine de Pisan, did not flourish until the late 14th and early 15th centuries. While she codified typically feminine behavior in her treatises on moral instruction, she is also credited with agitating for female education, a radical stance at the time. Another important feminist development came when French author Olympe de Gouges wrote her Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (“Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the [Female] Citizen”) in 1791, a response to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Declaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (“Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen”), which did not address the rights of women.

Early feminism developed on the European continent, but Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which argued that women were not placed on Earth solely to please men and deserved equal opportunities in society, was the first landmark feminist text in the English language. And social reformer Victoria Woodhull, who thrived during the famed suffragette era, is not nearly as recognized as she should be, considering that she—not Hillary Clinton, as popularly assumed—was actually the first woman to run for the presidency of the United States, in 1872.

So if, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., the arc of the moral universe is long but bends towards equality, there have been outstanding women working to shape it for longer than you probably realize.

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