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Thanks for organizing this event! I'm sorry I wasn't able to join you to talk in person, so thanks also for allowing me to record this little section from one of my lectures on Modern European History. Here is the transcript:
"Shorah Everyone. This is Ghaelen D'Lareh, and I am going to talk to you today about Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley. Mary Wollstonecraft was an enlightenment woman in England whose work at a publishing house had afforded her the company of Thomas Paine, William Blake and other writers. Her book, called A Vindication of the Rights of Women, was written in reaction to the criticisms of William Burke (and other conservatives) on the French Revolution. The efforts of French women in the revolution had not been lost on women around Western Europe. Wollstonecraft - and other progressive women - were tired of hearing the same old rational for continued oppression of half of Europe's population. She herself had grown up in a patriarchal family, and her father was not only domineering but abusive in his demands for control. Rather than become the passive, long-suffering daughter as so many women were wont to do (especially because of the helplessness they felt), Wollstonecraft left home and took up a life of outspoken radicalism against what she considered to be tyranny. It was her firm opinion that women's keen minds were wasted in nonsensical domestic servitude, that it was rubbish that their only value was in a pleasant appearance or a soothing voice, and that it was a feeble argument that a woman's education need only include the proper care of children, appropriate attire that pleased men, and a well-laid dinner table. She felt passionately that education was the key to the greater participation of all citizens in a body politic, and that women deserved the same legal, political, and educational rights as men.
Her first book, A Vindication of the Rights of Women is a response to William Burke in regard to the French Revolution in general. (Burke was a wealthy conservative who felt the few should continue to rule the many, because the latter had neither the experience nor the intelligence to rule themselves). Another book brings the rights of women firmly into the picture. The third book, A Vindication of the Rights of Men is a more thoughtful, slow paced book. Having had some time to analyze the revolution, the cause of it, and to consider continued societal problems, she gives even more solutions to the issues she sees in her time.
Some twenty years later her daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, would demonstrate the success of a good education with her keen mind and her perceptiveness. She would write her own work in 1818 called Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus. Her work was written during the Romantic Era, and after Industrialization had been firmly established. In art as well as in literature,
Romantic artists and writers merged emotions, particularly fear and horror, with an abhorrence of the mechanization of everything around them. They depict the human soul searching for something it cannot find in the hard cold walls of industrialization. The romantics melded these high emotions with what they saw as the mechanization even of human beings, a meld best represented in Mary Shelly's work. In her novel Shelly revives the supernatural of the Gothic era and takes it to new, hideous heights that illustrate the extremes to which mechanization seemed to be heading. The monster is not the wretch that is pieced together as in a factory, but the intellect that would mechanize him - the one who would dehumanize another so much so as to take him apart and piece him back together.
So we see here, as a mother and daughter, the achievements of women allowed to be well educated - in the best way possible. They were together, two of the most influential women in the area of philosophy and literature - they changed the way we see the relationship between the oppression of women (or the freeing of women) and the devaluing (or valuing) of human-ness as a whole."
_________________ We are the shapers and the caretakers of this metaverse. How we honor ourselves and others largely determines what we bring into being.
A story: De Landria
Ghaelen: Moula.2 KI #64299
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I'm glad you put it here also so it could be read by all those who missed the event.