‘I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves.’
Ground-breaking, radical, a… "hyena in petticoats"? In 1792, English writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft published the seminal work, 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,' where she called for female empowerment through education, and in 1795, Horace Walpole dismissed her as ‘that hyena in petticoats.’ Fine. Every hyena clan is a matriarchy ruled by an alpha female, and Wollstonecraft fits the bill.
After all, at a time where women’s education was barely conceptualised in England, Wollstonecraft argued that women were not naturally inferior to men but appeared to be only because they lacked education, a truly revolutionary suggestion. Today, where two-thirds of the 750 million illiterate adults in the world are women and more than 130 million girls are out of school, her words still ring true. Vive la révolution!
