Jane Austen’s Anti-Feminism - Janice Fiamengo

Although she is now often recruited by feminist critics to make points about women’s limited life choices, preeminent social satirist Jane Austen wrote to oppose the popular proto-feminist ideas of her time, and her warnings about Romantic self-indulgence remain relevant to our own.

Utopianism and Double Standards in Feminist Foremother Mary Wollstonecraft - Janice Fiamengo

Let us go even further back in feminist history to the late eighteenth century and the writing of Mary Wollstonecraft, an acclaimed proponent of women’s rights, whose 1792 treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, is now widely regarded as the founding document of Anglophone feminism. As I will hope to show, Wollstonecraft’s commitment to the Enlightenment principles of equality and reason is at best skin deep, covering over a foundation of anti-male double standards and irrational hostility that forecast all too clearly the next 230 years of female supremacism.