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International Women's Day
by Matheus Mazzochi, Undergrad RA for the Extending New Narratives project
International Women鈥檚 Day is here, and I would like to share something as a research assistant on the project 鈥�鈥�. Since September last year, I have been reading works by women such as Catharine Trotter Cockburn (England), N铆sia Floresta (Brazil) , Ninon de Lenclos (France), and Mary Ann Shadd Cary (USA/Canada) , and wondering to myself, 鈥渨hy were those women forgotten?鈥�, 鈥渨hy we don鈥檛 talk about them?鈥�
Well, it鈥檚 not because they didn鈥檛 write anything.
Cockburn published a defence on Locke鈥檚 philosophy in 1702. Apparently, she did that so well that some wrongly attributed her defense to Locke himself.
Floresta published 15 books that were translated into English, Italian and French. Her works were read and discussed by scholars in both France and Italy.
Mary Ann Shadd Cary is the first black woman in North America to publish a newspaper, and Ninon de Lenclos had her letters to the Marquis of S茅vign茅 published and translated into English, Italian, Dutch, German, Polish, Hungarian, and Spanish.
Maybe their ideas were not interesting? However, both Floresta and Mary Ann Shadd Cary were abolitionists, defending equal rights for all regardless of gender, sex, color, belief, education or nation. Ninon de Lenclos argued that women should be allowed to pursue their own pleasures without the fear of being judged by society, and Cockburn鈥檚 arguments were added in late editions of Locke鈥檚 Essay.
These women haven鈥檛 previously been considered philosophers despite their philosophical ideas, but why not? Could poetry be a reason for their exclusion? An interesting fact about them is that most of them also wrote poetry. Regardless of this, the form of a work shouldn鈥檛 determine whether it is philosophical or not; it鈥檚 the content that should. Thus, a poem, for instance, can be philosophical. It鈥檚 worth remembering that dialogues have even been considered to be philosophical; the content of a work, not its form, is what is important.
So, what were those women鈥檚 works about? That is one of the questions we are trying to answer.
These women wrote about the issues of their time. However, even though the issues they were dealing with arguably may have changed, they are still relevant today; we can still learn how to think through our own issues by reading their works. Their ways of understanding their political problems could help us to understand our own, and so help us address them.
After all, as Mark Twain noted, 鈥渉istory doesn鈥檛 repeat itself, but it often rhymes鈥�. Hence, these women matter.
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