Mary Wollstonecraft was born in London, England, the second of seven children. The family’s financial situation was unstable, and her father was abusive toward her mother. At 19, she found her way out of her home and took a position as a lady’s companion to a widow living in Bath. After two years, she got called back home to assist her ill mother. As soon as her mother died, Wollstonecraft moved in with her friend, the educator, and illustrator, Fanny (Frances) Blood. The two had envisioned a female utopia in which they meant to support each other financially and emotionally. Wollstonecraft, her sisters, and Blood established a school in Newington Green to make a living. Later, she detailed her teaching experiences in the pamphlet Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, published in 1787. Not long after, Blood became sick, and Wollstonecraft nursed her until she died in 1785. Afterward, the school closed, and she moved to Ireland to serve as governess for the Kingsborough family. After three years, she returned to London and decided to earn a living as a writer, an uncommon profession for a woman at the time. She befriended Joseph Johnson, a publisher of radical texts, and worked for him first as a translator and later as a regular contributor to his paper, the Analytical Review. He also published her first works, including the novel Mary: A Fiction; and the children’s book Original Stories from Real Life, both published in 1788. In 1790, at 31, she published a political pamphlet titled Vindication of the Rights of Men in response to MP Edmund Burke’s critique of the French Revolution. Two years later, she published her most famous work – A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In this groundbreaking essay, Wollstonecraft argued that women must receive education equally to men, asserting that women are more than mere wives, rather companions to their husbands, and their education is essential to the nation because they are the ones who educate the children. Although the essay aroused controversy, it didn’t lead to reforms or further interest. That same year, Wollstonecraft moved to Paris to witness firsthand the French Revolution. There, she met Captain Gilbert Imlay, an American timber merchant, and in 1794, she had her first child, Fanny. While caring for her newborn, she wrote and published the critique essay An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution. Shortly afterward, Imlay left her, and she followed him back to London. In their attempt to reunite, she joined him on a business trip to Scandinavia, documenting her accounts in Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. In 1796, on their return to London, Wollstonecraft and Imlay separated for good. She rejoined Johnson and became part of his radical group of friends, one of them was the philosopher William Godwin. Within a few months, she became pregnant, and the couple got married so their child would be legitimate. Suffering from post-partum infection, Wollstonecraft died 11 days after giving birth to her second child, who became the prominent novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. By the time she died at 38, she had published 10 of her works, and seven more were published posthumously. Although her legacy has been almost forgotten for nearly a century, her name was brought back by writers of the modern feminist movement, such as Virginia Woolf and Emma Goldman, who embraced her life story and achievements. The interest in her work increased during the 1960s and 1970s with the rise of feminist criticism in academia. Today, Wollstonecraft is considered one of the founding feminist philosophers. Read more...

Millicent Garrett Fawcett was born in Aldeburgh, England. At 12, she left her family to attend a boarding school in London. There, she met the philosopher John Stuart Mill, who introduced her to women’s rights activists, including Henry Fawcett, a Member of Parliament who was 14 years older than her, and in 1867 the couple got married. After the wedding, she worked as her husband’s secretary and started her writing career. She published articles and essays discussing women’s issues and her beliefs on equal opportunities for women and specifically women’s education. At 22, Fawcett attended her first suffrage movement meeting and soon joined the London Suffrage Committee. In the following year, she gave a speech at the first public pro-suffrage meeting, after which she became one of the leading speakers of the movement, giving lectures on the importance of women voting rights, mostly in schools for girls, women’s colleges, and adults education centers. In 1870, 23 years old Fawcett published the textbook Political Economy for Beginners, which became an immediate success, running through ten editions, translated into several languages, and aspired two novels. Two years later, she and her husband published a collection of essays titled Essays and Lectures on Social and Political Subjects. In 1875, she co-founded a college for women at the University of Cambridge, Newnham Hall, and served as its council. After her husband died in 1884, Fawcett sold her houses and moved in with her sister at Gower Street, Bloomsbury. She took a year off from public speaking. On her return to the Central Committee for Women’s Suffrage, they asked her to administer the joint meetings of the suffrage societies that merged into the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) in 1897. In 1907, she was appointed president of the NUWSS. Her campaign’s approach to achieving women’s right to vote was moderate and peaceful, in contrast to the militant position of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), led by Emmeline Pankhurst. She gave lectures, wrote articles and pamphlets. During WW1, Fawcett harnessed the NUWSS activities for the war efforts, supporting the services of hospitals in training camps in Scotland and Russia. The organization continued to campaign for women’s suffrage by emphasizing the contributions of women during wartime. Fawcett’s plan worked, mainly due to the movement’s actions during the war, the Representation of the People Act passed in 1918, giving women limited voting rights. Shortly after, when she was 72, Fawcett retired from her position as the president of the NUWSS, dedicating her time to writing. She also continued to launch and support other human rights campaigns, such as equal divorce rights, criminalizing incest, raising the age of consent, women’s access to the legal profession, stopping the white slave trade, and regulating prostitution in India. One of her most notable campaigns was against the Contagious Diseases Act, which required prostitutes to be tested for sexually transmitted diseases and imprisoned if positive, while the clients who infected the women were not required to get tested. She argued that the double standards of this and similar laws would continue to exist until women would be part of the decision-making process. Fawcett died at the age of 82 after dedicating her life to giving women a voice and promoting their rights, paving the way for generations of activist, feminist women. Read more...

Josephine Elizabeth Butler was born in Milfield, England, and grew up in Dilston. Her father was a social reformer and advocator against the slave trade, and all their seven children received equal education. Having been homeschooled most of her childhood, Butler learned politics and social issues from her parents. At 19, at the height of the Great Famine, she visited her brother in Ireland, where her awareness of social injustice had deepened. In 1850, at the age of 21, she began a relationship with George Butler, an academic and clergyman, who shared her opinions and commitment to liberal reforms. Two years later, they got married. The newlyweds settled in Oxford, where Butler encountered misogyny and was often the only woman at social gatherings. In 1853, the Butlers were part of a discussion about the novel Ruth by Elizabeth Gaskell, when the men criticized the “immoral behavior” of the heroine that was seduced and then abandoned by a wealthy man. Butler not only voiced her opinions but decided to take action, and she and her husband began to help women in similar conditions, especially prostitutes, inviting some of them to live in their home. In 1856, aged 28 and a mother of two, Butler began to have health issues caused by the damp atmosphere in Oxford, and the family moved to Clifton. There, the couple continued with their social activism, helping women in difficult situations. In 1864, her fourth child and only daughter died after falling 40 feet of a banister. Butler fell into a years-long depression, and her health declined. Two years later, the family relocated to Liverpool, where her husband received a teaching position. Still grief-stricken, she committed herself to charity work. She regularly went to sit, talk, and learn the bible with women who lived in workhouses, a living, and a working place for people who were unable to support themselves. She housed many women in her home, many of them were prostitutes who suffered venereal disease. When she realized she couldn’t provide shelter to all of them, Butler established two hostels that provided a place to live and appropriate work, such as sewing and envelopes manufacturing. Butler was also a loud advocate for women’s rights to vote and education. In 1867, 39 years old Butler, together with Anne Clough, founded the North of England Council for Promoting the Higher Education of Women and served as president for its first six years. Her first pamphlet, The Education and Employment of Women, argued that women deserved equal access to higher education and jobs as much as men. To further the effort, she initiated a petition for the senate of the University of Cambridge to allow women to take exams, which led to the establishment of the Cambridge Higher Examination for women the following year. And this has led to the foundation of the Newnham Women’s College in 1871. In 1869, Butler began a two-decade campaign to abolish the Contagious Diseases Acts. Introduced five years earlier as a means to reduce venereal disease, the act authorized the police to arrest and physically examine women who were suspected of prostitution, a conduct Butler referred to as surgical rape. She founded the Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts (LNA), wrote dozens of letters, pamphlets and petitions, and traveled 3,700 miles across the UK to give speeches on the subject. She mainly focused on working-class family men, who were shocked that a woman had spoken publicly about sexual matters. She faced many oppositions, often life-threatening, including smashing the windows of her hotel room and arson attempts. But this did not make her stop, and she continued her campaign until the act got repealed in 1886. Butler took her social activism overseas, and throughout the 1870s-1880s, she traveled to France, Switzerland, and Belgium to speak against licensed brothels and underage prostitution. Her acts led to the establishment of many organizations and committees devoted to ending child trafficking, including the International Abolitionist Federation for the Abolition of Government Regulation of Prostitution. She became involved with the campaign of journalist William Thomas Stead against child prostitution in London in 1885, which led to the raising of the consent age from 13 to 16 years of age. She moved to London after her husband died in 1890 and lived with her son and his wife before returning to Northumberland, where she grew up. Butler continued to write pamphlets and books, and in 1896, at the age of 68, she published her most known work – Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade. She also initiated more campaigns to promote various causes, including women’s suffrage, Irish Home Rule, eliminating police corruption, and regulating prostitution in India. She died at the age of 78. Read more...