Sublime

In late 18th-century England, women had very few rights. Philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft was frustrated that this lack of rights limited a woman’s ability to be independent and make choices on how to live her life. Instead of arguing, however, for why women should get rights, she recognized that she had to demonstrate the value that these rights wo

Mary’s “trespass”—her insistence that women’s rights be included in a society founded on the basis of personal liberties—was one of her most important contributions to political philosophy and what would come to be known as feminism.

1881, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony published the first volume of their monumental History of Suffrage, they put Wollstonecraft at the top of their list of heroic women “[w]hose earnest lives and fearless words, in demanding political rights for women have been, in the preparation of these pages, a constant inspiration.”

Marie Souvestre, the founder and headmistress, was the daughter of the French philosopher and novelist Émile Souvestre. A committed feminist, she believed passionately in educating women to think for themselves, to challenge accepted wisdom, and to assert themselves. These were subversive doctrines to patriarchal Victorians, yet Allenwood succeeded

self-sacrificing, patient queen of the domestic realm, who assumed the moral education of her children, was born in the eighteenth century. The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau deserves considerable credit for her creation.