Professor’s Classroom
Subject: Women’s Studies/American History
It is March and that would make it Women’s History Month…..what better time than now to try and right a historical wrong? I do not want to take anything away from the people that worked long and hard as suffragist and feminists, they tolled long and hard to help women get their deserved place in history and in society. Women like Clara Barton, Susan B. Anthony, Helen Keller, all women that gave their all for the cause…..
Almost every timeline that I see about women’s rights there seems to be a consensus that Abigail Adams, wife of Founder Father John Adams, told her husband while he and the others were working on the Declaration of Independence in 1776 to, “Remember the Ladies”….she is usually the first entry in the timeline on the fight for women rights…….
Actually, there was another about two years before Abigail’s now famous line……in 1774, a man, not a normal man but rather an idealists that led the charge to independence as well as the fight against slavery and the first person in the Colonies that called for the rights that women truly deserved….that man was Thomas Paine…..
He wrote an essay entitled: “An Occasional Letter On The Female Sex”:
Society, instead of alleviating their condition, is to them the source of new miseries. More than one half of the globe is covered with savages; and among all these people women are completely wretched. Man, in a state of barbarity, equally cruel and indolent, active by necessity, but naturally inclined to repose, is acquainted with little more than the physical effects of love; and, having none of those moral ideas which only can soften the empire of force, he is led to consider it as his supreme law, subjecting to his despotism those whom reason had made his equal, but whose imbecility betrayed them to his strength. “Nothing” (says Professor Miller, speaking of the women of barbarous nations) “can exceed the dependence and subjection in which they are kept, or the toil and drudgery which they are obliged to undergo. The husband, when he is not engaged in some warlike exercise, indulges himself in idleness, and devolves upon his wife the whole burden of his domestic affairs. He disdains to assist her in any of those servile employments. She sleeps in a different bed, and is seldom permitted to have any conversation or correspondence with him.”
The above is a portion of the essay that Paine wrote in 1774 for the Pennsylvania Magazine…..
Paine was a staunch supporter of human rights…..he opposed slavery in ALL forms…..and he especially found that women were treated more like property than equals….that they had NO voice and NO station other than arm candy and as a baby factory….he deplored the treatment of women and was one of the first, if not the first, to speak out in women’s defense…….
We as a country owe Thomas Paine a great deal….more than we could ever repay him for….his service to this country goes almost totally ignored….a sad fact that I attempt to rectify……I take every opportunity to point out the accomplishments of Thomas Paine because the US owes him a large debt that we have yet to pay….
When we celebrate Women’s History Month…let us look to Thomas Paine as the First feminist, who took on the establishment on the behalf of women….GIVE THE MAN HIS DUE!