Female World Activists

Mother of feminism

Today im going to talk about 4 female activists that caught my eye and
present their life and activism journey.

Mary Wollstonecraft might be best known for one of the earliest sources of western
feminism: “The Vindication of the Rights of Women.” She wrote this text in 1792,
right in the middle of the Enlightenment. Influenced by the ideas about rational
thinking and reason, she focuses on education and women as rational beings. Mary
argues here that women are rendered as inferior by society because they do not get the
space to develop their intellect the way boys do during their upbringing. She noticed
that girls and women were excluded from education and thus have no place to learn.
Women, according to Mary, need the power to exercise their own reason, and that is
only possible through educating them properly.

Those thoughts are quite interesting in regard to her own life. Mary was born in 1759
in London. Her childhood can be described as a first-hand experience of patriarchy.
The family she was born into, was a wealthy one but due to the fact that her father was
an alcoholic, violent and abusive to Mary and her siblings he lost most of it. Mary also
never had the chance to attend proper education due to the lack of money. Everything
she knew was self-taught and all this made her aware of the injustices in society and
sharpened her sense for it. 

Just during the first wave of feminism in Europe, feminists began to restore the
reputation of Mary and turned her into the figure we know now. She always knew that
society had to change: “till society be differently constituted, much cannot be
expected from education” is something she wrote in “The Vindication of the Rights of
Women.” 
Rosa Parks was an American activist in the civil rights
movement best known for her main role in the Montgomery bus
boycott. The United States Congress has honored her as "the first lady
of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement". She
became an international icon of resistance to racial segregation, and
organized and collaborated with civil rights leaders.

For much of her childhood, Rosa was educated at home by her mother, who
also worked as a teacher at a nearby school. The Ku Klux Klan was a
constant threat, Rosa’s grandfather would often keep watch at night, rifle in
hand, awaiting a mob of violent white men. On nights thought to be
especially dangerous, the children would have to go to bed with their
clothes on so that they would be ready if the family needed to escape.

What is more, Rosa Parks) helped initiate the civil rights movement  in
the United States when she refused to give up her seat to a white
man on a Montgomery, Alabama bus in 1955. “People always say
that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired,” wrote Parks in her
autobiography, “but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically… No,
the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” Eventually, two police
officers approached the stopped bus, assessed the situation and
placed Parks in custody. Her actions inspired the leaders of the local
Black community to organize the Montgomery Bus Boycott . 

However, Parks was the first woman and only the second Black person to
receive distinction.
Marsha Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were self proclaimed drag performers
and vibrant, indelible figures in Greenwich Village street life. The women emerged from the
events that took place at Stonewall in 1969 as leaders in the Gay Liberation Movement.
Together they helped found the group STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries),
which offered housing to homeless and transgender youth. 

Johnson and Rivera opened the first LGBTQ+ youth shelter in North America, and these
trailblazers became the first Trans women of color to lead an organization in the United
States.

Rivera was born and raised in New York City. She was abandoned by
her father and became an orphan after her mother committed suicide
when Rivera was three years old. She was then raised by her
grandmother, who disapproved of Rivera’s feminine behavior, especially
after she began to wear makeup in fourth grade.
As a result, Rivera began living on the streets and was forced to work as
a child prostitute. She was then taken in by the local community of drag
queens, who gave her the name Sylvia.

Johnson was born in New Jersey. She and her siblings were raised in
the African Methodist Church and Commenting on this upbringing,
Johnson said, "I got married to Jesus Christ when I was sixteen years
old, still in high school."

Johnson first began wearing dresses at the age of five but stopped
temporarily due to harassment by boys. In a 1992 interview, Johnson
described being the young victim of rape by a thirteen-year-old boy. After
this, Johnson described the idea of being gay as "some sort of dream",
rather than something that seemed possible.

Both women continued to be persistent voices for the rights of people of color, low-income
queer and Trans communities for the remainder of their lives

 To conclude, I want to say that we have to be grateful for all the activism,
writing, marching, arguing for women’s rights and education. These
women and many more have influenced society in such a way that women
today have the opportunities of which they only dreamt about.