Georgian England was very radical; there were all these new revolutionary ideas, and I think women had more freedom than they did later on.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I've always been interested in the history of radical feminism - what happened to those women of the 1960s and '70s.
Feminism was about making women's lives less constrained and giving them more choices.
The history of American women is about the fight for freedom, but it's less a war against oppressive men than a struggle to straighten out the perpetually mixed message about women's role that was accepted by almost everybody of both genders.
The fact that the movement was carried on by women who, for the most part, had no money of their own and were totally inexperienced in organization, and that they won their fight in about two generations, makes a story often dramatic and always worth preserving.
It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation.
While women were powerfully liberated both externally as well as internally by the feminism of the 1970s, we made some serious mistakes as well.
Cleopatra had one great advantage. She lived at a time when female sovereigns were not anomalies. And when women enjoyed rights they would not again enjoy for another 2,000 years. You could call them early feminists, if I may use a dirty word.
The freedom that women were supposed to have found in the Sixties largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion; things to make life easier for men, in fact.
Resolved, that the women of this nation in 1876, have greater cause for discontent, rebellion and revolution than the men of 1776.
The American Revolution and Declaration of Independence, it has often been argued, were fueled by the most radical of all American political ideas.