Protofeminism is a concept that anticipates modern feminism in eras when the feminist concept as such was still unknown. So we can correctly say that Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen were protofeminist writers.
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" in 1792 as an answer to Jean Jacques Rousseau, who had asserted that "men and women differ intrinsically with respect to virtue: a moral disjuncture resulting from man's natural posession and woman's natural deficiency of reason. " She argued that it depended on the lack of educational opportunities women had. That is a concept Jane Austen remarked in her novels, to which she added the lack of economic independence as a reason for women's being secon-class citizens in her time. The medieval law of primogeniture and entail, still regulated property and inheritance. Then, it was considered improper, if not shameful, for women of a good family to provide for themselves by working.
Lecture by Dr Octavia Cox
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