Question 1

Who was Mary Wollstonecraft?

Accepted Answer

An English writer and philosopher whose *A Vindication of the Rights of Woman* (1792) is a foundational text of feminist political thought — and whose reputation was destroyed for a century by her husband's well-meaning biography.

**Her argument.** Writing in response to revolutionary-era debates about rights, she argued that women appear less rational than men because they are **educated to be ornamental**, not because they are naturally so. Denied serious education and economic independence, they are trained in manners, appearance and dependence, then blamed for possessing exactly those qualities. **The solution she proposed was education** — national, co-educational and rational — rather than an appeal to sentiment.

**Why it was radical.** She extended the language of natural rights, then being used about men, to women — pointing out that the philosophers arguing for universal rights had drawn a line that had no principled basis. She also argued that a marriage between unequals corrupts both parties, and that women's economic dependence is the root problem.

**Her wider work:** *A Vindication of the Rights of Men*, an early reply to Burke on the French Revolution, published before Paine's; a novel; a history of the revolution written from Paris while it unfolded; a travel book from Scandinavia that was widely admired; and educational writing.

**What happened to her reputation.** She died in 1797 of infection following childbirth, at 38. Her husband **William Godwin** published a memoir intending to honour her — and disclosed her love affairs, an illegitimate child, and suicide attempts. In the moral climate that followed, this destroyed her standing: her arguments were dismissed by reference to her private life for the best part of a century, until later feminists recovered her.

**Her daughter** was **Mary Shelley**, author of *Frankenstein*, who never knew her and reportedly learned to read by tracing the letters on her mother's gravestone.

**A note on the text itself:** it is more readable than its reputation suggests, and contains arguments about education and dependence that remain directly relevant.

Question 2

Did Sojourner Truth say Ain't I a Woman?

Accepted Answer

Probably not in those words. The famous version of the speech was published twelve years after she gave it, by someone who was not a neutral recorder, and it differs substantially from the account

Question 3

Who was Émilie du Châtelet?

Accepted Answer

A French natural philosopher and mathematician of the early eighteenth century whose translation and commentary on Newton's Principia remains the standard French edition — and whose own work on

Question 4

Who was Hildegard of Bingen?

Accepted Answer

A twelfth-century German abbess, composer, writer, natural philosopher and political correspondent — one of the few medieval women whose work survives in substantial quantity, and whose range is

Question 5

Who were some influential women in history and what did they accomplish?

Accepted Answer

Influential women in history, such as Marie Curie and Rosa Parks, made significant contributions in science, civil rights, and education, shaping society and inspiring future generations.

Question 6

Who was Emmy Noether?

Accepted Answer

A German mathematician whose work underpins both modern abstract algebra and theoretical physics — and who spent much of her career barred from the positions her work merited. Noether's theorem,

Question 7

Who was Bessie Coleman?

Accepted Answer

Bessie Coleman (1892–1926) was the first African American woman, and the first Native American woman, to earn a pilot's licence — and she had to leave the United States entirely to do it. Her

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