Dolyushka feminist

Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov did not know the word "feminism". But when he wrote “you are the share of the Russian female,” he clearly defended women's equality. The poet did not suspect that the English female share was not much sweeter. Charlotte Brontë, born 195 years ago in June 1816, can be safely considered the founder of English (and indeed European) feminism.

In France, too, not everything was in order with women's rights. Under Louis XVIII, a certain novelist was forced to publish under the male pseudonym Camille Maupin. And Aurora Dupin, by her husband Dudevant, in the 30s of the XIX century fought for her rights with the help of the pseudonym George Sand and a men's suit. And this is after the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen!

Suffragettes who fought for women's right to vote will appear later in the US. Russian nihilists will cut their hair short, study in Switzerland, go to the Higher Women's Courses, work as teachers and paramedics, and even participate in terror on an equal footing with men.

Nekrasov wrote his human rights poem Frost, Red Nose in 1863. And in the first half of the 19th century, the daughter of an English priest, Charlotte Bronte, dreamed of the right to earn her living, not depend on her husband, publish under her own name, and receive her own literary fee. Herself, and not as her biographer and friend Elizabeth Gaskell, for whom her husband received (and spent) money with great pleasure. Charlotte studied at an English boarding school and in Brussels, then worked as an assistant teacher in a private school for girls. From 7 am to 11 pm, Miss Bronte worked at the boarding house, but could not buy herself good silk for her dress. She later served as a governess, was subjected to humiliation and rudeness (like the Russian governesses described by Dostoevsky and Chekhov).

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Charlotte Brontë dreamed of the right to earn a living, to publish under her own name, to receive her own literary royalties.

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In August 1847, her first and main novel, the ideological basis of European feminism, Jane Eyre, was published. Of course, under the male pseudonym - Carrer Bell (otherwise it was impossible to publish). Jane Eyre, a poor but educated governess, the alter ego of Charlotte herself, dreams of a small private school, does not agree to become the mistress of her kind master (later she becomes a lawful wife), does not accept his expensive gifts, runs away from his lawless love from home and almost is dying of hunger. And she asks the benefactors who found her only one thing: “I need some truly kind person to help me get a job that I can do; I need an income that would give me at least the bare necessities.”

So Jane Eyre will formulate the basis of the future of feminism: “Women experience the same as men; they have the same need to show their abilities and seek a field of activity for themselves; forced to live under the harsh yoke of tradition, in an inert environment, they suffer in the same way as men would suffer in their place. And when the privileged sex says that the vocation of a woman is only to bake puddings and knit stockings, play the piano and embroider handbags, then this is too limited a judgment.

The readers liked the novel, but the men and the Church met it with hostility.

The cause of Charlotte's early death was her marriage to the priest Bell Nichols in 1854. Her husband did not give her time to write, he loaded her with the affairs of the parish (a tea party for 500 parishioners, for example). The poor thing was finished off by the duties of a pastor's wife and a bad cold. She died in 1855, having lived only 39 years.

More than a hundred years have passed, but when I see black muzzles on the unfortunate women of the East, who even often hold rallies separately from men, everything in me rises, and it becomes clear that feminism has a future on our planet. Naum Korzhavin was right: “She would like to live differently, to wear a precious outfit ... But the horses all gallop and gallop. And the huts are burning and burning.”