Epistles on Women and Other Works (19th Century)

Writer Lucy Aikin fully embraced the principles of the Enlightenment: a profound conviction in the capacity of reason to discover the truths of human nature and the physical world, the belief that moral virtues and intellectual capacities are available to both sexes in equal measure, and that history is a process that moves by uneven developments towards higher levels of human civilization. One of the most important works by Aikin, Epistles on Women (1810) is the first text in English to re-write the entire history of western culture, from the Creation of Genesis through the eighteenth century, from a feminist perspective, explicitly defining the consequences of a patriarchal social system.