If anyone asks, I'm a nineteenth-century proto-feminist.

My mom asked me what I was reading over break, and when I told her that it was "Bell in Campo," a play by seventeenth-century British writer Margaret Cavendish, she told me she didn't know that women even wrote then. I realized that there was a time when I didn't, either. In American Writers this week we discussed "the woman question," and in British Writers we read pieces by Cavendish and Aphra Behn. It gave me lots of time to think about something I've been mulling over for a while now. Angelina Grimke said it startlingly well in 1837:

My doctrine then is, that whatever it is morally right for man to do, it is morally right for woman to do. Our duties originate, not from difference of sex, but from the diversity of our relations in life, the various gifts and talents committed to our care, and the different eras in which we live. . . . I recognize no right but human rights—I know nothing of men's rights and women's rights; for in Christ Jesus, there is neither male nor female. It is my solemn conviction, that, until this principle of equality is recognised and embodied in practice, the church can do nothing effectual for the permanent reformation of the world.

I don't know about the "permanent reformation of the world," but she makes an incisive point. It's funny to read of the prejudices that have been harbored toward females; the charges ring in tinny, silly tones when you're sitting in classrooms full of females and are often being taught by a female professor. But I'm realizing more and more what damaging perceptions I still harbor myself, and how much I need to fully embody Grimke's principle. A woman has "the right to think and speak and act on all great moral questions . . . the right to fulfil the great end of her being, as a moral, intellectual and immortal creature, and of glorifying God in her body and her spirit which are His."

As an interesting codicil, with some connections if you want to make them, there's a fascinating profile of Tina Fey in Vanity Fair.