wrote something that has always resonated across culture, to me. She said, in paraphrase, that societies must move beyond the myth of Prometheus in order to create more just societies.
What's also interesting about that is that her son-in-law, Percy Bysshe Shelley, wrote a famous poem about this very myth. They never met because she died in childbirth, while giving birth to Mary Godwin Shelley. But Shelley and Mary Godwin used to meet at her mother's grave and PB Shelley knew and had read Wollstonecraft's work and considered her a first-rate thinker. The Modern Prometheus was the subtitle of Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein. By the time Shelley was writing, the Romantic movement had morphed the story of Prometheus into a warning about human technological advancement with the rise of industrial society, or, concurrently, rebellious humans.
But when Wollstonecraft was alive, the myth of Prometheus was strongly bound to the idea that humans would be punished for overturning the hierarchy of god as replicated on earth - Prometheus is an "Adam" story - men (sic) suffer because they seek to create better lives for themselves, rather than relying on capricious gods. Like Adam, Prometheus brought knowledge to humankind and was punished for this. Wollstonecraft was a friend of John and Abigail Adams and attended what would become the UU church with both when Adams was the U.S. ambassador to England. They shared a belief that humans (tho Adams did forget the women, despite his wife's request) could improve their societies by education and participation in governance. By "stealing fire," humans could create more just systems and not fall back on stories that upheld power structures that existed at the time.
They were right. The myth is wrong in its attempt to smear both human attempts to create better societies and in its view of females.
In Greek myth, Prometheus was credited with the creation of man (sic) from clay. More importantly, Prometheus was punished by the gods for stealing fire, which the gods had reserved for themselves. Or stealing it back. To punish Prometheus, Zeus invented the first human female, Pandora. Pandora, like Eve, loosed evils upon the world in the Greek view of females.
Again, this myth shares aspects of the human creation story as told by Christianity, and enshrines misogyny as an attitude of the gods, not mere humans. This is what Wollstonecraft knew was damaging about this myth - looking to traditions of stone age beliefs to provide justification for second-class status for women in society - and, frankly, for hatred of women.
I have nearly always despised myths. When I read them, I thought they were horrid in their views of what would constitute a god. Those gods were identical to the human rulers who used them to justify their power.
I love the first 20 minutes of The Matrix. After that, when it devolves into a story about "the one," I was so entirely disappointed that the filmmakers couldn't find a more interesting way to tell a story. "The one" is a story that always evolves around some male's belief that he is "chosen" and females exist to make this possible. yawn.
Imo, the reason society continually struggles with sexism is because myths are not deconstructed as the power-enabling tales that they are. Rather than view them as some universal signifier of human truth, why not recognize them as ways that "others" are constantly disenfranchised and then this action is justified.
Where are the buffalo women in the stories of other cultures?
Western European culture tried to obliterate the female with Zeus giving birth to a female who was the symbol of reason - so that male, not female, was identified with conferring this power.
I always thought this story was the epitome of hatred toward females, by males pretending to themselves that intellect was their domain.
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