A journey through some of the texts that contributed to laying the foundations for the defense of the dignity, intelligence and human potential of women during the first feminist wave.

How were women going to rule, if they were considered minors and needed a man to supervise them? How could they take on such responsibility, if there were those who thought that their intellectual capacity was so evidently inferior that neither the public nor the private treasury could be wasted in educating them? Until the second half of the 18th century, women who practiced freely as writers were no more than isolated examples. But by the end of that century, the Enlightenment had raised the banners of liberty and equality, and had convinced women that their time had come, and, although the great ideologues of the nascent liberal democracies were soon to abandon them, they can be considered as precursors of what, at the end of the 19th century, would be known as feminism.

The story of injustices, inequalities, physical and mental confinement is the violet thread that unites the stories in this anthology. Many of its authors did not consider themselves feminists, few of them were active militants in any of the movements that we encompass under the first wave of feminism, but it is clear that all of them contributed to our understanding why feminism became such a solid movement through so many years.

Jane Austen, Elizabeth Caroline Gray, Fredrika Bremer, George Sand, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, Mary E. Bradley Lane, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Olive Schreiner, Kate Chopin, Begum Royeka, Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Rosalía de Castro, Fernán Caballero and Emilia Pardo Bazán.