FGV-RJ 2021/2

Texto para a pergunta.

EQUALITY

    “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” Those powerful words, from the all-important second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence (the document that led, eventually, to the creation of the United States of America), represented a watershed [divisor de águas] in the life of an idea that had sources going back as far as the ancient world and the precepts of Jesus Christ. But it required centuries of struggle for it to find genuine and widespread acceptance. It was Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) who composed the words, which were then amended by Benjamin Franklin. Jefferson had originally described the truths as “sacred and undeniable,” effectively rooting them in religious traditions. Franklin made them “self-evident,” basing them in traditions of reason going back to the self-evident axioms of the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid and the “analytic truths” of Franklin’s close friend, the eminent Scottish philosopher David Hume.

    Despite the confident tone of the famous assertion, equality was not an idea that would have seemed “self-evident” in most cultures and times – or even at the time and in the place that the words were written. It’s a well-recognized irony of the Declaration that fully a third of the 56 men who signed it in July 1776 were slaveholders [donos de escravos], including Jefferson, and few of them would have agreed that their black slaves were their equals. Real equality for women was also unimaginable to most men of the time. So it would be a long journey before that phrase took on real substance, one that would require a civil war and a century of turmoil [tumulto, distúrbio, desordem] after that. Yet with that momentous document the journey had truly begun.

    Even so, although the thinkers of the Enlightenment [o Iluminismo, uma época de grande progresso em ciência e cultura] spoke regularly and eloquently about the rights of man, when they did, they often seemed to have only men in mind. It was not until 1792 that someone stepped forward to speak at length about the conditions endured by the other half of the human race. That was the year Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. A former teacher and governess, Wollstonecraft identified the failure to educate women for any independent role in life as the great source of their difficulties. Men led women to be “docile and attentive to their looks [cuidadosas com suas aparências atraentes] to the exclusion of anything else,” she wrote. She called marriage “legal prostitution” and demanded the vote, proclaiming, “Let women share the rights and she will emulate the virtues of man.”

    Wollstonecraft was just 38 when she died, a few days after giving birth to a daughter, Mary (later the wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and the author of Frankenstein). After Wollstonecraft’s death, her husband, the political philosopher William Godwin, published a biography of his wife that frankly acknowledged her early affair with an American lover and the illegitimate child she bore him. Opponents soon used those revelations to dismiss her. But her arguments would inspire later generations, including the suffragists, who brought women the vote, and the feminist activists of the 1960s and ‘70s