Albion Parade IWD 2011

International Women's Day 2011 ~ Albion Parade

The Stoke Newington Women's Institute have decorated one of the trees on Albion Parade, to celebrate the centenary year of International Women's Day. Colourful pom poms adorn the otherwise bare branches, several of which are quite high up and must have required some tree climbing to take place!

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), who many consider to be the founder of feminism, might well have approved of  women climbing trees, as she wrote on many occasions that women needed to be physically stronger. She herself enjoyed swimming and horse riding. It was fashionable, in her time, for women to avoid bodily strength as they believed 'it takes from their feminine graces, and from that lovely weakness, the source of their undue power'. She goes on to argue that women needed to 'aquire human virtues' in the same way as men 'instead of being educated like a fanciful kind of half being'.  Wollstonecraft states 'I find that strength of mind has, in most cases, been accompanied by superior strength of body ' and she asks 'why are women so infatuated as to be proud of a defect?' 

A Vindication of the Rights of Women 1792

8 March 2011