From Mary Wollstonecraft
to Virginia Woolf – and onward

The efforts of ‘outsiders’, ‘rebels’, ‘oddities’, ‘lunatics’, i.e. women who were willing to risk their reputation (which meant, mind you, personal safety, social status, and comfortable life) created the alternative history of our modernity. It is thanks to the courage of Mary Wollstonecraft, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Mary Shelley, Olive Schreiner, Virginia Woolf, and many other singular artists and writers that we can be the heirs and heiresses of the rich tradition of resistance against the way the world is organised and against violence as the means of its organisation. We – both men and women – are indebted to them for the strength to think, write, and live without having to bow down before violence and accepting its presence.