Reading Mary Wollestonecraft in preparation for class tomorrow and this paragraph hit me right in the feels. It’s written 72 years too late for Stede to have read it, but someone should use the David Jenkins’ school of historical accuracy and write a fanfic in which Ed finds this in Stede’s library. Or Mary gifts it to Stede? Stede is surprised to find a book on Mary’s bedside table and when he picks it up, it falls open to this page. I don’t know how, I just need Stede to read these words and be seen.
“A brutal attachment to children has appeared most conspicuous in parents who have treated them like slaves, and demanded due homage for all the property they transferred to them, during their lives. It has led them to force their children to break the most sacred ties; to do violence to a natural impulse, and run into legal prostitution to increase wealth or shun poverty; and, still worse, the dread of parental malediction has made many weak characters violate truth in the face of Heaven; and, to avoid a father’s angry curse, the most sacred promises have been broken. It appears to be a natural suggestion of reason, that a man should be freed from implicit obedience to parents and private punishments, when he is of an age to be subject to the jurisdiction of the laws of his country; and that the barbarous cruelty of allowing parents to imprison their children, to prevent their contaminating their noble blood by following the dictates of nature when they chose to marry, or for any misdemeanor that does not come under the cognizance of public justice, is one of the most arbitrary violations of liberty.”
