March is Women’s History Month, and though the month is almost over, there’s still time to check out the Cosimo Classics that celebrate contributions to society made by women from around the world.

As interest in 19th-century English literature by women has been reinvigorated by a resurgence in popularity of the works of Jane Austen, readers are rediscovering a writer whose fiction, once widely beloved, fell by the wayside. British novelist Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell — whose books were sometimes initially credited to, simply, “Mrs. Gaskell” — is now recognized as having created some of the most complex and progressive depictions of women in the literature of the age. Gaskell’s one work of nonfiction is The Life of Charlotte Brontë, her 1857 biography of her close friend. At once a triumph of the biographical form and a charming celebration of the writer by someone who knew her well, this has been hailed as a remarkably insightful and highly readable life of Brontë, one that makes up for its lack of objectivity with its warmth, admiration, and respect. It offers a significant view of one woman writer’s perspective on another’s work at a time when women writers were afforded little respect at all.

One of the earliest works of protofeminist thought, A Vindication of the Rights of Women — by British writer and educator Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), the mother of Frankenstein author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley — is a startlingly prescient 1792 work, the first published argument advocating for the societal elevation of women as the intellectual and emotional equals of men. Written against the background of the French Revolution — the debate over which caused an uproar in both England and France — and the 1791 statement by French diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord to the French National Assembly that women should be educated only in domestic matters, this is a furious reprimand of the prevailing attitudes of late-18th-century Europe that women should be docile, virtuous, and untroubled by any matters beyond the home. Well received in its day and still an important resource for anyone wishing to understand the history of feminism, this extended essay demolishes the sexual double standard of the day, offers a rational defense for the education of girls, and demands merely that women be treated as people.

Mrs. Hill’s New Cook Book: Housekeeping Made Easy is a classic of post-Civil War Southern cooking, designed to aid well-to-do women forced into their kitchens for the first time with the end of slavery — it’s a charming example of education in the domestic arts in the late 19th century. In her stern but helpful manner, Annabella P. Hill (1810-1878) guides her fellow homemakers-and those today seeking a soupçon of old-style Southern elegance. With further instruction on other housekeeping chores, such as soapmaking and the preparation of medicines, this is an enlightening peek into the mundane chores of a bygone age.

Startling in its observations and radical in its conclusions, Women and Economics — a classic of women’s rights literature by pioneering American feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) — was a phenomenon when it was first published in 1898, and was eventually translated into in seven languages and reprinted around the world. From her characterization of women as virtual economic, social, and sexual slaves, dependent on men for everything from food to friendship to protection, to her call for women to free themselves from these shackles, Women and Economics electrified Victorian readers. It remains a foundational work of feminist theory, essential reading for anyone wishing to understand women’s struggle for full and self-determined personhood.

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