09/26/2019
Each passing year may be considered The Year of the Woman when women strive to shape the contours of a just, reasonable, well-educated, economically viable, and loving society.
Lest we forget, however, this unseen influence began long ago. Voices around the world cut into the very bedrock of emancipation at a time when the wellspring of women’s potential could only gurgle beneath the surface. Nana Asma’u initiated the education of women in Africa in the early 1800s. In the late century, women learned to speak out, from China’s Qui Jin (b. 1875), to the first Native American female author, Mourning Dove (b. 1884).
In the mid-century, the greatest global effort peaked in the 1840s, with its zenith in 1850. During those years, almost as if choreographed, feminist leaders in Europe, America and the Middle East exemplified an intense and noble dedication, not just to the rights of women but to peace, the reduction of prejudice and the dignity of all people, setting the moral compass for the centuries of women who would follow.
A shining light among these women, a young poet and mystic, emerged from the most repressive regime on earth, in the region now known as Iran, Iraq and Turkey. She set herself apart through her life and death, as she anticipated martyrdom as a token of her devotion to the cause. Her name was Tahirih.
Tahirih (Her Highness the Pure) served as an exception to every rule. Consider her, like many of these scions, a woman for our time as well as for her own time. In her twenties, Tahirih became the first Persian martyr for the education of women and for religious freedom.
As Tahirih declared, “You can kill me, but you cannot stop the emancipation of women!”
After her ex*****on in 1850, her oppressors burned many of her poems and historical documents, yet archivists continue to unearth, translate and study her work, to try to comprehend her profound impact as the most celebrated woman in Iranian literature and the first feminist of the Ottoman empire.
Cambridge Professor Edmund G. Browne (1862-1926) wrote in her biography: “The appearance of such a woman as Tahirih in any country and in any age is a rare phenomenon, but in such a country as Iran--almost a miracle.”
Freedom of conscience had awakened in the East with the emergence of a young figure who called himself the Báb, or the Gate. He foretold a coming age that would honor the truths of past ages while healing the corruptions introduced by men. Tahirih became the first woman to acknowledge belief in these teachings that would strip away prejudice, outmoded and divisive religious traditions and promote equity, charity, unity, concord and nonviolence and to consult with men.
In the exact same year, Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902) convened the Suffragettes for the convention at Seneca Falls and wrote the Declaration of Sentiments. Meanwhile, Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) searched for alternatives to oppression as she strived to stir the masses in Europe to care about human suffering. As an author and journalist, making a mark in history before her own short life ended, Margaret Fuller wrote in 1843, “No doubt a new manifestation is at hand, a new hour in the day of man.”
These women gave their lives to usher in an era of social reform, hoping the unification of women, races and classes would help to forge human bonds until, ultimately, humanity would experience true peace on earth.
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