Before the Hashtag: Feminist Voices from the Ancient to Early Modern World

Let me tell you a story. Feminism didn’t begin in the 1960s. Nope. It didn’t start with hashtags or suffragettes. Long before women were legally considered full citizens, before they could publish under their own names or own property without a man’s permission, some were already writing their resistance.

Of course, they weren’t always called feminists. Some were mythologized, some erased, some canonized for the wrong reasons. But read closely, and you’ll find a legacy of women who—through poetry, philosophy, and subversion—refused to be footnotes.

These were not women “ahead of their time.” They were precisely of their time. And still, they disturbed it.

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Sappho (7th Century BCE)

Before the male gaze became doctrine, there was Sappho. Writing from the Greek island of Lesbos, she crafted fragments of lyric poetry that burned with erotic intimacy. She didn’t just write about desire and turn it into porn but she made it divine.

“You may blame Aphrodite, soft as she is, she has almost killed me with love for that boy.”

Sappho’s poetry isn’t political in the didactic sense not does it preach. But it seduces in a patriarchal society where women were denied both voice and selfhood, to write about one’s love for another woman boldly and sensually. So, I guess, it was nothing short of rebellion.

“Someone will remember us,” she wrote, “even in another time.”

She was right.

Christine de Pizan (1364–1430)

Centuries later, when women were still cloistered in convents or married off as bargaining chips, Christine de Pizan picked up her quill in France and began to fight back—through reason.

In The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), she constructs an allegorical city built by and for women—filled with real historical figures who defied misogyny. It was a counter-narrative to the dominant texts of her time that painted women as inherently weak, vain, or sinful.

Christine wasn’t speculative in the sci-fi sense, but she was architectural. She built a feminist mythology using only ink, intellect, and fury. Her question was simple:

“Not all men (and especially the wisest) share the opinion that it is bad for women to be educated. But it is very true that many foolish men have claimed this because it displeased them that women knew more than they did.”

Aphra Behn (1640–1689)

The Restoration period wasn’t kind to women who spoke up—but Aphra Behn spoke anyway. A playwright, poet, and political spy, she was one of the first English women to earn a living from writing. That alone made her dangerous. Her plays were bawdy, sharp, and sexually charged. The Rover (1677) features women who manipulate desire, not suffer from it. Her novella Oroonoko (1688) tackled colonialism and race—topics most of her male contemporaries ignored or romanticized.

Behn blurred the lines between comedy and critique, eroticism and subversion. She proved that women could be both scandalous and serious, arousing and articulate.

“All I ask, is the privilege for my masculine part the poet in me.... If I must not, because of my sex, have this freedom... I lay down my quill and you shall hear no more of me."

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797)

If Christine wrote with tempered grace, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote like a storm. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), she tore through the illusions of Enlightenment-era rationalism, pointing out the absurdity of “universal rights” that excluded half the population. Wollstonecraft wasn’t writing fiction but a manifesto. Her works still brim with narrative urgency, a kind of moral twist: what if women were educated not to please, but to think? What if virtue wasn’t submission, but self-respect?

"I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves." ~A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) ch. 4

She called marriage “legal prostitution.” She saw femininity as a performance of weakness. She believed women deserved the same intellectual and moral agency as men—not as a favor, but as a right. She died young, reviled in her time. Her daughter—Mary Shelley—would write Frankenstein. The lineage of literary revolt lives on.

Others include:

• Margery Kempe, in the 15th century, dictated the first known English autobiography—part spiritual vision, part mental breakdown, part proto-feminist testimony.

• Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a 17th-century Mexican nun, wrote plays and poetry that questioned gender roles, power, and intellectual repression—until the church silenced her.

• Isabella Whitney, one of the first English women to publish secular poetry, wrote about poverty, longing, and female autonomy in 16th-century London.

• Rābiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya, in the 8th century, Iraq, a mystic, poet, and ascetic, who wrote about divine love with such eroticism and power that male theologians centuries later still couldn’t decide whether to worship or censor her. Her poetry blurred the lines between sensual and spiritual, body and cosmos. She refused marriage, wealth, and control—writing instead about a God who would not demand submission, but transcendence.

• Táhirih in 1814–1852, Qajar Iran, often called Iran’s first feminist, Táhirih was a theologian, poet, and revolutionary. She unveiled herself publicly in protest, knowing it could cost her life. She wrote searing Persian ghazals about injustice, exile, and spiritual liberation. Her execution—ordered by the state—didn’t erase her. It immortalized her. Her last words:

“You can kill me as soon as you like, but you cannot stop the emancipation of women.”

• Mah Laqa Bai Chanda, in 1767–1824, India was a court poet and courtesan in 18th-century Hyderabad, Mah Laqa was the first Indian woman to have a divan (book of poetry) published. She was multilingual, politically astute, and moved between worlds of art, power, and erotic performance with grace and ferocity. She wielded her words the way others wielded swords.

• Nana Asma’u, in 1793–1864 Nigeria was a scholar, poet, and educator in the Sokoto Caliphate, Nana Asma’u wrote in Arabic, Fula, and Hausa. She organized one of the earliest female education networks in West Africa, training women to teach other women. Her writing challenged colonialism, patriarchy, and ignorance—all under the banner of Islam and intellectual dignity.

It’s tempting to look for the label. To call these writers feminist and feel retroactive validation. But many of these women didn’t or couldn’t name their politics and their work emerged not from ideology, but necessity.

These women didn’t have movements. They had monasteries, veils, prisons, lovers, isolation. They weren’t always trying to be remembered—but they left traces: Books. Fragments. Prayers. Letters.

Their lives were protests written in metaphors, marginalia, and fire. What unites them is a shared refusal. They didn’t wait for liberation to be defined for them. They wrote themselves into the future—one forbidden word at a time.

And if that’s not feminism, what is?

Soon, I'll review some of the Victorian Era Transgressive Women Writers. Be patient with me.