Jane Eyre was written in 1847, an era teeming with discussion and turmoil over women's rights. Encyclopaedia Britannica states, "These debates and discussions culminated in the first women’s rights convention, held in July 1848 in the small town of Seneca Falls, New York. It was a spur-of-the-moment idea that sprang up during a social gathering of Lucretia Mott, a Quaker preacher and veteran social activist, Martha Wright (Mott’s sister), Mary Ann McClintock, Jane Hunt, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the wife of an abolitionist and the only non-Quaker in the group. The convention was planned with five days’ notice, publicized only by a small unsigned advertisement in a local newspaper" (Burkett, Elinor, and Brunell). Although many coin the Seneca Falls Convention as the "beginning" of the official start of the first-wave of the feminist movement (the hallmark of the era being women's suffrage), the discussions of women's rights started many years prior. Realizing the socio-political context in which Charlotte Brontë wrote and published the novel allows for readers to look even closer at Jane Eyre's actions (the novel being set pre-1848), and the way in which Jane pushes back against the ways a woman should conduct herself. It begs readers to question the ways in which Jane is a feminist icon, especially in the Victorian era.
Bibliography: Burkett, Elinor and Laura Brunell. "The Suffrage Movement." Encyclopaedia Britannica. 8 Feb. 2019, https://www.britannica.com/topic/feminism/The-suffrage-movement. Accessed 12 Sept. 2019.