ABSTRACT
Following the publication of the Appeal to One Half of the Human Race in 1825, Anna Doyle Wheeler became a public authority within the Owenite movement. Though he publicly declared his “profound sympathy” for women, he feared that the exploitation that they were submitted to had rendered them too weak to assume responsibility for their own salvation. Wheeler took an opposing stance, urging women of all nationalities to acknowledge their own oppression and join forces to defend their cause, thereby voicing what may be the first instance in history of a call for an international women’s movement. Woman it is, who by a stupid servile submission to man’s arbitrary will, gives stability to all his selfish propensities, and which encountering no judgment in their passage to her mind, leaves it the recipient of every foul and monstrous error; thus, like the fabled Pandora, she spreads the contents of the fatal box through all society.
