Miss Universe Inspired by Wollstonecraft

Enlightenment thinker Mary Wollstonecraft continues to inspire people the world over.

A portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft next to a photo of Sheynnis Palacios in her Miss Universe sash and tiara.
Paul Meany
Editor for Intellectual History, Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org

Paul Meany is the editor for intellectual history at Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org, a project of the Cato Institute. Most of his work focuses on examining thinkers who predate classical liberalism but still articulate broadly liberal attitudes and principles. He is the host of Portraits of Liberty, a podcast about uncovering and exploring underrated figures throughout history who have argued for a freer world. His writing covers a broad range of topics, including proto-​feminist writers, Classical Greece and Rome’s influence on the American Founding, ancient Chinese philosophy, tyrannicide, and the first argument for basic income.

Last month, Sheynnis Palacios won the 2023 Miss Universe pageant representing Nicaragua. Her victory was cause for celebration across Nicaragua, but Daniel Ortega’s dictatorship perceived the celebrations taking place on the street as a threat to his power. It might seem odd and maybe even a little sad that the dictator of a nation is afraid of a pageant show model, but Palacios represents the direction in which Nicaraguan people wish to move. She comes from a humble background but achieved a university education; she represents progress, something dictators tend to fear because progress usually means ousting them from power.

During the Miss Universe pageant, contestants were asked: “If you could live one year in another woman’s shoes, who would you choose and why?” Palacios replied, Mary Wollstonecraft, because of her struggle for women’s rights—an excellent answer.

Mary Wollstonecraft was an English philosopher, writer, and adherent to Enlightenment values. She was born in 1759 to a middle-​class family, but her father poorly managed their finances, leading to poverty. To worsen matters, her father became an abusive drunk who often beat his wife. Wollstonecraft’s early life cemented in her mind that without legal and economic equality, women like her mother would always be at the mere mercy of abusive men.

Wollstonecraft escaped her turbulent home life and began working. During this time, Wollstonecraft sent her sister a letter where she revealed her dream of becoming “the first of a new genus” (Wollstonecraft 1979, p. 176). Today, Wollstonecraft is renowned for two main works, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, written in reply to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, her most famous work where she advocates for women’s legal, economic, and intellectual equality to men.

In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft argued for the natural equality and liberty that all women deserved. Wollstonecraft believed education was the key to liberating women. Like the earlier John Locke, Wollstonecraft believed people begin life without any prior knowledge; we start as blank slates. What we become is, therefore, a result of our upbringing and education, which create what Wollstonecraft calls “the effect of an early association of ideas” (Wollstonecraft 2009, p. 190). During Wollstonecraft’s life, women’s education was confined to skills such as sewing, singing, and being charming in conversation. This frustrated Wollstonecraft to no end, who believed the best education enabled people to be independent and stand on their own two feet, not act as interesting companions at a party.

The focus of Wollstonecraft’s intellectual career was to envision and propose a social and political order in which women were treated as rational, autonomous beings capable of independence and moral virtue. This required women to be educated like their male counterparts.

Wollstonecraft was a critic of patriarchy and political power. For Wollstonecraft, to use political power “to subjugate a rational being to the will of another…is a most cruel and undue stretch of power” (Wollstonecraft 2009, p. 235). Our nature as rational beings entitles us to liberty, in Wollstonecraft’s words, “the birthright of every man” (p. 7).

Throughout Wollstonecraft’s writing, she praises the importance of independence, what she called “the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue.” But Wollstonecraft did not want men and women living as completely separate atomistic beings; men and women need each other’s companionship and support. She yearned for a society of equals; she wrote, “I do not wish women to have power over men, but over themselves” (p. 133).

Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and her inspiring vision of a world in which women are treated as autonomous beings influenced various thinkers within the early feminist movement. Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who organized the first-​ever women’s rights convention in America, read and admired Wollstonecraft’s work. Authors including Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, and Emma Goldman held Wollstonecraft in high regard. While Wollstonecraft is often praised as a feminist, her political philosophy is just as revolutionary as her feminist leanings. Sheynnis Palacios made a great choice choosing Wollstonecraft, an answer that might have secured her victory.

Anyone who wants to create a freer world would do well to pick up Wollstonecraft and get reading.

Works Cited

Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1979. Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft. Edited by Ralph M. Wardle. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. 2009. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of the Rights of Men. Edited by Janet Todd. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.