To begin with, there was Wilde’s formidable mother, Lady Jane Wilde. A hot-blooded, Irish nationalist and proto-feminist during her youth, she raged that women were forced into lives of “vacuity, inanity, vanity, absurdity and idleness.” She contended, quite accurately, that “all avenues to wealth and rank are closed to them. The state takes no notice of their existence except to injure them by its laws.” [same shit different century]