Badass Women: Mary Wortley Monagu

Seventy-five years before Edward Jenner ‘invented’ the smallpox vaccine, Mary Wortley Montagu successfully inoculated her two children against smallpox using techniques she observed in Turkey. Jenner’s famous vaccine built upon Wortley Montagu’s inoculation experiments, of which he had taken part in as a child—he was inoculated in the same way that Wortley Montagu had inoculated her own children. It was her introduction of smallpox inoculation that led to the development of the vaccine.

A bit of her backstory: after her mother died when she was very young, she had to become autodidactic, as her father didn’t really believe in education for girls. She believed her governess to be inadequate, and snuck into the library to read and educate herself, teaching herself Latin among other subjects.

After marrying, she accompanied her husband to Turkey where he was posted as a diplomat, and it was there that she contracted smallpox. Although she survived, it left her face disfigured, and she wanted to save her children from a similar fate. She observed how the women in her Turkish community inoculated their children every year, and how there were extremely few fatalities not only from the inoculation method, but also from smallpox in general, and decided to inoculate her children. Upon returning to Britain, she tried to convince the medical establishment to introduce this inoculation method, but they dismissed her as an ignorant woman trying to peddle folk medicine.

However, this is not the only thing Wortley Montagu is known for. While living in Turkey, she kept a journal and other writings, and detailed the life of women there, including hammam culture and the treatment of enslaved people. Her texts were published as The Turkish Embassy Letters, and inspired later generations of European women to travel and to write. Even though her travel writing has largely been forgotten in favor of male writers (no surprise there), it contains something that male writing never could: access to female-only spaces where men never had access to, and she recognized this throughout her writing.

In a time where women were largely dependent on men, Wortley Montagu made a name for herself apart from her husband in two completely different spheres. She is one of the women overlooked by history, whose accomplishments are credited to men, and who has faded with time. Let’s resurrect her memory and her achievements, especially today when vaccination is more important than ever.

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