Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

When Mrs. Hamovit came to our women's studies class, she gave us some background information about the life and story on the woman, Lady Mary, who wrote all the letters we were given to read. When first reading the letters I saw that in the words, she described everything with such passion that it made me start to imagine the places and people she was talking about. When hearing about her life and how she grew up in one culture and then opened up to another culture so easily, I started to get more and more interested. Lady Mary grew up in a very high class family but although she was very well educated and beautiful, she wasn't always what her parents wanted her to be. She ran away and eloped at age twenty and soon had a son in England. She lived in England with her son and husband for a few years then moved to Turkey. After she gave birth to another child, this time in Turkey, she started writing letters to her sister and the most interesting thing is she rewrote all of the letters to be able to keep them while the originals went to her sister. She wrote her letters about the different culture she saw and how different Turkey was from England, she wrote about the beautiful baths that all the woman would, without hesitation, walk around naked as if it was completely normal, she wrote about the clothing the women wore out in the streets that made all of them the same and free, and she even wrote about how much easier it was to give birth in Turkey than in England. Lady Mary started to become apart of the Turkish culture because she found that women gain so much freedom and power from the smallest things unlike in England.

The biggest part of these letters that stuck out to me was that, the Turkish women had more freedom because of the way they dressed and because they had control of their money and all of that led to them having more power for themselves. Lady Mary compared those times and things to England but still to this day, there is still a big diversity of cultures in different countries. Mrs. hamovit showed us some articles from today about the dress and culture of the Turkish women and about how they were banning that dress in some places because it is so different and unlike what we are use to in the United States. Ever since terrorism has become a big part of what we fear, all of these other culture that require you to wear certain things and dress a certain way are looked down upon. Lady Mary looked at these women with inspiration because she believed it gave them power and the ability to be free today but it makes us fear them and we make them feel different and out of place and in some places forbidding them from practicing their true religion and what they believe in. Lady Mary saw the true beauty in a different culture from the one she grew up with but with people today trying to alter other cultures and make everyone conform to “what’s normal”, there will be no beauty left in the diversity of the world.