In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft threw down the gauntlet, not only to her male readers, but equally important, to the other women writers of her day, as she called for a “REVOLUTION in female manners.” And these women took up Wollstonecraft’s challenge. Whether they endorsed her views or contested them, very few women writers of the time ignored them. In this essay, I shall explore the range of responses by women writers to Wollstonecraft’s ideas, or, more generally, to the feminist programs she and others espoused, taking the works of Mary Hays, Mary Robinson, Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Jane Austen as representative.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman proposed a model of what we would now call “equality” or “liberal” feminism. Grounded on the affirmation of universal human rights endorsed by such Enlightenment thinkers as Voltaire, Rousseau, and John Locke, Wollstonecraft argued that females are in all the most important aspects the same as males, possessing the same souls, the same mental capacities, and thus the same human rights. While the first edition of the Rights of Woman attributed a physical superiority to the male, acknowledging his ability to overpower the female of the species with his greater brute strength –
. . . the female, in general is inferior to the male. The male pursues, the female yields – this is the law of nature; and it does not appear to be suspended or abrogated in favor of woman. This physical superiority cannot be denied – and it is a noble prerogative!
(VRW 5:74n4).
– by the end of the second edition, Wollstonecraft has effectively denied the significance and even the necessary existence of male physical superiority. She first reduces the physical difference between males and females, rewriting the above passage thus:
In the government of the physical world it is observable that the female in point of strength is, in general, inferior to the male. This is the law of nature, and does not appear to be suspended or abrogated in favour of women. A degree of physical superiority cannot, therefore, be denied – and it is a noble prerogative!
(VRW 5:74, my italics).
She then insists that women’s virtues – “strength of mind, perseverance and fortitude” – are the “same in kind” if not yet in “degree” (VRW 5:105). She next adamantly denies “the existence of sexual virtues, not excepting modesty” (VRW 5:120), in effect erasing any essentialist difference between males and females. She concludes by suggesting that if females were allowed the same exercise as males, then they would arrive at a “perfection of body” that might well erase any “natural superiority” of the male body (VRW 5:155).
On this philosophical assumption of sexual equality and even potential sameness, Wollstonecraft mounted her campaign for the reform of female education, arguing that girls should be educated in the same subjects and by the same methods as boys. She further advocated a radical revision of British law to enable a new, egalitarian marriage in which women would share equally in the management and possession of all household resources. She demanded that women be paid – and paid equally – for their labor, that they gain the civil and legal right to possess and distribute property, that they be admitted to all the most prestigious professions. And she argued that women (together with all disenfranchised men) should be given the vote: “I really think that women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government” (VRW 5:217).
The revolution in female manners demanded by Wollstonecraft would, she insisted, dramatically change both genders. It would produce women who were sincerely modest, chaste, virtuous, Christian; who acted with reason and prudence and generosity. It would produce men who – rather than being trained to become petty household tyrants or slave-masters over their female dependents or “house-slaves” (VRW 5:165) – would treat women with respect and act toward all with benevolence, justice, and sound reason. It would eliminate the “want of chastity in men,” a depravity of appetite that in Wollstonecraft’s view was responsible for the social production of unmanly “equivocal beings” (VRW 5:208). And it would produce egalitarian marriages based – no longer on mere sexual desire – but on compatibility, mutual affection, and respect. As she concluded,
we shall not see women affectionate till more equality be established in society, till ranks are confounded and women freed, neither shall we see that dignified domestic happiness, the simple grandeur of which cannot be relished by ignorant or vitiated minds; nor will the important task of education ever be properly begun till the person of a woman is no longer preferred to her mind.
(VRW 5:263)
During the heady days of the early 1790s, as the workers and middle classes overthrew the ancien régime in France, Wollstonecraft’s call for a revolution in female manners was immediately taken up by several of her female compatriots. Her close friend Mary Hays, the daughter of middle-class London Dissenters and the author of a spirited defense of the Unitarian church, Cursory Remarks on an Enquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of Public or Social Worship (1791), sprang to the defense of Wollstonecraft’s feminist program. Hays’s Letters and Essays, Moral, and Miscellaneous (1793), a work which Hays submitted directly to Wollstonecraft for her advice and criticism, eloquently attacked the
mental bondage . . .; the absurd despotism which has hitherto, with more than gothic barbarity, enslaved the female mind, the enervating and degrading system of manners by which the understandings of women have been chained down to frivolity and trifles, have increased the general tide of effeminacy and corruption.
(Letters 3:23)
Hays further endorsed Wollstonecraft’s most radical claim, “the idea of there being no sexual character,” arguing that the opposite opinion has caused far more dangerous social extremes; moreover, “similarity of mind and principle is the only true basis of harmony” (Letters 3:24). She concluded that “the rights of woman, and the name of Woollstonecraft [sic], will go down to posterity with reverence, when the pointless sarcasms of witlings are forgotten” (Letters 3:29). And in her letter to the Dissenting Monthly Magazine for 2 March 1797, published under the running head “Improvements suggested in Female Education,” she again invokes Wollstonecraft before concluding:
Till one moral mental standard is established for every rational agent, every member of a community, and a free scope afforded for the exertion of their faculties and talents, without distinction of rank or sex, virtue will be an empty name, and happiness elude our most anxious research.
(3:195)
Mary Hays based both her novels, Emma Courtney (1796) and The Victim of Prejudice (1799), on Wollstonecraft’s program for social reform. Emma Courtney enthusiastically upholds both Wollstonecraft’s and William Godwin’s doctrines but brings to them Hays’s independent emphasis on the importance of sensibility, of women’s capacity for strong emotions and enduring love. Emma falls passionately in love with her mentor Augustus Harley, a Godwinian philosopher who insists that humans will necessarily perfect themselves through the exercise of reason. Although her offer to give herself to him, even outside of marriage, is coldly rejected by Harley (he is already married), Harley finally vindicates both Emma’s sensibility and her desire for a truly companionate relationship by confessing on his death-bed that he has always loved her. In the course of her trials, in which she on one occasion quotes Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman, Emma provides an ongoing feminist critique of her society, attacking both the slave trade and the enslavement of women, reflecting “on the inequalities of society, the source of every misery and of every vice, and on the peculiar disadvantages of my sex,” and lamenting the “cruel prejudices” that prevented her from being educated “for a profession, for labour” and instead “rendered feeble and delicate by bodily constraint, and fastidious by artificial confinement.”1
Hays’s second novel, The Victim of Prejudice (1799), explores the unjust treatment given to women who must pay for a moment of sexual pleasure with a lifetime of ruin, a subject that Wollstonecraft had addressed in the Rights of Woman and also, in the minds of many, came in some ways herself to exemplify. Abandoned by her lover, Hays’s heroine’s mother rapidly sinks into prostitution, is separated from her daughter, and is finally executed as a murderer’s accomplice. As she writes to her lost lover, “I perceived myself the victim of injustice, of the prejudice, of society, which, by opposing to my return to virtue almost insuperable barriers, had plunged me into irremediable ruin. I grew sullen, desperate, hardened.”2 Her daughter, the virtuous heroine Mary, is then raped but refuses to marry her traducer. Unable to get honest work since she is now regarded by society as “a fallen woman,” Mary is arrested for debt, sent to prison where her health is destroyed, and finally dies, still refusing to marry her (supposedly reformed and repentant) rapist. Mary Hays thus rewrites the narrative of the fallen woman as a story of social prejudice against an unjustly treated and innocent victim, one who preserves her moral integrity and personal independence throughout.
Mary Hays’s most radical feminist claims appeared in her Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Woman, a tract she wrote before reading Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman but did not publish until 1798. Here Hays is far more critical of men than was Wollstonecraft. She insists throughout on the primary equality of women, arguing that “God created mankind male and female, different indeed in sex for the wisest and best purposes, but equal in rank, because of equal utility.”3 It is men who have defied God, Hays charges, by refusing to educate women, keeping them in “subjection and dependence” (68), in a state Hays memorably defines as “PERPETUAL BABYISM” (97). Prostitution is caused not by female vice but by “the base arts used by profligate men, to seduce innocent and unsuspecting females,” and fallen women are thus “more objects of pity than blame” (235–6). And it is men who prefer “folly, vice, impertinence of every kind,” who desire women to be solely “their amusement, their dependent; and in plain and unvarnished terms their slaves,” because they are terrified that their unearned claims of sexual superiority could be overthrown, terrified “of the frightful certainty of having women declared their equals, and as such their companions and friends” (116).
Hays continued her campaign for liberal feminism even after Wollstonecraft’s death, although she was forced by the public denunciation of Wollstonecraft sparked by Godwin’s ill-judged publication of his Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1798 to speak more circumspectly (her Appeal was published anonymously). In 1803 she published her six volume collation of 305 mini-biographies of famous women, Female Biography; or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of all ages and countries (1803), designed to inspire her female contemporaries to “a worthier emulation” (vi). Here Hays felt compelled by public opinion to omit a biography of Wollstonecraft although she included biographies of such earlier feminists as Mary Astell, Catharine Macaulay, and Madame Roland. Hays’s actions here remind us of just how dangerous it had become by 1800 for a woman who hoped to be published and taken seriously to identify openly with Wollstonecraft as a person. As Susan Wolfson shows elsewhere in this volume, Wollstonecraft was widely demonized after her death. Nonetheless, many women writers who did not wish to be tarred with the blackened brush of Wollstonecraft’s reputation still continued to invoke and espouse her ideas. And as the nineteenth century wore on, as Kathryn Gleadle’s forthcoming research shows, numerous women writers and thinkers once again openly invoked Wollstonecraft as their noble precursor, both privately in letters and publicly in print.
Reaffirming her commitment both to the education of women and to the importance of the feelings in social intercourse, Hays prefaces the book:
My pen has been taken up in the cause, and for the benefit, of my own sex. For their improvement, and to their entertainment, my labours have been devoted. Women . . . require pleasure to be mingled with instruction, lively images, the graces of sentiment, and the polish of language. Their understandings are principally accessible through their affections: they delight in minute delineation of character; nor must the truths which impress them be either cold or unadorned.
(Female Biography, iv)
Hays here moves beyond her earlier arguments for the equality of the sexes to an even more radical suggestion, that females might potentially be superior to males: “A woman who, to the graces and gentleness of her own sex, adds the knowledge and fortitude of the other, exhibits the most perfect combination of human excellence” (V). In her final work, Memoirs of Queens Illustrious and Celebrated (1821), however, Hays returns to Wollstonecraft’s equality feminism:
I maintain . . . that there is, there can be, but one moral standard of excellence for mankind, whether male or female, and that the licentious distinctions [between the sexes] made by the domineering party, in the spirit of tyranny, selfishness, and sexuality, are at the foundation of the heaviest evils that have afflicted, degraded, and corrupted society: and I found my arguments upon nature, equity, philosophy, and the Christian religion.
(vi)
In the 1790s several women writers endorsed the program of liberal feminism which Wollstonecraft, Catharine Macaulay, and Mary Astell had developed, although none so rigorously or whole-heartedly as did Mary Hays. In The Female Advocate; or, An Attempt to Recover the Rights of Women from Male Usurpation (1799), Mary Anne Radcliffe, evoking her personal experiences as a landed Scottish heiress whose ne’er-do-well husband had lost all their money, leaving her destitute and in ill health, bitterly attacked the lack of suitable employment for women. The poet and novelist Mary Robinson, writing as Anne Frances Randall, in her Thoughts on the Condition of Women, and on the Injustice of Mental Subordination (1799), attacked the sexual double standard, directly repeating Wollstonecraft’s and Hays’s argument that male hypocrisy was primarily responsible for female prostitution. At the same time, she celebrated the historical accomplishments, both political and cultural, of contemporary women, citing thirty-nine examples of accomplished female writers, philosophers, historians, translators, and artists, including both Mrs. Woollstonecraft [sic] and Miss Hayes [sic]. After calling for a university for women, Robinson turned her attention to women’s writing as a literary genre. Anticipating Anna Barbauld’s later canon-forming claim in her Essay on the Origin and Progress of Novel-Writing, the Introduction to the collection of reprints of British novels published by Rivington (1810) and titled The British Novelists, Robinson was the first to argue that by 1790 the novel had become a feminine genre:
The best novels that have been written, since those of Smollett, Richardson and Fielding, have been produced by women: and their pages have not only been embellished with the interesting events of domestic life, portrayed with all the elegance of phraseology, and all the refinement of sentiment, but with forcible and eloquent political, theological, and philosophical reasoning.
(London, 2nd edn., 1799: 95)
At the conservative end of the feminist spectrum in Wollstonecraft’s day stood Hannah More, a prolific writer of poems, plays, religious and political tracts and ballads, and fiction. So “Invincibly” opposed to Wollstonecraft was More that she refused even to read the Rights of Woman.4 Often dismissed by scholars and critics as a reactionary thinker dedicated to upholding the status quo, Hannah More developed a feminist program of her own, one based on a theoretical basis different from Wollstonecraft’s. But as Mitzi Myers first recognized, More and Wollstonecraft arrived at surprisingly similar conclusions.5
Hannah More was the most influential woman living in England in Wollstonecraft’s day. Through her writings, political actions, and personal relationships with the Bishop of London and the Evangelical Clapham Sect, she promoted a successful program for social change from within the existing social and political order. She called for a “revolution in manners” or cultural mores, a radical change in the moral behavior of the nation as a whole.6 In contrast to Wollstonecraft’s “revolution in female manners,” which aimed at transforming the education and behavior of women in particular, Hannah More attempted to change the behavior of all the subjects of the British nation, aristocrats, clergy, the middling classes, workers, and women. But insofar as Wollstonecraft’s efforts to change radically the social construction of gender in her day entailed a change in the attitudes and daily practices of men as well as women, these two “revolutions in manners” came finally to work toward very similar feminist goals.
As I have argued in my book Mothers of the Nation,7 Hannah More’s writings contributed significantly to the prevention of a French-style, violent political revolution in England. They did so by helping to reform, rather than subvert, the existing social order. More’s reform efforts were aimed in four directions: at the moral and financial irresponsibility of the aristocracy, at the laxness of the Anglican clergy, at the immorality and economic bad management of the working classes, and most important here, at the flawed education and frivolous behavior of women of all classes. More sought above all to create a new British national identity, one based on a shared value-system grounded on the Christian virtues of rational benevolence, honesty, personal virtue, the fulfillment of social duty, thrift, sobriety, and hard work.
Fundamental to More’s project of social revolution was a transformation of the role played by women in the formation of British moral and political culture. Unlike Wollstonecraft, who argued that the two sexes were in all significant aspects the same, Hannah More insisted on the innate difference between the sexes. To women she assigned a greater delicacy of perception and feeling and, above all, a greater moral purity and capacity for virtue. Men, on the other hand, in More’s view, have better judgment, based on their wider experience of the public world; at the same time their manners are coarse, with “rough angles and asperities” (“Introduction” to Essays on Various Subjects, 1777; 6: 266). Unlike Wollstonecraft’s program of liberal political reform which looked equally to men and to women to institute her new systems of coeducation and egalitarian marriage, if More’s “revolution in manners” was to occur, it must be carried out primarily by women.
But first women must be educated to understand their proper function in society. More’s Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799) laid out her program for the education of “excellent women” (III:200): a systematic development of the innate female capacity for virtue and piety through a judicious reading of the Bible, devotional tracts, and serious literature, extended by rational conversation and manifested in the active exercise of compassion and generosity. The goal of More’s educational project for women was no less than a cultural redefinition of female virtue. As summed up in that “pattern daughter . . . [who] will make a pattern wife,” Lucilla Stanley (Coelebs in Search of a Wife, 1808),8 female virtue was equated by More with rational intelligence, modesty and chastity, a sincere commitment to spiritual values and the Christian religion, an affectionate devotion to one’s family, active service on behalf of one’s community, and an insistence on keeping promises. In More’s words:
I call education, not that which smothers a woman with accomplishments, but that which tends to consolidate a firm and regular system of character; that which tends to form a friend, a companion, and a wife. I call education, not that which is made up of the shreds and patches of useless arts, but that which inculcates principles, polishes taste, regulates temper, cultivates reason, subdues the passions, directs the feelings, habituates to reflection, trains to self-denial, and, more especially, that which refers all actions, feelings, sentiments, tastes and passions to the love and fear of God.
(Coelebs, 13)
More’s concept of female virtue – like Wollstonecraft’s concept of the rational woman – thus stood in stark contrast to her culture’s prevailing definition of the ideal woman as one who possessed physical beauty and numerous accomplishments and whose principal object in life was effectively to entice a man into marriage.
Embedded in More’s program for the education of women was a new career for upper and middle-class women, as Dorice Elliot has shown,9 namely, a sustained and increasingly institutionalized effort to relieve the sufferings of the less fortunate. As Mrs. Stanley defines this career: “Charity is the calling of a lady; the care of the poor is her profession” (Coelebs: 138; More’s italics). While More did not endorse Wollstonecraft’s view that women should enter the professions in general (Wollstonecraft had singled out careers in business, medicine, and education as particularly suited to female talents), she did conceptualize for the first time the female professional career of what we would now call the “social worker,” the organized and corporate, as opposed to the spontaneous and individualistic, practice of philanthropy. As embodied in Lucilla Stanley, this profession involves spending one day each week collecting “necessaries” for the poor – food, clothing, medicine – and two evenings each week visiting them in their own cottages where she can best determine “their wants and their characters” (Coelebs 63).
More advocated that women participate in an even more institutionalized philanthropy, a “regular systematical good” resulting in a “broad stream of bounty . . . flowing through and refreshing whole districts” (Strictures, III: 270). She urged her women readers to work aggressively in the organization of voluntary benevolent societies and in the foundation of hospitals, orphanages, Sunday Schools and all-week charity or “ragged” schools for the education and relief of the poor. And her call was heard: literally thousands of voluntary societies sprang up in the opening decades of the nineteenth century to serve the needs of every imaginable group of sufferers. More’s Evangelical demand that women demonstrate their commitment to God through a life of active service for the first time gave her upper- and middle-class sisters a mission in life, the personal and financial support of institutionalized charities, from orphanages, workhouses, and hospitals to asylums and prisons. As F. K. Prochaska documented, these philanthropic activities contributed directly to the emancipation and increasing social empowerment of women by teaching them the skills necessary to organize and maintain complex financial institutions.10
According to Hannah More, women were particularly suited to the active exercise of charity precisely because of their sexual difference, because women possessed greater sensibility than do men. More defined sensibility as an active rather than passive sympathy for the sufferings of others, one that immediately attempts to relieve the misery it perceives. As she invoked it in one of her early poems,
Sweet Sensibility! thou keen delight!Thou hasty moral! sudden sense of right!Thou untaught goodness! Virtue’s precious seed!Thou sweet precursor of the gen’rous deed!(Sensibility: A Poetical Epistle to the Hon. Mrs. Boscawen, 1782, V:336, lines 244–7)
Secondly, women were more versed in what More called “practical piety,” the immediate assessment and relief of the day-to-day requirements of the poor, the sick, the dying. Finally, women who had learned how to manage a household properly could more readily extend those skills to the Sunday School, workhouse or hospital.
Implicit both in More’s Strictures on Female Education and in her novel Coelebs is the argument that household management or domestic economy provides the best model for the management of the state or national economy. Here More agrees with Wollstonecraft’s similar argument in Rights of Woman that the same skills are required to administer the well-run household as to govern the well-run nation. More spelled out this concept of home economics in her Strictures on Female Education:
Economy, such as a woman of fortune is called on to practise, is not merely the petty detail of small daily expenses, the shabby curtailments and stinted parsimony of a little mind operating on little concerns; but it is the exercise of a sound judgment exerted in the comprehensive outline of order, of arrangement, of distribution; of regulation by which alone well-governed societies, great and small, subsist. . . . A sound economy is a sound understanding brought into action; it is calculation realized; it is foreseeing consequences, and guarding against them; it is expecting contingencies, and being prepared for them.
(III:189–90, my italics)
By assigning to women – and their mentor Eve – the capacity to develop and execute a fiscally responsible plan of household management which satisfies the physical, emotional, and religious needs of all the members of the household (servants as well as family members), More effectually defined women as the best managers of the national estate, as the true patriots. As Kathryn Sutherland has argued, More proposed “a practical politics of domestic reformation, which is national in the ambitious scope of its campaign and personal in its focus on the woman in her family as the source of this larger regeneration.”11 Invoking Milton’s Eve as her model of female propriety and “Those thousand decencies which daily flow / From all her words and actions,” More urged her sisters to “exert themselves with a patriotism at once firm and feminine, for the general good” (Strictures, III:14).
It is in the role of mother that More’s ideal of the well-educated, fiscally responsible, and morally pure woman finds her fulfillment. But it is crucial to recognize that More’s mother is the mother, not just of her own family, but of the nation as a whole. More thus implicitly endorses what I have elsewhere described as Wollstonecraft’s “family politics,” her argument that the well-managed, co-parented, and egalitarian family provides the best model for the government of the state.12 As More affirmed in her Strictures on Female Education,
the great object to which you, who are or may be mothers, are more especially called, is the education of your children. If we are responsible for the use of influence in the case of those over whom we have no immediate control, in the case of our children we are responsible for the exercise of acknowledged power: a power wide in its extent, indefinite in its effects, and inestimable in its importance. On YOU depend in no small degree the principles of the whole rising generation. . . . To YOU is made over the awfully important trust of infusing the first principles of piety into the tender minds of those who may one day be called to instruct, not families merely, but districts; to influence, not individuals, but senates. Your private exertions may at this moment be contributing to the future happiness, your domestic neglect, to the future ruin, of your country.
(Strictures, III:44)
As Mitzi Myers has noted, no one worked harder than More to define a new ideological mission for women: to “educate the young and illiterate, succor the unfortunate, amend the debased popular culture of the lower orders, reorient worldly men of every class, and set the national household in order,” thereby elevating women’s “nurturing and reformative assignment” into a “national mission.”13 Women can become, in More’s view, the Mothers of the Nation.
Emphasizing women’s public role as mothers of the nation, More necessarily downplayed their more private sexual roles as females. Like Wollstonecraft, More has been criticized by modern feminist critics for insisting on a new ideal of female “passionlessness.” As Nancy Cott put it, Hannah More’s “work perfected the transformation of woman’s image from sexual to moral being,” giving women power only at the price of sexual repression. But this is too one-sided a reading of More’s campaign. More did not urge women to deny their sexual desires, but only to channel them into marriage with a morally as well as sexually desirable partner. As Michael Mason has rightly observed, “To Hannah More belongs the distinction of having written at greater length explicitly about sex than any other leading Evangelical” in her novel Coelebs in Search of a Wife.14
By defining the private household and “private principle” as the source of “public virtue” (Strictures, III:44). More implicitly endorsed Edmund Burke’s concept in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) of the domestic estate as the model for the state of the nation. But rather than assigning to Burke’s “canonized forefathers” the ultimate responsibility for the moral improvement and sustenance of the family estate, More like Wollstonecraft explicitly assigned that responsibility to women, to mothers. Men may wage battles abroad, but women protect the home front: as she asked rhetorically: “Is it not desirable to be the lawful possessors of a lesser domestic territory, rather than the turbulent usurpers of a wider foreign empire?” (Strictures, III:200). This is why her heroine Lucilla Stanley devotes a great deal of time to gardening – to nurturing and controlling the native land of England, as Eve cultivated the fields of Eden.
In making the private middle-class household the model for the national household, as had Mary Wollstonecraft before her, Hannah More effectively erased any meaningful distinction between the private and the broadly defined public sphere. Both More and Wollstonecraft further agreed that it is women, not men, who are most responsible for carrying out moral reforms and thus for advancing the progress of civilization as such. As More put it: “The general state of civilized society depends, more than those are aware who are not accustomed to scrutinize into the springs of human action, on the prevailing sentiments and habits of women, and on the nature and degree of the estimation in which they are held” (Strictures, III:12). Insisting on the primary role of women in establishing “true taste, right principle, and genuine feeling” in the culture of a nation, both More and Wollstonecraft finally claimed for women the dominant role in what Norbert Elias has since called the “civilizing process.”
Between these two camps of feminist reform, Wollstonecraft’s overtly political “revolution in female manners” based on an assertion of sexual equality and universal human rights and More’s more restrictively cultural “revolution in manners” based on sexual difference and the essential moral superiority of women, other women writers took up more moderate feminist positions. Most notable in their efforts to find a middle ground were the Dissenters, women whose religion (whether Quaker, Unitarian, or Methodist) had already granted them a degree of sexual equality based on their capacity for virtue, rationality, and religious leadership.15 The Quaker philanthropist, Priscilla Bell Wakefield, in her Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex; with Suggestions for Its Improvement (London, 1798), disagreed with Wollstonecraft’s arguments for the equality of women with men, asserting instead that women should submit to their husbands’ superior judgment. And while she singled out Hannah More and Sarah Trimmer for special praise, she went beyond More to argue that women must be educated in practical vocations so that they could support themselves, since the accidents of fortune often left women of all classes without male economic support.
The Unitarian Anna Letitia Barbauld, inspired by her education at the leading Dissenting academy, Warrington Academy, where her father was the tutor in Classics and Belles Lettres, argued aggressively for the equal rights of all the subjects of the British nation in 1790 in her fiery denunciation of the government’s refusal to repeal the Corporation and Test Acts which prohibited non-members of the Church of England from holding political office or attending the established universities, in her political pamphlet Appeal to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts. Barbauld was the leading female literary critic of her day, arguing forcefully for the preeminence of contemporary women’s writing in the genre of prose fiction. She also promoted the rational religious education of children in her widely disseminated Hymns in Prose for Children and wrote numerous poems and tracts attacking the British slave trade, slavery in the British colonies, and the growing corruption both of the British government and of British commerce as it extended its empire to India and the Pacific Islands.
Turning her attention to the rights of woman, Barbauld entered into an extended debate with Wollstonecraft on the proper role of women in society. Wollstonecraft had attacked Barbauld directly in a footnote to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (122n5). After endorsing Barbauld’s affirmation of virtue over physical pleasure in her poem “To Mrs. P—, with some drawings of birds and insects,”
Pleasure’s the portion of the’ inferior kind;But glory, virtue, Heaven for man design’d.
(Barbauld is here using “man” in the generic sense, as contrasted to the inferior species of birds and insects), Wollstonecraft then quoted the entire text of Barbauld’s poem “To A Lady, with Some Painted Flowers” (1773), a poem which she contemptuously dismissed as “ignoble.” Wollstonecraft passionately objected to Barbauld’s identification of femininity with delicate flowers “born for pleasure and delight alone” and her conclusion that for women, “Your BEST, your SWEETEST empire is – to PLEASE” (Wollstonecraft’s emphases). Wollstonecraft then commented sardonically, “So the men tell us; but virtue, says reason, must be acquired by rough toils, and useful struggles with worldly cares (123n5).
Barbauld then responded with a poem she chose not to publish, “The Rights of Woman” (composed 1793, pub. 1825; text given in footnotes16). In this radically destabilized poem, Barbauld first urges “injured Woman,” quoting Wollstonecraft, to “assert thy right!” (line 1). But for Barbauld, who endorses Hannah More’s belief in innate sexual difference, woman’s “rights” are a “native empire o’er the breast” (line 4), in other words, a greater sensibility, virtuousness or “angel pureness” (line 6). At the same time she mocks the traditional rhetoric of the battle of the sexes, most famously located perhaps in the image of the “virago Thalestris” in Pope’s Rape of the Lock, and instead urges women to resist the conventional notion that they might be able to attain domination over men through the artillery of their “soft melting tones,” “blushes and fears” (lines 11–12), the wiles (“wit and art”, line 17) of feminine coquetry. For a female conquest based on the “sacred mysteries” or irrational arts of romantic love only makes “treacherous Man thy subject, not thy friend” (line 20) and leaves women imprisoned in a system of emotional manipulation (“Thou mayst command, but never canst be free,” line 20).
Instead Barbauld urges women to use their “angel pureness” to “Awe the licentious, and restrain the rude; / Soften the sullen, clear the cloudy brow” (lines 21–2), in other words, to heighten the moral tone of society and thus advance the civilizing process. She will then become the “courted idol of mankind” (line 25), courted both in the sense that she is sought after or wooed by now-“subdued” man, but also in the sense that she has assumed her rightful place at the center of the now-reigning court of middle-class morality. Once she has raised “subdued” man to her moral level, Barbauld concludes, woman must in turn “subdue” herself, soften her coldness, give up her moral pride, “abandon each ambitious thought” (line 29), any desire for “conquest or rule” over men, and instead submit to “Nature’s school” (line 30), a school that teaches that ideally, “separate rights are lost in mutual love” (line 32). Here Barbauld finally foreswears what she sees as Wollstonecraft’s overly aggressive demand for the immediate equality or “rights” of woman for a more gradual process of moral development, mutual sexual appreciation, tolerance, and love, a process in which middle-class women recognize and take seriously their ethical responsibilities and emotional capacities to exercise an ethic of care and to prevent conflict and violence at home and abroad (an argument she made at greater length in 1793 in her political pamphlet, Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation).17
This debate between Wollstonecraft and Barbauld, together with the program advocated by Hannah More, vividly reveals the very real intellectual and psychological tensions that existed between the leading feminists in England in the 1790s. Although each of these three influential female writers advocated the radically improved education of women and increased female control over British social, cultural, and political life, they held distinctly different views as to exactly how women could best exercise that new cultural authority. Wollstonecraft would have women fulfill the social and political roles currently played by men, Barbauld would have women enter the literary realm as didactic writers, educators, and critical judges, while More would have women engage in a life of active service for the welfare of others.
At the end of the century, after the publication of Godwin’s loving but ill-judged Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1798, it became increasingly difficult for feminist writers openly to endorse even Wollstonecraft’s less controversial demands. In the Memoirs, Godwin publicly revealed Wollstonecraft’s love affair with Gilbert Imlay and his fathering of her illegitimate daughter Fanny, Wollstonecraft’s two suicide attempts (in defiance of the Anglican Church’s definition of suicide as a sin), and his own sexual liaison with Wollstonecraft long before their marriage. He further asserted, inaccurately, that Wollstonecraft did not call on God on her deathbed. The popular press then widely denounced Wollstonecraft as a whore and an atheist, as well as a dangerous revolutionary. Their attacks were fueled by the chauvinist, anti-French feelings roused by England’s declaration of war against France in 1802, and the hysterical British reaction against all French revolutionary ideas and practices during the Napoleonic campaigns.
This wide-spread denunciation of Wollstonecraft’s personal life made it increasingly difficult for women writers to invoke Wollstonecraft’s writings by name, although many continued to endorse her ideas. Maria Edgeworth took pains to distance herself from Wollstonecraft the person even as she directly advocated Wollstonecraft’s “revolution in female manners.” In her Letters for Literary Ladies (1799), Edgeworth insisted that she was not “a champion for the rights of woman” – which she then narrowly defined as “a vain contention for superiority” by women over men – but was concerned only “to determine what is most for our general advantage.”18 And in her novel Belinda (London, 1803), Edgeworth in the seventeenth chapter entitled “Rights of Woman” caricatured her “champion” for women’s rights in the figure of Harriet Freke, a cross-dressed, duel-fighting woman who assumes the worst aspects of masculinity – tyranny over the weak (she plays several cruel practical jokes on the black servant Juba), infidelity, and physical violence. The extent to which Edgeworth feels she must go to distance the reader’s sympathies from and to punish this early example of what we would today call a macho woman or butch lesbian – Harriet Freke is finally crippled in a “man-trap” – only reveals, as Patricia Juliana Smith has perceptively recognized, Edgeworth’s own lesbian panic, her powerful fear that she will be painted with the Wollstonecraft brush, defined as a literary “amazon,” and thereby excluded from all “polite society,” her reputation as a serious thinker and advocate for the education of women in tatters.19 At the same time, Edgeworth aggressively promoted her own version of the revolutionary feminist, the new Belinda who will replace Pope’s “fairest of mortals” as the envy of her age. Belinda Portman is the embodiment of all that Wollstonecraft called for in women: sound sense, wide reading, prudence, personal modesty, and a loving heart. She makes an egalitarian and companionate marriage with Clarence Harvey (after his own foibles have been exposed) and converts her friend Lady Delacour from a life of aristocratic license and personal anguish to a loving domesticity by reconciling and reuniting her with her estranged husband and daughter.
Like Edgeworth, Jane Austen responded positively to many of Wollstonecraft’s feminist arguments without ever mentioning her by name. All of Austen’s novels are novels of education, in which her female heroines learn from their reading, their wiser mentors, and their own mistakes to become moral, responsible wives and shrewd judges of human nature. Allusions to and endorsements of ideas promoted in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman are scattered throughout Austen’s fiction – whether as Elizabeth Bennet’s sarcastic condemnation of female “accomplishments” or Wickham’s embodiment of Wollstonecraft’s critique of standing armies in Pride and Prejudice, as the association of the slave trade with the enslavement of British women in Mansfield Park (where Fanny Price functions as a house-slave20), as the modulated recognition of the competing claims of sense and sensibility which Wollstonecraft had tracked from her Mary, A Fiction through Right of Woman to The Wrongs of Woman in Sense and Sensibility, or as the affirmation of Anne Elliot as better qualified to manage the national estate than Wentworth in Persuasion. In Anne Elliot, as I have argued in detail in Mothers of the Nation (chapter 5), Jane Austen deftly stitches together Wollstonecraft’s feminist ideas with those of Hannah More: Anne, Austen’s ideal woman, achieves the rational, companionate marriage urged by Wollstonecraft and exemplified in Admiral and Sophia Croft, at the same time that she practices Hannah More’s “profession” of caring for the sick, the needy, the poor. Throughout her novels, Jane Austen endorses Wollstonecraft’s belief that the best woman is a rational woman, a woman of sense as well as sensibility, who seeks a psychologically egalitarian marriage. Within the context of the politicized discourse of the novel in her day, as Claudia Johnson has shown,21Jane Austen can be seen as a moderate feminist.
Wollstonecraft’s impact on the women writers of her day was incalculably profound. Whether individual writers endorsed Wollstonecraft’s specific demands that women enter the professions on a par with men, that they be granted their own “representation” in Parliament, that they be entitled to the legal custody of their own children and to divorce at will, or disagreed with them, very few denied the validity of her key arguments: that women should be rationally educated, that they should be the companions rather than the servants of men, and that they should be responsible, caring mothers and prudent household managers. However reluctant individual female writers may have been to acknowledge directly their indebtedness to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, this ideology which Wollstonecraft so sharply articulated became the dominant belief of the women writers of her day, across the entire feminist spectrum, from the radicals Mary Hays and Mary Robinson through the more moderate Anna Barbauld, Priscilla Wakefield, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen, to the conservative Hannah More.
1. Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney, ed. Marilyn L. Brooks (Peterborough, Canada: Broadview Press, 2000), 88, 65–6. This edition contains the Monthly Magazine articles by Hays, as well as a helpful Introduction.
2. Mary Hays, The Victim of Prejudice (1799), ed. Eleanor Ty (Peterborough, Canada: Broadview Press, 1998), 66. Also see Eleanor Ty, Unsex’d Revolutionaries – Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), chapters. 2–3.
3. Mary Hays, Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (1798), intro. Gina Luria (New York and London: Garland Publishers, Inc., 1974), 21.
4. See Hannah More’s letter to Horace Walpole, 1793, William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs Hannah More, 4 vols. (London: Seeley and Burnside, 1834), II:371.
5. Mitzi Myers, “Reform or Ruin: ‘A Revolution in Female Manners,’” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, ed. Harry C. Payne (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 11:199–216. A recent analysis of the intersections as well as the differences in the political discourse of Wollstonecraft and More can be found in Harriet Guest’s Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 271–89.
6. Hannah More, The Works of Hannah More, 6 vols. (London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher and P. Jackson, 1834), II:316.
7. See my Mothers of the Nation – Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), chapter 1.
8. Hannah More, Coelebs in Search of a Wife (London, 1808; repr. Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995), 246.
9. Dorice Elliott, “‘The Care of the Poor is Her Profession’: Hannah More and Women’s Philanthropic Work,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 19 (1995), 179–204.
10. F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 227 and passim.
11. Kathryn Sutherland, “Hannah More’s Counter-Revolutionary Feminism,” Revolution in Writing: British Literary Responses to the French Revolution, ed. Kelvin Everest (Milton Keynes and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1991), 27–64, 36.
12. On Wollstonecraft’s “family politics,” see my Romanticism and Gender (New York and London: Routledge Press, 1993), chapter 4.
13. Mitzi Myers, “Hannah More’s Tracts for the Times: Social Fiction and Female Ideology,” Fetter’d or Free? British Women Novelists, 1670–1815, eds. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1986), 264–84, 266.
14. Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Women’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 226. Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 77.
15. Ruth Watts, Gender, Power and Unitarians in England, 1780–1860 (London and New York: Longman, 1998), Part I.
16. Anna Letitia Barbauld, “The Rights of Woman,” The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, eds. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 121–2. The text follows:
Yes, injured Woman! rise, assert thy right!Woman! too long degraded, scorned, opprest;O born to rule in partial Law’s despite,Resume thy native empire o’er the breast!Go forth arrayed in panoply divine;That angel pureness which admits no stain;Go, bid proud Man his boasted rule resign,And kiss the golden sceptre of thy reign.Go, gird thyself with grace; collect thy storeOf bright artillery glancing from afar;Soft melting tones thy thundering cannon’s roar,Blushes and fears thy magazine of war.Thy rights are empire: urge no meaner claim, –Felt, not defined, and if debated, lost;Like sacred mysteries, which withheld from fame,Shunning discussion, are revered the most.Try all that wit and art suggest to bendOf thy imperial foe the stubborn knee;Make treacherous Man thy subject, not thy friend;Thou mayst command, but never canst be free.Awe the licentious, and restrain the rude;Soften the sullen, clear the cloudy brow:Be, more than princes’ gifts, thy favours sued; –She hazards all, who will the least allow.But hope not, courted idol of mankind,On this proud eminence secure to stay;Subduing and subdued, thou soon shalt findThy coldness soften, and thy pride give way.Then, then, abandon each ambitious thought,Conquest or rule thy heart shall feebly move,In Nature’s school, by her soft maxims taught,That separate rights are lost in mutual love.
17. Different readings of this poem are possible. Many have seen it as a straightforward rejection of Wollstonecraft, penned in anger: see for instance G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 222, 266, and William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft, Introduction to The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld, XXV. Harriet Guest reads it in a more nuanced way, as an affirmation of women’s domestic duty and republican motherhood, in Small Change, 226–30.
18. Maria Edgeworth, Letters for Literary Ladies (London: Joseph Johnson, 2nd edn., 1799), 89.
19. Patricia Juliana Smith, Lesbian Panic – Homoeroticism in Modern British Women’s Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 8–11.
20. For this argument, see Moira Ferguson, “Mansfield Park: Slavery, Colonialism and Gender,” Oxford Literary Review 13 (1991), 118–39.
21. Claudia L. Johnson, Jane Austen – Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988).