English Feminists and their Opponents in the 1790s Unsex'd and Proper Females

This fascinating book examines what sixteen radical and conservative, famous and notorious British women wrote about their sex in the 1790s. In doing so it offers the most comprehensive survey of what they thought about their fellow women with regard to love, sexual desire and marriage; their domestic roles and their engagement in the ‘public’ sphere; and issues of gender and female abilities including sensibility and genius. Texts studied include ‘feminist’ and conduct material by Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Catharine Macaulay, Priscilla Wakefield, Maria Edgeworth and Hannah More; historical writings by Helen Maria Williams, and prose fiction by Mary Robinson, Anne Radcliffe, Elizabeth Inchbald, Eliza Fenwick, Charlotte Smith, Jane West, Elizabeth Hamilton and Frances Burney. How contemporary reviewers divided these writers into ‘unsex’d’ and ‘proper’ is investigated, as is the issue of whether they attempted to exclude women from certain kinds of writing. The book reveals the depth of female complaint but contends that women did not passively submit. Conservative and radicals alike sought to extend their sphere of activity, to reform men, challenge gender stereotypes and propose that a woman should be a self for herself and her God rather than for her husband. This book will be indispensable to academics and students of history, literature, gender and the history of social and political thought.