Mary Hays and Dissenting Culture, 1770–1810

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 318-347
Author(s):  
Timothy Whelan
Keyword(s):  
Mary Hays

Mary Hays and Henry Crabb Robinson

2015 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 176-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Whelan
Keyword(s):  
Mary Hays

scholarly journals Women write the rights of woman: the sexual politics of the personal pronoun in the 1790s

2007 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Hodson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Sexual Politics ◽  
The Other ◽  
Personal Pronoun ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Gender Expectations ◽  
Mary Hays ◽  
Analysis Programme ◽  
Political Pamphlets

This article investigates patterns of personal pronoun usage in four texts written by women about women's rights during the 1790s: Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Hays' An Appeal to the Men of Great Britain (1798), Mary Robinson's Letter to the Women of England (1799) and Mary Anne Radcliffe's The Female Advocate (1799). I begin by showing that at the time these texts were written there was a widespread assumption that both writers and readers of political pamphlets were, by default, male. As such, I argue, writing to women as a woman was distinctly problematic, not least because these default assumptions meant that even apparently gender-neutral pronouns such as I, we and you were in fact covertly gendered. I use the textual analysis programme WordSmith to identify the personal pronouns in my four texts, and discuss my results both quantitatively and qualitatively. I find that while one of my texts does little to disturb gender expectations through its deployment of personal pronouns, the other three all use personal pronouns that disrupt eighteenth century expectations about default male authorship and readership.

Feminism and the Position of Women

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Moore
Keyword(s):  
Social Reform ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Mary Robinson ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Mary Hays ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Writing ◽  
Legal Position ◽  
Intellectual Advancement

Feminism in its modern meanings attests to a movement for change in the social, economic and legal position of women. In the Romantic period, no such movement existed. There were, however, individual women whose voices, separately and together, suggest the existence of a commonality of feeling around the intellectual advancement of the female sex. This article examines writing by women on female education and sexual and social reform, focussing on the work of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Mary Robinson, and Mary Lamb. It connects political writing and educational treatises to the novels and essays written by these women and it reflects on the shared concerns from which modern feminism emerged.

Disciplinarity (Embedded and Specialized Systems)

System ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clifford Siskin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Embedded Systems ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Useful Knowledge ◽  
Mary Hays ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
True Knowledge

During the final decades of the eighteenth century, Enlightenment efforts at comprehensive mastery gave way to different uses of system—to delimited and dedicated systems and to the dispersing of systems into other forms, including the specialized essays of the modern disciplines. Their “travel” filled the world in new ways. This transition highlights our differences from Enlightenment. For Smith, who based his master SYSTEMS on “sentiments” as probable behaviors, true knowledge was useful knowledge that worked in the world to change that world. For us knowledge is knowledge because it is true. The end-of-century proliferation of systems and of print made inclusive master SYSTEMS unsustainable. Late eighteenth-century Britain is a laboratory for studying the consequences of this proliferation: instead of becoming parts of master SYSTEMS, systems were inserted into other forms. This shifted the organization of knowledge from every kind being a branch of philosophy, moral or natural, into the specialized and professionalized disciplines of modernity. This “travel” of system into other forms—embedded systems—was exemplified by Mathus’s Population “essay,” and in works, also published in 1798, by William Wordsworth and Mary Hays. Systems embedded in other forms and stretched to accommodate more things meant system proliferated into every aspect of everyday life.

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