Enlightenment Biographies

Enlightenment Biographies

John Anderson (1726–96)

A Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, John Anderson dedicatedhimself to promoting women’s higher education. Born in Dumbartonshire, the son ofdevout Presbyterians (both his father and grandfather were ministers), Anderson demon-strated an early and persistent belief that women – contra popular theories of the period –were ‘rational beings’ and deserved every opportunity to ‘cultivate’ their understanding.This commitment culminated in a deathbed wish to found a coeducational technicaluniversity. In a detailed will, Anderson outlined a plan whereby ‘the ladies of Glasgow’might be provided with ‘such a stock of general knowledge’ as to make them the ‘mostcultivated in all of Europe’. His school would offer a ‘Ladies Course’ in Natural Philosophywhere women, ‘for a small fee,’ would be introduced to a range of scientific subjects.Although Anderson did not live to see his dream realized, the school, aptly namedAnderson’s Institution, was successfully established in 1796. As Anderson had requested,the Institution offered women courses in astronomy, electricity, magnetism, hydrostatics,hydraulics and optics. Thomas Garnett, one of the school’s early instructors, praisedAnderson for his recognition that providing women with a better education was a neces-sary part of the ‘civilizing’ process. As Garnett wrote in his 1800 Observations on a Tourthrough the Highlands, ‘The ladies of this city are undoubtedly much indebted to thefounder [Anderson], as being the first person in this island who set on foot a plan of ra-tional education for them, which affords the means of acquiring knowledge, not onlyuseful to themselves in various circumstances of life, and capable of always supplying arational amusement, without the necessity of seeking it elsewhere; but which fits them forcompanions for the other sex, and puts them on a footing of equality in conversation.’

Arianne Chernock

Mary Astell (1666–?)

Mary Astell, a feminist avant la lettre and a philosopher, published eight polemical works inthe service of women, conservative Tory politics, and the church of England; she alsoplanned and raised the funds for a girls’ school in Chelsea, where she lived most of her life.Born into a family of coal hostmen in Newcastle in 1666, she was educated by her clergy-man uncle, Ralph Astell, who had been influenced by the ‘so-called ‘Cambridge Platonists’with whom he attended university. The Astell family fortunes declined when her fatherdied, and sometime in 1689 or 1690, this remarkable, intellectual young woman went toLondon to seek patronage.

Her philosophical correspondence with John Norris of Bemerton so affected him that heasked her if he might publish their correspondence. She agreed on the condition of heranonymity and that the volume of their letters (Letters Concerning the Love of God [1695]) bededicated to Lady Catherine Jones, her lifelong friend and patron. Meanwhile, Astell pub-lished her first and most popular feminist tract, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694),arguing for women’s intellectual equality and the necessity for their education; she proposed a retreat where women might pursue intellectual lives. In 1697 she published A Serious Proposal to the Ladies Part II, continuing several philosophical threads of her previ-ous work, and in 1700 Some Reflections Upon Marriage, about how marriage subordinatedwomen to men. Thus Astell published her three most feminist works by 1700, and wassatirized by Swift, plagiarized by Berkeley, and imitated by Defoe.

716

In 1704 she opposed occasional conformity in Moderation truly Stated and A Fair Waywith the Dissenters and their Patrons, much admired by George Hickes and other non-jurors,and published the high church tract An Impartial Enquiry Into the Causes of Rebellion andCivil War In This Kingdom. Her The Christian Religion As Profess’d by a Daughter of the Churchof England (1705) was a philosophical rejoinder to Locke’s materialism and Bart’lemy Fair:Or, An Enquiry after Wit (1709) a response to Shafesbury’s Letter Concerning Enthusiasm.Astell was a feminist philosopher of the Enlightenment who championed women andpublished responses to the major thinkers of her day. She was supported financially andpsychologically by a coterie of aristocratic women who admired her mind and spirit.

Ruth Perry

Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743–1825)

Although often remembered simply as ‘Mrs. Barbauld’ the writer for children, Anna LetitiaBarbauld (née Aikin) was a woman of letters who earned renown as a poet, essayist,hymnist, political and religious pamphleteer, children’s author, reviewer, and editor. Herbrother, John Aikin (1747–1822), a practicing physician and popular author in his ownright, collaborated with her on a volume of prose pieces and on well-known works for chil-dren. In 1758 their father, Dr John Aikin, accepted a post at the Warrington Academy,which became the leading college for Dissenters. Among the tutors there were JosephPriestley, Gilbert Wakefield, and William Enfield. Barbauld spent the most intensely pro-ductive period of her poetic career, between the ages of 22 and 31, at Warrington, culmi-nating in her influential Poems (1773; reissued in expanded form in 1792). After hermarriage in 1774 to Rochemont Barbauld, a French Protestant educated at Warrington, thecouple moved to Palgrave, where Rochemont had been offered a Dissenting ministry. Theylived there until 1785, sharing the management of a boarding school for boys. Followingtheir resignation of the school and a tour of France, the Barbaulds settled in Hampstead,where they would remain until 1802. During these years Anna Barbauld engaged in themajor political debates of the period: the movement to repeal the Corporation and TestActs, the attempt to abolish the slave trade, and the debate over the French Revolution.The remainder of her life was spent in Stoke Newington, where her professional work con-tinued unabated: she wrote for the new Annual Review; edited Richardson’s Correspondence(1804), Selections from the Spectator, Tatler, Guardian, and Freeholder (1805), and The PoeticalWorks of Mark Akenside (1807); edited and produced prefaces for the 50-volume collectionThe British Novelists (1810); and published her last major poem, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven(1812).

Daniel White

Laura Bassi (1711–78)

Laura Bassi spent over forty-five years teaching physics at the University of Bologna. Shemight be described as the first woman to pursue a paid scientific career. The daughter of alawyer, Bassi was initially tutored at home by the family physician, Gaetano Tacconi. Shesubsequently met other members of Bologna’s scholarly community who were equallyimpressed with her intellectual abilities. The archbishop of Bologna, Prospero Lambertini,encouraged Bassi’s patrons to propose her as a candidate for a university degree in philoso-phy. On 17 April 1732, Bassi publicly defended forty-nine philosophical theses; shereceived her laurea on 12 May – the second woman whose graduation we can documentfrom any university. After the success of her degree, her supporters agreed to create a paidprofessorship at the University of Bologna, which Bassi accepted on 29 October 1732. Shetaught philosophy, mathematics, and physics at the university until her death in 1778, andsubsequently held two other professorships – an appointment at the Collegio Montalto

Enlightenment Biographies 717

and, as of 1776, a professorship in experimental physics at the Academy of the Institute forSciences in Bologna. Bassi married the physician Giuseppe Veratti (1707–1793) in 1738. In addition to producing a household of eight children (five of whom survived infancy),they created an experimental household with an impressive physics cabinet. Bassi routinelytaught students and visitors in their home. Celebrated throughout Europe for her accom-plishments, she enjoyed a cameo appearance in Francesco Algarotti’s Newtonianism forLadies (1737), and corresponded with such leading experimenters as the abbé Nollet, thephysicist Alessandro Volta, and her cousin, the naturalist Lazzaro Spallanzani, who claimedhe never would have become an experimenter if he had not studied with her.

Paula Findlen

Mme LePrince de Beaumont (1711–80)

A teacher and prolific authoress, Jeanne-Marie LePrince was born in Rouen, Normandy, to afamily of craftsmen specialising in ecclesiastical ornament. At 12 she entered an Ursulineconvent near Rouen specialising in preparing girls to teach. In 1735 she went to Luneville,the court-city of the Duke of Lorraine, obtaining patronage from the Duchess-RegentElisabeth-Charlotte d’Orléans. She taught music and dancing to the duchess’ daughter, andin court circles. Gaining a pension in 1743 made her the target of a mercenary marriageproposal from Antoine Grimard de Beaumont, another patron’s raffish godson, which pro-duced a daughter, Elisabeth. She annulled the marriage two years later, and began to writecriticisms of natural religion and the libertine morality she believed to be its consequence,beginning with The Triumph of Truth (1748). The keynote of her books was a blending ofaustere Christian piety with modern rationalism, possibly inspired by Poulain de la Barre.She came to London in 1750 and successfully combined writing and running a school inLondon for young ladies, using contacts close to Frederick and Augusta, Prince and Princessof Wales. Her books include the series of dialogues and fables entitled in English The YoungMisses Magazine (1759), The Young Ladies Magazine (1760), and Instructions for Young Ladieson their Entering into Life, Their Duties in the Married-State, and Towards their Children (1764).Civan, King of Bungo (1754) is an oriental conduct book for princes; later conduct fictionsare Letters of Mme de Montier (1767) and Moral Tales (1776). In London she had an associa-tion, possibly a secret marriage, with Thomas Pichon, a Frenchman who had spied inCanada for the English, but left in 1763 with her daughter, who married an army surgeonserving in Savoy. The French remember her as the great-grand-mother of Prosper Merimée.

Clarissa Campbell Orr

Eliza Berkeley (1734–1800)

Eliza Berkeley, née Frinsham, inherited a love of scholarship from her father, the Rev. Henry Frinsham, who encouraged her to learn Hebrew, Spanish and French. When hedied in 1746 her attendance at Mrs Sheele’s school in Queen Square, London, came to anend, her mother believing that women should not be too learned if they were to findhusbands. In 1761 Eliza married the Reverend George Berkeley, son of the philosopherBishop Berkeley and Ann (Forster) Berkeley, mystic and intellectual. Eliza and George hadtwo sons, George Monck (1763–1793) and George Robert (1767–1775), to whose educationthey devoted themselves with zealous enthusiasm. Both sons predeceased their parents.

The fullest source of biographical information available for Eliza Berkeley is her ownextensive ‘Preface’ (630 pages) to her edition of her late son’s Poems (170 pages), which sheedited for publication in 1797. This eccentric text is arguably more revealing of its authorthan its subject, the life and rather indifferent poetry of George Monck. Contemporaryreviewers praised her anecdotal, if garrulous, style, placing her work in the context of thenew and increasingly popular genre of biography. Like many women of her time, Berkeleydefined herself through her relationships with men, particularly her father, husband and

718 Enlightenment Biographies

sons. However, her voluminous ‘Preface’ suggests a degree of resistance to her subordinatesituation. After her husband’s death in 1795 she gathered his Sermons for publication in1799. She also contributed several articles to the Gentleman’s Magazine, including ‘A Singular Tale of Love in High Life’ (August, 1796) which described her husband’s youth-ful courtship with bluestocking Catherine Talbot. Eliza Berkeley died at Kensington in1800, aged 66. According to her wishes, her body was buried in Cheltenham, in the sametomb as her son George Monck.

Elizabeth Eger

Inés Joyes y Blake (1731–1806)

Information about Inés Joyes y Blake is very scarce, as her life is still being researched. Shewas born in Madrid in 1731 to Gregorio Joyes and Inés Joyes, both members of Irish mer-chant dynasties established in Spain. She belonged to the middle class, with commercial,financial, bureaucratic and military connections. Her family seems to have been a culturedone, connected with Enlightenment circles (her refined home was praised by English trav-ellers, while one of her sons, Joaquín, and her grandson José played significant intellectualand political roles in the period of liberal revolution in early nineteenth-century Spain).She married another Irishman, Agustín Blake, in 1752, and lived all her adult life inMálaga, a flourishing sea-port, and in Vélez-Málaga, a small provincial town. She had ninechildren, for whom she had to provide after her husband’s banckruptcy and death in 1782.Her name appeared in the world of letters with a 1798 translation of Samuel Johnson’sRasselas, Prince of Abissinia, followed by an Apology of women, which seems to have gonerather unnoticed in her time.. The fact that the Irish in Spain were a compact community,inclined to maintaining their language and customs, accounts for endogamy and alsoexplains her rather unusual mastery of the English language. Her decision to translate aphilosophical novel – written by a defender of the talents of women and friend to manywomen writers, a novel which was sceptical about matrimony and had a heroine with asingular personality – rather than one of the sentimental plots then in vogue, is an indica-tion of her leanings. Inés Joyes’ ideas are further developed in her Apology, a vehement pleafor women’s intellectual aptitudes, moral responsibilities and emotional autonomy, withobvious connections to the work of Josefa Amar and more intriguing parallels with that ofMary Wollstonecraft.

Monica Bolufer

Josefa Amar y Borbón (1749–?)

Borbon was an enlightened Spanish woman. Her date of death is uncertain, but it was notbefore 1808. Descended on both sides from families of a certain intellectual renown andsocial standing (both her father and grandfather were distinguished physicians), she livedat the court as a young woman. Later, she married a lawyer, Joaquín Fuertes Piquer, hadone son and spent most of her adult life in Zaragoza, a provincial town whose reformistand Enlightened circles she and her husband joined. Her education was rather uncommonfor a non-aristocratic woman of the day. She learnt Latin, Greek, and several modernlanguages; and she gained considerable knowledge of the Classics, of Spanish moralisticand pedagogical writing of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of eighteenth-centuryeducational works, and, most particularly, of ancient and modern medical texts. Her writ-ings include translations of agronomic, literary, erudite and pedagogical works from theEnglish, French and Italian. However, her most relevant publications are her Discourse inDefense of the Talents of Women (Discurso en defensa del talento de las mujeres, 1786), writtenas a contribution to the debate concerning women’s admission to the Economic Society ofMadrid, and her Discourse on women’s physical and moral education (Discurso sobre la educa-ción física y moral de las mujeres, 1790), the most comprehensive pedagogical treatise for


women in eighteenth-century Spain. She enjoyed considerable prestige in her time. Shewas admitted to the Economic Society of Aragón in 1782, to the Junta de Damas (Ladies’Committee) of the Economic Society of Madrid in 1787, and to the Royal Medical Society of Barcelona, in recognition of her contribution to the popularization of medicalknowledge.

Monica Bolufer

Frances Evelyn Boscawen (1719–1805)

Frances Evelyn (née Glanville), was the great-niece, on her mother’s side, of the diarist JohnEvelyn, whose literary skill and love of nature she inherited. She married Edward Boscawenin 1742. The union was marked by long periods of separation while Edward was engaged innaval battles overseas. Frances oversaw the building of their fine country mansion,Hatchlands in Surrey, designed by the architect Robert Adam. The Admiral died in 1761after a distinguished career in North America and in the Seven Years War against France.Together they had five children, three of whom predeceased Frances.

While her long widowhood was marked by much personal sorrow, it was also the most sociable period of her life. Frances acted as a muse and patron to several writers,including Edward Young, who dedicated his poem ‘Resignation’ (1761) to her, aiming toconsole her on her husband’s death. She hosted popular assemblies at her London house –her guests included Elizabeth Montagu, Dr. Johnson, James Boswell, Joshua and FrancesReynolds, Elizabeth Carter and Hannah More. She was widely known as a model letter-writer, prized for her wit, elegance and warm heart. More compared her to MadameSévigné and eulogized her social virtues in her poem ‘Sensibility’ (1782). She also praisedBoscawen alongside Elizabeth Vesey and Elizabeth Montagu in her poem ‘Bas Bleu, orConversation’ (1786), which celebrates the intellectual values of the bluestocking commu-nity. Frances died in London on 26 February, 1805. At her request, she was laid in herhusband’s tomb in the church of St. Michael Pinkivel, Cornwall. While her copious corre-spondence remains in family hands, some of her letters have been published in collectionsof bluestocking correspondence.

Elizabeth Eger

Edmund Burke (1729–97)

Edmund Burke was a parliamentary politician and philosopher. He was born in Ireland ofa Protestant father and Catholic mother, but himself identified as Protestant, although sympathetic to Catholic claims. Upon moving to England, his political and intellectualtalents attracted the patronage of influential men such as the Marquis of Rockingham. In1757, he published A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime andBeautiful, which identified the sublime as masculine and the beautiful as feminine.Although Burke is now thought of as the father of modern conservatism, for most of hispolitical career he sided with the Rockingham Whigs, who criticized what they saw as theoverweening power of the King, and wished to strengthen the power of Parliament. In1770 he published Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents to address this issue.Burke believed that George III was unconstitutionally advised by a secret cabinet, includ-ing his mother, which deprived the Parliament of its due voice. Because of his suspicion ofroyal power, Burke feared the supposed secret influence of the king’s mother, and later, inthe Regency Crisis of 1788, of his wife the queen. The Whigs identified with the heritageof the Glorious Revolution of 1688, but they still believed that the descendents of the oldaristocratic families who led that revolution were the natural leaders of society. As a Whig,Edmund Burke was not sympathetic to calls for expanding the parliamentary franchise.When the French revolution broke out in 1789, Burke turned against his former Whigallies and wrote his famous Reflections on the Revolution in France against it. Featuring most


prominently was the dazzling vision of Marie Antoinette and the call for chivalry, butBurke squarely based his political philosophy on inherited traditions, family patrimoniesand natural subordination.

Anna Clark

Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis (1757–1808)

Cabanis, a French physician and social theorist, was born in Cosnac in 1757 and died inRueil in 1808. After serving in his youth as secretary to prince-bishop Massalski of Vilna,Cabanis moved to Paris in 1775, where he studied medicine with the Royal physician J-B-Léon Dubreuil while also cultivating letters; over the course of his life, he translatedfragments of the Iliad and works by Meissner, Goethe, and Gray. In 1778, Cabanis settledin Auteuil and soon became the protégé of Mme Helvétius, who oversaw an intellectuallyvibrant salon where Cabanis made the acquaintance of numerous philosophes, writers andpolitical figures – including Mirabeau, who employed Cabanis as both speechwriter andphysician. Cabanis was politically active in the Revolutionary era: he advocated hospitalreforms, universal primary education, national public assistance, and standards for themedical profession. During the violence of the Terror, Cabanis prepared poison for hisfriends (including the vial which Condorcet consumed to avoid execution) and confinedhimself to Auteuil. After Thermidor, he assumed a leading role in the reconstruction ofFrance’s cultural and educational institutions, serving as deputy in the Council of FiveHundred, conspirator in Bonaparte’s coup of Brumaire (November 1799), and a professor ofclinical medicine, legal medicine and history of medicine at the Paris School of Medicine(although it is doubtful that Cabanis actually taught). On May 14 1796, he marriedCharlotte-Félicité de Grouchy, Condorcet’s sister-in-law. That same year, he entered theFrench National Institute, where he was reunited with fellow ‘Ideologues’ who secondedhis effort to produce a ‘science of man’ that clearly articulated the links between physi-ology, psychology and intelligence. It was there, from 1796 to 1800, that Cabanis read thetwelve Memoirs that constituted his major work, Les Rapports du physique et moral del’homme (1802). In the Rapports, Cabanis posited that physical sensitivity is the simple, gen-erative principle not just of physiology but also of man’s moral and intellectual life; hethen proceeded to analyse this principle in all its fixed and variable aspects – including thatof sex, which Cabanis described as exerting a profound influence on the character of ideasand moral affections. After his death from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1808, Cabanis wasburied in the Pantheon.

Anne Vila

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–74).

Margaret Cavendish was born in Colchester, the daughter of Sir Thomas Lucas. In 1642she became a maid of honour at the court of Queen Henrietta Maria, whom she accompa-nied into exile in 1644. During her exile in France, she met and married William, Earl ofNewcastle. Thereafter she lived with her husband in France and the Netherlands. Whenshe returned to England at the Restoration, her intellectual profile and highly colourfulpublic persona gave her a reputation for eccentricity which haunts her memory to thisday.

Margaret Cavendish was a prolific writer whose wide-ranging interests extended fromdrama and poetry to philosophy and science. She was one of the first English women topublish in these areas. Her pursuit of philosophy in particular was a major achievement ata time when very few women had the opportunity to develop an interest in the subject.Through her husband and his brother, Sir Charles Cavendish, she had contact with someof the leading thinkers of her time, including Huygens, Hobbes, Descartes, Sir KenelmDigby and Walter Charleton. In 1667 she received recognition of a sort when she was


invited to visit the Royal Society. Nevertheless , as a woman, she was not permitted to jointhe society.

Initially Cavendish’s preferred medium was verse – Poems and Fancies (1654) and Philo-sophical and Physical Opinions (1654). But she subsequently adopted a more systematicmode for setting out her philosophy especially in Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668),where she proposed a vitalistic and materialist account of nature. She asserted the distinc-tiveness of her position by critiquing contemporary thinkers in several writings:Philosophical Letters (1664) is a series of epistolary essays addressed to an imaginary femalecorrespondent which argue against Hobbes, Descartes, Jan Baptiste van Helmont andHenry More; Observations on Experimental Philosophy (1666) attacks the experimentalscience of the Royal Society; and A Description of a New World Called the Blazing World, pub-lished with the latter, is a fictional utopia in which she satirises contemporary science andphilosophy. She also published collections of plays (1662 and 1668), and semi-discursiveprose writings – The World’s Olio (1655), Orations (1662), and Sociable Letters (1664) – and aLife of her husband (1667).

Sarah Hutton

Mme du Châtelet (1706–49)

Gabrielle Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil was born into a well-connected noble family; bothparents maintained a Paris salon. Her father taught her Italian; she was also tutored inmathematics, science, English and Latin. At nineteen she married Florent Claude, Marquisde Châtelet, from an ancient military noble family. Their main estate was at Cirey inChampagne, near the duchy of Lorraine whose ruler, Stanislas, the former king of Poland,was Louis XV’s father-in-law. Mme du Châtelet always combined her intellectual pursuitswith an intense social life at the courts of Nancy and Versailles, including private theatri-cals and gambling. She loved dress and jewels, and with Voltaire’s help redecorated parts ofCirey in rococo taste combined with modern luxury. In the first seven years of her marriagethe marquise combined bearing three children with the life of a salonnière; in keeping withelite mores she had several liaisons, including one with the statesman, the duc deRichelieu, and the scientist Maupertuis, who also tutored her in advanced mathematics.After 1734 she and Voltaire became acknowledged partners, a situation accepted by herhusband; at Cirey they wrote, studied, acted, and negotiated the complex literary quarrelswhich reflected the cultural politics and personal animosities of the era. As a philosophe shemediated both English and German thought into French. Her most significant achieve-ment were the translation of Newton’s Principia Mathematica, with a commentary assistedby the mathematicians A.-C. Clairaut and D. Bernouilli, (1759); and her synthesis ofLeibniz and Newton, in Les Institutions physiques (1740, in the form of letters to her son).She deepened Voltaire’s interest in science and influenced his Eléments de la Philosophie deNewton. Her translation of Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, was prefaced with heradvocacy of feminist possibilities in the arts and sciences.


Marquis de Condorcet (1743–94)

Mathematician, philosopher, feminist, and revolutionary activist, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet was born into a noble family in Picardy in 1743. Asa young protégé of Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Condorcet did innovative work on calculusthat won him entry into the Academy of Sciences by 1769. He became a Physiocrat andsupporter of Turgot’s reforms, served as Inspector-General of the Mint, and wrote pam-phlets backing free trade, praising American political innovations, and criticizing the polit-ical disenfranchisement of women (in Letters from a Bourgeois of New Haven to a Citizen ofVirginia, 1787). Well known for his éloges of fellow philosophes, he also made his name by


developing a “social arithmetic” that attempted to apply the science of probability to socialproblems (Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions, 1785).He and his wife, Sophie de Grouchy, ran one of Paris’s most prominent salons. During theFrench Revolution, he became a deputy to the Legislative Assembly and the Convention. A prominent advocate of humanitarian causes, he argued for the abolition of slavery,opposed the death penalty, and drafted an influential proposal for a national, secular edu-cation system. His controversial work, On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship(1790), lobbied for political rights and educational opportunities for women. As a republi-can deputy, he authored the Girondin proposal for the Constitution of 1793. Denouncedfor his connections with the Girondins, Condorcet fled Paris and was eventually arrested.In hiding and in prison, he wrote his most well-known work, Sketch for a Historical Picture ofthe Progress of the Human Mind (1795), which examined the stages of human progress inlanguage and knowledge and predicted the perfectibility of humankind in a tenth and finalstage. Still in prison in late March 1794, he committed suicide.

Suzanne Desan

Thomas Cooper (1759–1840)

Thomas Cooper, physician and activist, was a man with keen democratic instincts.Committee member of the ‘Society for the Purpose of Effecting the Abolition of the SlaveTrade,’ leader in Dissenting circles and active member of both the Manchester Literary andPhilosophical Society and Manchester Constitutional Society, Cooper publicized his strongpro-Woman views during an ardent political exchange with the conservative M.P. EdmundBurke regarding the course of the French Revolution. In his 1792 A Reply to Mr. Burke’sInvective, written in response to a particularly nasty speech delivered by Burke in the Houseof Commons, in which Burke had chastised Cooper for traveling to France on behalf of theManchester Constitutional Society, Cooper argued that all those capable of ‘self-direction’ –women included – had a right to the basic liberties advocated by the French revolutionar-ies. ‘I have repeatedly considered the subject of the Rights of Women,’ Cooper wrote, ‘and I am perfectly unable to suggest any Argument in support of the political Superiority sogenerally arrogated by the Male Sex, which will not equally apply to any System ofDespotism of Man over Man.’ Cooper’s statement attracted considerable attention, and wasreprinted in the essays of British writers Thomas Starling Norgate and John Bristed, as wellas in an American article entitled ‘On the Rights of Woman’, published in the NationalMagazine in 1800. In 1794, Cooper followed Joseph Priestley to America, where he lobbiedagainst John Adams’ administration and taught mineralogy and chemistry at theUniversity of Pennsylvania, eventually becoming President of South Carolina College in1820.

Arianne Chernock

Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802)

Erasmus Darwin was a physician, botanist and poet who played a central role in the forma-tion of the Lunar Society of Birmingham. The Society, whose members included JosephPriestley, Thomas Day, Robert Bage and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, took a strong interest inimproving female education – at least 11 of its members wrote pro-Woman educationaltreatises – and Darwin himself was the author of A Plan for the Conduct of Female Educationin Boarding Schools (1797), written to support his two illegitimate daughters who hadrecently opened a boarding school in Derbyshire. In the plan, Darwin chastised parents ofthe ‘last half century’ for not taking enough pains to educate their daughters: ‘Hence ithappens, that female education has not yet been reduced to a perfect system.’ To createthis ‘perfect system’, Darwin recommended that young women be instructed not only in‘grammar, languages, and common arithmetic’, but also in ‘geography, civil history, and


natural history’, as well as in botany and chemistry. He also encouraged teachers to engagetheir female students in regular physical activity. The Plan was generally well-received,although John Aikin complained in The Monthly Review that Darwin had ‘done no morethan slightly touch on a few leading ideas’. Female education, however, was only one ofDarwin’s many causes. Overweight and sybaritic, this wide-ranging thinker (who fatheredfourteen children) was also deeply committed to liberating eros. His poem The BotanicGarden (1791), which publicized the Linnaean system of classification, cited the poly-gamous practices of plants as a means of legitimating sexual freedoms for both men andwomen. As Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin, once observed, love was ‘the purestsource of human felicity, the cordial drop in the otherwise vapid cup of life’.

Arianne Chernock

Laura Bentivoglio Davia (1689–1761)

Laura Bentivoglio Davia was one of many aristocratic women engaged in the pursuit ofknowledge in eighteenth-century Italy. She is noteworthy primarily for her relationshipswith leading natural philosophers associated with the University of Bologna and theIstituto delle Scienze in the first half of the eighteenth century. The last direct descendant,along with her sister, of the Bentivoglio family that ruled the city of Bologna prior to itsannexation by the Papal States, Bentivoglio married Francesco Davia in 1708. Maritaldifficulties lead to a lengthy separation between 1715 and 1726. For the majority of thisperiod, she lived with her husband’s uncle, cardinal Giovan Antonio Davia, in his bish-opric in Rimini. There she developed a serious interest in scientific and philosophical pur-suits by participating in cardinal Davia’s scientific academy and being educated in modernphilosophy by the Riminese physician Giovanni Bianchi. In 1723 Francesco Maria Zanotti,the secretary of the Istituto delle Scienze, called her the bella Cartesiana (beautifulCartesian) in recognition of her prominent social role in the cardinal’s academy as its sole female member. In the decades following her return to Bologna, Bentivoglio Daviacontinued to perfect her scientific and mathematical education; she also played an impor-tant role as a patron of local scientific figures such as Zanotti, Bianchi, and even the youngFrancesco Algarotti whose Newtonianism for Ladies (1737) she eagerly read. While she initially disapproved of the idea of Laura Bassi taking up a university professorship in 1732,she eventually became a patron and supporter of this younger woman physicist. Like manywomen of her generation, Bentivoglio Davia left behind no published writings in relationto her scientific interests. She was primarily a consumer of the knowledge of her time,albeit a very interesting and opinionated one judging by her extant correspondence.

Paula Findlen

Thomas Day (1748–89)

Thomas Day was one of the most respected Rousseauian theorists and social reformers ofthe late British Enlightenment, whose didactic children’s book The History of Sandford andMerton (1783–89) was praised by Mary Wollstonecraft in the pages of the Analytical Reviewfor its pro-Woman content. In her review, Wollstonecraft cited Day’s eagerness to seewomen treated as ‘rational creatures’ rather than as ‘polished playthings’ and commendedhis efforts to promote ‘a very different mode of education for females, from that whichsome late writers on the subject, have adopted’. Day’s attitude towards women, however,was by no means straightforward, and this ‘studiously unkempt’ philosopher’s personal lifeat times suggests a far more complicated relationship to the opposite sex. After conductingan unsuccessful search for a British ‘Sophie’ – a woman who might favor the ‘natural’ overthe ‘artificial’ – Day adopted two young girls and raised them along Rousseauist lines inhopes of transforming them into ideal wifely material. The project failed. One of the girlsproved ‘invincibly stupid’. The other, Sabrina Sidney, though beautiful, also lacked


‘strength of mind’. As the Lichfield poet Anna Seward reported of the affair, Day dislikedthe way that Sidney responded to his experiments, particularly the fact that she screamedwhen ‘melted-sealing wax’ was dropped on her arms and jumped when pistols were fired ather petticoats. In the end, Day and Sidney parted ways – she heading off to a boardingschool and becoming the wife of one Mr. Bicknel (a barrister who had been with Day whenhe first selected his orphans) and he marrying Miss Esther Milnes, a woman who, in thewords of Day’s good friend Richard Lovell Edgeworth, combined ‘in an unusual manner,independence of sentiment, and the most complete matrimonial obedience’.

Arianne Chernock

Denis Diderot (1713–84)

Denis Diderot, philosopher, novelist, and editor of the Encyclopédie, was one of the centralfigures of the French Enlightenment. Educated at a Jesuit College in Langres and at theCatholic Collège d’Harcourt in Paris, he was destined for the priesthood. In 1732, howeverhe renounced the religious life thereafter subsisting on a hand-to-mouth existence in Parisby tutoring in history and mathematics and writing sermons to order. In 1743, Diderotmarried, against his father’s strong opposition, a seamstress and lace-maker, Anne-Antoinette Champion, by whom he had several children, but only one, a daughter towhom he was devoted, surviving into adult-hood. His marriage, intellectually less thancompatible, was not happy. Engaging in a number of extra-marital affairs, Diderot’s longrelationship with his mistress, Sophie de Volland, is notable for the fascinating correspon-dence to which it gave rise. Diderot was at the centre of the philosophes circle, a friend ofVoltaire, Rousseau, d’Alembert and Grimm. In 1746 he and d’Alembert began work on thevast Encyclopédie, which given strict French censorship, had a chequered and protractedpublishing history. In 1749 Diderot’s writings on natural religion and materialism, as wellas his pornographic novel, Les Bijoux indiscrets led to his imprisonment at Vincennes forseveral months. As well as the Encyclopédie, he wrote widely on art criticism, in his Salons,and on the theatre, developing an important theory of naturalistic acting. His stage plays,Le Père de famille (1758), Le Fils naturel (1757) were dramas of sentiment based on familyaffections. His letters to the actress Marie Madeleine Jodin, who became his protégée,expound his theories on acting also developed in Le Paradoxe sur le comédien (The Actor’sParadox, 1773). In same year he undertook a trip to Russia, to visit his patroness, CatherineII, who had made him her librarian and who gave him a generous pension. A polymathand an enormously fertile mind, interested in everything, he combined enormous erudi-tion with wit and lightness of touch. Many of his most daring and speculative writingssuch as Le rêve d’Alembert and Jaques le fataliste were not published in his lifetime. A convinced materialist, Diderot anticipated theories of evolution. He was one of the mostbrilliant and engaging of Enlightenment philosophes.

Felicia Gordon

William Enfield (1741–97)

William Enfield served alternately as an instructor and rector at the Dissenting WarringtonAcademy, minister at the Octagon Chapel in Norwich, and essayist for various left-leaningperiodicals. Throughout his varied career as a teacher, preacher and writer, he channeledmuch of his energy into fighting for sexual equality. In book reviews written for TheMonthly Magazine and The Monthly Review, he touted Woman’s abilities, encouraging Manto treat her as his intellectual equal. Perhaps Enfield’s most intriguing assertion, however,was that a new term was needed to describe the human species in toto. Assessing MaryWollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, he noted that he disliked the terms‘man’ and ‘woman’, feeling that they were designations that emphasized the differencesbetween the sexes, rather than their overwhelming commonalities: ‘Both men and women


should certainly, in the first place, regard themselves, and should be treated by each other,as human beings. It might, perhaps, in some measure, contribute to this end, if, beside thesexual appellations of man and woman, we had some general term to denote the species,like… Homo in the Greek and Roman languages. The want of such a general term is amaterial defect in our language.’ Yes, there were biological distinctions, he explained, butmost of the perceived differences stemmed less from physiology than from culturalcontext. It was his aim, he noted, as an enlightened subject, to minimize the gap betweenthe sexes (though not in such a way, he insisted, as to completely ‘confound’ difference).Enfield himself was no doubt working in this spirit when he decided – likely playfully – touse the pseudonym ‘Homo’ in the essays he wrote for the radical Norwich periodical The Cabinet.

Arianne Chernock

Louise-Florence-Pétronille Tardieu d’Esclavelles de la Live d’Épinay(1726–83)

Though she married for love, Louise d’Épinay soon discovered that she had made a disas-trous marriage to her profligate tax-farmer cousin, La Live d’Épinay. Best known for her association with the philosophes, in particular Diderot, Grimm (who was her lover) andthe abbé Galiani, with whom she corresponded extensively after his return to Naples in1769, she was herself a distinguished member of the intellectual society in which shemoved. She contributed anonymously to Grimm’s Correspondance littéraire, taking charge ofits production for lengthy periods when he was away. She was also closely acquainted withJean-Jacques Rousseau, with whom she famously quarrelled. She wrote up her version ofevents in the Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant, often referred to as her Pseudo-Mémoires,which was published for the first time in 1818. Her pedagogical work, Les Conversationsd’Émilie (1774, augmented and corrected in 1782) demonstrates the influence of Rousseau,while at the same time criticising him in the area of the education of women. Written for her grand-daughter, Émilie de Belzunce, Les Conversations d’Émilie was awarded the Prix Montyon (a newly established prize offered by the Académie française for the book ofthe year judged to be the most useful to society) in January 1783. She was in competitionfor this with Mme de Genlis, who clearly considered that her own pedagogical novel Adèleet Théodore deserved to win. It was suggested at the time that Genlis’s known anti-philosophe stance spoiled her chances. Mme d’Épinay’s educational theory designated threedevelopmental stages: (i) up to ten, (ii) from ten till fourteen or fifteen, (iii) from fifteen tillmarriage. The published work covers only education up to ten.

Jean Bloch

Father Benito Jerónimo Feijoo (1676–1764)

Feijoo was a Benedictine monk, the eldest son of a family of the lesser nobility, and aTheology professor at the University of Oviedo for almost half a century (1710–59). He wasone of the most popular Spanish writers of the eighteenth century, and an energetic advo-cate of Enlightenment principles. He opposed defenders of traditional scholasticism andwas an admirer of modern European philosophy. For a long time, he has been presented byhistorians as an exceptional figure, heroically standing alone in a landscape of mediocrityand backwardness. Recent research offers a more nuanced version of enlightened change,pointing to its origins in the last third of the seventeenth century, and reassessing Feijoo’ssignificance instead as the most relevant representative of the early Spanish Enlightenment,given his wide range of interests and his determination to reach a large audience. His mostimportant works – two collections of essays entitled Critical Theater of Common Errors andPrejudices (Teatro Crítico de Errores Comunes) and Erudite Letters (Cartas Eruditas) – attained anunprecedented popularity in the rather bleak outlook of Spanish editorial industry. They


went through, respectively, twenty and eleven full or partial editions between 1725 and1787, as well as dozens of reprints. At the moment of Feijoo’s death, almost 500,000 copieshad been sold, and dictionaries and indexes of his work had been published to help quickbrowsing. He was also one of the Spanish intellectuals most famous abroad, with transla-tions into five languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, German and English.) His Defense ofwomen (essay XVI of his Critical Theater) aroused intense and longlasting polemics and hada strong influence on eighteenth-century Spanish culture.

Monica Bolufer

Mme de la Fite (1737–94)

Marie Elisabeth de la Fite, author, translator and governess, belonged to the sector of north-ern European Republic of Letters which was moderate, Protestant, Enlightened, and pur-sued the Baconian and Newtonian goal of demonstrating the compatibility of theology andnatural philosophy. She was born in Hamburg (or Altona), possibly of French Huguenotstock. She married a Dutch Huguenot pastor, Jean-Daniel La Fite, who was also a Chaplainto the House of Orange in The Hague; both were involved in educating the royal children.She also collaborated with him in the Bibliothèque des Sciences et des Beaux Arts, an explicitlyanti-Deistic journal, also devoted to the advancement of the arts and sciences. After beingwidowed she joined the household of Queen Charlotte in Britain in 1781, as a Reader, andinstructress to the princesses in German and French. She also helped Sarah Trimmer withthe Queen’s charity schools in Windsor. Her educational works, written with the royalprincesses in mind, include Eugénie et ses élèves,(1787) dedicated to Princess Elizabeth, andEntretiens, Drames, et Contes Moraux à l’usage des femmes,(1801) dedicated to QueenCharlotte. These were modelled on similar works by Mme LePrince de Beaumont, and aswell as dialogues on natural history include playlets by progressive continental educatorssuch as Armand Berquin, C. F. Weisse, C. G. Salzmann and J.H. Campe, many of whomwere influenced by English moral writers. (Mary Wollstonecraft in turn translatedSalzmann). She cherished her literary friendship with Mme de Genlis. Her moral themesinclude the need to override passion with reason, to cultivate rural simplicity rather thanmetropolitan sophistication, and enjoy the pleasures of philanthropy. She also translatedLady Sophia Sternheim, by Sophie von La Roche, Thoughts on the Manners of the Great byHannah More and two works by Lavater, the founder of physiognomy.


Eliza Fletcher (1770–1858)

Eliza Fletcher, née Eliza Dawson, was the daughter of Elizabeth Hill, from a Yorkshire gentryfamily, who died at her birth, and Miles Dawson, a surveyor and small landowner.Educated at the Manor School, York, in July 1791 she married the Scottish advocateArchibald Fletcher, a Gaelic speaker and burgh reformer, made Edinburgh her home. Fromthen until her husband’s death in 1828 she remained close to the reforming politics ofEdinburgh Whiggism, and her autobiography is an outstanding account of early nine-teenth-century Edinburgh literary and reforming circles. She shared and celebrated herhusband’s political sympathies with the early principles of the French Revolution, thoughnot with more radical revolutionary politics, and she wrote of the strength of Tory preju-dice against reformers in Edinburgh in the 1790s. Her attractive personality and politicalinterests allowed her to play a lively role in the circles surrounding the Edinburgh Review,founded in 1802. With Elizabeth Hamilton and Anne Grant of Laggan, she helped to provide the sociable and conversational contexts in which men such as Francis Jeffrey,Henry Brougham, Dugald Stewart and many others flourished. Her autobiography alsoidentifies the close connections between a network of literary women which includedHamilton, Grant, Joanna Baillie, Margaret Cullen, Mary Brunton, and the English


dissenters Anna Barbauld and Catherine Cappe. Their common interests included the edu-cation of women, and philanthropic activities, especially in Edinburgh. After 1828 shespent less time in Scotland, but still celebrated the passing of the Reform Act for Scotlandin Edinburgh in 1832. Most of her later years were spent in the English Lake District, butthroughout her long life she maintained active political interests, notably in the politics ofEuropean nationalism; she corresponded with Mazzini until 1853. She had four daughters,two sons and many grandchildren. Her daughter Mary, Lady Richardson (1802–80) editedher autobiography, most of which was written between 1838 and 1844, with additionalcorrespondence, privately printed at first, in 1874.

Jane Rendall

William Frend (1757–1841)

William Frend was the son of an Anglican wine merchant who sent him to North Americato learn the trade at the outbreak of the American rebellion. Frend was drafted into andserved in the British army. On his return to England he refused either a mercantile or a mil-itary career, determined to prepare for the ministry. He took a degree at Christ’s College,Cambridge, where William Paley (1743–1805) influenced him. Frend became Tutor inMathematics at Jesus College; Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Robert Malthus were among his students. He renounced his prospects as an Anglican by confessing Unitarianism in 1787, and resigned his livings. In 1788 he published two provocative texts, Thoughts onSubscription to Religious Tests and An Address to the Inhabitants of Cambridge and itsNeighbourhood, exhorting them to turn from the false worship of Three Persons to the worship ofOne True God, then left to tour the Continent, although he retained his tutorship with astipend of £150 per annum. On his return to Cambridge, Frend resumed his duties as atutor; he also collaborated with Joseph Priestley on a new translation of the Scriptures, andRobert Robinson’s researches for his History of Baptism (1790) by securing manuscripts forhim from the University libraries. Frend published Peace and Union recommended to theAssociated Bodies of Republicans and Anti-Republicans in February 1793, in which he attackedthe ‘Church of England [as] a political institution’. He was tried by the University and ban-ished on grounds that his judges knew were without statutory basis, and so kept hisstipend. He moved to London in 1794 where he worked as a freelance tutor in Mathematicswhile continuing radical activities with other Unitarians and political progressives; later, heparticipated in the agitation for the Reform Bill of 1832. In 1807, Frend accepted a regularposition as actuary at the newly formed Rock Life Assurance Company. Frend demon-strated a lifelong interest in education, including for women. He encouraged his frail half-sister in her studies, supported Mary Hays in her intellectual ambitions, tutored AnnabellaMilbanke, later the unhappy wife of Lord Byron, in Latin and Mathematics; after his mar-riage to Sara Blackburne, the granddaughter of Archdeacon Francis Blackburne, in 1808, heserved as mentor to the first of their seven children, Sophia, teaching her reading, writing,Hebrew, philosophy, and taking her with him everywhere.

Gina Luria Walker

Mme de Genlis (1747–1830)

Stéphanie-Félicité Ducrest de Saint-Aubin came from an old but not wealthy aristocraticfamily in Burgundy, and married the well-connected soldier Charles-Alexis, Comte deGenlis, in 1763. She was educated at a convent, followed by self-education with the help ofsalon friends. Through family connections she became lady-in-waiting to the duchessed’Orléans, whose husband was a cousin of Louis XVI, and heir to the throne, until Louisproduced children. She had a brief liaison with the duc; her adopted daughter Pamela, laterwife of the Irish rebel Lord Edward Fitzgerald, was widely, but almost certainly erroneously,believed to be their daughter. In 1779 she became Gouvernante to the Orléans’ sons and


daughters. As an educator she imitated Mme Maintenon, Louis XIV’s morganatic wife, bywriting children’s plays. A prolific author, her two most influential books, read and trans-lated across Europe, were Adèle et Théodore ou Lettres sur l’éducation, (1782), in which a virtuous couple retire to the country to educate their children, and exchange letters withfriends including one who is educating a prince; and the anthology of stories, Les Veillées duChâteau (Evenings at the Castle,1784), including ‘Alphonse and Dalinda’, where the marvelsof science surpass folklore magic. De Genlis believed religion was the foundation of moral-ity, though religion in a benevolent and social rather than a doctrinal and sacramentalsense; this put her at odds with philosophes such as D’Alembert and Rousseau. Her educa-tional philosophy included science, history, geography and modern languages for bothsexes. Her influence over the duc’s politics in the French Revolution was overestimated. Shespent 1791–1800 abroad, supporting herself by writing, and in 1800 made her accommoda-tion with Napoleon. Always a constitutional monarchist, she remained socially conservative.Her great ambition for her pupil Louis-Philippe to become king was realised in 1830.


Marie-Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin (1699–1777)

Born in Paris and orphaned young, she was married off at fourteen with a substantialdowry to the wealthy director of the royal glassworks at Saint-Gobain. Although she hadbeen pious in her childhood and youth, she became less so in her twenties, when her intel-lectual curiosity developed. She began to frequent the salon of her neighbour Mme deTencin, where she became a regular until the death of her mentor (and of her ownhusband) in 1749. Before that time she had already begun her own salons: one onMondays for artists and amateurs of art, the other on Wednesdays for men of letters. Shewas an important patron of artists and men of letters, known for her generosity to both.She was not a writer and published nothing. Her correspondence with StanislasPoniatowski, king of Poland, whom she considered her adopted son, has been published.

Dena Goodman

William Godwin (1756–1836)

William Godwin was born in Suffolk, into a family steeped in religious dissent. His paternalgrandfather, father and uncle were all dissenting ministers, and in 1767 Godwin followedthem, beginning his training with a Norwich Independent, and then moving on to theHoxton Academy from which he graduated in 1778. He practised as a minister for severalyears, in Suffolk and London, until his religious views became too heterodox for his con-gregations and he turned to writing instead. His early years as a literary professional wereprecarious, generating so little income that he often had difficulty feeding himself; but inthe mid-1780s he gained a post on the New Annual Register that afforded him a modicum ofeconomic security. He held this post for seven years, during which time he became afixture on the London literary scene, and thus was well positioned to join the debate thatbroke out following the publication of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution inFrance (1790). His contribution to this debate, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) –a weighty statement of anarcho-individualist principles – won him great renown, andbrought him to the centre of the fierce political conflicts of the day. His next major work,Things as They Are – or the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), an extraordinary explorationof the psychological effects of injustice and inequality, heightened his reputation further.In 1794 he published Cursory Strictures on the Charge Delivered by Lord Chief Justice Eyre to theGrand Jury (1794), a very effective attack on the charge of High Treason directed against hisfriend Thomas Holcroft and other leading radicals of the day. In 1796 he became MaryWollstonecraft’s lover and then–following her pregnancy with the future Mary Shelley –her husband. Wollstonecraft’s death in childbirth left him desolate, and his remarriage – to


Jane Clairmont in 1801 – was not emotionally successful. In 1798 he published a veryrevealing memoir of Wollstonecraft which badly tarnished both her and his public status,and from this point on his reputation went steadily downhill. None of his succeedingworks brought him much success, and his finances – despite the assistance of his son-in-law, Percy Bysshe Shelley – became increasingly precarious. Several personaltragedies darkened his life further. In 1833 the reformed Parliament gave him a stipendiarypost, which he held until his death in 1836.

Barbara Taylor

Olympe de Gouges (1748–93)

Born Marie Gouze in Montauban in 1748, Olympe de Gouges became one of the mostprominent feminist author-activists of the French revolutionary era. After the death of herhusband Pierre Aubry in the late 1760s, she moved to Paris with her son. In the 1780s and90s she published more than sixty political texts, including plays, pamphlets, and postersplastered across the walls of Paris. Her most well known text, the Declaration of the Rights ofWoman and Citizen (1791), proclaimed that women shared natural rights with men,demanded a public political role for women, and exposed contradictions within themeaning and practice of universal rights. This manifesto also argued for replacing women’smarital subjection with a new ‘social contract between man and woman’ that would guar-antee shared control over property and protect woman’s right to name and raise her child.Olympe de Gouges’s plays outlined programs for social reform, such as the abolition ofslavery, an end to forced religious vows, and the legalization of divorce. During theRevolution, she became a prominent figure in the legislative galleries and Parisian politicalclubs. Initially, she supported the creation of the constitutional monarchy and even offeredto defend King Louis XVI when he was put on trial in 1792. She became increasingly alliedwith the Girondins and produced a series of controversial political pamphlets. Her supportfor a possible federalist alternative to the Jacobin republic landed her in prison in July 1793and she was guillotined in November 1793. In reporting her death, the newspaper, theCourrier républicain announced, ‘Remember this virago, this woman-man, the impudentOlympe de Gouges, who first instituted women’s societies, wanted to engage in politics,and committed crimes.’ Although she was executed for her Girondin political stance, herfeminist activism aggravated contemporary resentments against her. Over the longer term,various post-revolutionary feminists drew inspiration from her probing writings andactivism.

Suzanne Desan

Marie le Jars de Gournay (1565–1645)

Marie de Gournay grew up in a moderately prosperous noblesse de robe family. Her fatherdied early (1577), but her mother took good care of the family, though she did not approveof Marie’s intellectual ambitions. Marie, however, read everything she could lay her handson, and taught herself Latin by comparing original texts with French translations. Shesteadfastly refused an arranged marriage, and remained single to the end of her life.

In 1584, Gournay read Montaigne’s Essais: she was instantly electrified, and henceforthardently desired to carve out a place for herself in the world of letters. In 1588 she metMontaigne in Paris. He became ‘a second father’ to her, offering her friendship and anentrance to the world of writers and philosophers. Marie corresponded with Montaigneuntil his death in 1592. She became his literary executor: in 1595 she edited the first com-plete publication of the Essais with a long introduction by herself in which she defendedMontaigne against accusations of heresy.

After 1600 Gournay slowly made her own literary reputation, publishing poetry, proseand comments on the French language. She frequented the salon of Madame des Loges


where she met prominent figures from the literary world, such as Voiture, Balzac andVaugelas. As a female author, however, she had to suffer much slander and abuse. It onlystrengthened her feminist convictions, culminating in her defense of the equality of thesexes in Egalité des hommes et des femmes (1622).

In the 1620s and 1630s Gournay was a prolific author, publishing large collections of herwork in 1626, 1634,and 1641, as well as a new edition of Montaigne’s Essais (1635). Shecontributed to the founding of the Académie Française, and in 1635 she was the only femaleauthor included in the Parnasse Royal, published in honour of Louis XIII. She died in 1645,at the age of 79.

Siep Stuurman

John Gregory (1724–73)

John Gregory, professor of medicine at the University of Edinburgh and author of severalpopular works, belonged to the literary circles that characterized the Enlightenment inScotland. The son of James Gregory, professor of medicine at King’s College, Aberdeen, andAnne Chalmers (whose father George Chalmers was Principal of King’s College, Aberdeen),he was born at Aberdeen into a family of distinguished physicians and mathematicians. Hestudied at King’s College, Aberdeen before pursuing medical studies first at the Universityof Edinburgh and then at Leyden (1745–76). From 1746 to 1749 he held a professorship atAberdeen, where he lectured on mathematics and natural and moral philosophy. In 1752he married Elizabeth Forbes (d. 1761), daughter of Lord Forbes, with whom he had threesons and three daughters (the youngest daughter, Elizabeth, died in 1771). In 1754 hemoved to London to set up a successful medical practice, returning to Aberdeen in 1755 totake up the position of professor of medicine at King’s College. In 1764 he moved toEdinburgh, where he combined his teaching duties with a practice that would earn him thetitle of physician to the king in Scotland.

A member of the Royal Society and one of the founders of the Aberdeen PhilosophicalSociety, Gregory enjoyed the friendship of such figures as David Hume, Lord Monboddo,and James Beattie, and engaged in a close correspondence with the Bluestocking ElizabethMontagu, whose patronage of Gregory’s eldest daughter came to an abrupt end whenDorothea Gregory refused to marry Montagu’s nephew (she married Archibald Alison in1781). To contemporaries, Gregory’s literary status rested on his Comparative View of theState and Faculties of Man (1765, with numerous reprints in Britain and America), a combi-nation of medicine, ethics, and natural history which sought to defend the common sensephilosophy of his cousin Thomas Reid against the scepticism of his friend David Hume. Heis now best remembered for his posthumously published A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters(1774), which ran through numerous editions and reprints in Britain and America andwhich was translated into French, German and Russian. He also published several works inmedicine, and his Duties of a Physician (1770) is now seen as a significant contribution tothe development of modern medical ethics.

Mary Catherine Moran

Elizabeth Griffith (1727–93)

Elizabeth Griffith was born in Wales and brought up in Dublin, where she acted inThomas Sheridan’s theatre company from 1749. She secretly married the aristocratic butpenniless Richard Griffith in 1751, after a long correspondence, which she later trans-formed into A Series of Genuine Letters between Henry and Frances (1757) – an immediateliterary sensation. As a model of sentimental romance blended with witty exchange andmoral bite, the letters established the fame but not the fortune of their authors. ElizabethGriffith’s first play, the tragedy Theodorick, King of Denmark, recently discovered by BettyRizzo, was published in Dublin in 1752. It was never produced but probably raised £25


in subscriptions. After moving to London in 1753 to join the Covent Garden theatrecompany, Elizabeth began to write comedies: The Platonic Wife (1765), adapted fromMarmontel, The Double Mistake (1766); A Wife in the Right (1772); The Times (1779),adapted from Goldoni,; and a revision of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1800). She dedicatedThe Morals of Shakespeare Illustrated (1775) to David Garrick, her long-term employer, andcites Elizabeth Montagu’s Essay on Shakespeare (1769) as inspirational. ‘Shakespeare is notonly my Poet, but my Philosopher also’, declared Griffith, extending Johnson’s concernwith Shakespeare’s ‘purely ethic’ morals to highlight his ‘general economy of life …domestic ties, offices and obligations’, and showing particular interest in his heroines.She edited A Collection of Novels (1777) which included work by Aubin, Heywood andBehn – an unusual attempt to reassess novelists who were at that time synonymous withsexual immorality. Her last works were spirited epistolary novels, The History of LadyBarton (1771) and The Story of Juliana Harvey (1776). The return of a wealthy son fromIndia removed the need to write.

Elizabeth Eger

Elizabeth Hamilton (1758–1816)

Elizabeth Hamilton was the daughter of Katherine Mackay of Dublin, and CharlesHamilton, a Scottish merchant in Belfast. The youngest of three children, she was sentin 1762 to live with her Scottish uncle and aunt near Stirling, and from the age of 13was educated at home mainly by her aunt. She was greatly influenced by her brotherCharles, an orientalist scholar, and in 1786 she joined him in London, where he intro-duced her into literary and political circles, until his death in 1792. His inspiration wasevident in her Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), which used the perspec-tive of a visiting Hindu Rajah from northern India to mock the follies of British society.She wrote in an anti-jacobin spirit against the ideas of the French Revolution, yet alsowith a progressive concern to improve women’s education. Her Memoirs of ModernPhilosophers (1800) satirised radical ideas, but at the same time supported MaryWollstonecraft’s educational views, and female philanthropy. Her major interest lay ineducation and in her Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education (1801–02) she sug-gested to her women readers that they should be acquainted with the philosophy of thehuman mind. In this she was influenced by Dugald Stewart, Professor of MoralPhilosophy at Edinburgh University. With his encouragement she took up residence inEdinburgh from 1804 and with Eliza Fletcher played an active role in literary societythere. Her later works included Memoirs of Agrippina (1804), a semi-fictional didacticbiography, much less successful than The Cottagers of Glenburnie (1808), which humor-ously related the education, cleansing and civilizing of the McClarty family ofPerthshire. After a period in 1804–05 as governess to the daughters of Lord Lucan, shepublished Letters Addressed to the Daughters of a Nobleman (1806) and the Series of PopularEssays (1813), both on the philosophy and practice of education. She did not marry butlived mainly in her later years with her widowed sister, Katherine Blake.

Jane Rendall

Mary Hays (1759–1843)

Mary Hays (1759–1843) was the most purposefully intellectual woman among the ‘Gallicphilosophesses’ in the 1790s. Her earliest text was the ‘book’ of their love letters she con-structed after the sudden death of her Dissenting lover, John Eccles, in 1780. She cameunder the influence of Robert Robinson (1735–1790), radical proponent of the ‘the right toprivate judgment’, who gave Hays access to advanced Huguenot notions of ‘universal toler-ation’ which Hays applied to women. Hays acted on the Dissenting mandate to inquire,even into areas such as love and sex. She sought training in the new science of mind by


participating on the periphery of the final flowering of Unitarian pedagogy at New CollegeHackney as ‘proto-coed’, reading and discussing faculty publications at her demi-salon inher mother’s home in Southwark. In 1791, Hays entered the controversy over ‘public orsocial worship’ as ‘Eusebia’ (the pious woman), when former New College classicist, GilbertWakefield, attacked the practices of his Dissenting colleagues. She was an intimate of MaryWollstonecraft; when they met in 1792, Wollstonecraft was mentor to Hays as one of ‘a new genus’ of professional women writers, advising her on Letters and Essays, Moral andMiscellaneous (1793) in which Hays broke new ground by interpreting Enlightenmentconcepts for a female audience. After Wollstonecraft returned to London in autumn 1795,Hays proved her staunch defender, and famously reintroduced Wollstonecraft and WilliamGodwin. She was publicly excoriated for explicit expressions of female sexual and intellec-tual passion in her ‘fiction’, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) that incorporated correspon-dence with Godwin, and with the Unitarian mathematician William Frend, the object ofher desire. Hays’s ‘memoirs’ of Wollstonecraft after her death was the first of an imaginedcontinuum of women represented in her Female Biography (1803), reinventing the genre byincluding reformers, courtesans, and the British historian Catharine Macaulay Graham. InMemoirs of Queens (1821), her last published work, Hays identified a unique historicalmoment when British women of all classes coalesced as a political force in public supportfor the uncrowned Queen Caroline of Brunswick during the spectacular ‘Queen’s Trial’.With women’s civic participation, Hays predicted, ‘all things will become new’. Hays’sequivocal reputation as controversialist in her own time continued well into the twentiethcentury.

Gina Luria Walker

Thomas Holcroft (1745–1809)

Thomas Holcroft, dramatist, novelist and translator, was the son of a shoemaker whoworked as a stable-boy before launching a career in writing. A string of early successes inthe 1780s made him a fixture in the London literary scene, where he soon distinguishedhimself for his radical political positions. (Holcroft has been described as the ‘first revo-lutionary novelist’.) A member of the Society for Constitutional Information, Holcroftwas put on trial for high treason in 1794 – charged, among other things, with trying toestablish a national convention in England and with circulating the works of ThomasPaine. Eventually acquitted, Holcroft continued to agitate for reform long after Jacobinsympathizing fell out of favour. Holcroft’s radicalism extended to his ideas regardingmale–female relations. In his 1792 novel Anna St. Ives, Holcroft drew on the philosophi-cal arguments of his close friend William Godwin to imagine a world in which men andwomen might reject civil marriage and join themselves together instead in what MaryWollstonecraft, in her review of the work, described as ‘democratic sentiments’. ‘Of allthe regulations which were ever suggested to the mistaken tyranny of selfishness’,Holcroft wrote, ‘none perhaps to this day have surpassed the despotism of those whichundertake to bind not only body to body but soul to soul, to all futurity, in despite ofevery possible change which our vices and our virtues might effect, or however numer-ous the secret corporal or mental imperfections might prove which a more intimateacquaintance should bring to light!’ Though Holcroft’s arguments opened him tocharges of libertinism, the testimonies of his many mixed-sex friends and acquaintancesmake clear that he was ultimately interested in promoting human happiness. AsWollstonecraft observed, summing up Anna St. Ives, ‘Some of the characters are ratherover-charged, but the moral is assuredly a good one. It is calculated to strengthendespairing virtue, to give fresh energy to the cause of humanity, to repress the pride andinsolence of birth, and to shew [sic] that true nobility which can alone proceed from thehead and the heart, claims genius and virtue for its armorial bearings, and possessed ofthese, despises all the foppery of either ancient or modern heraldry.’

Arianne Chernock


Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782)

Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782) was an influential Scottish judge and author, andone of the leading figures of the Enlightenment in Scotland. The son of minor landed gentryat Eccles in the eastern borders borough of Berwickshire, Henry Home was educated at homebefore pursuing legal studies in Edinburgh, and was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in1723. In 1741 he inherited the Kames estate and married Agatha Drummond, who wouldinherit her family’s estate at Blair Drummond in Stirlingshire in 1766. He became ‘LordKames’ when he was appointed to the Court of Sessions (Scotland’s highest civil court) in1752, and was appointed to the High Court of the Justiciary (Scotland’s highest criminalcourt) in 1763.

Kames is often viewed as the quintessential Scottish Enlightenment figure, a practical manof affairs who also achieved prominence as a man of letters. In addition to his legal career,Kames sat on the boards of two governmental agencies, belonged to a number of the impor-tant clubs and societies, and served as patron to the generation of literati who are associatedwith the high point of the Enlightenment in Scotland. Among those who benefited from hispatronage were Adam Smith, whose public lectures at Edinburgh in 1748-51 were sponsoredby Kames, and Smith’s student John Millar, who lived at the Kames household while quali-fying as an advocate and who owed his chair in civil law at the University of Glasgow to theinfluence of Kames and Smith. While he published on a wide variety of topics, from legalhistory to flax-husbandry to education, Kames is now best remembered for his Elements ofCriticism (1762), which is considered a classic in the history of aesthetics, and his Sketches ofthe History of Man (1774), a progressive account of the history of the human species and atypical example of Scottish conjectural history. He also made a significant contribution tothe development of Scottish Moral Sense philosophy with his Essays on the Principles ofMorality and Natural Religion (1759), a response to Humean scepticism which sought to vin-dicate the veracity of our common moral intuitions and of our common sense perceptions.


David Hume (1711–76)

David Hume, philosopher, historian and man of letters, was a central figure in the ScottishEnlightenment and one of the most important thinkers in modern philosophy. Born into afamily of Scottish gentry in the eastern borders borough of Berwickshire, he was theyounger son of Joseph Home (1681–1713) and Katherine Falconer (1683–1745). From 1723to 1725 or 1726, he attended Edinburgh University, but left without taking a degree.Though his family intended him to pursue the law, in his autobiographical essay ‘My OwnLife’ (published posthumously in 1777 in accordance with the instructions Hume left to hisclose friend Adam Smith) he recorded that by age eighteen he had determined to become aphilosopher and scholar. After five years of study at home, he spent three years in France(1734–37), where he wrote A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40). For the next threedecades, Hume published in a wide variety of areas, while variously holding positions astutor to the Marquess of Annandale (1745), as Keeper of the Advocate’s Library inEdinburgh (1752–57), as Secretary to Lord Hertford (1763–65, at Paris) and as Under-Secretary of State, Northern Department (1767–68). His two attempts to secure a universityposition (first at Edinburgh University in 1744–45, then at Glasgow Univeristy in 1752)both ended in failure, due to the vehement opposition of the Scottish clergy. He settled atEdinburgh in 1768, where he died in 1776.

Lionized in the French salons as ‘le bon David’ and excoriated by evangelical Scottishministers as a dangerous infidel, Hume made significant contributions to epistemology,ethics, social theory and historiography. After his Treatise of Human Nature ‘fell dead-bornfrom the press’, Hume determined to present his philosophy in a more accessible form,rewriting Part I of his Treatise as An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (first pub-


lished as Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding in 1748), and revising PartIII of his Treatise to produce An Enquiry concering the Principles of Morals (1751). WhileHume’s fame now rests on his achievements in philosophy, contemporaries knew him asthe author of the six-volume History of England (1754–62), which secured his reputationas one of Britain’s greatest historians. His Essays Moral, Politcal and Literary were first pub-lished in 1741, and his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion was published posthumouslyin 1779.


Alexander Jardine (1739?– 99)

Born in Applegirth, Dumfriesshire, a captain of the royal invalid artillery, Alexander Jardinemay at first seem an unlikely candidate for the feminist pantheon. But this close friend ofthe philosopher William Godwin developed strong pro-Woman views during his travelsthrough Europe and North Africa during the 1770s and 1780s, where he encounteredwomen in a range of unconventional social roles. In his Letters from Barbary, France, Spain,Portugal, & c , published in 1788, Jardine offered up an extended meditation on the similar-ities between the sexes, paving the way for the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman four years later. ‘The talents or abilities of the sexes areprobably nearly equal, when equally cultivated’, he observed. ‘[O]r, if some mental consti-tutional differences exist, these are not greater than between individuals of the same sex,and not beyond the power of habit and education to assimilate and equalize.’ Jardinefurther elaborated this position in his edition of An Essay on Civil Government, or SocietyRestored, translated from the Italian of ‘A.D.R.S’ in 1793, in which he argued for co-education and marriage reform. In her ‘Advertisement to the Reader’ in An Appeal to theMen of Great Britain in Behalf of Women, published in 1798, Mary Hays would cite the workof both Jardine and Wollstonecraft in explaining why she had waited so long to publishher own views on the subject. Hays’ pairing of these two figures in her preface suggests thatJardine’s argument in support of women’s rights circulated quite extensively during the1790s.

Arianne Chernock

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).

Kant lived his whole life in the city of Königsberg, then part of East Prussia. His father was asaddle maker whose Pietism exerted a lasting influence on his son. Kant attended theUniversity of Königsberg where he focused on philosophy, mathematics, and physics. Hespent his entire career at this university, starting as a lecturer, and ultimately becoming itsrector. At the same time, he achieved a Europe-wide reputation as a philosopher through hispublished writings. Around 1769 Kant experienced what he called a great ‘upheaval’ in histhinking, possibly from reading Hume’s works of Philosophical skepticism. His most impor-tant works of philosophy were the result of this ‘critical turn’: Critique of pure Reason(1781),Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics(1783); Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critiqueof Practical Reason(1788) and Critique of Judgment(1790). Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason estab-lished the basic of knowledge claims now associated with the Enlightenment and modernityby working out a position that avoided both skepticism and determinism, but assumed universal human reason. Between 1784 and 1786, Kant’s interventions in several publicdebates, including his response to the question, ‘What is Enlightenment’, made him aprominent representative of the German Englightenment. By the 1790s, however, a back-lash against the Enlightenment developed in Germany, and Kant’s ability to publish freelywas constrained by the order of this king. Thereafter Kant avoided the subject of religion butpublished on other topics until his death in 1804.

Dena Goodman


Marie-Madeleine Jodin (1741–90)

Marie-Madeleine Jodin was the daughter of Jean Jodin, a Genevan watchmaker and a friendof the philosopher Diderot, who consulted him on watch-making for the Encyclopédie. Asthe daughter of Swiss Protestants living in Paris, she converted to Catholicism, apparentlyunwillingly, at the age of nine. From the ages of nine to fifteen, she was sent to and ejectedfrom five convents and when returned to her parents, was alleged to have a violent natureand to have led a disorderly life. Her father dead, in 1761 she was denounced by her rela-tions and imprisoned by lettres de cachet in La Salpêtrière Prison for prostitutes. Released in1763-64, she was licensed as an actress with the Comédie Française and subsequently playedin court and provincial theatres in Warsaw, Dresden, Bordeaux and Angers. While engagedby the Saxon Court in Dresden, she became the mistress of Count Werner von derSchulenburg, Danish Envoy to Saxony. Their relationship was so public and considered soscandalous that she was imprisoned briefly by the Saxon authorities. Schulenburg aban-doned his diplomatic post in a gesture of outrage. Jodin retained her rebellious tempera-ment throughout her acting career, as is evidenced by various lawsuits and libels. In spiteof her disastrous educational experiences, she was widely read in literature, philosophy andhistory and was enthusiastic for the materialist theories of philosophers like Helvétius.From 1765 to 1769 she was in correspondence with Diderot whose 21 letters to her develophis theories about drama as well as offering financial and moral advice. In the last year ofher life and in the early stages of the French Revolution she published the first signed,woman-authored, feminist pamphlet of the Revolutionary period, Vues législatives pour lesfemmes (Legislative Views for Women). Part of her surviving estate was left to Mme Diderot.

Felicia Gordon

Vicesimus Knox (1752–1821)

Vicesimus Knox (1752–1821) was a schoolmaster and Anglican cleric whose treatise LiberalEducation (1781) was one of the most popular works on education in his time. Knox wasborn in Newington Green, Middlesex, and educated at home till he was fourteen. He wasthen sent to Merchant Taylors School where his father was master. At the age of nineteen,he was elected fellow of St John’s College Oxford, where he soon acquired such a high rep-utation for his Latin verse that he was elected one of the speakers for the Encoenia whenLord North was installed as Chancellor. In 1778, he resigned his fellowship to becomeheadmaster of Tunbridge school, against the wishes of Dr Dennis, President of St John’sCollege and of Mrs Montague. They feared the responsibilities of the post would interferewith the development of his already outstanding literary talents. As he had decided tomarry, his determination remained fixed. In 1812, he resigned from the school and movedto a house in Adelphi Terrace, the Strand, in London. He continued as minister of theparochial chapelry of Shipbourn in Kent, having been ordained priest by Bishop Louth in1777.

Knox is an interesting figure, combining an enlightened perspective on a variety of issueswith a staunch support of traditional values. An educational reformer, his plan to regener-ate boys’ public schools was based on reviving the most conservative classical curriculum.He was at the same time a strong advocate of female education. Liberal Education includes achapter on the education of women, as do Essays Moral and Literary (1778) written when hewas at Oxford. In 1793, he preached a sermon in Brighton on the ‘Unlawfulness ofOffensive War’, which made him the object of a riot a few days later. His lifelong commit-ment to the discipline of the classics and to the social system it upheld is evident in thepamphlet he wrote, towards the end of his life, opposing a Parliamentary Bill to educatethe poor in grammar schools, in a parallel stream to that of classical scholars. Knox arguedthis would inevitably degrade the schools and dilute their liberal education. The Bill waswithdrawn.


Knox knew the most prominent literary figures of his day. He had developed a friendshipwith Oliver Goldsmith while still at school, and knew Johnson, Boswell and James Beattieas well as Charles Dilly, the bookseller who first published the Essays. Winter Evenings,another collection of miscellaneous papers, came out in 1787, Personal Nobility, an educa-tional and conduct manual, in 1793; Knox also edited expurgated versions of Horace andJuvenal for schools and wrote a variety of theological texts. His Essays were translated intomost European languages, and he was awarded a Doctor’s degree by the University ofPhiladelphia as expression of the esteem in which his work was held in America.

Michèle Cohen

Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles, marquise de Lambert(1647–1733)

The talented Anne-Thérèse is said to have profited intellectually from the influence of herliterary step-father, François de Bachaumont and his Epicurean circle of friends, though shewas later to become involved in a protracted legal battle with him over her father’s inheri-tance (the latter had died when she was three). Well-educated and well-read, with acommand of the art of conversation that befitted a member of the enlightened aristocracy,Lambert was to become a celebrated salonnière and writer, though she opened her salononly when she was over sixty and was reluctant to have her works published during herlifetime. Married at eighteen to Henri de Lambert (lieutenant-général and governor ofLuxemburg), she had four children, two of whom survived into adulthood. It was for eachof these surviving children that she wrote her famous letters of advice to her son and herdaughter. She was widowed in 1686. When some of her works were published in 1726 and1727, she was said to have felt ‘dishonoured’ by exposure to the public eye. Yet, althoughshe felt that it was compromising for a woman of her rank to publish, she seems to havedesired publication after her death. Her writings were well viewed, especially for the way inwhich she allegedly made the practice of virtue seem desirable. Her salon in the Hôtel deNevers (rue de Richelieu) became the most famous in Paris and was seen as the heir to thefamous ‘chambre bleue’ of the marquise de Rambouillet, which had dominated Paris societyin its long life from 1610 to 1665. Set up to counter the prevailing fashion for dissipationand gambling, Lambert’s salon was seen as bestowing respectability on its regular visitors.When she died, one of these, the writer and scientist, Fontenelle (who was both a memberof the Académie française and permanent secretary to the Académie des Sciences) wrote anéloge for her, celebrating her character, learning and literary discernment.

Jean Bloch

James Henry Lawrence (1773–1840)

Born in Jamaica, educated at Eton and in Germany, James Henry Lawrence was an enthusi-astic advocate of ‘Nairism’ – the radical idea, loosely modeled on the cultural practices ofthe Nairs of southwest India, that all societies should ban marriage, encourage casual sexualrelationships, and replace the patriarchal family with a matrilineal system of inheritance.In several essays, novels, songs and poems, including his most famous ‘utopian romance’,The Empire of the Nairs, or The Rights of Women (published in German in 1800 and trans-lated into English by the author in 1811), Lawrence waxed philosophic on the benefits ofNairism, celebrating its promotion of love, truth, and equality between men and women.Although Lawrence identified himself as a disciple of Mary Wollstonecraft, however, hisarguments weren’t always clearly egalitarian. In attacking prevailing attitudes towards mar-riage, education, property, and morality, Lawrence was perhaps more interested in liberat-ing men than in liberating women. What Lawrence hoped to achieve, in implementing theNair system, was a nation in which men – lacking both wife and children – could commit


themselves to ‘masculine’ pursuits. ‘What a race of politicians, generals, and philosophers,might be expected in a nation where every lofty goal were unimpeded, by the care of providing for its offspring, from following any grand object in contemplation!’, Lawrenceecstatically noted in his ‘An Essay on the Nair System of Gallantry and Inheritance’. ‘Thisconsideration has detained the field; has deadened the curiosity of the philosophers, andstopped the voice of the patriot’.

Arianne Chernock

Catherine Macaulay (1731–91)

Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay Graham was born in Kent into a wealthy whig family,and was privately educated. She lived subsequently in London, where the Sawbridgeswere active in City of London politics, moving to Bath in 1774. She was twice married:first, in 1760 to Dr George Macaulay (d. 1766), the father of her only daughter, alsocalled Catharine. In 1778 she married William Graham, a man 26 years younger thanherself – an age difference which attracted adverse comment at the time. After hersecond marriage she lived in Leicestershire. Known in her own day as ‘Mrs Macaulay’,she achieved contemporary fame as an historian. The first volume of her History ofEngland was published in 1763. The final, eighth volume, appeared in 1781. She subse-quently embarked on a separate history from the 1688 revolution to her own day, butonly completed one volume. Her History, whose chronological scope 1603–1721 reflectsher republican views and offers a whig interpretation of the events surrounding andensuing the English Civil war. In politics she was a supporter of Wilkes and took anactive part as a pamphleteer. She wrote against Edmund Burke and defended RichardPrice’s defence of the French Revolution. Following the international fame brought byHistory, she visited France in 1777, and Boston and New York in 1784. CatharineMacaulay’s reputation as a feminist rests on her Letters on Education (1790) in which shechampions the education of women as the equals of men. She also wrote a work onethics entitled A Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth (1783), some of which wasincorporated in her Letters on Education.

Sarah Hutton

John Millar (1735–1801)

John Millar was professor of civil law at the University of Glasgow, student and friend ofAdam Smith, author of two important works of historiography, and a central figure inthe Scottish Enlightenment. Born at Blantyre, near Glasgow, the eldest son of JamesMillar, a Church of Scotland minister, and Anne Hamilton, he entered the Old College atGlasgow at age eleven. Though initially intended for the church, he chose to pursue thelaw. In 1751 he attended Adam Smith’s lectures on rhetoric and moral philosophy,which had an enormous influence on his subsequent intellectual development. Whilestudying to qualify as an advocate, Millar spent two years in the Kames household,where he served as tutor to Lord Kames’s son. In 1759 he married Margaret Craig, withwhom he had eight daughters and five sons (with one girl and one boy dying in infancy).He was admitted to the bar in 1760. Thanks to the patronage of Kames and Smith, hewas appointed Chair of Civil Law at the University of Glasgow in 1761, a position heheld until shortly before his death.

Millar is best known for his Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1779; first published in 1771as Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society), a central contribution toScottish ‘conjectural’ or philosophical history and a key text in the development of sociol-ogy. With its lengthy opening chapter on ‘the Rank and Condition of Women in DifferentAges’, the Origin is also a notable example of Enlightenment interest in the history ofwomen. In his other major historical work, the Historical View of the English Government


(1787), Millar opposed what he saw as the monarchical and authoritarian sympathies ofHume’s History of England. A staunch Whig with republican sympathies, Millar was a supporter of the American Revolution, a vocal opponent of the slave trade, and an earlysupporter (at least in its initial phases) of the French Revolution. Two anonymously published pamphlets opposing the war against France have been attributed to Millar: hewas almost certainly the author of Letters on Crito (1796) and has also been suggested asauthor of Letters on Sydney (1796), which may have been the work of his nephew and biographer, John Craig.


Elizabeth Montagu (1720–1800)

Elizabeth Montagu (née Robinson) was born in Yorkshire, elder daughter of ElizabethDrake and Matthew Robinson, landowner. Her younger sister was the novelist Sarah Scott,author of the 1762 novel Millenium Hall [sic], a utopian tale of a female community basedupon the ideals of learning, economy, charity and friendship. She was brought up inCambridge, where she frequented the literary meetings of her grandfather, the classicistConyers Middleton, author of the celebrated Life of Cicero (1741) and a fellow of TrinityCollege. Her youthful letters to her friend the Duchess of Portland, which she signed‘Fidget’, convey a lively and often mischievous intellect. In 1742 she married the wealthyEdward Montagu, nearly thirty years her senior. Their only child, ‘Punch’, died when still ababy.

Montagu was perhaps most famous in her lifetime as the leader of bluestocking society,first in her Hill Street home and later in Montagu House, the palatial mansion she built inPortman Square after her husband’s death in 1775. Her guests included Samuel Johnson,who dubbed her ‘Queen of the Blues’, Edmund Burke, Elizabeth Carter, David Garrick,Fanny Burney and Hannah More. Originally referring to mixed society, the term ‘blue-stocking’ came to refer to women only from the 1760s, due to Montagu’s particular supportof female learning and writing. She published three dialogues anonymously at the end ofGeorge Lyttelton’s Dialogues of the Dead (1760) and later An Essay on the Writings and Geniusof Shakespeare, with some remarks on the Misrepresentations of Msr Voltaire (1769). This workproved extremely popular, celebrating Shakespeare as national poet of the vernacular anddaring to refute Voltaire’s criticisms directly. Only by the time of the fourth edition, pub-lished in 1777, did Montagu’s name appear on the title page. Her letters were gatheredtogether after her death in 1800 by her nephew, Matthew Robinson, who published themin 1810.

Elizabeth Eger

Montesquieu (1689–1755)

Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, was a gentleman writer, jurist, historianand philosopher, who might be considered the father of political science. He was born intoa family which had long held high legal posts in the Bordeaux parlement or law-courts. Hestudied law with the Oratorians, spending the years 1709–13 in Paris, and married in 1715.Elected to the Bordeaux Academy in the same year, his first contributions were on naturalscience and on ancient Rome. Under the relatively permissive regime of the Regency(1715–23) he composed and published (anonymously and abroad) the Persian Letters,which were a huge and scandalous success. Attributed to imaginary Persian visitors to Paris,this pot-pourri of observations and reflections on social practices and values (Oriental andWestern) blended satire with philosophical ideas, playfulness with critique, and libertinismwith a certain ‘feminism’. It set the agenda for much French Enlightenment writing of thenext forty years. Montesquieu contrived to live down this work, and the mildly eroticTemple of Cnidus (1725), sufficiently to be elected to the Académie Française in 1728. He


then embarked on three years of European travels (Austria, Hungary, Italy, Germany,Holland and chiefly England). In 1734 his Considerations on the Causes of Roman Greatnessand Decline appeared. His major achievement, published abroad in 1748, was The Spirit ofthe Laws. Here he tried to establish a science of elements (from climate to economics), andof general principles, underlying different forms of government. These forms broadly intorepublican (inspired by virtue), monarchic (by honour) and despotic (by fear). He arguedfor humane values and some separation of powers. The work and its author weredenounced in France and Montesquieu produced a Defense (1750). In 1754 he published anexpanded version of the Persian Letters (1754), emphasising its qualities as an epistolarynovel. Montesquieu died in 1755 in Paris.

Robin Howells

Lady Morgan (1776 –1859)

Sydney Owenson (later Lady Morgan) was born on 25 December, 1776; the daughter ofIrish-speaking actor Robert, originally MacOwen, (d.1812) and Englishwoman Jane Hill(d. 1789). She resided in Dublin, attending Madame Terson’s Academy, Clontarf.Though raised a Protestant, family visits to Connaught familiarized her with native Irishculture. The 1798 rebellion and 1800 Act of Union spelled decline for the theatre andOwenson became a governess and professional writer to help family finances. Her firstpublication Poems (1801), was followed by novels St Clair; or, the Heiress of Desmond(1802) and The Novice of Saint Dominick (1805). Owenson corresponded with the anti-quarians Joseph Walker, and Charlotte Brooke, whose Reliques of Irish Poetry appeared in1789. She pioneered a nostalgic Romantic nationalism, publishing in 1805 TwelveOriginal Hibernian Melodies: translated traditonal airs which inspired Thomas Moore. Herbestselling novel The Wild Irish Girl, a National Tale (1806) was followed in 1807 bymore verse, The Lay of an Irish Harp and Patriotic Sketches of Ireland. Her comic opera TheFirst Attempt, or Whim of a Moment (1807) starring her father, was performed in theTheatre Royal, Dublin. Advocacy of Catholic emancipation earned her the emnity ofDublin Castle, specifically of John Wilson Coker, who regularly savaged her in theQuarterly Review. Novels Woman, or Ida of Athens (1809) and The Missionary (1811)extended her critique of colonialism to the East and incorporated gender issues. In 1812she married the freethinking surgeon Sir Charles Morgan (d.1843) and held a regularsalon. O’Donnel, a National Tale (1814) was the first novel with a governess heroine.Florence Macarthy (1818) also had autobiographical elements; The O’Briens and theO’Flaherties (1827), explored the state of Ireland. Travelogues France (1817) and Italy(1821) were politically radical, the latter admired by Byron. Other publications includedThe Life and Times of Salvator Rosa (1824), the autobiographical Book of the Boudoir(1829), last novel The Princess, or The Beguine (1835); and a feminist history, Woman andher Master (1840). In 1837 the first woman to receive a literary pension from the Britishgovernment, she died on 16 April, 1859.

Caroline Franklin

Judith Sargent Murray (1751–1820)

Born into an elite mercantile family, Judith Sargent became an essayist, playwright, andperhaps the most politically outspoken of late eighteenth-century American womenwriters. She spent her entire sixty-nine years in New England, first in Gloucester and laterin Boston. Her intellectual talents recognised by her family, she was educated by a tutoralongside her Harvard-destined brother. Her first marriage, in 1769, to sea captain andtrader John Stevens ended with his death in the West Indies. Her second marriage in 1788was to Universalist preacher John Murray, and Universalist religious preoccupations runthrough much of her writing. ‘On the Equality of the Sexes’ (1790) used that supposition


to argue for better education for girls and the encouragement of female self-worth, andrevised the biblical story of Adam and Eve. Murray sought to be independent as a writer –an unusual ambition for any American in this period – and was a frequent contributor, likeMercy Otis Warren, to the Massachusetts Magazine. The Gleaner is her best-known publica-tion: it included a novel, “The Story of Margaretta”, and a history of female genius fromthe ancient past to her present day. Together with her earlier essay, this has prompted his-torians to identify Murray as one of the principal architects of ‘republican motherhood’.‘Sketch of the Present Situation of America’ (1794) is her most high political writing andexposes a Federalist stance in the turbulent party debates that followed the FrenchRevolution. Murray’s final years were spent editing her husband’s papers and addingseveral chapters to the end of his autobiography.

Sarah Knott

Suzanne Curchod Necker (1739–94)

Her father was a Calvinist pastor who died when she was young. She moved with hermother to the nearby city of Lausanne. There she was active in a women’s literaryacademy, the Académie de la Poivrière. When her mother died, she took a position asgoverness with a family that was moving to Paris. She arrived there in 1764, and throughher employer she met Jacques Necker, a banker from Geneva who went on to distinguishhimself in the administration of the French monarchy and to contribute to the Republic ofLetters. They married in 1765. The next year she gave birth to a daughter, Anne-LouiseGermaine, and began a salon. The daughter grew up to be the writer Germaine de Staël; thesalon met weekly on Friday afternoons and continued until the departure of the Neckersfrom France for Switzerland in 1790. Suzanne Necker published virtually nothing duringher lifetime. After her death her husband published a pamphlet she had been completingagainst divorce (1794), and five volumes of Mélanges (1798) and Nouveaux mélanges (1801)culled from the notebooks in which she had been writing down thoughts, essays, portraits,and éloges for nearly thirty years.

Dena Goodman

Thomas Starling Norgate (1772–1859)

The pro-Woman essayist Thomas Starling Norgate came from a family of Norwich radi-cals – his father, the surgeon Elias Norgate, was a Unitarian Dissenter and Whig whowas very active in local politics during the 1770s and 1780s. As one of the leadingwriters for the Cabinet, a pro-democratic publication printed in Norwich by John Marchfrom 1794–5, the younger Norgate provided one of the most sustained late-eighteenth-century arguments in support of women’s rights. In a two-part essay, aptly titled ‘Onthe Rights of Woman’, he emphatically insisted that ‘the mind knows no difference ofsex,’ and proceeded to explain why it was necessary to provide women with a bettereducation and employment opportunities, as well as political and legal rights. ‘It hasbeen urged by the tyrannical opposers of female rights,’ Norgate wrote, ‘that womenhave occupations of a domestic kind, in which they are much better employed than inexercising any political office, or in wielding a massy argument in favour of any politicalhypothesis; it is true that they have domestic occupation; but … what man is there dis-engaged from domestic concerns? we all, whether male or female, have a part, andnone, whether male or female, have the whole of our time so necessarily employed asnot to admit leisure for investigating a subject of such paramount importance to every-one, as that of politics.’ In older age, Norgate would revise his feminist beliefs – chalkingthem up to the radicalism of his youth – although he continued to insist that some ofthe more ‘sober hints’ were still ‘worthy of attention.’

Arianne Chernock


Thomas Paine (1737–1809)

Tom Paine was a political theorist and activist who challenged the traditional institutionsof his day on the basis of reason. He was born in Thetford, Norfok and came from a Quakerbackground. He emigrated to America in 1774 and published Common Sense (1776), aninfluential pamphlet which argued for American independence. In 1787 he returned toEngland. He had corresponded and met with Edmund Burke, but when Burke published hisReflections on the Revolution in France in 1790, Paine wrote the Rights of Man in response(published 1791 and 1792). This was not the first reply to Burke; Catherine Macaulay andMary Wollstonecraft had also penned replies, but Paine’s was the most influential. Paineattacked Burke’s argument that political institutions should be founded on tradition, insist-ing instead that they should derive from human reason. All individuals, Paine argued,possess natural political rights – an idea with obvious feminist implications. AlthoughPaine himself did not apply his ideas to women, his philosophy represented a significantmove away from the classical republican tradition, which had based political citizenship onthe masculine qualifications of military service, property ownership, and being head ofhousehold. The second part of his Rights of Man presented the germ of the idea of thewelfare state, for Paine saw the government as obliged to provide for wider rights of citi-zenship beyond the franchise, such as help for families with children. Paine was prosecutedfor treason for his criticisms of the British constitution and fled to Paris, where he becameactive in French revolutionary politics, although the Jacobins eventually imprisoned him.Paine also criticized conventional religion in his Age of Reason, published in 1794–95.

Anna Clark

François Poulain de la Barre (1647–1723)

Born to a prosperous bourgeois family, Poulain studied theology at the Sorbonne. Afterhis bachelors degree (1666), he turned to Cartesianism, and in the 1670s he publishedthree feminist treatises: The Equality of the Two Sexes (1673), The Education of the Ladies(1674), and The Excellence of the Men: Against the Equality of the Sexes (1675). The last titleis ironical: the preface discusses the Scriptural objections to equality, in the middle part asexist straw man is set up, and the final part is devoted to the gleeful demolition of thesexist reasoning of the middle part. Taken together, the three books contain the outlineof an Enlightenment social philosophy.

Poulain did not obtain patronage. To make a living, he opted for the priesthood. In 1680he became a curé de village in northern France. Poulain, a tolerant man, became a Catholicpriest shortly before the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, when a veritable state terror wasunleashed on the French Calvinists. In the end, he got in trouble, probably over the doc-trine of transubstantiation, possibly because he helped the Protestants. In 1688, he left hischarge, went to Paris, secretly converted to Calvinism, and shortly thereafter left France forGeneva (1689). There, he married Marie Ravier, a daughter of a prominent patrician family.They had a daughter, Charlotte, and a son, Jean Jacques.

In 1696 Poulain was suspected of Unitarian ideas. He was not found guilty, but the affairthoroughly frightened him. In 1708, he finally got a tenured post as teacher at the Genevancollege. In 1720 he published a treatise on biblical criticism that can be seen as his ‘theologicalautobiography’ and also as his last word on the religious issues that he had first grappled within his feminist treatises in the 1670s. Poulain died in 1723, at the age of seventy-five.

Siep Stuurman

Richard Price (1723–91)

The son of a Calvinist Dissenting minister, Richard Price became one of the most influen-tial nonconformist writers of the late eighteenth century, producing important works of


theology, moral philosophy, economics, and political science. Educated at a series of non-conformist academies, Price turned away from his father’s Calvinism to a liberal belieftypical of the ‘rational’ Dissenters who came to think of themselves as ‘Unitarians’. In1757, the same year in which he married Sarah Blundell (d. 1786), Price rose to nationalattention with A Review of the Principal Questions and Difficulties in Morals (revised in 1787and now seen as a forerunner of Kantian ethics). Having settled in Newington Green,where he ministered to a Dissenting congregation, during the 1760s and 1770s Price wrotetracts on the British population and economy, influencing the development of actuarialscience and advocating the elimination of the national debt. Opposed to the War with theAmerican colonies, in 1776 Price published Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, whichearned him a considerable degree of fervent admiration as well as vilification and whichinspired the American Declaration of Independence. In 1778 Price entered a public debatewith his friend Joseph Priestley concerning materialism and necessity, with Price maintain-ing the immateriality of the soul and the free agency of the human will. After 1784 Pricebecame a close friend and mentor of Mary Wollstonecraft, who, although raised anAnglican, attended Price’s sermons. Two years before his death, Price enthusiastically wel-comed the French Revolution in the belief that France was embracing and refining theprinciples of the English Revolution of a hundred years earlier. Price’s sermon A Discourseon the Love of Our Country (1789) provoked Edmund Burke to respond in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), thus instigating the French Revolution debate in England.

Daniel White

Joseph Priestley (1733–1804)

A Dissenting polymath, Joseph Priestley shaped late-eighteenth-century religion, philoso-phy, politics, and science. Born in Yorkshire and raised a Calvinist, he was educated at theDaventry Academy, where he began to reject orthodoxy. Priestley would ultimately becomethe leading spokesman for Unitarianism, his beliefs centering upon the Arminian rejectionof original sin, the Socinian denial of Christ’s divinity and atonement, the materialist posi-tion that the soul is not distinct from the body, and the necessarian doctrine (consequentupon materialism and Hartleian associationism) that all human actions are fixed by anatural succession of causes and effects. After Daventry he held a series of ministerial posi-tions, eventually joining the faculty of the Warrington Academy. At Warrington (1761–67)he married Mary Wilkinson (d. 1796), befriended Anna Letitia Barbauld, pursued theologi-cal and scientific researches, and wrote An Essay on the First Principles of Government (1768).Having assumed a ministry in Leeds, in 1773 he became librarian to the Earl of Shelburne.Priestley’s Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion (1772–74) defended rational Dissentingtheology, and in 1774 he made the scientific advance for which he is usually remembered,the isolation of ‘dephlogisticated air’, often described as the discovery of oxygen. QuittingShelburne’s employ in 1780, he moved to Birmingham, where he served as minister, asso-ciated with the Lunar Society, defended Unitarianism in debates with Samuel Horsley, andagitated for the repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (earning the nickname ‘GunpowderPriestley’). On 14 July 1791, the Constitutional Society of Birmingham commemorated thefall of the Bastille. A mob responded by rioting, and Priestley’s house was destroyed. He leftBirmingham soon afterwards for Hackney. Having become a citizen of France and declinedelection to the National Convention, he emigrated to America in 1794, where he passedthe remaining years of his life in Northumberland, Pennsylvania.

Daniel White

Madeleine Darsant de Puisieux (1720–98)

Born in Paris in 1720, Madeleine Darsant is said to have shown signs of literary talent froman early age. Following her marriage to Philippe-Florent de Puisieux, she became a successful


writer, publishing prolifically between 1749 and 1768. He was an avocat at the Parlement deParis, who worked as a translator more than he practised at the bar. Amongst his many trans-lations from the English is, supposedly, a feminist tract: La Femme n’est pas inférieure àl’homme, first published in French in 1750 and republished in 1751 as Le Triomphe des dames.For some time the actual authorship of this work was attributed to him but, more recently, ithas been suggested that either he co-authored it with Madeleine or that Madeleine herselfwas the author. What is not disputed is her authorship of a number of novels, the occasionalcomedy and a history of the reign of Charles VII, as well as the moral and satirical writingsfor which she was best known: Conseils à une amie (1749), Les Caractères (1750) and Réflexionset Avis sur les ridicules à la mode (1761). The Conseils, which offer advice to a young womanabout to leave her convent school for the world outside, were particularly successful butmuch of her work received hostile criticism. In 1795, however, the Convention required herto pay a tax of 2,000 livres on income received from her publications, which suggests thatthey had sold well. From 1745 to 1748 she had an affair with Diderot. The cynical views ofupper-class society and of the difficulties facing women in the mid-18th-century expressed inthe Conseils may well owe something to her discussions with the philosophe. They certainlymark her out from other women writing on female education and conduct in that period.

Jean Bloch

Guillaume-Thomas Raynal (1711–96)

The son of minor nobility from the Aveyron, Raynal was educated by the Jesuits in Rodezand became a priest. He left the Company of Jesus in 1747 and went to Paris where he fre-quented the salons, notably that of Mme Geoffrin, and made influential friends in philo-sophical and political circles, including Diderot, Voltaire and Choiseul, Minister of ForeignAffairs under Louis XV. Through his contacts he became editor of the Mercure de France andworked on Grimm’s Correspondance Littéraire. In 1762 Choiseul commissioned him to writehis first big work, L’Ecole Militaire, a manual on modern military practice. He devoted thenext two decades of his life to compiling the Histoire philosophique et politique des établisse-ments et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes for which he employed a team ofanonymous collaborators including the Baron d’Holbach, the distinguished botanist, de Jussieu and Diderot. He also exploited a vast network of correspondants and informers –diplomats, slave-traders, soldiers, businessmen and travellers – from whom he acquiredextensive up-to-date information. One of the bestsellers of the book trade prior to theRevolution, the first edition appeared in 1770, followed by some 50 editions over the next20 years, many reprints of particular sections of the work, and an impressive number oftranslations. Described by Jules Michelet as the ‘Bible of the Revolution’, the workdenounced slavery, colonialism and the abuses of the crown and the Church. It was widelyread throughout Europe by statesmen, political thinkers, creative writers and ordinarypeople and was very influential in purveying ideals of liberty to the general public. It gen-erated an enormous pamphlet literature, including, amongst other writers, Thomas Paine;it was central, at a slightly later date, in the political debate surrounding the bid for inde-pendence of the colonies in Latin America. The work was banned in 1772, put on theIndex in 1774 and burnt in public in 1781. To avoid incarceration Raynal left France andtravelled around Europe appearing at the major courts as a martyr of free speech. Hereturned to France in 1784 and settled in Marseille from where he followed the events of the Revolution. To begin with he was venerated by the revolutionaries as a benefactor ofhumanity and an ‘ardent apostle of liberty’, and was offered a post as Deputy in the EstatesGeneral, which he turned down on account of his age. The events of the Terror, however,horrified him and in 1791 he denounced the excesses of the Revolution in a letter to the Assembly. His prestige and his great age enabled him to escape the guillotine but hisreputation was ruined. Accused of senility, he spent the final years of his life in oblivion.

Jenny Mander


Mary Darby Robinson (1758–1800)

Mary Robinson was the daughter of an impoverished Bristol sea captain. She had a highlysuccessful though brief acting career. Married to the ne’er-do-well Thomas Robinson bywhom she had two daughters, she made her debut at Drury Lane with the encouragementof Garrick and Sheridan in 1776. In 1779 she began an affair with the Prince of Wales. Thenotoriety which ensued obliged her to leave the stage in the summer of 1780 and to sepa-rate from the Prince, in return for a lump payment and the promise of an annuity.Robinson, one of the most beautiful women of her day, was painted by Gainsborough,Hopner and Reynolds. She subsequently had affairs with other notables of the period:among them Sheridan, the Earl of Cholmondeley, Charles James Fox and Colonel BanastreTarleton. After giving up the stage, she became a successful author, publishing poetryunder the influence of Robert Merry of the Della Cruscian School. In politics she took upideas of the radical Enlightenment, welcoming the French Revolution in her poem ‘Ainsi va le monde’ (‘So goes the world’). In spite of her radical sympathies, she mournedthe fate of Marie Antoinette in a pamphlet, ‘Impartial Reflections on the situation of theQueen of France’ (1791) and a poem ‘Monody to the Memory of the Queen of France’(1793). Aside from her voluminous poetry, she published a number of novels celebratingsentiment and the natural affections. Partly paralysed through much of her adult life by arheumatic complaint, she continued to support herself and her daughter through herwriting. In 1799 she published a feminist treatise, ‘A Letter to the Women of England, onthe Injustice of Mental subordination’. She died on 26 December 1800 at the age of 42.

Felicia Gordon

Robert Robinson (1735–90)

Robert Robinson was a theologically independent Baptist whose advanced views onfreedom of conscience kept him mired in controversy. He left school at fourteen, althoughhe demonstrated prodigious intellectual ability; his mother’s poverty caused him toapprentice with a London peruke maker, then a bridle maker. He became a countrypreacher after completing his apprenticeship, first to a group of Methodists, then as anIndependent, and, from 1760 to 1790, as minister at St. Andrew’s Street Baptist Church inCambridge. He maintained a thriving farm in nearby Chesterton with his wife and twelvechildren, and established a beachhead of radical thought, independent of CambridgeUniversity, although he used its libraries through faculty who were his parishioners.Robinson was a self-taught, iconoclastic apostle of the Christian Enlightenment, who wasalso grassroots activist, proto-socialist, reformist historian, early abolitionist, and mentor toyounger Cambridge radicals, including William Frend and George Dyer. He founded theCambridge Constitutional Society in 1780 to promote parliamentary reform, a free press,and unlimited toleration, and exerted striking influence in local electoral politics. Heachieved notoriety for his efforts on behalf of repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts; inan address to Parliament in March 1790 Burke singled out Robinson’s A Political Catechism(1782) for severe censure, condemning it as ‘one continued invective against Kings andBishops’. Robinson produced fifty published works that contributed to the emergence ofnon-sectarian ‘Dissent’ as a new and fluid identity. Between 1770-77 he translated and pro-vided commentary on the sermons of Jacques Saurin (1677-1730) and Jean Claude(1619–87), Huguenot theologians, victims of Le Refuge and participants in the dissidentRepublic of Letters after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Robinson’s transla-tions attested to the alienation of English Dissenters from British establishment culture, bylinking this with Huguenot resistance to Catholic censorship and persecution in the six-teenth and seventeenth centuries. Robinson educated his daughters and sons equally; at hisfuneral, Joseph Priestley commended him for acting on the understanding that ‘the mindsof women are capable of the same improvement, and the same furniture as that of men’.


Robinson was Mary Hays’s first and most important mentor, whom, in the last year of herlife, she acknowledged as the ‘awakener of my mind.’

Gina Luria Walker

Mme Roland de la Platière (1754–93)

Born into the artistic bourgeoisie of Paris, Manon Phlipon was the daughter of an engraverand painter. She wrote appealingly about her childhood and upbringing in the auto-biographical section of her memoirs. Reportedly a brilliant pupil, she received an above-average education for a girl of her class, thanks to instruction (including Latin) from aclerical uncle and encouragement in music, drawing and engraving from her father. In1777, at the age of twenty-three, she competed for the annual essay competition of theBesançon academy on the subject of how the better education of women might improvethe conduct of men. No prize was awarded that year. In 1775 she had been introduced toJean-Marie Roland de la Platière (1734–93) who was to become Minister of the Interior in1792. Her father opposed her marriage to Roland, with whom she set about studying Greekand Roman literature, the writings of Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau and works ofpolitical economy, before she was finally free to marry him in 1780. The couple movedback to Paris from the provinces early in the Revolution and Mme Roland opened a salonwhich became the meeting place for a group of Revolutionary deputies, later known as theGirondins or Brissotins. She took an active part in the political struggles of the Revolutionand was an open opponent of Danton and Robespierre. With the fall of the Girondins inJune 1793, her husband escaped but she was arrested. When he learnt of her execution (15 November 1793) he committed suicide. In addition to her political activities, she isremembered for her memoirs, which were written in prison and cover both the private andpolitical sides of her life. She presented her account of recent political events as an attemptto rescue her husband’s reputation, apparently seeking to underplay her own role, but it isclaimed that it was she who was the real inspiration of the Girondins, that she ran herhusband’s political affairs once he became Interior Minister, and that she was responsiblefor drawing up political documents to which he merely signed his name.

Jean Bloch

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born into a respectable but modest family in the Calvinistrepublic of Geneva. His mother died just after his birth, and he was raised till the age of tenby his father, a watchmaker of unstable character. After two years boarding with a pastorwho tutored him, he was apprenticed to an engraver. Unhappy with his situation, at theage of 16 he ran away. His Wanderjahre saw him converted to Catholicism in Turin, moth-ered by Mme de Warens in Annecy then Chambery (‘Les Charmettes’) where he also edu-cated himself, then turned itinerant music teacher and tutor in Lyon. In 1742 he went toParis, and after a year with Louis XV’s ambassador in Venice he established himself in thecapital of the French monarchy, where he mixed with bright young provincials like Diderotand Condillac. Secretary to a tax-farmer, he set up household with the servant ThérèseLevasseur, whose successive offspring were consigned at birth to the orphanage (a notuncommon practice) and who became his lifelong companion. On the way to visit hisclose friend Diderot in jail at Vincennes in 1749, he had – he later affirms – a vision of howmankind could recover virtue and happiness. He wrote the Discourse on Sciences and Arts.His eloquent denunciation of high civilisation and progressive Enlightenment values, asthe source of individual and social corruption, brought him suddenly into prominence. Hefollowed it with his first major philosophical work, the Discourse on Inequality (1755).

Despite writing for the Encyclopedia, and success at court as a composer (The VillageSoothsayer), in 1756 Rousseau withdrew from Paris. His Letter to d’Alembert on Theatre (1758)


cemented his quarrel with the ‘philosophes’, who treated him henceforth as a traitor. Inthe late 1750s, living on the estates of noble patrons, he composed three great works. Hisepistolary novel of love and regeneration Julie, or The New Heloise (1761) was an enormoussuccess. His treatise The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right (1762) was banned inFrance. But it is the theism of ‘The Savoyard Vicar’ in Emile, or On Education (1762) thatprompted the authorities in both Paris and Geneva to order his arrest. He became a kind ofrefugee (including fifteen months in 1766–67 in England as the guest of Hume, with whomhe quarreled, and receiving a pension from George III). Increasingly celebrated as themartyr of virtue, he became increasingly paranoid. He published justifications of his phi-losophy, drafts political projects for Corsican and Polish patriots, completed his Dictionaryof Music (1768), and wrote defences of himself. His much-anticipated Confessions, theDialogues and his intimate final work The Reveries of the Solitary Walker were publishedposthumously in the 1780s.

Robin Howells

Pierre Roussel (1742–1802)

Born in Ax in 1742, Roussel is best known as the author of the Système physique et moral dela femme (1775), the most widely read medical treatise on women in eighteenth-centuryFrance. After receiving his training at the University of Medicine of Montpellier, Rousselmoved to Paris and became a disciple of Théophile de Bordeu, a celebrated high-societypractitioner and theorist of medical vitalism. Like Bordeu, Roussel tailored his medicalpractice to the ills and the temperament deemed peculiar to the ‘sensitive’ women of the social elite. After his own delicate health forced him to abandon his practice, Rousseldevoted himself to writing book reviews for various scientific and literary journals (Le Journal des beaux-arts, La Clef du cabinet des souverains, Le Mercure de France, Le Journal dessavants, La Décade philosophique, politique et littéraire). Roussel never married, but he did fre-quent Parisian salons like that held by Mme Helvétius, where he met Cabanis and otherthinkers intent on making medicine an integral part of ‘anthropology’, or the sciences ofman. Although keenly interested in politics, Roussel was too timid to engage actively in theevents of the French Revolution; he was nonetheless subsidized under the Convention andnamed associate member of the French National Institute upon its creation in 1795.Roussel’s Système, a medico-philosophical inquiry into women’s nature that adopted avitalist approach to the human persona, did much to popularize both anthropological per-spectives on women and the radical view of sex difference which would mark Frenchmedical discourse for decades afterward. In addition to the Systeme, Roussel wrote impor-tant essays on sensibility and sympathy. His three volume work Médecine domestique (1805)was published after his death as part of the Bibliothèque Universelle des dames.

Anne Vila

Benjamin Rush (1746–1813)

The controversial leading physician of the early American republic, Benjamin Rush was aprolific literary and medical writer and commentator, not least on matters of sex andgender. He was born to a farming family but married exceptionally well into the New Jerseypolitical and intellectual elite. Judith Stockton was daughter of poet Annis Boudinot andpolitician Richard Stockton, and the physician’s wife (and mother to nine living children)from 1776 to his death. Rush’s medical training was in Edinburgh and the legacy of theScottish Enlightenment, as well as a fervent religiosity, can be seen through all his activities.His medical career spanned practice as a physician from 1769 to 1813, service in theContinental Army and numerous philanthropic institutions, and teaching at the College ofPhiladelphia. Though a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and the man whoarranged the publication and suggested the title for Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, his


radical political career was short and disillusioning. In the young nation, the doctor contin-ued his pre-revolutionary reformist efforts for temperance and the abolition of slavery. Tothese social concerns, he added women’s education (for their republican role in the home),prison reform and the abolition of public and capital punishments. Increasingly conserva-tive in his maturity, Rush developed an American medical theory of mind and body thatplaced inordinate emphasis on sensibility and sympathy but–unlike his Scottish mentors,and in explicit reaction to Mary Wollstonecraft–highly elaborated woman’s inferiority andbiological distinctiveness.

Sarah Knott

Adam Smith (1723–90)

Born at Kirkcaldy, son of the comptroller of customs there, Adam Smith was educated atKirkcaldy grammar school and at Glasgow University, from 1737-40, after which he wentto Balliol College Oxford, for seven years. In 1748, in Edinburgh, he gave lectures onjurisprudence and rhetoric, under the patronage of Lord Kames. In 1751 he won the Chairof Logic at Glasgow, and in 1755 moved to the Chair of Moral Philosophy. He spent muchtime in Edinburgh, where, with David Hume, he founded the Select Society, helped towrite the first Edinburgh Review in 1755, and joined the Poker Club. In 1764 he left hisUniversity position and became tutor to the young Duke of Buccleuch, with whom hevisited France, meeting some of the leading philosophes there, Quesnay, D’Alembert,Turgot and Necker. After settling in Kirkcaldy in 1766, on a pension from Buccleuch, hedevoted himself to the writing of the Wealth of Nations (1776) Throughout his life his in-tellectual interests were wide-ranging, engaging with the scientific study of man acrosspresent disciplinary boundaries. His Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) elaborated on DavidHume’s concept of sympathy, sometimes in explicitly gendered ways, and proposed theidea of the ‘impartial spectator’, or the internalised conscience. The political economy ofhis Wealth of Nations has to be placed in the broader context of his sense of philosophicalhistory, and his rejection of an older republicanism. His study of the workings of a com-mercial society identified the ‘public good’ as best achieved through the pursuit of individ-ual self-interest, harmonized through the ‘invisible hand’ of Providence. Student notes onhis lectures on jurisprudence and history, and also on rhetoric, have survived. He alsowrote essays on the evolution of language and on the history of astronomy, posthumouslypublished as Philosophical Essays (1795). In 1778 he accepted an appointment as one of theCommissioners of Customs for Scotland, and spent the remaining period of his life inEdinburgh society.

Jane Rendall

Mme de Stael (1766–1817)

Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker was born on 22 April 1766 in Paris. Her Genevan father,Jacques, was finance minister, and her mother, Suzanne (née Curchod), a salonnière. In 1786 she was married to Baron Eric de Staël-Holstein (d.1802), the Swedish ambassadorand instituted her own powerful salon. In 1787 she gave birth to the first of five children,the only one certainly her husband’s. Her many lovers included Talleyrand, Narbonne andBenjamin Constant. An influential political activist for the moderates throughout the revo-lutionary period, she was also a groundbreaking cultural theorist and novelist. Early pub-lications included Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractère de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1788),Réflexions sur le procès de la reine (1793), the novel Zulma and Réflexions sur la paix (1794). In1792 she retreated to Coppet, the Genevan family home, and in 1793 visited England. Staëlreturned Paris under the Directory, but she and Constant aroused the enmity of Napoleonfor their critical stance. Important literary-philosophical publications were Recueil demorceaux détachés (1795); De l’influence des passions (1796); and De La Littérature (1800). The


latter and the novel Delphine (1802) aroused hostility for their political implications.Constant was now expelled from the Tribunate and Staël banished from Paris. From 1803 to1805 she visited first Germany then Italy, meeting Goethe, Schiller and August Wilhelm von Schlegel. The latter became tutor to her children at Coppet. Her bestselling novel-travelogue Corinne, ou L’Italie (1807) protested against Napoleonic imperialism whilstmythologizing the woman artist as tragic heroine. In 1810 her principal work, Del’Allemagne, which analysed German Romanticism, was printed but pulped by Napoleonwho judged it ‘anti-French’. Exiled from France, she visited Austria, Russia, Sweden andEngland, where she was lionized when De l’Allemagne was published there in 1813. Réflex-ions sur le suicide (1813) followed. After the fall of Napoleon, she visited Italy again. Byronwas amongst the vistors to Coppet in 1816, the year when she secretly married the youngJohn Rocca. However, she died in Paris on 14 July the following year. Posthumous publica-tions included Considérations sur les principaux èvénements de la Révolution française (1818),Oeuvres complètes (1820), and the autobiographical Dix années d’exil.

Caroline Franklin

Voltaire (1694–1778)

François-Marie Arouet was born in 1694, the third child of a Parisian legal family. Educatedat the elite Jesuit college of Louis le Grand, he quickly became known for his wit andimpertinence. Aiming for the top in the realm of letters, he wrote a classical tragedy,Œdipus, which was a huge hit in 1718 (when he adopted the name ‘de Voltaire’), then anational epic, The Henriad. The famous quarrel with the aristocrat Rohan resulted in hisbanishment and sojourn in England (1726–28), where he developed a wide acquaintanceand assiduously acquired the language. His Philosophical Letters (English 1733, French1734), celebrating English toleration and mixed government as well as trade and science,got him into serious trouble in France. He retreated to live at Cirey in Champagne withMme du Châtelet, turning with her to the physical sciences and publishing in 1737 hisElements of Newton’s Philosophy. A period of relatively good conduct enabled him to gainentry to the Académie Française in 1746. In 1749 Mme du Châtelet died in childbirth, andVoltaire spent three years at the court of his admirer Frederick of Prussia. He published hismajor histories, The Century of Louis XIV (1751) and the Essay on Manners and the Spirit ofNations (1756), and contributed articles to Diderot’s great Encyclopedia. In the later 1750s heestablished himself at ‘Les Délices’ (where he wrote much of Candide (1759)), and acquiredthe estate of Ferney near Geneva, where he set about practical improvements of every kind.In his seventh decade, and still inexhaustibly productive, he became the champion of indi-vidual victims of judicial or sectarian injustice (Calas, Sirven, La Barre), and campaigner forhumanitarian and social reforms. The doyen of the Enlightenment became both ‘the sage ofFerney’ and in effect the first modern intellectual. He was finally allowed to visit Paris (after30 years absence) in 1778, where he was hugely acclaimed, and died in the same year.

Robin Howells

Mercy Otis Warren (1728–1814)

Mercy Otis Warren was one of the first American women to publish works on traditionalmale subjects such as war, politics, and history. Born in Barnstable, Massachusetts, shecame of age in the politically active Otis family which included James Otis, one of the ear-liest leaders of colonial resistance against Britain. In 1754 she married James Warren, withwhom she had five children. As the patriot movement grew, family and friends encouragedher to use her considerable literary talents to serve the American cause. Publishing her workanonymously, she issued a series of political satires, poems, and plays, including The Adulateur (1772), The Defeat (1773), and The Group (1775), that attacked British corrup-tion and urged Americans to defend their liberties through force of arms, if necessary.


Later, during the debate over the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, she wrote a pam-phlet under the pseudonymn, ‘A Columbian Patriot’ (1788), that criticized the proposedgovernment for lacking a bill of rights and removing important powers from local control.In 1790 an edition of Warren’s collected poems and plays appeared under her own nameand received great public acclaim.

During this time, she continued to work on her magnum opus, a three-volume history ofthe revolutionary era. By 1805, when she finally published the History of the Rise, Progress,and Termination of the American Revolution, her contrarian view of American society, fear ofmoral decline, and critical treatment of the policies of former Presidents George Washingtonand John Adams, no longer found a receptive audience. In fact, Adams, who had originallyencouraged her to write the work, dismissed the project, saying, ‘History is not the Provinceof the Ladies’. Only in retrospect does the full scope and impact of Warren’s vision appear inplain view.

Rosemarie Zagarri

Helen Maria Williams (1761–1827)

Helen Maria Williams was born in London, the daughter of a Welsh army officer father,Charles and a Scottish mother, Helen (née Hays). Her widowed mother moved to Berwick-on-Tweed, returning to London in 1781. A Presbyterian, Williams became influenced byUnitarian radicalism and the Enlightenment debate on the moral value of the emotions.Prominent Dissenter Andrew Kippis saw her verse tale Edwin and Eltruda through the presswhen it appeared anonymously in 1782. Guests such as novelist Henry Mackenzie, play-wright Joanna Baillie, and writer Dr John Moore frequented the Williams sisters’ literaryparties. Her Poems were published in a subscription edition in 1786 (2nd edit. 1791), afterAn Ode on the Peace (1783) and Peru (1784), the latter dedicated to Elizabeth Montagu, ‘thequeen of the Bluestockings’. In 1788 she published A Poem on the Bill Lately Passed forRegulating the Slave Trade. Her sentimentalist poetry argued for pacificism and humanitarianreform, and led to a revival of the sonnet. In 1790 she published Julia, A Novel; interspersedwith Some Poetical Pieces. That summer a visit to France produced the first of four volumesof her popular Letters from France (1790–93), personal impressions of the revolution.Publishing A Farewell, for Two Years, to England in 1791, Williams returned to France, even-tually settling there. Her affair with the married Unitarian businessman, John HurfordStone, and her liberal politics scandalized the Tory press. Her salon became one of the chiefmeeting places for the Girondins and British revolutionaries such as Mary Wollstonecraftand Thomas Paine. Friends included Alexander Humboldt, whose travels she translated in 1814, the Countess de Genlis, Madame de Helvetius, and Manon Roland. Initially anenthusiastic supporter of the revolution, she later recounted the tragic downfall of herGirondin friends, her own spell in prison and escape to Switzerland. In 1795 Williamstranslated Paul et Virginie by J.H. Bernadin de Saint-Pierre, and published a second series offour volumes of Letters from France concluding the following year. 1798 saw her Tour inSwitzerland, and she continued publishing poetry, translations and reflections on Frenchaffairs until her death on 15 December, 1827.

Caroline Franklin

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97)

Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, was born into amiddle-class London family which over the course of her childhood descended into near-penury. The eldest girl of seven children, Wollstonecraft sought employment at a youngage, scrabbling a living from jobs typical of women of her class: lady’s companion,needlewoman, teacher, governess. In the mid 1780s, while running a girls’ school atNewington Green, north of London, she became attached to a community of leftwing


Protestants – Rational Dissenters, or Unitarians as they were later known – whose radicalEnlightenment ideals strongly influenced her. About this time, she also turned to writingfor an income. Her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), was conven-tionally didactic, but her next, a novel titled Mary, A Fiction (1788), contained strongintimations of her feminism. The outbreak of the French Revolution excited her politi-cally, as it did so many in Britain, but it also presented her with a golden opportunity. In1788 she had begun working for the radical publisher Joseph Johnson, writing regularlyfor his Analytical Review. In 1790 Edmund Burke published his attack on the Revolution,Reflections on the Revolution in France. Wollstonecraft, encouraged by Johnson, replied toBurke with A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), following that up with A Vindicationof the Rights of Woman (1792). With these two political works she became very famous,possibly the best-known woman writer in the world. At this time she was in a romanticliaison with the painter Henry Fuseli, which ended unhappily in 1792. She went to Paris,to witness the Revolution first-hand, and there wrote An Historical and Moral View … ofthe French Revolution (1794). She also became the lover of an American army captain,Gilbert Imlay, with whom she had a child, Fanny. The relationship foundered andWollstonecraft attempted suicide. Imlay then persuaded her to undertake a business tripto Scandinavia for him: a journey that resulted in her Letters Written during a ShortResidence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796). On returning, Wollstonecraft foundImlay living with a new mistress and again attempted suicide. Finally reconciled to theseparation from him, she settled into writing and tending Fanny until, in 1796, sheacquired a new lover, the radical philosopher William Godwin. Pregnant by Godwin, shemarried him in March 1797, and died seven months later, shortly after giving birth toher second daughter, the future Mary Shelley. In 1798 her final, unfinished novel, TheWrongs of Woman, or Maria, was published posthumously by Godwin, along with amemoir of his wife which revealed her unorthodox sexual history. Wollstonecraft’simage was badly tarnished, and remained so until her rehabilitation by women’s suffrageactivists in the late nineteenth century.

Barbara Taylor


Aberdeen Philosophical Society, 15, 16academic institutions, women in, 383actresses, 610–29Adams, Abigail, 668Adams, John, 668, 678Addison, Joseph, 34, 292Address to the People of England (Macaulay),

540–1Adèle et Théodore (Genlis), 252, 317Advice to the Female Sex in General (Grigg),

149Advice to Young Ladies (LePrince de

Beaumont), 315Aeneid (Virgil), 180agency, 434, 435–6

and evangelicalism, 450–5and Quaker women, 439without autonomy, 438–43

Aitkin, Lucy, Epistles on Women, 7Alcuin (Brown), 675Alexander, William, 82

History of Women, 36, 71, 79, 118, 678Algarotti, Francesco, Newtonianism for

Ladies, 272Allestree, Richard, The Ladies Calling, 144Amar y Borbón, Josefa

biography, 719–20Discourse in Defense of the Talent of

Women, 403‘Amazonianism’, 42Amazons, 420American Philosophical Society, 652, 660American Revolution, 655, 667–8Analytical Review, 503, 552Ancient Society (Morgan), 129Anderson, John, 594

biography, 716Année merveilleuse (Coyer), 247anthropology, 98anti-feminist ideas, 47Anti-Jacobin Review, 57, 551–2, 554anti-slavery activism, 576Apologie de la science des dames, 375–6Apology of Women (Joyes y Blake), 404Appeal to the Men of Great Britain (Hays),

506, 577Arar y Borbón, Josefa, Discourse of women’s

physical and moral education, 191

aristocracy, 193, 306–25aristocratic women, 622

political influence, 570, 571–2, 574–5,577, 579, 580

Aristotle, 397–8Aristotle’s Complete Master-piece, 140, 147–8,

149artifice, 137–8

versus nature, 10–15Association Movement, 573–4Astell, Mary, 42, 312, 355–6, 357–70

biography, 716–17critique of Shaftesbury’s liberal

permissiveness, 363–4early life, 358on education, 359–60, 361on Enlightenment principles, 366feminist works, 359, 363influence of, 366–7Letters concerning the Love of God, 361in London, 358–9, 367–8on marriage, 312, 362–3patrons and supporters, 360as a philosopher, 364–5published works, 359reading, 368and religion, 361, 363Serious Proposal, 143, 312, 313, 359, 360,

361Serious Proposal Part II, 361–2, 542

attachment between the sexes, 21–2Augustine, Saint, The Trinity, 412, 419‘Aura seminalis’, 54Austen, Jane, education, 231authenticity, 137autonomy, 435, 436, 706–7, 711–12Avantcoureur (weekly), 211Avis d’une mere á sa fille (Lambert), 245Ayala, López de, 403

Baillie, Joanna, 329, 336Ballard, George, 463Barbapiccola, Giuseppa Eleonora, 270–1Barbauld, Anna Letitia, 414, 474–92, 712

biography, 717Devotional Pieces, 483devotional theory, 482–3Poems, 477

752

Index

on pubic worship, 486–7recent work on, 475on religion, 484–5religious background, 476–8Sins of Government, 519on the Wakefieldian controversy, 485–6on women writers, 475

Barthelemy, Louis de, 212, 213Bassi, Laura, 261, 265–70, 279

biography, 717–18Battersby, Christine, 55Battle of the Sexes, 126Bayle, Pierre, 507

Dictionnaire historique et critique, 372Beattie, James, 23

Elements of Moral Science, 36Essay on the Nature and Immutability of

Truth, 12letter to Elizabeth Montagu, 23

‘Beauty and the Beast’, 308–11Beauzeé, Nicolas, 208–9The Bee (Buchan), 329, 336–7Bell, Margaret, 452Bellaigue, Christina de, 230Bennett, John, 35, 39

Letters, 230Strictures on Female Education, 228–9

Bentham, Jeremy, 168, 169, 591, 594–5, 600Bentivoglio Davia, Laura, 260, 261, 265–7,

268–9, 272, 275, 279–81ailments, 281–2biography, 724marriage, 273–4and Zanotti, 275–8

Berkeley, Eliza, biography, 718–19Bewell, Alan, 151Bianchi, Giovanni, 266, 275, 278, 281–2

Brief History of the Life of CatterinaVizzani, 279

Bible, feminine symbols, 429Biblical criticism, 429biological essentialism, 679Biron, Duc de, 161Black Dwarf, 601Blair, Hugh, 159, 164, 166

Critical Dissertation, 85‘Blas Bleu, or conversation’ (More), 288‘bluestockings’, 262, 288–305, 337–8, 358,

414, 463–4, 700conversation, 290–7, 301and didactic literature, 471and education, 297–301literary dialogue, 301and philosophy, 292

boarding schools, 228–30Book of the City of Ladies (Pizan), 417Borromeo, Clelia Grillo, 271Boscawen, Frances Evelyn, biography, 720Boswell, James, 161The Botanic Garden (Darwin), 150botany, and sex education, 150–1Boudier de Villemert, Pierre-Joseph, 213bourgeois public sphere, 610Brant, Clare, 301Brief History of the Life of Catterina Vizzani

(Bianchi), 279Briquet, Fortunée, Dictionnaire historique,

259Britain

after 1688, 355–6education of girls, 224–42feminism, 42

Broughan, Henry, 337Brown, Charles Brockdenè, Alcuin, 675Brunot, Ferdinand, 195Brunton, Mary, 328Buchan, Lord, The Bee, 329, 336–7Buffer, Pére, 206Buffet, Marguerite, Nouvelles observations sur

la langue Franc[,]oisè, 378Buffon, 84, 124

De L’homme, 19Burke, Edmund, 156, 167, 170

biography, 720–1Catherine Macaulay on, 521A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of

our Ideas of the Sublime and theBeautiful, 124

Reflections on the Revolution in France, 32,552

Burney, Frances, 139, 231on Elizabeth Vesey, 294

Butler, George, 595

Cabanis, Pierre-Jean-Georges, biography,721

Caledonian culture, 86–8Calidore, 593, 594, 596–7Cambis, Madame de, 642Campbell, Peter Robert, 308Campomanes, Pedro Rodriguez, 401Cappe, Catherine, 338Cappe, Newcome, 329Carlyle, Alexander, 8Carter, Elizabeth, 231, 233, 466, 467

as a classical scholar, 291letter to Elizabeth Montagu, 291letters from Elizabeth Montagu, 292, 293

Index 753

Carter, Philip, 137Carteret, Sophia, 309–10Cartesian moment, 351, 354, 371, 378–80‘Cartesian women’, 262, 265–70Castiglione, Il Cortegiano, 372Castle, Terry, 138Catholicism, 416–33

and feminism, 417–21, 429–30and French education, 243–4

Catrach, Nina, 206Cavaignac, Madame de, 197Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of

Newcastle, 721–2celibacy, 427–8Chalus, Elaine, 571Chapone, Hester

on conversation, 295, 299–300on Elizabeth Rowe, 468Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, 8,

14, 143, 468, 469–70on marriage, 470

Chappuzeau, Samuel, 381Charpentier, C.A.T.

Essai sur la mélancolie, 57on Rousseau, 57

chastity, 143conduct book definition, 144

Châtelet, Emilie Gabrielle du, 246biography, 722

Che le donne siano della spezie degli uomini(Tarabotti), 425–7

Chernock, Arianne, 567Chesterfield, Lord, Letters to His Son, 8, 37,

168Child, Gardner, 685chivalry, 6–7, 33, 35, 40, 72, 82, 695

Ferguson on, 79Stuart on, 80

The Christian Hero (Steele), 165Christian Platonism, 352, 478Christianity, 423–4Christina, Queen of Sweden, 127, 270–1Churchill, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough,

308citizenship, 570, 573, 587–609, 612–13

in the French Revolution, 630–48and marriage, 630–48

Citton, Yves, 201The Civilising Process (Elias), 73civility, definitions of, 121–2civilization, 9–10, 19, 43, 70–2, 73, 117–35

and virtue, 119–25and women’s writing, 71

civilizing influence of women, 77–8, 103,106

Claeys, Gregory, 73Clark, Anna, The Struggle for the Breeches,

599classics, teaching of, 233–4Clement , Elisabeth Marie, Dialogue de la

Princess Sc[,]avante, 376–8Clément, Pierre-Paul, 176Cobbett, William, 656Cockburn, Catherine, 463, 464Coelebs in Search of a Wife (More), 320Cohen, Michele, 163, 192Coleman, Deidre, 47Collins, Anthony, 500colonial period, suffrage during, 62Colwill, Elizabeth, 638commercial society, 101, 102–3Common Sense (Paine), 668communication networks, 351comparative history, 72–3Comparative View of the State and Faculties of

Man with Those of the Animal World(Gregory), 9, 15–23

Complaints of the Poor People of England(Dyer), 592

Condorcet, Marquis de, biography, 722–3conduct books, 5, 8, 13, 144, 247, 291, 307,

308Madame de la Fite, 316

Confessions (Rousseau), 137, 166, 169, 174,178, 179, 180, 182

conjectural history, 131, 695–6and women writers, 117–20, 129

conjugal love, 637, 640Conseils a une amie (Puisieux), 249Constantini, Guiseppe Antonio, 272Constitutional Politics (Williams), 599–600convergence, between the sexes, 3conversation, 77, 83, 190, 211–12, 288, 289

and the ‘bluestockings’, 290–7, 301Chapone on, 295and spelling, 208

Conversations d’Emilie (d’Épinay), 251–2Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds

(Fontenelle), 271Cooper, Thomas

biography, 723Reply to Mr. Burke’s invective, 590

Corinne (Staël), 4, 56, 59, 60–4, 555, 559–62melancholy in, 62–4

Cornara, Elena Lucrezia, 383, 429cosmopolitanism, 108, 109, 112Cotin, Charles, 210Cottagers of Glenburnie (Hamilton), 338–9Courcelles, Anne-Théresè see Lambert,

Marquise de

754 Index

Cours complet d’instruction (Miremont),247–8

Coyer, Année merveilleuse, 247Creech, Gregory, 8Critical Dissertation (Blair), 85The Critical Review, 578Crocker, Hannah Mather, 682Cromwell, Oliver, 169Cullen family, 327–8, 331–2

and the Millar family, 347Cullen, Margaret, 328

Home, 331–4on marriage, 331–4

Cullen, William, 327, 331, 650, 652Currie, William, 651

Dacier, Anne Lefevre, 269Darby, Abiah, 449Darsant, Madeleine see Puisieux, Madeleine

deDarwin, Erasmus

biography, 723–4The Botanic Garden, 150Loves of the Plants, 150

Davia, Giovanni Antonio, 274Day, Thomas, 166

biography, 724–5De la Littérature (Staël), 57De la santé des gend de lettres (Roussel), 55De L’Allemagne (Staël), 118De l’excellence des hommes (Poulain de la

Barre), 247De L’homme (Buffon), 19debating societies, 567, 574, 578Declaration of Independence, 668Declaration of the rights of man, 656Defense of women (Feijoo)., 390Defoe, 366Delphine (Staël), 555d’Épinay, Louise

biography, 726Conversations d’Emilie, 251–2

Desan, Suzanne, 568Descartes, 354, 378

Meditations, 270Principles of Philosophy, 270

d’Espinassy, Mlle, Essai sur l’éducation desdemoiselles, 251

d’Este, Aurelia, 270determinism, 71Deverell, Mary, 461Devonshire, Georgiana, Duchess of, 574–5,

614Devotional Pieces (Barbauld), 483devotional writings, 461, 479

Dialogue de la Princess Sc[,]avante (Clement),276–8

Dialogues Concerning Education (Fordyce), 38Dialogues of the Dead (Montagu), 301dictionaries, 202, 204, 206Dictionnaire historique (Briquet), 259Dictionnaire historique et critique (Bayle), 372didactic literature, 469

and the bluestockings, 471Diderot, Denis, 97, 248

biography, 725on gallantry, 103Jacques le Fataliste, 97La Religieuse, 97Le Fils Naturel, 54Le Neveude Rameau, 250and religion, 100review of Thomas’ Essai, 124on ‘savages’, 101Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville, 72,

79, 109–11, 112Sur les Femmes, 71, 97, 98–107women as ‘thermometers’, 98

dimorphism, 55Discours sur l’Origine et les Fondements de

l’onégalité (Rousseau), 129Discourse in Defense of the Talent of Women

(Amar), 403A discourse on the Love of our country (Price),

538Discourse on the Origin … of Inequality

(Rousseau), 43Discourse of women’s physical and moral

education (Arar y Borbón), 191disembodied mind, 404Dissenters, 480, 481, 482, 487, 494–5, 539,

542, 588Dissenting tradition, 233dissimulation, 11‘distinction of sex’, 3, 6division of labour, 81Dodd, William, 166–7d’Oliver, Abbé, 206domestic (home) education, 225–31domesticity, 36–7, 101–2, 193Dotoli, Giovanni, 424Du célibat volontaire (Suchon), 427–8Du Pont, Nicolas, 205–6DuChatelet, Madame, 260Duchet, Michéle, 84, 98Duclos, Charles Pinot, 208, 210Dunbar, James, 89Duncombe, John, The Feminiad, 462Dundas, Henry, 330Dupin, Madame, 117, 126, 246

Index 755

Dupont, Félicité, 196Dwyer, John, 161Dyer, George, 597–8

Complaints of the Poor People of England, 592

Earle, Rebecca, 504Eccles, John, 495–6Edgeworth, Maria, 474, 555Edgeworth, R.L., 236, 474Edinburgh New Town Female Friendly

Society, 338Edinburgh Review, 330, 335education, 142, 189–92, 541–2

and the ‘bluestockings’, 297–301female education in Britain, 224–42female education in France, 243–58female education, and spelling, 197–9gender difference and equality, 234–5Latin in, 199–201, 202–3, 207, 232,

233–4, 236–7male, 225method in, 231–4method and ‘modern’ education, 236–7Poulain de la Barre on, 379public/private debate, 225–31‘system’, 237teaching of the classics, 233–4and virtue, 226, 232and women’s cultural roles, 190writing on, 190–1

effeminacy, 75, 85, 125and sensibility, 158

Égalité des hommes et des femmes (Gournay),423–6

Eger, Elizabeth, 261Elements of Moral Science (Beattie), 36Elements of Morality (Wollstonecraft), 145Elias, Norbert, The Civilising Process, 73Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 594Emile (Rousseau), 54, 137Encyclopédie, 208, 209Enfield, William, biography, 725–6Engels, Frederick, 129–33

The Origin of the Family, 129–33England

Enlightenment, 357stage, 618

English Review, 503Enlightenment

broadening of concept, 693influence, 47–8as a value system, 707

The Enlightenment in National Context(Porter and Teich), 356

An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice(Godwin), 503

Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex(Gisborne), 9

Entretiens sur l’orthographe franc[,]oise(Roche), 213–14

Epicurean philosophy, 421, 696–8Epistles on Women (Wollstonecraft), 7Epstein, James, Radical Expression, 592equality, 43, 126

Gournay on, 373–4intellectual, 389Macaulay on, 538in the public sphere, 400–404Spain, 401spiritual, 391Suchon on, 427

‘equality of the sexes’, 371Essai sur la mélancolie (Charpentier), 57Essai sur le caracter, les moeurs et l’esprit des

femmes (Thomas), 76, 78Essai sur l’éducation des demoiselles

(d’Espinassy), 251Essay on a course of liberal education

(Priestly), 500Essay on the Government of Children

(Nelson), 147Essay on the History of Civil Society

(Ferguson), 13, 78, 166Essay on the Nature and Immutability of

Truth (Beattie), 12An Essay on the Origin of Evil (King), 547Essay on the Writings and Genius of

Shakespeare (Montagu), 291‘Essex Result’, 677European Magazine, 527evangelicalism, and agency, 450–5Exemplary novels (Zayas), 391–2

Fable of the Bees (Mandeville), 698family, 129, 695A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (Gregory),

5, 8–13, 31Wollstonecraft on, 31

Feijoo, Benito J.background and writings, 395biography, 726–7compared to Poulain de la Barre, 394,

396–7, 398–9defense of gender equality, 395–6, 398Defense of women, 390, 392influences on, 392–3on Malebranche’s theory, 398

rhetorical construction, 393

756 Index

on women’s intellectual equality, 393–4Fell, Margaret, 447Female Biography (Hays), 506–7Female Friend, 680female intellectuals, 54female nature

Gregory on, 12, 13as human nature, 23–7

The Female Quixote (Lennox), 224, 462The Female Reader (Wollstonecraft), 10Female Restoration (Haley), 574female solidarity, 249, 250, 254female submission, 242, 640The Feminiad (Duncombe), 462feminine goodness, 413feminine influence, 76, 81The Feminine Mystique (Friedan), 438feminine symbols, in the Bible, 429femininity, 54

Gregory on, 11feminism, 389–90, 705–15

backlash against, 578Britain, 42and Catholicism, 417–21prior to the Enlightenment, 390

feminist discourse, 385feminist writing, and learning, 375feminists, male, 567Feminists Rethink the Self, 435‘feminization’, 75, 79, 82Femme savante, 53Fénelon, 191, 313

on female education, 244Telemachus, 180, 313–14Traité de l’éducation des filles, 244, 245,

313Ferguson, Adam

on chivalry, 79Essay on the History of Civil Society, 13, 78,

166Fessenden, Thomas, 680feudalism, 80, 82Findlen, Paula, 261Fite, Marie Elisabeth de la

biography, 727conduct books, 316as governess, 316

Fletcher, Eliza, 326, 468–9on Anne Grant, 341–2biography, 727–8Edinburgh New Town Female Friendly

Society, 338memoir of her daughter, 334–5network of friends, 328–30

on Reform Bill 1832, 341social life, 335–6

flow, in Rousseau’s works, 183–4Fontana, Biancamaria, 330, 331Fontenelle, Bernard de, 277

Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds,271

foppery, 40, 41Fordyce, David, 6, 39

Dialogues Concerning Education, 38Fordyce, James, 33, 158, 160

on marriage, 36Sermons to Young Women, 8–9, 31

Foronda, Valentin de, 401Fothergill, Samuel, 449, 450, 451Foulke, John, 651‘four stages theory’, 13Fox, Charles James, 164, 167, 574–5France, 73, 572–3

effeminacy, 82female education, 243–58female writers, 259learned women, 3, 53Louis XIV, 355reform of orthography (spelling), 193,

196, 201–6stage, 617–18

Francis, Sir Philip, 156, 170Franklin, Caroline, 521French Revolution, 128, 707

citizenship in, 630–48and female rights, 553–4, 565, 576, 612marriage in, 630–48

Frend, William, 499–500, 502biography, 728and Mary Hays, 505

Fréron, 215Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique, 438Fumaroli, 200

Gale Jones, John, 596gallantry, 5–7, 30, 31, 33–47, 82, 102, 695,

697Diderot on, 103enlightened British, 33–4French influence, 33–4Shaftesbury on, 34Wollstonecraft on, 44–5and women writers, 6

Gassendi, 697Gay, Peter, 404, 649gender

as a contested concept, 371in the pubic sphere, 380–4

Index 757

gender differencesand equal education, 234–5nervous system, 54

gender divisions, 41gender equality, 353

Feijoo on, 395–6gender functionalism, 5gender relations, 70gender roles, 101–2gendered subjectivity, 136gendering of genre, 175genius, 4, 55–6, 59, 62Genlis, Felicité de, 198, 212

Adèle et Théodore, 252, 317biography, 728–9as governess, 317–19on marriage, 318

genre, gendering of, 175Geoffrin, Marie-Thérèse, 195

biography, 729George III, King, 315–16Germania (Tacitus), 87Germany, 87, 132Gibbon, 224Gisborne, Thomas, Enquiry into the Duties of

the Female Sex, 9Glazebrook, James, 480Gleadle, Kathryn, 326Glorious Revolution, Macaulay on, 530–1Glorious Revolution Society, 128Godwin, William

biography, 729–30An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice,

503, 553and Mary Hays, 504Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of

the Rights of Woman, 30, 43–4, 47,331, 551

Gohier, 637Goldsmith, Oliver, 159Gonda, Caroline, 623Goodman, Dena, 193, 290, 623Gouges, Olympe de, 612, 656

biography, 730Gournay, Marie de, 372

biography, 730–1Égalité des hommes et des femmes, 423–6on equality, 373–5references to, 375religious attitude, 423, 424

governesses, 26, 230, 247, 309–10, 314–16de la Fite, 316Genlis, 317–19LePrince de Beaumont, 314–15More, 319–20

Grafton, Anthony, 231Grant, Anne, 329, 331

on Eliza Fletcher, 341–2Grassi, Marie-Claire, 7, 196Graves, Richard, The Spiritual Quixote, 462Gregory, John, 5, 77–8, 653

biography, 731Comparative View of the State and Faculties

of Man with Those of the AnimalWorld, 9, 15–23, 86

A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters, 8–15,31

Griffith, Elizabeth, biography, 731–2Grigg, John, Advice to the Female Sex in

General, 149Grimm, Friedrich-Melchior, 97Grubb, Sarah, 454Guest, Harriet, 119, 157, 535

Haakonssen, Lisbeth, 16Habermas, Jurgen, 290, 610, 698Haley, E., Female restoration, 574Hamilton, Cicely, 47Hamilton, Elizabeth

biography, 732Cottagers of Glenburnie, 338–9Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, 577Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, 338–9

Harth, Erica, 262Hartley, David, Theory of the Human Mind,

500Hayley, William, The Triumphs of Temper,

472Hays, Mary, 31, 42, 237, 493–518

Appeal to the Men of Great Britain, 506,577

biography, 732–3and Dissent, 494–5, 501early life, 494Female Biography, 506–7and Franco-British revolutionary politics,

494and Frend, 505and Gilbert Wakefield, 498–9and Godwin, 504and Hugh Worthington, 501Letters and Essays, Moral and

Miscellaneous, 501–3letters to John Eccles, 495–6and Mary Wollstonecraft, 46–7, 503Memoirs of Emma Courtney, 504–6Memoirs of Queens, 507novels, 496and religion, 494–5and Robert Robinson, 496–8

758 Index

Southey on, 493The Victim of Prejudice, 577

Haywood, Eliza, Love in Excess, 462Helvétius, Anne Catherine, 656Hickey, Margarita, 404Hillsborough, Mary, 310Hints on the Education of a Princess (More),

31Histoire des deux Indies (Raynal), 71, 72,

104–8women in, 106

historians, female, 260, 695historical discourse, women in, 76–9Historical and Moral View of the French

Revolution (Wollstonecraft), 31An Historical View of the English Government

(Millar), 83historical writing, 523, 555history

and liberty, 539–40study of, 254

History of America (Robertson), 78History of England (Hume), 525History of England (Macaulay), 519, 520,

524–31, 539–40, 552, 696history of women, 70, 76–7

limits of progress in, 79–83History of Women (Alexander), 36Hitchcock, Tim, 147, 148Hodgson, William, 589Holcroft, Thomas, 733home birth movement, 442Home (Cullen), 331–4Home, Henry see Kames, Lordhomo-eroticism, in Rousseau’s works,

179–81Hubert de Sevrac (Robinson), 619human nature, 12

female nature as, 23–7humanitarianism, 575–6, 579Hume, David

biography, 734–5compared to Macaulay, 525on gallantry, 6History of England, 525on male sensibility, 163on modesty, 37On the Rise and Progress of the Arts and

Sciences, 30Treatise of Human Nature, 12on women, 76–7

Hunt, Margaret, 10Hutcheson, Francis, 81Hutton, Sarah, 520hysteria, 99–100, 651, 653

Il Cortegiano (Castiglione), 372independence, 591individual, and nation, 633infidelity, 36

and religion, 25inheritance, 130intellectual equality, 389

Feijoo on, 393–4intellectuals, 54–5

female, 54, 55, 576–7Introduction to Botany (Wakefield), 150Introduction to the History of Great Britain

and Ireland (Macpherson), 86Ireland, 556–9Italy, 265–87

aristocratic women and science, 270–2

women in academic institutions, 383

Jacobs, Margaret, 434, 707Jacques le Fataliste (Diderot), 97Janowitz, Anne, 475Jardine, Alexander, 39, 227, 234, 589–90

biography, 735Jardine, Lisa, 231Jefferson, Thomas, 16, 655, 667Jeffrey, Francis, 336Jerome, Saint, 424Jerusalem Delivered (Tasso), 180Jesuits, 54, 248Jodin, Marie-Madeleine, 610

autobiography, 615biography, 736early life, 612feminist writing, 618imprisonment, 614love affairs, 614on marriage, 622and Schulenberg, 614, 616temperament, 615–16Vues legislatives pour les femmes, 613, 614,

618, 619–20Johnson, Claudia L., 157Johnson, Joseph, 145Johnson, Pauline, 707Johnson, Samuel, 22, 139, 234

The Rambler, 460Jones, Lady Catherine, 360Jones, Vivien, 9, 13, 309Jordan, Constance, 374Joyes y Blake, Inés

Apology of Women, 404biography, 719

Julie (Rousseau), 166, 174, 182–3, 192,250–1, 478

Index 759

Kames, Lordbiography, 734Sketches of the History of Man, Book I, 14,

78, 86on women, 81

Kant, Immanuel, 711–12biography, 735

Kelly, Gary, 73kenosis, 438Kerber, Linda, 658Kindersley, Jemima, 71, 78King, William, An Essay on the Origin of Evil,

547Kingsborough family, 306Kirkland, John Thornton, 675Knott, Sarah, 566Knox, Vicesimus, 39, 160, 162, 163–4, 225,

229biography, 736–7Liberal Education, 226–7, 232–3

La Femme n’est past inférieure à l’homme(Puisieux), 248

La nobilità et excelenza delle donne(Marinella), 421–3

La Religieuse (Diderot), 97La Roche, Sophie von, 262

The Sorrows of Lady Sophia Sternheim, 316labour, and women, 131–2Laclos, Choderlos de, Les Liaisons

Dangereuses, 192The Ladies Calling (Allestree), 144The Ladies Dispensatory, 149laissez-faire economics, 120Lamb, Frederick, 327Lambert, Anne-Théresè Marquise de

Avis d’une mere à sa fille, 245–6biography, 737on female education, 245

Landes, Joan B., 565Langford, Paul, 233Laqueur, Thomas, 99Lartigaut, Antoine, 202Latin, 198, 199–201, 202–3, 204, 207, 232,

233–4, 236–7Lawrence, James Henry, 737–8Le Doeuff, Michele, 434Le Fils Naturel (Diderot), 54Le Masson le Golft, Mlle, 248

Lettres relatives à l’éducation, 248Le Neveude Rameau (Diderot), 250leadership, 462, 472The Learned Ladies (Molière), 53learned women, 39, 225

17th century, 357–8France, 3, 53Marinella on, 373

learningand feminist writing, 375and women, 380–1

Lectures on Education (Williams), 232Lekain, 417Lennox, Charlotte, The Female Quixote, 224,

462LePrince de Beaumont, Jeanne-Marie, 191,

247Advice to Young Ladies, 315biography, 718as governess, 314–15Magasins, 247The Young Ladies Magazine, 110, 310Triumph of Truth, 314Young Misses Magazine, 308, 310

Les Femmes Savantes (Molière), 53Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Laclos), 192Les Moeurs (Toussaint), 315L’Esclache, Louis de, 202, 203–4Lespinasse, Julie de, 262L’Esprit des Lois (Montesquieu), 133Letter to the Women of England (Robinson),

613letters, 542Letters (Bennett), 230Letters concerning the Love of God (Astell),

361Letters on Education (Macaulay), 143–4, 519,

534, 538, 541–2, 544, 546, 577Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous

(Hays), 501–3Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (Hamilton), 577Letters on the Improvement of the Mind

(Chapone), 8, 14Letters to his Kinsfolk (Lockhart), 337Letters to his son (Chesterfield), 8, 37Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractére de Jean-

Jacques Rousseau (de Staël), 57, 58–9Levite of Ephraim (Rousseau), 181Lewis, Judith, 580Liberal Education (Knox), 226–7liberalism, 667libertinism, 313, 315, 317liberty, 525–6

and history, 539–40Macaulay on, 538

Lindsey, Theophilus, 495, 500literary dialogue, and the ‘bluestockings’,

301‘literary intemperance’, 55

760 Index

literary society, 698–700literature review, 692–3Lives of Illustrious Men (Plutarch), 174, 180Lock, Frederica, 316Locke, John, 362

on education, 146influence of, 528–9Reasonableness of Christianity, 365Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 158,

226Two Treatises of Government, 528, 681

Lockhart, John Gibson, Letters to hisKinsfolk, 337

Lofft, Capel, on Mary Hays, 493Logan, George, 650London, 367London Corresponding Society, 587–8, 589Louis XIV, 355Lounger (periodical), 160, 162love

physical and moral, 124–5, 132and power, 102

Love in Excess (Haywood), 462Loves of the Plants (Darwin), 150Lucretius, 421

Macaulay, Catherine, 118, 119, 309,523–37, 538–50, 712

Address to the People of England, 540–1biography, 738compared to Hume, 525–6on education, 541–2, 546–8education of, 231on equality, 538, 541–2, 546–8gender-neutrality of work, 533on the Glorious Revolution, 530–1historical writing, 523–4History of England, 519, 520, 524–31,

539–40, 552, 696Letters on Education, 143–4, 519, 534, 538,

541–2, 544, 546, 577on liberty, 538, 539–40marriage, 524millenarian perfectionism, 543Observations on the Reflections of the Right

Hon. Edmund Burke, 521, 538patriotism, 521, 523–4on political priority of the individual,

531on politics, 540–1religion, 538–50, 539, 542–6, 546–8theology of, 532Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth,

519, 538, 546, 547–8

McCarthy, William, 474Mack, Phyllis, 692, 694Mackenzie, Henry, The Man of Feeling, 57McLaughlin, Blandine, 97Macmahon, Thomas, 168Macpherson, James, Introduction to the

History of Great Britain and Ireland, 86Maese, Sarah, 291Magasins (LePrince de Beaumont), 247Magné, Bernard, 197, 199Mahmood, Saba, 440Maintenon, Madame de, 313Major, Emma, 293male feminists, 567, 587–609male sensibility, Hume on, 163male superiority, 680male writers, 18th century France, 3–4Malebranche’s theory, 398The Man of Feeling (Mackenzie), 57Mancini, Hortense, 312Mander, Jenny, 71Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, 698manhood, and sensibility, 161Manzolini, Anna Morandi, 278‘Marginality, Melancholy and the Learned

Woman’, 3Marie Antoinette, 621–2Marinella, Lucrezia, 372–3

influence on Feijoo, 392La nobilità et excelenza delle donne, 421–3on learned women, 373

marriage, 36, 79, 110Astell on, 312, 362–3Chapone on, 470and citizenship, 630–48as a civil contract, 636companionship within, 132–3Cullen on, 331–4Engels on, 130in the French Revolution, 630–48Genlis on, 318Gregory on, 11Hutcheson on, 81Jodin on, 622and regeneration, 637Robinson on, 622as a social and civil contract, 632–6as a social and political obligation, 633–4Wollstonecraft on, 133

Mary Wollstonecraft and the FeminineImagination (Taylor), 494

masochism, in Rousseau’s work, 179Mason, Priscilla, 674masquerade, 138

Index 761

maternity, 18–19, 72, 100Mede, Joseph, 543medical literature, 148–9medicine, 649–66

female difference in, 659, 661nervous physiology, 650and sensibility, 650, 654, 660–1vascular system, 652

Meditations (Descartes), 270Mee, Jon, 475melancholy, 56–7, 60

in Corinne, 62–3de Staël on, 62–4and Rousseau, 57–9

Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of theRights of Woman (Godwin), 30, 43–4,47, 331, 551

Memoirs of Emma Courtney (Hays), 504–6Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (Hamilton),

338–9Memoirs of Queens (Hays), 507menopause, 100mental illness, 58, 59–60method

in education, 231–4and ‘modern’ education, 236–7

Midgely, Clare, 576Mill, J.S., The Subjection of Women, 132Millar family, and the Cullen family, 347Millar, John, 37, 327

biography, 738–9family, 327An Historical View of the English

Government, 83Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, 34, 36,

73, 78, 82, 327Millar, Margaret, 328Millar, Robina, 328, 329

and Benjamin Rush, 660millenarian perfectionism, 543Millenium Hall (Scott), 300mind-body dualism, 709–10Miremont, Comtesse de

Cours complet d’instruction, 247–8Traité de l’education des femmes, 247–8

The Missionary (Owenson), 556mistress system, 307–8modernity, 40, 120modesty, 109, 144, 440

Hume on, 37Molière, 354

Les Femmes savantes, 53, 381Montagu, Elizabeth, 23, 288, 296, 470

biography, 739

Dialogues of the Dead, 301Essay on the Writings and Genius of

Shakespeare, 291Hester Thrale on, 294letter from Elizabeth Carter, 291letter to Hannah More, 138letters to Elizabeth Carter, 292, 293Wraxall on, 297–8

Montbart, Madame de, Sophie, oul’éducation, 251

Montesquieu, 5biography, 739–40L’Esprit des Lois, 133

moral separation, 611The Moral Sex (Steinbrugge), 4Moran, Mary Catherine, 5, 32, 289, 326, 649

on Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, 73More, Hannah, 138, 143, 228, 234, 294–5,

296, 579–80‘Blas Bleu, of conversation’, 288Coelebs in Search of a Wife, 320on Elizabeth Vesey, 294on goals of the bluestockings, 298–9as governess, 319–20Hints on the Education of a Princess, 31and religion, 319on social diversity, 296–7Strictures on Female Education, 319, 579Thoughts on the manners of the Great, 320on women’s education, 235, 2334

Morgan, Lady Sydney see Owenson, SydneyMorgan, Lewis H., Ancient Society, 129Muraire, 635mythology, 417, 429

Namierite school, 571Napoleon, 554, 555Narcisse (Rousseau), 176Nash, Richard ‘Beau’, 159nation, and the individual, 633National Magazine, 671national politics, 519nationalism, 551

USA, 661‘nations’, 89–90Native Americans, 657–8The Natural Daughter (Robinson), 578natural history of man, and women, 15–23natural law, 13natural rights theories, 560, 588–9, 592,

681–2‘natural’ state of society, 5nature, 9–10, 19–20

Gregory on, 22

762 Index

of men and women, 380versus artifice, 10–15

Necker, Suzanne, 118, 120, 207, 212biography, 741

Nelson, Horatio, 554Nelson, James, Essay on the Government of

Children, 147nervous disorders, 651, 652–3nervous system, 650

gender differences, 54–5networks, 351‘New Lights’, 451New-York Daily Advertiser, 674New-York Weekly Museum, 67Newlyn, Lucy, 475Newton, Isaac

Optics, 266Principia, 266

Newtonianism for Ladies (Algarotti), 272Norgate, Thomas Starling, 591, 592, 593–4

biography, 741Norris, 362, 364Nouvelles observations sur la langue

franc[,]oise (Buffet), 378novels, 13, 462, 471, 579

of Mary Hays, 496

Observations on the Reflections of the RightHon. Edmund Burke (Macaulay), 521

‘oceanic interculture’, 649O’Gorman, Frank, 571On the Duty of Man and Citizen (Pufendorf),

13On the Equality of the Sexes (Poulain de la

Barre), 379On Germany (Staël), 555On Literature (Staël), 4, 555On the Rise and Progress of the Arts and

Sciences (Hume), 30Optics (Newton), 266Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (Millar), 34,

36, 73, 78, 82, 327Moran on, 73

The Origin of the Family (Engels), 129–33Origins of British Feminism (Rendall), 14Orsi, Robert, 439, 440Ossian, 17–18, 85–6, 87, 90, 695Outram, Dorinda, 707Ovid, 138Owenson, Sydney, 555–6

biography, 740The Missionary, 556The Wild Irish Girl, 556–9Woman, 556

Paine, Thomasbiography, 742Common Sense, 668The Rights of Man, 588, 669

Pamela (Richardson), 469Parsons, James, 159Pascoe, Judith, 621passivity, in Rousseau’s work, 175–9paternalism, 11patriarchy, 130, 706patriotism, 125–7, 551–64, 637–9, 641Pauw, Cornelius de, Recherches

Philosophiques sur les Américains, 85Payton, Catherine, 49, 448, 449–50pedagogical enlightenment, and spelling,

206–10pedantry, 213Peisley, Mary, 448–9Pennsylvania Gazette, 651Percy, Carol, 230Perry, Ruth, 125Petty, William, 310philanthropic activism, 338–40, 580philosophers

Astell as, 364–5women as, 272–7, 693

philosophes, 53–4A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our

Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful(Burke), 124

Philosophical Nosography (Pinel), 57philosophy, 42

and ‘bluestockings’, 292Phlipon, Manon see Roland de la Platière,

Manonphonetic spelling, 207, 209

Voltaire on, 208physical differences in gender, 678–80, 708Pignatelli, Faustina, 271Pinel, Philippe, Philosophical Nosography, 57Pizan, Christine de, 417–21

Book of the City of Ladies, 417–21playwrights, women as, 463pleasure, Wollstonecraft on, 141–2plebeian women, 581pluralism, 694Plutarch, Lives of Illustrious Men, 174, 180Pocock, J.G.A., on Macaulay, 523–4Pocock, John, 40, 413Poems (Barbauld), 477poets, female, 261politeness, 14, 30, 40, 71, 190

definition of, 123Wollstonecraft on, 43

Index 763

political rights of women, 600–2politics

and sensibility, 495–6women in, 567–8, 570–86

The Politician’s Creed (Thornton), 590Polwhele, Richard, 137

The Unsex’d Females, 145, 150, 551, 588and Wollstonecraft, 145

polygenists, 84, 86, 87, 88Porter, Roy, 356Poulain de la Barre, Franc[,]ois, 244, 379–80

compared to Feijoo, 394De l’excellence des hommes, 247on education, 379on female education, 244–5feminism of, 379–80On the Equality of the Sexes, 379

power, 131centralisation, 89in European history, 80and love, 102

power-turned-polite principle, 40Prevóst, Manon Lescaut, 98Price, Richard, 128

A discourse on the Love of our country, 538,552

biography, 742–3Priestley, Joseph

biography, 743Essay on a course of liberal education, 500

Principia (Newton), 266Principles of Philosophy (Descartes), 270private education, 225–31private property, 129‘proper lady’, 144prostitution, 610, 620, 698Provoking Agents, 435Prunay, 211–12psychiatry, 57, 58public (boarding) schools, 225–31public sphere, 571–80, 623, 693, 698, 700

equality in, 400–4Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen,

13Puisieux, Madeleine de, 198, 248–9

biography, 743–4Conseils à une amie, 249–50La Femme n’est past inférieure à l’homme,

248Puritans, 464–5, 485

Quaker women, 439, 443–50and agency, 439ministers, 447–9

Quakerism, 434–59reform, 453, 454

quietism, 444, 451

‘race’, 75, 76, 84, 88, 89–90and sexuality, 84–5

Radical Expression (Epstein), 592radical intellectuals, 46Radicals, 572Raftery, Deirdre, 225Rambaud, Honorat, 201The Rambler (Johnson), 460Ramsay, John, 16‘rational discourse’, 41Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas

biography, 744Histoire des deux Indies, 71, 72, 97, 98–9,

103reading, informal, 224–5reason, 20–1, 190, 246, 357, 378, 403, 417,

483, 546, 590–1, 659, 711Reasonableness of Christianity (Locke), 365Recherches Philosophiques sur les Américains

(Pauw), 85Reeve, Clara, 142, 227Reflections on the Revolution in France

(Burke), 32Reflections on the Seven Days of the Week

(Talbot), 460–1, 465–6Reform Bill 1832, 341Regnier, Francois Séraphim, 204–5, 208Relational Autonomy, 435religion, 22, 306, 307, 311

and Astell, 361Barbauld on, 484, 484–5Catholicism, 416–33Christian attitudes to women, 412Christianity, 423–4Christ’s suffering, 437and Diderot, 100empirical studies, 441–2and the Enlightenment, 410–12Genlis on, 318Gregory on, 24–6and Hays, 494–5and infidelity, 25and language, 203–4and Macaulay, 538–50and More, 319Quakerism, 434–59and science, 435Spain, 391women writers on, 119

Renaissance, 351, 352, 372–5

764 Index

Rendall, Jane, 6, 263Origins of British Feminism, 14

Reply to Mr. Burke’s invective (Cooper), 590Republic of Letters, 254, 259, 267, 306‘republican motherhood’, 658Rèveries du promeneur solitaire (Rousseau), 58Reyre, Abbé, 197Richardson, Pamela, 469Richesource, Jean de, 381Richey, Russell, 477Ridgeway, Mary, 446The Rights of Man (Paine), 588Rivet, André, debate with van Schurman,

375Rizzeti, Giovanni, 266Rizzo, Betty, 11Roach, Joseph, 649Robertson, William, 80

History of America, 78Robinson, Mary Darby, 577, 610

autobiography, 615biography, 745early life, 612, 614feminist writing, 618–19Hubert de Sevrac, 619Letter to the Women of England, 613, 619,

620–1love affairs, 614–15on Marie Antoinette, 621–2on marriage, 622The Natural Daughter, 578and the Prince of Wales, 616stage career, 616writing, 616–17

Robinson, Robert, 496–8biography, 745–6

Roche, J.B., Entretiens sur l’orthographefranc[,]oise, 213–14

Roland de la Platière, Manon, 252, 253, 262biography, 746

Rollin, Charles, 235, 246Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 5, 117, 126, 698

biography, 746–7Charpentier on, 57childhood, 174, 175, 176, 179–80Confessions, 137, 166, 169, 174, 175, 178,

179, 180, 182Discours sur l’Origine et les Fondements de

l’onégalité, 129Discourse on the Origin … of Inequality, 43on education, 248, 250Emile, 54, 137, 174, 175, 248, 250, 252family situation, 177–8flow, 183–4

homo-eroticism, 179–81influence of Calvinism on, 177influence on de Staël, 56influence of, 250–52influence on Wollstonecraft, 31Julie, 166, 174, 181–3, 192, 250–51, 478on language, 207–8, 213Levite of Ephraim, 181masochism, 179, 180and melancholy, 57–8and Madame de Warens, 178Narcisse, 176passivity, 175–9Rèveries du promeneur solitaire, 58, 177,

181sexuality, 174–88theory of woman, 251on women’s emancipation, 611

Roussel, Pierrebiography, 747De la santé des gend de lettres, 55

Rowe, Elizabeth, 466–7Chapone on, 468

Ruether, Rosemary, 438Rush, Benjamin, 164, 566, 652–66, 679

biography, 747–8and ‘republican motherhood’, 658on rights, 657and Robina Millar, 660on slavery, 658on women, 659–60

Russell, William, 78

Salzmann, Christian Gotthilf, 145Sargent Murray, Judith, biography, 740–1sati, 71‘savages’, 76, 77, 78, 79, 84, 88, 98

Diderot on, 101and politeness, 123

Saxon attitudes to women’s politicalinclusion, 593, 597

Schiller, Friedrich, 259Schulenberg, 614, 616Schurman, Anna Maria van, debate with

Rivet, 375science

and religion, 435and women, 382–3

scientists, female, 265–70Scotland, 6

Enlightenment, 13, 75–91, 326–47and gallantry, 34–5historians on women, 14, 72stadial approach to Enlightenment, 83–4

Index 765

Scott, Sarah, Millenium Hall, 300Scott, Walter, 555secularisation, 444self control, 465Senaca Falls convention, 667, 676sensibility, 137–8, 157, 252, 566–7, 698

and effeminacy, 158and manhood, 161in medicine, 650, 654, 660–1and politics, 495–6

‘sensitive men’, 157sentiment, 478, 711sentimental culture, tears, 137–8, 156–73Serious Proposal (Astell), 143, 313sermons, 461, 464, 479–82Sermons to Young Women (Fordyce), 8–9Sévigne, Madame de, 198, 212sex education

botany, 150literature, 147–8and Wollstonecraft, 140–55

sexual liaisons, 249sexuality, 140–1

and ‘race’, 84–5Rousseau’s, 174–88

Shaftesbury, Lord, on gallantry, 34shame, 109Shaw, Peter, 159Sheridan, 618Simmonds, Martha, 449Sins of Government (Barbauld), 519Skedd, Susan, 230Sketch from the Dead (Thelwall), 159Sketches of the History of Man, Book I

(Kames), 14, 78slavery, 76, 630

movement for abolition, 454, 576Rush on, 658

Smith, Adam, 40biography, 748on John Millar’s family, 327Theory of Moral Sentiments, 161–2

Smith, Hilda, 589sociability, 694–5social connectedness, 436social contract, 13social reform movements, 444‘social sympathy’, 40Society for the Suppression of Beggars,

339–40Socrates, 161Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Locke),

158Sonnet, Martine, 197

Sophie, ou l’éducation (Montbart), 251The Sorrows of Lady Sophia Sternheim (La

Roche), 316soul, absence of sex, 416–17, 419, 423, 427spa towns, 651Spain, 572

Enlightenment, 356, 389–409equality, 401, 404religion, 391women and the Economic Society, 402women writers, 392, 400, 402works on women, 390–1

Spectator, 34spelling

books on, 21–13and education of girls, 197–9and pedagogical enlightenment, 206–10phonetic, 207reform in France, 201–6teaching of, 210–17women writers, 195–7

Spence, Thomas, 598–600Spensonia, 598The Spiritual Quixote (Graves), 462spiritual equality, 391Springborg, Patricia, 362stadial approach to Enlightenment, 83–4stadial history, 88Staël, Germaine de, 4, 56–7, 252–3

biography, 748–9Corinne, 4, 56, 59, 60–4, 555, 559–62De la Littérature, 57, 555De L’Allemagne, 118, 555Delphine, 555exile, 555influence of Rousseau on, 56, 252Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractére de

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 57, 58, 252on melancholy, 62–4

Starobinski, Jean, 176Steele, Richard, 158, 159

The Christian Hero, 165Steinrugge, Lieselotte, 4Stepan, Nancy Leys, 679Stillingfleet, Benjamin, 289Strahan, William, 8Strictures on Female Education (Bennett),

228–9Strictures on Female Education (More), 319The Struggle for the Breeches (Clark), 599Strugnell, Anthony, 99, 107

on women in Histoire, 106, 108Stuart, Gilbert, 88–9

A View of Society in Europe, 79–80

766 Index

Stuart Mill, John, 6studious women, 463Stuurman, Siep, 390, 404, 411The Subjection of Women (Mill), 132Suchon, Gabrielle

Du célibat volontaire, 427–8on equality, 427Traité de la morale et de la politique, 427

Sur les femmes (Diderot), 71, 97, 98–107

tabula rasa doctrine, 365Tacitus, Germania, 87Tahiti, 109–11Talbot, Catherine, 460, 463, 464, 467–8,

471Reflections on the Seven Days of the Week,

460–1, 465–6sermons, 464

Tarabotti, ArcangelaChe le donne siano della spezie degli uomini,

425–7La tirannia paterna, 426

Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, 177, 180Taylor, Barbara, 5–6, 234, 237, 478, 697

Mary Wollstonecraft and the FeminineImagination, 494

tears, 137–8, 156–73of Christ, 164–5as communication, 159

Teich, Mikulas, 356Telemachus (Fénelon), 180, 313–14Thelwall, Robert Carter, Sketch from the

Dead, 159Theory of the Human Mind (Hartley), 500Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 161thinking

dangers of, 56gender differences, 99traditions of, 708–9

Thomas, AntoineEssai sur le caracter, les moeurs et l’esprit

des femmes, 71, 76, 118, 124, 127on Madame Necker, 120–1

Thompson, William, 602Thornton, John, The Politician’s Creed, 590Thoughts on the Manners of the Great (More),

320Thrale, Hester, 294Tissot, Samuel-Auguste, 55Todd, Janet, 8Tomaselli, Sylvana, 70, 71Tone Wilson, Matilda, 329Tournon, Antoine, 215Toussaint, Les Moeurs, 315

Traité de la morale et de la politique(Suchon), 427

Traité de l’education des femmes (Miremont),247–8

Traité de l’éducation des filles (Fénelon), 244travel, 104travel writing, by women, 118–19A Treatise on Education (Williams), 232Treatise of Human nature (Hume), 12Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth

(Macaulay), 519, 538, 546, 547–8Trenard, Louis, 199The Trinity (St Augustine), 412, 419Triumph of Truth (LePrince de Beaumont),

314The Triumphs of Temper (Hayley), 472truth, 137Tuke, Esther, 453, 454Turgot, 661Tuveson, E.L., 711Two Treatises of Government (Locke), 528

UK, women in 18th century politics, 570–86Unitarianism, 476–7, 494universal suffrage, 587, 589, 593–4, 598,

669male, 673, 685

The Unsex’d Females (Polwhele), 145USA

American Revolution, 655, 667–8Democratic-Republican party, 667, 671–2Federal Constitution, 657medicine, 649–66nationalism, 661Native Americans, 657–8New Jersey, equality, 668–9political rights of women, 674–84qualifications for voting, 672–3universal suffrage, 673Vindication of the Rights of Women

(Wollstonecraft), 667, 669, 670women, 656women’s rights, 667–91

Vallisneri, Antonio, 271van Krieken, Robert, 73vascular system, 652Vaudelin, Pére, 203Vaugelas, 200Veratti, Guiseppe, 268Vergniaud, 634–5Vesey, Elizabeth, 288, 293

Burney on, 294More on, 294

Index 767

Vickery, Amanda, 519, 611The Victim of Prejudice (Hays), 577A View of Society in Europe (Stuart), 79–80Vila, Anne, C., 3, 4Vindication of the Rights of Men

(Wollstonecraft), 31Vindication of the Rights of Women

(Wollstonecraft), 5, 10political implications, 670and the USA, 667, 669, 670

Virgil, Aeneid, 180Virginia Gazette, 679virtue, 126, 289, 384, 660

and civilization, 119–25and education, 226, 232and mental improvement, 463nature of, 121

Voltairebiography, 749on learned women, 53on phonetic spelling, 208

Vues legislatives pour les femmes (Jodin), 613

Waddington, Samuel Ferrand, 601, 602Wade, Ira O., 246Wahrman, Dror, 573Wailly, Nöel-Franc[,]ois, 209Wakefield, Gilbert, 483

and Mary Hays, 498–9Wakefield, Priscilla, Introduction to Botany,

150Warburton, William, 462Warens, Madame de, and Rousseau, 178Warren, Mercy Otis, 678

biography, 749–50Webster, Noah, 653weeping, 137–8, 156–73West, Jane, 15Whigs, 328, 330–1

and political reform, 340–1views on women, 336–7

White, T.H., Age of Scandal, 156The Wild Irish Girl (Owenson), 556Wilkes, Wetenhall, 144Williams, David

Lectures on Education, 232, 233A Treatise on Education, 232

Williams, Helen Maria, 46, 553–4biography, 750

Williams, Thomas, Constitutional Politics,599–600

Wilson, Kathleen, 519Wise Club, Aberdeen, 77, 89Wiseman, Susan, 533

Wolfe, James, 166Wollstonecraft, Mary, 3, 127–9, 552, 700–1,

706on the aristocracy, 306biography, 750–1on boarding schools, 227death, 506education, 225Elements of Morality, 145Epistles on Women, 7on equality in education, 235The Female Reader, 10on gallantry, 44–5Hays on, 46–7Historical and Moral View of the French

Revolution, 31on marriage, 133and Mary Hays, 503on patriotism, 553on pleasure, 141–2, 152on politeness, 43on political influence of aristocratic

women, 577Polwhele on, 145posthumous reputation, 551–2on Reflections on the Revolution in France,

32and religion, 410, 413reviews of, 331and Rousseau, 31–2and sex education, 140–55status, 30–1Vindication of the Rights of Men, 31, 33Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 5, 10,

30, 118, 119, 127–8, 137, 141–2, 144,146, 148, 149, 150–1, 553, 656, 667

The Wrong of Woman, or Maria, 31, 140,141, 152

Woman (Owenson), 556women

in academic institutions, Italy, 383in historical discourse, 76–9and labour, 131–2and learning, 380–1and the natural history of man, 15–23,

76as philosophers, 272–7playwrights, 463plebeian, 581in politics, 567–8and science, 382–3teaching of Latin, 233teaching of spelling, 210–17as ‘thermometers’, 98

768 Index

travel writing by, 118–19USA, 656

women intellectuals, 193women writers, 41–2, 73, 119

Barbauld on, 475and conjectural history, 117–20on education, 191France, 259on religion, 119Spain, 392, 400spelling, 195–6, 210–11

women’s role, dialogues on, 354–5women’s writing

and civilization, 71on education, 253–4, 255pedagogical works, 247as a physical skill, 216

Wood, Paul, 16Worthington, Hugh, and Mary Hays, 501Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary, 367

education, 231

Wraxall, Nathanial, on Elizabeth Montagu,297–8

Wray, Mary, 227The Wrong of Woman, or Maria

(Wollstonecraft), 31Wyss, André, 201Wythey, Lynne, 543

Yorkshire Association, 573Young, Brian, 461Young, Edward, 138Young, Iris Marion, 216The Young Ladies Magazine (LePrince de

Beaumont), 110, 310, 314, 315Young Misses Magazine (Le Prince de

Beaumont), 308, 312Young, William, 651

Zanotti, Francesco Maria, 266, 271, 275and Bentivoglio, 275–8

Zayas, Maria de, Exemplary Novels, 391–2

Index 769

Enlightenment Biographies

Documents

Transcript of Enlightenment Biographies