ThePersonaof the Woman Philosopher in Eighteenth‐Century England: Catharine Macaulay, Mary Hays, and Elizabeth Hamilton

2008 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 403-412 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Hutton
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Mary Hays ◽  
Elizabeth Hamilton ◽  
Catharine Macaulay

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

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

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

Eighteenth-Century Women's Writing and the Methodist Media Revolution

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew O. Winckles
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Women's Writing ◽  
Samuel Richardson ◽  
Reform Era ◽  
Hannah More ◽  
Discourse Practices ◽  
Elizabeth Hamilton ◽  
Discourse Patterns ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Women’S Writing

Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing and the Methodist Media Revolution argues that Methodism in the eighteenth century was a media event that uniquely combined and utilized different types of media to reach a vast and diverse audience. Specifically, it traces specific cases of how evangelical and Methodist discourse practices interacted with major cultural and literary events during the long eighteenth-century, from the rise of the novel to the Revolution controversy of the 1790’s to the shifting ground for women writers leading up to the Reform era in the 1830’s. The book maps the religious discourse patterns of Methodism onto works by authors like Samuel Richardson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah More, Elizabeth Hamilton, Mary Tighe, and Felicia Hemans. This not only provides a better sense of the religious nuances of these authors’ better-known works, but also provides a fuller consideration of the wide variety of genres women were writing in during the period, many of which continue to be read as ‘non-literary’. The scope of the book leads the reader from the establishment of evangelical forms of discourse in the 1730’s to the natural ends of these discourse structures during the era of reform, all the while pointing to ways in which women—Methodist and otherwise—modified these discourse patterns as acts of resistance or subversion.

Disciplinarity (Embedded and Specialized Systems)

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

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

scholarly journals Revolution and human rights thought in the political philosophy of Catharine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft and Anna Laetitia Barbauld

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-266
Author(s):  
Marie-Luisa Frick
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
The Political ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
Public Reasoning ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Catharine Macaulay ◽  
Core Issues

The Age of Reason is first and foremost an age of public reasoning. Equipped with a fresh and indeed unprecedented consciousness of feasibility and responsibility, educated citizens start to participate actively – and in many cases by taking personal risks – in discourses on political, religious and philosophical issues. In this article, I will highlight two core issues of the late eighteenth century – the dispute about the legitimacy of the French Revolution as well as its underlying philosophical conceptions and the rising human rights idea – and thereby revisit the interventions of three women who, though rediscovered in various fields of research, still have to gain their due recognition as pre-eminent political philosophers of their time.

Catharine Macaulay's Civil War: Gender, History, and Republicanism in Georgian Britain

2002 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Hicks
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Sentimental Fiction ◽  
Prescriptive Literature ◽  
Catharine Macaulay ◽  
Lucy Hutchinson ◽  
War Memoirs ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
William Robertson

The eighteenth century marked a watershed in the relationship between women and historical writing in Britain. Previous to this period, D. R. Woolf has demonstrated, women had certainly purchased, read, and discussed works of history, contributing to “the ‘social circulation’ of historical knowledge.” A few, perhaps most notably Lucy Hutchinson, had composed Civil War memoirs. Some women had written genealogical, antiquarian, and biographical works, as well as local and family history, a “feminine past,” according to Woolf, that men often judged unworthy of real history. Only in the eighteenth century, however, did women and men significantly modify a neoclassical paradigm that conceived of history as a strictly male enterprise, the record of political and military deeds written by men and for men. In this century prescriptive literature increasingly urged history upon women as reading matter intellectually and morally superior to novels and romances. The great triumvirate of British historians, David Hume, Edward Gibbon, and William Robertson, wrote expressly for female readers. Their “philosophical” history, with its shift of emphasis from political to social and cultural subjects, appealed to women, as did their experiments with the narrative techniques of sentimental fiction. The century also witnessed the appearance of the first female historian in Britain to write in the grand manner, Catharine Macaulay (1731–91). Mrs. Macaulay's success in the traditional genre of history won her the respect of male peers as well as the applause of a wide readership.

An English Audience for American Revolutionary Pamphlets

1976 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 355-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. C. Bonwick
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
The World ◽  
Catharine Macaulay ◽  
Joseph Priestley ◽  
And Function ◽  
Good Number ◽  
The Revolution

The eighteenth century was a great age of pamphleteering. Subjects were legion and authors innumerable. Every question of substance – and many of none – attracted writers to such a degree that in the world of politics one is tempted to establish the scale of pamphleteering as one of the yardsticks against which the importance of an issue should be measured. The American revolution fully conforms to this criterion, for during a twenty-year period beginning in 1763 it stimulated the publication of well over a thousand pamphlets in England alone. A good number of those pamphlets originated in America and their subsequent reappearance in England was a matter of considerable significance; some were written by Americans resident in London. This paper will examine the mechanics by which American revolutionary tracts were published and distributed in England, and their circulation among the radicals who proved themselves to be the patriots' best English friends during the difficult years of the revolution. They included among others Thomas Hollis, John Wilkes, Major John Cartwright and Granville Sharp; the Dissenting ministers Richard Price and Joseph Priestley, and one of the most brilliant women of her generation, Catharine Macaulay. Such an examination is not only an integral component in the analysis of the English side of the revolution; it also serves as a useful case-study in the mechanics and function of political propaganda.

The Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Republican Period ◽  
Parliamentary Reform ◽  
Catharine Macaulay ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
Radical Republicanism

This edition of all of Catharine Macaulay’s known correspondence includes an introduction to the life, works, and influence of this celebrated, eighteenth-century, republican historian. Through her letters and those of her correspondents it offers a unique glimpse of the connections between radical republicanism and dissent in London, and throws light on the origins of parliamentary reform in Great Britain. Macaulay’s correspondents include many individuals who were active in the lead-up to the American and French Revolutions, others who became involved in the antislavery movement, and yet others who were central to the development of feminism. These letters demonstrate how Macaulay’s history of the seventeenth-century republican period in Great Britain, which she published between 1763 and 1783, encouraged her readers to represent themselves as the heirs of those earlier struggles and to lavish praise on the author as an important defender of their liberties and of the universal rights of mankind. It shows Macaulay and her friends to have been inspired by positive notions of liberty and by ideals of democratic republicanism, thought of as systems of equal government committed to universal benevolence, in which the common good would become the common care.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
pp. 200-205
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Economic Statecraft ◽  
Hugh Blair ◽  
Catharine Macaulay

Writers on historical affairs in the eighteenth century increasingly came to conceive of commerce as a sphere of activity which was more dependent on the manners and desires of a nation's people than it was on the specific actions of its monarchs. The book's conclusion discusses this development with reference to a range of writers (including Hugh Blair, Adam Anderson and Catharine Macaulay) and considers its consequences. Chief among these, it is argued, was a shift in attitudes towards economic statecraft, and a series of new approaches to the histories of finances and commerce.

Classical Reception Among the Women of the Eighteenth-Century Bluestocking Society

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raphaelle Walsh-Beauchamp
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Informal Education ◽  
Social Standing ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Art And Politics ◽  
Classical Scholarship ◽  
Classical Reception ◽  
Catharine Macaulay ◽  
The Temple

Eighteenth-century Britain saw a rich period of classical reception and allusions to antiquity in its literature, art, and politics. Among those who were influenced by the ancient Greek and Roman cultures were the members of the Bluestocking Society. Comprising mainly of authors, artists, and politicians of the elite class, it is its female members who have gained the most prominence in the subsequent study of the Society. While its most famous female members have been extensively studied through feminist, political, and literary lenses this work seeks to examine the classical influences upon the group. This paper will examine a mixture of contemporary literary works, paintings, engravings, and commissioned architecture, analyzing the classical allusions within these works and how these were used by the Bluestocking women to propagate their social standing. Additionally, the education of the Bluestocking women will be examined to see how certain women of the eighteenth-century made use of informal systems of learning to become as affluent in classical scholarship as their male counterparts. The Bluestocking women were able to use this informal education to become celebrated scholars. Major works analyzed within the paper include the personal letters of the leader of the Bluestockings Elizabeth Montagu, Sarah Fielding’s The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia (1757), Portraits in the Characters of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo (1778) by artist Richard Samuel, and representations of historian Catharine Macaulay as a Roman figure.

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