Abstract
Mary Wollstonecraft was a Revolutionary feminist — an advocate of the rights or claims of women in a specific revolutionary situation. There were two related aspects of that situation: the French Revolution and the cultural revolution that founded the modern state in Britain.1 Many cultural revolutionaries in Britain saw the Revolution in France, at least in its early stages, as an example of what they themselves could achieve. But the British cultural revolution was itself a field of struggle in which the fortunes of various contestants, including Revolutionary feminism, were influenced by the changing course of the French Revolution. Paradoxically, the Revolution soon turned against feminists in France, yet it was also used as a reason to reject feminism, along with other forms of ‘innovation’ or ‘French principles’, in Britain.
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Notes
On cultural revolution and state formation, see Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985)
Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979)
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© 1992 Gary Donald Kelly
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Kelly, G. (1992). Gender, Class and Cultural Revolution. In: Revolutionary Feminism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22063-2_1
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