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
Philippa Levine, Victorian Feminism, 1850–1900 ( London: Hutchinson, 1987 ) p. 14.
Penelope J. Corfield, The Impact of English Towns, 1700–1800 ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982 ).
Alan D. Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England: Church, Chapel and Social Change, 1740–1914 ( London and New York: Longman, 1976 ).
Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 ( 1930; London: Virago, 1969 ).
See Nancy Armstrong, ‘The Rise of Domestic Woman’, in The Ideology of Conduct: Essays in Literature and the History of Sexuality, ed. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse ( New York and London: Methuen, 1987 ) pp. 96–141.
Devendra P. Varma, The Evergreen Tree of Diabolical Knowledge ( Washington, D.C.: Consortium Press, 1972 ).
Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe ( London: Duckworth, 1986 ).
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism ( London: Verso, 1983 ).
Stephen D. Cox, ’The Stranger Within Thee’: Concepts of the Self in Late Eighteenth-Century Literature (Pittsburgh, Pa: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980 ).
See Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society ( Glasgow: Fontana/Croom Helm, 1976 ).
Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–1830 ( New York: St Martin’s Press, 1987 ).
See Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, ch. 7; Jean Bethke Elshtain, Meditations on Modern Political Thought: Masculine/Feminine Themes from Luther to Arendt ( New York: Praeger, 1986 ) pp. 46–7.
Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800, abridged edn (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin Books, 1979 ) p. 404.
Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel ( New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987 ).
James Fordyce, Sermons to Young Women (1766), 8th edn, corrected and enlarged (Dublin, 1796) pp. 11, 18.
Margaret Walters, ‘The Rights and Wrongs of Women: Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Martineau, Simone de Beauvoir’, in The Rights and Wrongs of Women, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin Books, 1976 ) p. 305.
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© 1996 Kelly, Gary
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Kelly, G. (1996). Gender, Class and Cultural Revolution. In: Revolutionary Feminism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24327-3_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24327-3_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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