Eighteenth Century Women Writers And The Gentleman S Liberation Movement

In the late eighteenth-century English novel, the question of feminism has usually been explored with respect to how women writers treat their heroines and how they engage with contemporary political debates, particularly those relating to the French Revolution. Megan Woodworth argues that women writers' ideas about their own liberty are also present in their treatment of male characters. In positing a 'Gentleman's Liberation Movement,' she suggests that Frances Burney, Charlotte Smith, Jane West, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen all used their creative powers to liberate men from the very institutions and ideas about power, society, and gender that promote the subjection of women. Their writing juxtaposes the role of women in the private spheres with men's engagement in political structures and successive wars for independence (the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic Wars). The failures associated with fighting these wars and the ideological debates surrounding them made plain, at least to these women writers, that in denying the universality of these natural freedoms, their liberating effects would be severely compromised. Thus, to win the same rights for which men fought, women writers sought to remake men as individuals freed from the tyranny of their patriarchal inheritance.

First published in 1984, this book filled an acknowledged gap in the social history of the eighteenth century. Drawing on newspapers, journals, memoirs, diaries, courtesy books, county surveys and records, it also does so on the literature of the period. It examines the role assigned to women in society and explores attitudes of the time and the real experience of women.

This anthology gathers together various texts by and about women, ranging from `conduct' manuals to pamphlets on prostitution, from medical texts to critical definitions of women's writing, from anti-female satires to appeals for female equality. By making this material more widely available, Women in the Eighteenth Century complements the current upsurge in feminist writing on eighteenth-century literary history and offers students the opportunity to make their own rereadings of literary texts and their ideological contexts.

This book, first published in 2000, is an authoritative volume of new essays on women's writing and reading in the eighteenth century.

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, Ruhr-University of Bochum (Englisches Seminar), course: Romanticism in the Light of Cultural Studies, language: English, abstract: The time of Romanticism is historically regarded as a masculine phenomenon. As Anne K. Mellor pointed out, Romanticism as a literary movement was constructed and defined by a masculine discourse and ideology, a “masculine Romanticism”. This masculine Romanticism is the traditional understanding of the literary movement – based on the writings and thoughts of the five canonical writers Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Mellor suggests that “feminine Romanticism” occurs to recover the erased and neglected voices of women writers within this movement. To understand these differences of masculine and feminine Romanticism, one has to realize that both terms serve as an ideological gender construction, not in terms of the author ́s sex. To analyse female romantic literature also means to consider the division of ́private ́ and ́public ́ sphere occuring in the eighteenth century, a phenomenon that should be discussed in the following chapter. This paper aims to show how women writers could made a career in the male-dominated time of Romanticism. In order to show the problems they experienced within a patriarchal society, I will explore the subordination of women by a construction of femininity which did not grant them the status of rational thinking subjects. For this purpose I have chosen the example of Mary Wollstonecraft, the revolutionary founder of feminism. Wollstonecraft was not only a writer herself, but she was also the wife of the well-known political philosopher, William Godwin, and she gave birth to Mary Godwin Shelley, the famous author of Frankenstein. As a member of the literary circle around Joseph Johnson, she was surrounded by famous contemporary writers and was involved in literary relationships within her own family circle.

Exploring the Lives of Women, 1558-1837' is an engaging and lively collection of original, thought-provoking essays. Its route from Lady Jane Greys nine-day reign to Queen Victorias accession provides ample opportunities to examine complex interactions between gender, rank, and power. Yet the books scope extends far beyond queens: its female cast includes servants, aristocrats, literary women, opera singers, actresses, fallen women, athletes and mine workers.The collection explores themes relating to female power and physical strength; infertility, motherhood, sexuality and exploitation; creativity and celebrity; marriage and female friendship. It draws upon a wide range of primary materials to explore diverse representations of women: illuminating accounts of real womens lives appear alongside fictional portrayals and ideological constructions of femininity. In exploring womens negotiations with patriarchal control, this book demonstrates how the lived experience of women did not always correspond to prescribed social and gendered norms, revealing the rich complexity of their lives.This volume has been published to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Womens Studies Group 1558-1837. The group was formed to promote research into any aspect of womens lives as experienced or depicted within this period. The depth, range and creativity of the essays in this book reflect the myriad interests of its members.