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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
The circumstances of the times, aided by the natural curiosity of the human mind, will ensure an extensive circulation to these books. Yet we cannot help regretting, that these facts should be recorded by a female, who has been so deluded by a visionary phantom, as to forsake her friends and her country in pursuit of what she might have enjoyed at home without peril and with greater honour.
Review of Helen Maria Williams's Letters Containing a Sketch of the Politics of France, in the British Critic, November 1795REVERENCING THE RIGHTS OF HUMANITY
I want to begin by reading two quotations against each other, the first from Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and the second a passage from a theatrical review in Leigh Hunt's Reflector, exactly two decades later. Together they reveal both the ambiguities and the anxieties generated by women's aspirations to participate in those fields of literary production that were traditionally reserved for men. In a footnote to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft writes,
I have conversed, as man with man, with medical men on anatomical subjects; and compared the proportions of the human body with artists – yet such modesty did I meet with, that I was never reminded by word or look of my sex, of the absurd rules which make modesty a pharisaical cloak of weakness. And I am persuaded that in the pursuit of knowledge women would never be insulted by sensible men, and rarely by men of any description, if they did not by mock modesty remind them that they were women … Men are not always men in the company of women, nor would women always remember that they are women, if they were allowed to acquire more understanding.
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