Nielsen                  Women’s Rights in the Romantic Era

British  Timeline

1694/97     Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest by a Lover of her Sex

1712        Alexander Pope, "The Rape of the Lock"

1792        Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

1798        William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman’; Richard Polwhele, The Unsex'd Females

1799        Mary Robinson, A Letter to the Women of England

1810        Lucy Aikin, Epistles on Women, Exemplifying their Character and Condition in Various Ages and Nations (1810)

1833        End of slavery in UK

1847        Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Princess

1851        Harriet Taylor Mill, The Enfrachisement of Women

“Many persons think they have sufficiently justified the restrictions on women’s field of action, when they have said that the pursuits from which women are excluded are unfeminine, and that the proper sphere of women is not politics or publicity, but private and domestic life. We deny the right of any portion of the species to decide for another portion, or any individual for another individual, what is and what is not their ‘proper sphere.’ The proper sphere for all human beings is the largest and highest which they are able to attain to. What this is, cannot be ascertained, without complete liberty of choice” (13).

1856        Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (1856)

1857        Matrimonial Causes Act (men allowed to divorce women for adultery, but not vice versa)

1858        Cheltenham Ladies College

1860        Mill starts writing  The Subjection of Women

1867        Mill proposes that unmarried women be given the right to vote in Parliament

1869        J. S. Mill, The Subjection of Women; Women granted the right to vote in local elections

1870         Girton College established for women

1880        Newnham College for women at Cambridge

1882        Married Women's Property Act

1894        Married women granted the right to vote in local elections

1910        Over 1,000 women at Oxford and Cambridge, but they are still unable to earn degrees

1918        Full vote granted to women over 30 and men over 21

The Myth of Matriarchy

- J. J. Bachofen, Mother Right (1861): Postulates that matriarchy was the true origin of culture and replaced by the patriarchal

- Amazons and warrior women: See Paige duBois, Centaurs and Amazons: Women the Pre-History of the Great Chain of Being (Michigan UP, 1982).

Richard Polwhele, Excerpt from “The Unsex’d Females” (1798)

15: I shudder at the new unpictur'd scene,
16: Where unsex'd woman vaunts the imperious mien;
17: Where girls, affecting to dismiss the heart,
18: Invoke the Proteus of petrific art;
19: With equal ease, in body or in mind,
20: To Gallic freaks or Gallic faith resign'd,
21: The crane-like neck, as Fashion bids, lay bare,
22: Or frizzle, bold in front, their borrow'd hair;
23: Scarce by a gossamery film carest,
24: Sport, in full view, the meretricious breast;
25: Loose the chaste cincture, where the graces shone,
26: And languish'd all the Loves, the ambrosial zone;

27: As lordly domes inspire dramatic rage,
28: Court prurient Fancy to the private stage;
29: With bliss botanic as their bosoms heave,
30: Still pluck forbidden fruit, with mother Eve,
31: For puberty in signing florets pant,
32: Or point the prostitution of a plant; (7-8)

63: See Wollstonecraft, whom no decorum checks,
64: Arise, the intrepid champion of her sex;
65: O'er humbled man assert the sovereign claim,
66: And slight the timid blush of virgin fame. (13)

 *Polwhele's note: That Miss Wollstonecraft was a sworn enemy to blushes, I need not remark. But many of my readers, perhaps, will be astonished to hear, that at several of our boarding-schools for young ladies, a blush incurs a penalty.

·       Supported herself as a teacher and then a governess

·       Writes Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1786) but becomes famous for her response to Burke, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790)

·       Also writes a novel, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Norway, Denmark and Sweden, and some fragments

·       Had an illegitimate child with an American businessman, Gilbert Imlay

·       Met and married anarchist writer William Godwin in 1797

·       Dies in shortly after giving birth to Mary Shelley (Frankenstein)

·       In 1798 Godwin publishes Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Wollstonecraft's Posthumous Works, eliciting Polwhele’s response

Elizabeth Inchbald, The Massacre

Interpretive / Creative Questions: As a group, select 2 or 3 interpretive questions/activities to examine closely in the next 10-15 minutes. (You will share these orally with the rest of the class.)

1. In a letter to Godwin in November 1792, Inchbald writes: “There appears an inconsistency in my having said to you, ‘I have no view of any public good in this piece,’ and afterwards alluding to its preventing future massacres to this I reply that it was your hinting to me that it might do harm which gave me the first idea that it might do good” (qtd. Jenkins 317). What “good” does Inchbald seek to do with this play? What morals does it attempt to teach its audience? 

2. How does Burke’s Reflection on the Revolution in France relate to The Massacre? What are the “Burkean aesthetics” of this play?

3. In her Advertisement,  Inchbald claims that she “never flattered” herself that The Massacre would “appear on the stage.” Do you think this play could be performed in London of 1792? Why or why not?

4. Rewrite Rochelle’s description of the mob’s attack on Madame Tricastin in script form / as a dramatic scene (p. 13, left side). Choose a specific audience for this scene—21st-century FX viewers, for example, or Romantic audiences in 1792, etc..

5. What similarities, if any, do you see in Inchbald’s work to previous texts we have read?

The Short Feminist Revolution in France

·       Women participate in the storming of the Bastille, the siege of Versailles (October Days) and even participate in some military battles

·       Theroigne de Mericort (1758-1817), dressed as an Amazon, organizes a female militia (“Needles and spindles are not the only weapons which we know how to handle); women’s (political) clubs flourish 1789-92

·       Divorce enacted shortly after First Republic founded (civil marriage); Napoleon rescinds divorce in 1808

·       1793 decree against female combatants; women’s clubs declared illegal

Olympe de Gouges (1748-1793)  Declaration of the Rights of Woman (1791)

·       Daughter of a washerwoman and butcher; married as a teenager to a businessman

·       Arrives in Paris in the 1780s as a widow; becomes a courtesan and changes her name (from Marie Gouzes)

·       Member of the Amis des Noirs (anti-slavery group)

·       Stages a number of plays about slavery, women warriors, and patriotism

·       Girondin (supporter of constitutional monarchy)