Chapter 13 - Jacobin Reformers

Summary

Barbara Taylor notes that though Mary Wollstonecraft is often seen as an “individual pioneer … setting her among her fellow radical literatae, the first coterie of women intellectuals to intervene in British reform politics, gives a truer sense of her historic significance.”¹ This chapter investigates how Wollstonecraft’s life and professional practice entwined with those of three of her contemporaries, Mary Hays, Mary Robinson, and Charlotte Smith. The reception of reformist causes underwent a sea change during the 1790s, and I analyze how Wollstonecraft, Hays, Robinson, and Smith respond to such change. The first part explores the response to Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792–93, when it is possible for Jacobin writers to celebrate and advance the “linked” causes of women’s rights and political reform.² The second part investigates the period following Wollstonecraft’s death, from 1797–99, when anti-Jacobin reaction makes it difficult to advance any reformist cause, and the polemical writings and fiction of Wollstonecraft, Hays, Robinson, and Smith articulate a complication of, and even dissatisfaction with, earlier claims for equality.