Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750-1810

Portada
University of Chicago Press, 2000 - 350 páginas
During the second half of the eighteenth century, the social role of educated
women and the nature of domesticity were the focus of widespread debate in Britain. The emergence of an identifiably feminist voice in that debate is the subject of Harriet Guest's new study, which explores how small changes in the meaning of patriotism and the relations between public and private categories permitted educated British women to imagine themselves as political subjects.

Small Change considers the celebration of learned women as tokens of national progress in the context of a commercial culture that complicates notions of gender difference. Guest offers a fascinating account of the women of the bluestocking circle, focusing in particular on Elizabeth Carter, hailed as the paradigmatic learned and domestic woman. She discusses the importance of the American war to the changing relation between patriotism and gender in the 1770s and 1780s, and she casts new light on Mary Wollstonecraft's writing of the 1790s, considering it in relation to the anti-feminine discourse of Hannah More, and the utopian feminism of Mary Hays.

Dentro del libro

Páginas seleccionadas

Contenido

Introduction
1
Part One Learning and Shopping in the MidEighteenth Century
19
Part Two The Fame of Elizabeth Carter
93
Part Three Femininity and National Feeling in the 1770s and 1780s
153
Part Four Politics Sensibility Domesticity 17901810
269
Index
341
Derechos de autor

Otras ediciones - Ver todas

Términos y frases comunes

Acerca del autor (2000)

Harriet Guest is a director of the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies and senior lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. She is the author of A Form of Sound Words and co-editor of Johann Reinhold Forster's Observations Made during a Voyage round the World.

Información bibliográfica