The Unsex'd Females, a Poem (1798), by Richard Polwhele, is a polemical intervention into the public debates over the role of women at the end of the 18th century. The poem is primarily concerned with what Polwhele characterizes as the encroachment of radical French political and philosophical ideas into British society, particularly those associated with the Enlightenment. These subjects come together, for Polwhele, in the revolutionary figure of Mary Wollstonecraft.
The poem is of interest to those interested in the history of women, as well as revolutionary politics, and is an example of the British backlash against the ideals of the French Revolution; it is representative of the strategic conflation of women writers with revolutionary ideals during this period;Sharon M. Setzer, Introduction, A Letter to the Women of England and the Natural Daughter, Mary Robinson, Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2003 and it helps illuminate the obstacles faced by women writers at the end of the 18th century.
Historical context Responding to women authors according to presumptions about their sexuality has a long history; a comparison between the critical reputations of Aphra Behn and Katherine Philips, more than a century earlier, is instructive here as these two writers were virtually symbolic of the choices available to women writers in the 18th century: Behn's reputation as "shady and amorous"Virginia Woolf, Ch. 4, A Room of One's Own, 1929. continued well into the 20th century, whereas Philips — known as "The Matchless Orinda" — was considered an exemplar of proper femininity."John Dryden, Henry Vaughan, Sir William Temple, Wentworth Dillon, the earl of Roscommon, and Roger Boyle, the earl of Orrery, are among the many who wrote poems of tribute to Philips." Paula Loscocco, "Manly Sweetness: Katherine Philips among the Neoclassicals," Huntington Library Quarterly 56.3 (Summer 1993): n.2. Polwhele is hardly original in his opposition of "proper" and "improper" women writers and his criticism of Wollstonecraft is focused on her troubled and unconventional life as described in the frank biography by William GodwinWilliam Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798) as much as on her writing.
The Unsex'd Female is complicated, however, by the tumultuous political situation at the time of its publication. The American Revolution had occurred only two decades earlier, the events of the French Revolution were even more recent, and the Haitian Revolution, the most successful of the African slave rebellions in the Western Hemisphere, was in process. Ideas about enfranchisement, liberty, and equality were widespread. To Polwhele and others who shared his perspective, these ideas were perceived as attacks on religion, the monarchy, and the government. Women's advocacy of access to educationSee History of Feminism was confused with the most outrageous actions ascribed to the revolutionaries: free love, irreligion, and violent upheaval. Some commenters went so far as to blame the French Revolution on "a notorious dereliction of female principle" and "the dissipated and indelicate behaviour and loose morals" of French women.Jane West, Letters to a Young Lady, in which the Duties and Character of women are considered, 3 vols. (London, 1806), I 58. Many of those who had initially supported the French Revolution turned away from the excesses of the Terror, and Britain was gripped by a strong backlash against any ideas that seemed in the least revolutionary. Janet Todd wrote that "Britain, once priding itself on being the most politically enlightened and liberal state in Europe, came to define itself in increasingly conservative, patriotic, and anti-French terms."Janet Todd, The Sign of Angelica: women, writing and fiction, 1600–1800 (London: Virgo, 1989. 196.) See also John Bull. "Gallic" and "French" came to mean, in the popular imagination, "revolutionary," so when Polwhele writes of "Gallic freaks" (l. 21) he is not merely describing fashions in clothing. Those Britons who sympathized with the French Revolution were known as "Jacobins." Those who opposed it were "Anti-Jacobins." The Antijacobin, or Weekly Examiner (1797–1798), the Anti-Jacobin Review, and the British Critic (1793–1843), were among the conservative journals that grew up during this highly polarized period. Polwhele, a conservative member of the Anglican clergy, was himself a contributor to the Anti-Jacobin Review. According to Eleanor Ty, although feminist thought had existed for decades, the women of the 1790s seemed "particularly threatening to the anti-Jacobins" because of "the outspoken claiming of their 'rights' shortly after and coinciding with the events in France that culminated in the Revolution."Eleanor Rose Ty, Unsex'd Revolutionaries: Five Women Novelists of the 1790s (University of Toronto Press, 1993. 4).
(See also A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.)
Publication history and reception As indicated in the subtitle, "Addressed to the author of the Pursuits of Literature," Polwhele was inspired to write his poem after reading satirist Thomas Mathias' "blistering attack" on the democratisation of culture in his Pursuits of Literature (1798).Thomas James Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature: A Satirical Poem in Four Dialogues. 6th. ed. London: T. Becket, 1798. Mathias deplored "unsex'd female writers [who] now instruct, or confuse, us and themselves, in the labyrinth of politics, or turn us wild with Gallic frenzy.""Judith Pascoe, "'Unsex'd females': Barbauld, Robinson, and Smith," The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1740–1830, Jon Mee and Tom Keymer, eds. (Cambridge University Press, 2004. 212).
The Unsex'd Females was originally published anonymously in London in 1798 by Cadell and Davies in a standalone, one volume edition. The American edition of 1800 also included A Sketch of the Private and Public Character of P. Pindar, an attack on the anti-monarchical satiric poet John Wolcott (1738–1819), a pairing publisher William Cobbett apparently saw as "a marketable combination" for a presumably Tory readership.Noah Heringman, " 'Manlius to Peter Pindar': Satire, Patriotism, and Masculinity in the 1790s," Romantic Circles Praxis Series: Romanticism and Patriotism: Nation, Empire, Bodies, Rhetoric, May 2006.
The Unsex'd Females was "well known" among the responses to Wollstonecraft and her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.Adriana Craciun, Mary Wollstonecraft's a Vindication of the Rights of Woman: A Sourcebook (Routledge, 2002, 2). One reviewer comments this "ingenious poem" with its "playful sallies of sarcastic wit" against "our modern ladies,"Ralph Griffiths, The Monthly Review 30 (1799): 103. though others found it "a tedious, lifeless piece of writing."Introduction , The Unsex'd Females, Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library. Critical responses largely fell along clear-cut political lines. Mathias, whose Pursuits of Literature had been so inspirational to Polwhele, was himself somewhat tepid in his enthusiasm for the work.Appendix I, The Unsex'd Females, Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library.
Structure and themes The poem itself consists of 206 lines of heroic couplets. There are a quantity of footnotes, to the degree that they outweigh the poem, word for word, by a considerable margin. In these footnotes Polwhele elaborates on various points which might get lost in verse and underscores the primacy of his polemical purpose. In structure the poem is straightforward: Polwhele compares two groups of writers, the "unsex'd females" of the title — "unsex'd" meaning un-feminine or un-womanly — and a second group of exemplary women writers. He also makes some more general points about feminine decorum in the earlier part of the poem.
Unsex'd females
The poem betrays a particular animus for Mary Wollstonecraft and, by extension, others Polwhele considered to be of her radical, pro-French camp: writers Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Mary Robinson, Charlotte Turner Smith, Helen Maria Williams, Ann Yearsley, Mary Hays and Ann Jebb, and artists Angelica Kauffman and Emma Crewe. Strangely, perhaps, only Hays, Jebb and Smith shared political sympathies with Wollstonecraft, and Smith, by 1798, had turned her back on her previous ideas. The others, though, in different ways, all fell afoul of restrictive ideas of female (and class) decorum. Yearsley, for example, a labouring-class poet who had a dispute with her patron, Hannah More, is accused of longing "to rustle, like her sex, in silk" (l.102). According to one editor, "one can only conclude that Polwhele attacks these women not for what they are, but for what they are not: they are unsexed, unfeminine, either because they are immodest, or unsentimental, or insubordinate. Women must do more than simply avoid setting a bad example: they must provide a positive model of chaste, sentimental, subordinate femininity."Introduction , The Unsex'd Females, Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library. See also William Stafford, English Feminists and Their Opponents in the 1790s: unsex'd and proper females (Manchester University Press, 2002) for the argument that Polwhele and other Anti-Jacobin critics were inconsistent, approving the public speech of their female allies while deploring the same activities in their opponents. Of this transgressive group, Polwhele invites the reader:
Survey with me, what ne'er our fathers saw, A female band despising NATURE's law, As "proud defiance" flashes from their arms, And vengeance smothers all their softer charms. (ll.11–14)
His remarks on Wollstonecraft, "whom no decorum checks" (l.63), stray from the literary and political into the personal; he invokes her complicated personal history and, of her death in childbirth, comments in a note: "I cannot but think, that the Hand of Providence is visible, in her life, her death… As she was given up to her 'heart's lusts,' and let 'to follow her own imaginations, that the fallacy of her doctrines and the effects of an irreligious conduct, might be manifested to the world; and as she died a death that strongly marked the distinction of the sexes, by pointing out the destiny of women, and the diseases to which they are liable" (29–30).
Proper ladies
After a catalogue of the various evils of the age, the poem ends on a positive note when it turns to a group of writers, many of them Bluestockings, who reverse the dangerous literary, philosophical and political trends outlined in the earlier sections. The approved writers, in contrast to the "witlings" (l.9) previously described, are lauded for their facility in combining morality and feminine decorum with literary publication, and comprise a number of Polwhele's acquaintance: Elizabeth Montagu is praised for her ability to "refine a letter'd age" (l.188) and Elizabeth Carter for hers to "with a milder air, diffuse / The moral precepts of the Grecian Muse" (ll.189–90). Frances Burney is praised for her ability to "mix with sparkling humour chaste / Delicious feelings and the purest taste" (ll.195–96). "And listening girls perceive a charm unknown / In grave advice, as utter'd by [Hester] CHAPONE" (ll.191–192). Anna Seward, Hester Thrale Piozzi, Ann Radcliffe, artist Diana Beauclerk, and, most centrally, Hannah More, who is set up as a sort of "anti-Wollstonecraft," complete the list of proper women writers: … round their MORE the sisters sigh'd! Soft on each tongue repentant murmurs died; And sweetly scatter'd (as they glanc'd away) Their conscious "blushes spoke a brighter day." (ll.203–206)