‘A legion of Wollstonecrafts’: Radical Women of the 1790s

In a letter written in 1799 the writer Mary Robinson wrote: ‘It requires a legion of Wollstonecrafts to undermine the poisons of prejudice and malevolence’. Mary Wollstonecraft was an outspoken advocate of the rights of women, children and men in the 1790s, but she was not the only woman of that decade who might be called ‘feminist’. This talk by Prof Moyra Haslett looks at the ‘legion of Wollstonecrafts’ who wrote and campaigned in this period, including Martha McTier and Mary Ann McCracken.

Moyra Haslett is Professor in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic literature at Queen’s University of Belfast and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy.  She teaches courses on the poetry of the Romantic period and women’s writing 1680-1830 at Queen’s and has published extensively on these topics. Her most recent publications are the edited volume Irish Literature in Transition, 1700-1780 (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and the co-edited volume, The Oxford Handbook of Irish Song, from the earliest beginnings to 1850 (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Book online HERE