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research
Women write the rights of woman: The sexual politics of the personal pronoun in the 1790s
Authors
R. Altick
Anonymous
+35 more
Anonymous
Anonymous
Anonymous
Anonymous
Anonymous.
M. Bakhtin
D. Baron
E. Benveniste
E. Burke
M. Carpenter
A. Cracuin
N. Fairclough
J. Fetterley
L. Finke
S. Gilbert
W. Godwin
H. Guest
Mary Hays
W. Iser
Jane Hodson
C. Macaulay
A. Mellor
S. Mills
M. Montgomery
P. Mühlhäusler
T. Paine
G. Pendleton
J. Penelope
M. Poovey
Mary Anne Radcliffe
Mary Robinson
A. Vlasopolos
K. Wales
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
Publication date
1 August 2007
Publisher
'SAGE Publications'
Doi
Cite
Abstract
This article investigates patterns of personal pronoun usage in four texts written by women about women's rights during the 1790s: Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Hays' An Appeal to the Men of Great Britain (1798), Mary Robinson's Letter to the Women of England (1799) and Mary Anne Radcliffe's The Female Advocate (1799). I begin by showing that at the time these texts were written there was a widespread assumption that both writers and readers of political pamphlets were, by default, male. As such, I argue, writing to women as a woman was distinctly problematic, not least because these default assumptions meant that even apparently gender-neutral pronouns such as I, we and you were in fact covertly gendered. I use the textual analysis programme WordSmith to identify the personal pronouns in my four texts, and discuss my results both quantitatively and qualitatively. I find that while one of my texts does little to disturb gender expectations through its deployment of personal pronouns, the other three all use personal pronouns that disrupt eighteenth century expectations about default male authorship and readership. Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications
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