‘Uncompromising politics’: Mary Wollstonecraft and Catherine Macaulay

You are the only female writer who I coincide with respecting the rank our sex ought to endeavour to attain in the world. I respect Mrs Macaulay Graham because she contends for laurels whilst most of her sex only seek for flowers. (Letter from Mary Wollstonecraft to Catherine Macaulay, 30 December, 1790, cited in Hill, 1995: 177) Introduction Catherine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft are considered to be the two most important women writers on politics and society in late 18thcentury England. Macaulay (1763–83) had achieved international fame and kudos with her eight-volume History of England from the Accession of James 1 to that of the Brunswick Line , which was a generation before the publication of Wollstonecraft's (1792) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman . Gunther-Canada (2003: 49), in her analysis of Catherine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft, shows that they advocate distinct notions of gender politics. As she comments: ‘Their texts are powerful examples of women's participation in eighteenth century debates about civic education that reveal how class privilege, gender ideology, and religious beliefs could complicate and compromise arguments for women's political rights.’ She goes on to show that ‘Catherine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft offer different models of voice and advocacy for women in the historical discourse on civic virtue’ (Gunther-Canada, 2003: 49). Peltz (2008: 95), in ‘A Revolution in Female Manners’, maintains that from the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 to the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, Britain's economic, social and political stability was in turmoil. She argues that ‘against the background of revolution in America and France, relations between the sexes – and the proper roles of each – were increasingly challenged’. Peltz maintains that the turmoil surrounding this time can be seen ‘in the reception and troubled reputation of a new generation of political voices: the republican Catherine Macaulay, the radical Mary Wollstonecraft and the conservative Hannah More’. Hill (1992: 130) describes Macaulay (but it equally applies to Wollstonecraft) as: ‘a woman in a man's world, unorthodox and [an] anti-establishment figure’. Both writers were important in the development of political thought, and Wollstonecraft was particularly important in the development of early feminist thought.

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