‘Uncompromising politics’: Mary Wollstonecraft and Catherine Macaulay
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".