Men, History, and the Rights of Women in Enlightenment Britain

In late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Britain, few men supported the “rights of women.” Yet amongst the minority of men who did endorse women’s rights, most cited historical precedent – namely, the prominent role played by female warriors, abbesses, and queens regnant in the nation’s past – as pushing them ineluctably towards their “feminist” positions. This paper will explore how a group of male legislators, jurists, and writers became feminists through their confrontations with their nation’s inconsistent treatment of women.  It was in attempting to reconcile what they perceived as women’s elevated status in the past with their diminished role in the present, I will be arguing, that some men felt compelled to support women’s rights. As one man who endorsed women’s “right of voting” put it in 1793, in the context of surveying the accomplishments of Queen Elizabeth, “The want of this right [of voting] is peculiarly absurd in this kingdom, where a woman may reign, though not vote for a Member of Parliament.” In examining history as a vital source of men’s feminist thought, this paper has three goals: first, to illuminate how men understood feminism within a national historical framework, that is, as a set of arguments intended to further rather than disrupt national customs and traditions; second and closely related, to consider the implications of these men’s decision to ground the “rights of women” in a particular reading of the nation’s past, and the degree to which their use of British history differed from that of female feminists during this same period; and third, to rehabilitate history more generally as a critical source of modern rights argumentation in Britain, and thus to explore in greater depth the links between emergent forms of nationalism and liberalism.