Champions of the Fair Sex

In his 1792 poem 'The Rights of Woman - Spoken by Miss Louise Fontenelle on her benefit night', Robert Burns the Ayrshire poet put words into the actress's mouth in defining the three fundamental 'rights' of her sex. (Fontenelle had recently causing a sensation in Dumfries's provincial theatre while touring with her company.) The first and most 'sacred Right of Woman' was (male) 'Protection'; followed by 'Decorum', or the expectation of male politeness; and last but not least, the right to 'dear, dear Admiration!' This, Burns suggested provocatively, was a right that women shared with 'prostrated' kings, clearly alluding to the fate of Louis XVI. He concluded this travesty of Wollstonecraft (the poem's title clearly alludes to her Vindicationpublished earlier that year) with a bizarrely gallant conflation of revolutionary and loyalist discourse: 'But truce with kings, and truce with Constitutions,/ With bloody armaments, and Revolutions;/ Let MAJESTY your first attention summon, / Ah, ça ira! THE MAJESTY OF WOMAN!!!'

In all probability Fontenelle's status as an actress here (rather than as a woman) underpinned contemporary understanding of Burns's lines: after all, the notorious 'Sheridan case' of 1747 had seen the Dublin actor Thomas Sheridan prosecuted for attempting to prevent a drunken member of the audience from 'ravishing Actresses and abusing Actors', which he had claimed constituted his 'right to be entertained'. If eighteenth-century women were universally discriminated against, actresses were doubly so. On the other hand, as Arianne Chernock suggests in commenting on what she calls Burns's 'clever poem', the belief in a woman's right to male 'protection' was itself a fundamental article of the eighteenth-century gender code. The central notion of female independence that emerged in the feminist argument of the last decades of the century, she writes, was a 'hurdle that proved too much even for some "champions of the fair sex", as they equated the loss of household authority with . . . the "loss of male potency" '.

Understandably, historians of eighteenth-century feminism have focused on the work of women writers and activists, with a special emphasis on Wollstonecraft and her circle. But in this thoughtful and lucidly argued book, Chernock illuminates some of the strengths and weaknesses of malefeminism in the late British enlightenment, inevitably resonating with more recent memories of a similar phenomenon in the 1970s and '80s. Although the 'gallante' attitude revealed in Burns's poem is easily conflated with the male chauvinism of a later era, it turns out that male champions of feminist views were often viewed (at least by their partisans) as manly in the extreme. In a letter of 1792, the Unitarian Minister William Shepherd decried vocal male critics of Wollstonecraft's Rights of Womanas 'a set of male creatures who have never looked into her book', while the Scottish artillery officer and ardent feminist Alexander Jardine complained that 'those who pretend to be so highly disgusted with learned or masculine women, [were hardly] the most manly or learned of men'. As Chernock comments, 'patriarchy was for the weak, while feminism was for the virile', although the chivalric desire to rescue women from their domestic cages also often revealed a daring rejection of convention and a desire to envisage a new society based on gender equality. The uncompromising pursuit of reason (dedicated rationalists are the real intellectual heroes of this book) meant abandoning the rusty code of chivalry upheld by Edmund Burke and others, and imagining a role for women beyond male 'protection'. Yet even the rationalists didn't always manage to surmount traditional gender roles: as Mary Wollstonecraft wrote to Mary Hayes in 1792 'Your male friends will still treat you like a woman'. (The motive for Wollstonecraft's marriage to the anti-matrimonial rationalist Godwin was itself largely an issue of 'protection' in a patriarchal society.) It's one of the real strengths of this book that it's so alert to tensions and contradictions of this nature, which it treats with nuanced historical...