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Unsexed Souls: Natural Philosophy as Transformation in Eliza Haywood's Female Spectator
- Eighteenth-Century Studies
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 43, Number 1, Fall 2009
- pp. 55-74
- 10.1353/ecs.0.0086
- Article
- Additional Information
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Though love and marriage are Eliza Haywood's central concerns in The Female Spectator, the first periodical written by a woman with a primarily female audience in mind, in a series of issues devoted to the study of Baconian empiricism, Haywood turns her attention away from such concerns to the natural world. This essay aims to determine what is at stake in the Female Spectator's philosophical interactions with nature. It argues that, for Haywood, natural philosophy is a tool with which women may expand the horizon of, and thereby reshape, the sphere to which they are consigned.