The Unsex'd Females facts for kids

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The Unsex'd Females, a Poem

Title page from the 1800 New York edition
Author	Richard Polwhele
Country	Britain
Language	English
Publisher	William Cobbett (orig. pub. Cadell and Davies)
Publication date	1798; rpt. 1800

The Unsex'd Females, a Poem (1798), by Richard Polwhele, is a polemical intervention into the public debates over the role of women at the end of the 18th century. The poem is primarily concerned with what Polwhele characterizes as the encroachment of radical French political and philosophical ideas into British society, particularly those associated with the Enlightenment. These subjects come together, for Polwhele, in the revolutionary figure of Mary Wollstonecraft.

The poem is of interest to those interested in the history of women, as well as revolutionary politics, and is an example of the British backlash against the ideals of the French Revolution; it is representative of the strategic conflation of women writers with revolutionary ideals during this period; and it helps illuminate the obstacles faced by women writers at the end of the 18th century.

George Cruikshank, "The Radical's Arms" (1819). "No God! No Religion! No King! No Constitution!" is written on the Republican banner.

Structure and themes

The poem itself consists of 206 lines of heroic couplets. There are a quantity of footnotes, to the degree that they outweigh the poem, word for word, by a considerable margin. In these footnotes Polwhele elaborates on various points which might get lost in verse and underscores the primacy of his polemical purpose. In structure the poem is straightforward: Polwhele compares two groups of writers, the "unsex'd females" of the title — "unsex'd" meaning un-feminine or un-womanly — and a second group of exemplary women writers. He also makes some more general points about feminine decorum in the earlier part of the poem.

Mary Wollstonecraft

Legacy

During his lifetime Polwhele was seen as a minor figure, though prolific, and after his death he was little read. The contemporary reader may find some of Polwhele's preoccupations, particularly botany and fashion, amusing. The Unsex'd Females, however, was a salvo in a propaganda war that the participants took extremely seriously. After the revolution in literary criticism in the 1970s and 1980s when it was successfully argued that works could not solely be judged on their literary merit, poems such as Polwhele's were resurrected. They have subsequently shed considerable light on the cultural moments during which they were written. The Unsex'd Females remains of considerable interest today as a vibrant example of the politically charged culture of the revolutionary period in Britain.

Writers/artists named in The Unsex'd Females