This paper will consider the ways in which ideas of gender structured and influenced notions of citizenship in Britain in the period 1789-1825. Beginning with the dramatic consequences of the French Revolution upon British culture, the pioneering feminist writings of Mary Wollstonecraft will be examined in depth, as will the counter-revolutionary texts of Hannah More. The significance of changing notions of masculinity will also be investigated, with a particular focus upon the impact of war. A central text in this regard is Jane Austen’s Persuasion.

The paper also provides the opportunities to consider the specific literary and intellectual cultures of Scotland and Ireland, and the 1798 Irish rebellion will be a particular focus. In addition, the gendered contours of imperial activity will be traced through debates over colonial slavery and widow-burning in India.  The challenges facing labouring families in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars are a further theme traced here through incidences of industrial and political protest. Meanwhile, the emergent ideas of political economy, as in Malthus’s influential, An essay on population will serve to illustrate a growing tendency to conceptualise working-class women in their domestic capacities rather than in their role as labourers.

An investigation of the Queen Caroline affair (1820) through a range of contemporary cartoons provides a vehicle for exploring the inter-connectedness of the themes of gender, national identity and citizenship. Finally the paper examines one of the most extraordinary feminist texts of the nineteenth century: An Appeal of one half the human race: women, against the pretensions of the other half, men.… (1825), the joint production of two Irish radicals, William Thompson and Anna Wheeler.