Reforming minds: Women, civilization, and the ends of the Enlightenment

This dissertation focuses on a group of late eighteenth-century women writers, all of whom developed new theories of female identity that applied Enlightenment concepts of the cultural formation of character to women. I make the claim that women writers were not just more deeply engaged in using Enlightenment concepts of psychological development and social organization than has usually been recognized, but that they were also generating new theories of gender formation. Thus, my dissertation adds to the ongoing recognition of the importance of women writers to eighteenth-century literature and, at the same time, makes the case that we need to revise our understanding of the role of women in the intellectual and literary history of the Enlightenment.; In my dissertation, I argue that Britain's leading women writers of the late eighteenth century brought into existence a new identity profile for women---the figure of the female philosopher---that they used to formulate new models of gender that challenged dominant conceptions of inherent femininity. Mary Wollstonecraft herself was, for this period, the original female philosopher, and she remained a powerful influence on her contemporaries after her death. She was, however, only one version of the figure. After her death, other writers struggled to refashion the idea of the female philosopher in order to retain Wollstonecraft's powerful challenge to prevailing concepts of a sexually-based femininity while eliminating the divisiveness of her revolutionary approach to social change. We see in fiction written by Wollstonecraft's contemporaries the figure of the female philosopher emerging repeatedly in varied forms---sometimes, among anti-Jacobin writers, as a clear caricature of Wollstonecraft, but more often as an acutely intellectual female character who formulates social theories intended to move society forward toward an improved state of civilization. The dissertation's individual chapters explore how Wollstonecraft along with her contemporaries Mary Hays, Maria Edgeworth, and Elizabeth Hamilton developed differing versions of the female philosopher to articulate theories of gender that gave women the intellectual and moral qualities that, in this period, were widely understood to be the engine of progress.