Print and gender: British and American women writers, 1770 to 1820

This dissertation examines the changing relationship of women to the medium of print in the Anglo-American world during a period when greater numbers of women were publishing than ever before. Just as the category of gender has been shaped by ideological forces, so have its intersections with medium of print. Women's access to steady and remunerative publication in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries coincided with a particularly volatile moment in Anglo-American print culture, as beliefs about the connections between individual authority, print, and political subjectivity solidified. In chapters on four key women writers of the period---Phillis Wheatley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Judith Sargent Murray, and Jane Austen---I analyze the authorial self-display that these writers developed for imparting their provocative ideas in a gendered print medium that was gaining new ideological significance.;The case of Phillis Wheatley demonstrates how the conventions that shaped white women's publications both affirmed and limited a writer whose race, enslavement, and talent gave her extraordinary access to contentious issues in American political life. The 1790s debate about women's roles reflected women writers' growing consciousness of these changes. Mary Wollstonecraft and her critics and defenders crafted authorial identities to reinforce their arguments about women's abilities. Their strategies reveal that the problem confronting radical women writers went beyond the increasing conservatism of the reading public. The changing medium of print was another important variable at work, with implications that I examine in a chapter on Wollstonecraft's American counterpart, Judith Sargent Murray. To examine this growing consciousness of women's literary identities is to discover reasons for the enduring resonance of some writers and not others. Jane Austen's grasp of the difficult issues that women writers faced in their sense of authorial self-presentation helped her to develop a voice that was at once revolutionary in its power to project a disembodied female intellect, yet for that very reason severed from political engagement.