A Letter to the Women of England

Abstract: This essay attempts to increase awareness of the scope of the letter, A Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Mental Subordination by Mary Robinson who wrote it to persuade readers towards peace, revealing the warfare threatening the heart and home of women, the historical conditions in which they worked, their subject matter and style, and the ways in which they manoeuvred rhetorically within male-dominated publishing and political arenas. In such case, the poet places the reader in the radical’s shoes and depicts the current social state that privileges the wealthy in order to reveal the conspicuous lack of equality and democracy. In this poem, Mary took advantage of her authority in domestic matters as a woman and nurturer and explicitly identified the government as a threat to both nuclear families and the national family. Women claimed their place in public discourse by publishing poetry that frequently recounted tales of fallen fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons and thus transformed impersonal casualty statistics into actual family members and real trauma. I shall discuss the letter which is a consequence of the sorrows of Robinson and all British women under male domination unjustified, ‘slavery’ and its impact in the British society. Mary Robinson’s work not only advocated a (re)evaluation and reversal of the moral codes to which eighteenth-century women were subjected to but also argued against the educational disadvantages experienced by women.

Key words: British society, Women, eighteenth-century women, poetry.