“Genius will educate itself.” 247ten became personal. Most adjusted their expectations — or at least spoke
and acted in accordance with prevailing notions of female decorum; but for
some, like Wollstonecraft, accommodation was not an option. A Vindica-
tion of the Rights of Woman declared the need for radical change in social,
cultural, and political attitudes towards women.
It is important to recognize that when the Rights of Woman appeared
in 1792 it was well received as a contribution to this debate. Though
some readers, like the dramatist Hannah Cowley, thought it “unfeminine,”
most did not consider it shocking or even especially controversial (Tay-
lor 2003, 27). Reviewers tended to regard it as a work on education, like
Wollstonecraft’s Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787). As such,
it was one among many in the vigorous eighteenth-century tradition of con-
duct literature, much of it written by women, of which Hester Chapone’s
Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773) is the pre- eminent example.
Conduct literature sought to guide young women in their most important
life task: preparing themselves for marriage and dependence. The virtues
of self-control were preached, as well as the benefi ts of a little knowledge
of life and books, enough to make them fi t companions for their husbands.
Conduct literature affi rmed the power relations of men and women, while
what Wollstonecraft argued for was equality; but few contemporary readers
engaged with her arguments. They were able to slide over the more trou-
bling pronouncements, such as that the “desire of being always women, is
the very consciousness which degrades the sex” (134). One reason for this
was that they were used to being addressed in teacherly tones by authori-
tative women, as the many reprints of Chapone’s Letters on the Improve-
ment of the Mind demonstrated. Similarly, Hannah More’s Strictures on
the Modern System of Female Education, which appeared a few years after
Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman, had sold 11,000 copies by 1801.
Both Chapone and More were bluestockings, protégées of the powerful
Elizabeth Montagu, whom Samuel Johnson dubbed “Queen of the Blues.”
Respectable bluestockings were not generally sympathetic to the radical
ideas canvassed amongst Wollstonecraft’s circle of writers and thinkers,
being, for the most part, keen upholders of church and state and the es-
tablished order (Pohl and Schellenberg 2003). However, to understand
the cultural context in which a self-educating female genius born in 1759
came to understand herself and her world, it is helpful to begin with the
bluestockings.