“Genius will educate itself.” 251higher social groupings and with conservative fi gures who came to her
salon in Portman Square in London. The 1780s saw a stirring of reform
movements across Britain, with calls for annual parliaments, liberty of the
press, and religious freedoms (dissenters were still subject to constraints).
Williams’s mentor Andrew Kippis and Wollstonecraft’s publisher Joseph
Johnson founded the London Revolution Society in 1788, just a year after
Thomas Clarkson and other Quakers founded the Society for the Aboli-
tion of the Slave Trade. Encouraged, as were all lovers of liberty, by the
early stages of the French Revolution, Williams moved to Paris in 1791
and began publishing her Letters from France, extracts from which were
widely reproduced in periodicals and newspapers and which ran eventu-
ally to eight volumes. Anna Seward commented in December 1790 that the
Letters showed “the sunny-side of the French Revolution,” though she her-
self feared the “evils of anarchy” that might be unleashed (Seward 1811,
3:44, 45).
English ladies of the late eighteenth century inherited a Protestant tra-
dition that could be understood to assert the spiritual equality of women.
This had been a contested theme since the Reformation, but at the very
least it gave them a language of spiritual self-assertion which polemicists
like Mary Astell and devotional writers like Elizabeth Rowe had employed
to powerful effect (Perry 1986, Clarke 2000a [2]). Anna Barbauld, “one
of the fi rst women writers in Britain whose infl uence on the culture met
with no resistance” (McCarthy 2008, x) was a Protestant Dissenter who
signed her political essays “A Dissenter” or “Citizen.” She campaigned for
abolition of the slave trade and reform of the electoral system, as well as
religious liberty, calling men to a higher ethic of citizenship in her eloquent
denunciation of “Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation” (Mc Carthy
2008). Liberty was understood as a necessary condition for virtue. Severe
and serious bluestockings, living chaste lives, imbued discussions of fe-
male liberty with high-minded ideals. Their task was to reform the fallen
world of men, which, following the teachings of the Bible, encompassed
charitable work amongst the poor, inveighing against the evils of gambling,
drunkenness, and other vices, and promoting images of matronly gravitas.
Hannah More’s Thoughts on the Importance of the Manners of the Great
(1788) stressed the duties and responsibilities of the elite, while her friend
Sarah Trimmer founded the Sunday School movement for the children of
the poor. Heartfelt religious conviction could unleash a torrent of activist
energy. The rhetorical connection of patriotism and liberty in the English
tradition underpinned some of this, although associations of libertinism
and licentiousness (as in the slogan from the 1768 Middlesex election of