252 Norma Clarke
the libertine John Wilkes, “Wilkes and liberty!”) made avowed religious
purposes all the more important.
There are at least fi fty discussions of religious themes in Wollstone-
craft’s Rights of Woman; Barbara Taylor argues convincingly that for Woll-
stonecraft, Christian faith and feminism were closely harnessed (Yeo 1997,
15 –35). This is not the place to examine Wollstonecraft’s religious beliefs,
but it is useful to note the importance of religion for otherwise unlikely
bedfellows amongst prominent women writers of the time. Wollstone-
craft’s highly personal vision of God brought together religion, eroticism,
and female subjectivity with a call for women’s rights that insisted that
rights were essential to redemption. Women could obey God rather than
man. They needed liberty from men in this world (since the individual man
a woman was required to obey might be foolish or depraved) in order to
achieve their spiritual goals in the next.
Chief among the unlikely bedfellows was Evangelical activist and so-
cial reformer Hannah More. A second-generation bluestocking, politically
conservative and a protégée of Elizabeth Montagu, More was at home in
high Anglican circles of senior clergy and bishops. She argued that men
and women occupied separate spheres and that on the whole women, while
improving themselves, should be content in the more limited, domestic
sphere assigned by tradition. Hostile to radicalism, she intensely disliked
the language of rights, which she mocked as “fantastic and absurd” (Stott
2003, 217). The call for women’s rights she thought presumptuous and
only little short of the complete absurdity, as she put it, of children’s rights.
She thought women, like children, needed clear boundaries: “there is per-
haps no animal so much indebted to subordination for its good behaviour
as woman” (Stott 2003, 217). All this did indeed make her the antithe-
sis of Mary Wollstonecraft, as was well noted at the time — not least by
More herself, who cultivated an image as arch antifeminist, insisting she
would not read the Rights of Woman on principle. However, her aptitude
for leadership, her organizing skills, and her reforming vision inevitably
brought her into confl ict with men in power and exposed the contradictions
of her position. When Horace Walpole’s friend Mary Berry read Hannah
More’s Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799) she
was at the same time reading Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman, and she
was notably amused to see how they essentially agreed: “it is amazing,
or rather it is not amazing but impossible, they should do otherwise than
agree on all the great points of female education.” She also knew Han-
nah More would be “very angry” with her to be told as much (Stott 2003,
224 –225). Ann Stott points out in her biography of Hannah More that the