Oxford Companion to English Literature, 842 ), championing “absolute
creative freedom” (Preminger, Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poet-
ics, 718 ), and as having for its fundamental tenets liberty and individu-
alism. Although many women found Romantic ideology inspiring, their
relationship to it was necessarily more ambivalent than men’s, since it
was never intended for them. In revolutionary France, Olympe de
Gouges, who answered the Declaration of the Rights of Man with her
“Declaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne” ( 1791 ), was guil-
lotined in 1793 for “having forgotten the virtues which belong to her
sex.”^66 Also in 1793 , the same year that the French revolutionary gov-
ernment granted universal male suffrage, it denied women the right of
public assembly and of citizenship—along with the demented, minors,
and criminals. In the United States, John Adams found it amusing when
his wife, Abigail, asked him during the Second Continental Congress of
1776 to “remember the ladies” in the future U.S. law code.^67 Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, whose name in Russia was synonymous with revolutionary
thought up to the second half of the nineteenth century, wrote in Emile
( 1763 ), his highly influential treatise on education: “Woman is made to
please and to be subjugated.... Thus the whole education of women
ought to relate to men. To please men, to be useful to them, to make her-
self loved and honored by them, to raise them when young, to care for
them when grown, to counsel them, to console them, to make their lives
agreeable and sweet—these are the duties of women at all times and they
ought to be taught from childhood” (Emile or on Education, 358 , 365 ).^68
In Russia, the “men of the forties” (Nikolai Stankevich, Vissarion Belin-
sky, Mikhail Bakunin, and others), who immersed themselves in German
philosophy, imposed the “hierarchical binary oppositions” of German
Romantic gender ideology on real women, producing, in Ginzburg’s
words, “inevitable emotional catastrophes” (O lirike, 141 ).^69 It is not sur-
prising, then, that both European and Russian women’s poetry differs
from that of their male contemporaries by focusing on women’s often re-
stricted experience, as well as by referring less frequently to the philo-
sophical concepts in vogue with men.
If we wish to expand the concept of Romanticism to include women,we must focus on the elements that women’s and men’s poetry shared.
For example, one gender-neutral definition of the Romantic lyric de-
scribes it as expressing sensuality, feelings, and mysticism.^70 While these
women poets did not write poems of overt sensuality, they wrote many
poems that verbalized feeling and mysticism, poems that could be com-
pared fruitfully with those of their male contemporaries. Such compar-
86 Gender and Genre