Book Description

Excerpt from Brockden Brown and the Rights of Women One cannot correctly appraise the literature dealing with the social and political emancipation of women in the last third of the eighteenth century without some knowledge of the evolution of the thought of which that literature is a record. Particularly is this so in evaluating the work of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Brockden Brown. It is too generally assumed that the first two were the originators of the social theories that are now so invariably associated with their names; and that their work in turn inspired Brockden Brown in America. Although a detailed study of the struggle for the social and political freedom of women is beyond the scope of the present work, certain general tendencies in the literature of revolt in England, France, and America, will be briefly traced. As a matter of fact neither Mary Wollstonecraft, nor William Godwin, nor yet Brockden Brown was an original thinker, for there is nothing really new in any of them. Mary Wollstonecraft in her Rights of Women (1792), and Godwin in his Political Justice (1793) and in his novels, did, however, put the arguments for the social emancipation of men and women in imperishable form, and thus established their chief claim to a place in the literature of the movement. Brockden Brown was familiar with the works of these writers, but he was also familiar with what had been done by others earlier than the time of Godwin. It can be shown that Brown was full of the revolutionary spirit before the appearance of the Rights of Women and Political Justice, and that the influence of these two works upon Brown has been overemphasized. Theories of government and social reform are so much a part of Brown's life and writings that some account of them in relation to his predecessors seems necessary. Brown's political theories were shaped by Locke and his French and American disciples. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.