Sharon Ruston (Salford) on 'Natural History and the Rights of Women'
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street
No booking required
Thursday 23rd May, 19.40 – 21.00, Room 152, Malet Street building, Birkbeck
During the two-year period of the composition and publication of her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of Mary Shelley and early advocate of women’s rights, read and reviewed a number of important works of natural history for a periodical called the Analytical Review. Wollstonecraft is not known for her interest in science, but, in this talk, Professor Ruston showed that reading these texts helped her to formulate her feminist theory. Close attention to her reviews of natural history reveal her developing thought on issues of equality, education, and what it means to be human. On a more general note, Wollstonecraft’s reviews show that in the late eighteenth century, people were aware of the political purpose of scientific writings.
Sharon Ruston is Chair in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science at Salford, and the author of Shelley and Vitality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Literature, Science, and Medicine of the 1790 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). She is currently editing a Collected Edition of Humphry Davy and his Circle’s letters with Frank James, Tim Fulford, Jan Golinski, and David Knight.
Contact name:
Ann Lewis