1. Outram Dorinda The Enlightenment Cambridge University Press Cambridge 1995 63
2. There is not sufficient space in this article to challenge the now fairly commonplace construction of Barbauld as anti-feminist. To pursue the question more fully, other poems and writings by Barbauld would have to be studied rather than those addressed here; most obviously, Barbauld's poem “The Rights of Woman”, which is usually read simply as a reactionary response to Wollstonecraft's criticism of Barbauld's poem, “To A Lady With some Painted Flowers”, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Marlon Ross follows this conventional reading when he claims that “Barbauld argues against women's rights because she thinks that political demand leads to misshared desire”
Ross Marlon The Contours of Masculine Desire Oxford University Press New York and Oxford 1989 217 I would want to argue, however, that a close examination of the imagery, context, and language of this complex poem suggests that it functions only ironically in its relegation of women to the non-public realm of blushes and tears, a realm which was certainly not occupied by Barbauld in her own life. As an active writer of political pamphlets and poetry she frequently created enemies in her involvement with the volatile political issues of the day, such as the demand for the repeal of the Test and Corporation acts, and the French Revolution. Although Barbauld on some occasions distanced 368 herself from the perceived radicalism of Wollstonecraft's feminism, she was infamously allied with Wollstonecraft as one of a band of “Amazonian” revolutionaries by the Anti-Jacobin, Richard Polwhele, in his poem The Unsex'd Females, because of her repeated transgressions into the political sphere and her apparent support of French Revolutionary politics
Polwhele Richard The Unsex'd Females: A Poem Addressed to the Author of The Pursuits of Literature Cadell & Davies London 1798 Within the context of the period at which she was writing, such transgressions into the political must be seen as an active gesture of support for the freedom of voice and right to an opinion in matters of politics, which Wollstonecraft claims for women
3. Rodgers Betsy Georgian Chronicle: Mrs Barbauld and her Family Methuen London 1958 41