The French Revolution stirred a bitter debate in Britain concerning the nature of civil society and the political nation. This is an original and lively study of the efforts of contemporary women writers to base a reformed state and national culture on virtues and domains traditionally conceded to women. The pre-Revolutionary call for the feminization of culture acquired new and controversial meaning during the Revolution debate with the claims of Mary Wollstonecraft and others for intellectual, vocational, sexual, and even political equality with men. But women writers of the period were faced with a literary discourse that assigned learned, sublime, and controversial genres, and public and political themes, to men. Women writers therefore undertook bold literary experiments that were derided and suppressed in their time, and which are still misunderstood. Gary Kelly investigates this hitherto neglected achievement by combining a wide survey of women's writing in its historical context with detailed analyses of three leading women writers: Helen Maria Williams, the eyewitness to the Revolution most widely read in Britain; the determined feminist and self-styled 'female philosopher' Mary Hays; and Elizabeth Hamilton, relentless 'feminizer' of supposedly 'masculine' discourse, from satire to social reform and from classics to theology.