A Defiant and Critical Female Voice in the Eighteenth Century: Mary Hays and the Memoirs of Emma Courtney

2017 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 201-210
Author(s):  
Hakan Yılmaz ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Female Voice ◽  
Mary Hays

scholarly journals Women write the rights of woman: the sexual politics of the personal pronoun in the 1790s

2007 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Hodson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Sexual Politics ◽  
The Other ◽  
Personal Pronoun ◽  
Personal Pronouns ◽  
Gender Expectations ◽  
Mary Hays ◽  
Analysis Programme ◽  
Political Pamphlets

This article investigates patterns of personal pronoun usage in four texts written by women about women's rights during the 1790s: Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Hays' An Appeal to the Men of Great Britain (1798), Mary Robinson's Letter to the Women of England (1799) and Mary Anne Radcliffe's The Female Advocate (1799). I begin by showing that at the time these texts were written there was a widespread assumption that both writers and readers of political pamphlets were, by default, male. As such, I argue, writing to women as a woman was distinctly problematic, not least because these default assumptions meant that even apparently gender-neutral pronouns such as I, we and you were in fact covertly gendered. I use the textual analysis programme WordSmith to identify the personal pronouns in my four texts, and discuss my results both quantitatively and qualitatively. I find that while one of my texts does little to disturb gender expectations through its deployment of personal pronouns, the other three all use personal pronouns that disrupt eighteenth century expectations about default male authorship and readership.

Disciplinarity (Embedded and Specialized Systems)

System ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clifford Siskin
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Embedded Systems ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Useful Knowledge ◽  
Mary Hays ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
True Knowledge

During the final decades of the eighteenth century, Enlightenment efforts at comprehensive mastery gave way to different uses of system—to delimited and dedicated systems and to the dispersing of systems into other forms, including the specialized essays of the modern disciplines. Their “travel” filled the world in new ways. This transition highlights our differences from Enlightenment. For Smith, who based his master SYSTEMS on “sentiments” as probable behaviors, true knowledge was useful knowledge that worked in the world to change that world. For us knowledge is knowledge because it is true. The end-of-century proliferation of systems and of print made inclusive master SYSTEMS unsustainable. Late eighteenth-century Britain is a laboratory for studying the consequences of this proliferation: instead of becoming parts of master SYSTEMS, systems were inserted into other forms. This shifted the organization of knowledge from every kind being a branch of philosophy, moral or natural, into the specialized and professionalized disciplines of modernity. This “travel” of system into other forms—embedded systems—was exemplified by Mathus’s Population “essay,” and in works, also published in 1798, by William Wordsworth and Mary Hays. Systems embedded in other forms and stretched to accommodate more things meant system proliferated into every aspect of everyday life.

The Female Sublime: Domesticating Luigia Todi’s Voice

2021 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-288
Author(s):  
Jessica Gabriel Peritz
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Women's Education ◽  
The Other ◽  
Female Voice ◽  
Domestic Labor ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Moral Qualities ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
Cultural Anxieties

Abstract This article delves into the puzzling reception of opera singer Luigia Todi (1753–1833) in order to explore how the traces left by pre-phonographic voices contain long-forgotten cultural histories. Operagoers in 1790s Venice claimed that Todi’s moral qualities allowed her to overcome her “vocal defects,” and, in turn, taught her listeners to become good citizens. Hearing vocal difficulties as a manifestation of interiority, rather than as poor training, marked a significant departure from what were then the predominant aesthetics of operatic voice. In attempting to smooth over this gap, listeners pieced together narratives about Todi’s subjectivity based on the unstable, fragmented sounds of her voice. This article argues that such remediations of Todi’s singing were subtended by two seemingly irreconcilable ontologies of female voice, one of them rooted in ancient myths of sublime song and the other born of Enlightenment ideologies of domesticity. I thus read inscriptions of Todi’s voice through a network of late eighteenth-century Italian cultural anxieties, drawing on literary reimaginings of Sappho, debates over the nature of musical skill, discourses on women’s education, and more. By interrogating the narratives about one woman’s unusual voice, I offer a new origin story for still resonant assumptions about the relationships between gender and disability, politics and domestic labor, and, fundamentally, bodies and voices.

'Sewing in the Next World': Mary Hays as Dissenting Autodidact in the 1780s*

2009 ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Gina Luria Walker
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Missing Link ◽  
Mary Hays ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Obvious Candidate ◽  
Intellectual Advancement

Abstract Mary Hays believed that "in the intellectual advancement of women […] is to be traced the progress of civilization." This essay traces the trajectory of Hays's own "advancement," focusing on Robert Robinson's tutelage from 1781 to her initial encounters with Wollstonecraft. The rational culture of late-eighteenth-century radical Dissent encouraged Hays to venture into the masculine strongholds of Enlightenment understanding, but here, as in the larger world, the "insuperable barriers" of gender obtained. Despite these obstacles, Hays forged an identity as female autodidact in the 1780s, readying herself to embrace Wollstonecraft's "revolution in female manners." Hays's initial contribution was to urge a new cognitive freedom, the recognition that women, too, may aspire to "the emancipated mind [which] is impatient of imposition, nor can it, in a retrogade [sic] course, unlearn what it has learned, or unknow what it has known." Hays's unfinished transition from sheltered puritan to Nonconformist apprentice to ardent feminist provides the missing link in our appreciation of her collaboration with Wollstonecraft and Godwin in the 1790s. I show how Hays was transformed into the obvious candidate for public denunciation as chief living "unsex'd female" in Wollstonecraft's stead.

scholarly journals Female Voice in Urdu Poetry

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 758-767
Author(s):  
Zayana Nasir
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Female Voice ◽  
Feminist Movement ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Writing Style ◽  
Poetic Tradition ◽  
Secondary Sources ◽  
The Status

This essay aims at understanding the development and struggles of a ‘female voice’ within Urdu poetic tradition through the writings of women poets of the Nineteenth century in contrast to the women poets of the twentieth-century feminist movement. The women in traditional Urdu poetry have remained a silent cruel beloved, the image offered is that of a ‘feckless beloved, endowed with heavenly beauty, reigned: fair to face, doe-eyed, dark hair, tall and willowy, a woman who vacillated from indifference, shyness and modesty to wanton cruelty. The essay is an attempt to understand the level of autonomy of the female voice in the poems of women poets through the years. To portray the development of a feminine expression in Urdu poetry the paper will be ranging from the poems of tawaifs (courtesan) of the eighteenth century like Mah Laqa Chanda, their attempts to acquire a place within the patrilineal Urdu literary tradition; the rekhti tradition where men wrote poems in a female voice, to the twentieth century feminist poets like Kishwar Naheed and Fehmida Riaz. The paper is based on Hakim Fasihuddin Ranj’s anthology ‘Baharistan-i-Naz’ which provides a brief yet important introduction on the status of various tawaif poets within the Urdu literary circle; Rahat Azmi’s Halat-i-Mah Laqa, a biographical work on the life and works of Mah Laqa Bai Chanda; and Rukhsana Ahmad’s ‘We Sinful Women’, a compilation of the original and translated works of feminist women poets of twentieth-century Pakistan. Various secondary sources have been used to understand the dynamics behind the writing style of these poets and how similar terms came to be used for portraying completely distinct themes.

scholarly journals Mary Hays, an Eighteenth-Century Woman Lexicographer at the Service of “the Female World”

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-94
Author(s):  
Begoña Lasa Álvarez
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Aphra Behn ◽  
Intended Audience ◽  
Mary Hays ◽  
Data Collector

The English reformist writer Mary Hays published a compilation of women’s biographies entitled Female Biography (1803), with the aim at providing other women with examples to emulate. she intended not only to convey her deepest convictions about women’s capacities and abilities, but also to leave her own stylistic imprint on the text. This study seeks to analyse diverse entries of Hays’s collection (Lady Dudleya North, Lady Damaris Masham, Margaret Roper, Aphra Behn, and Lady Rachel Russel) in order to elucidate her concerns as a data collector and biographer, and her techniques as a lexicographer, which are chiefly shaped by her concern about education and by her intended audience: women.

Hormone Replacement Therapy and Voice

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 607-614
Author(s):  
Jean Abitbol
Keyword(s):  
Replacement Therapy ◽  
Symptom Severity ◽  
Low Dose ◽  
Hormone Replacement ◽  
Clinical Signs ◽  
Female Voice ◽  
Fat Cells ◽  
High Pitch ◽  
Endocrine Effects ◽  
The Voice

The purpose of this article is to update the management of the treatment of the female voice at perimenopause and menopause. Voice and hormones—these are 2 words that clash, meet, and harmonize. If we are to solve this inquiry, we shall inevitably have to understand the hormones, their impact, and the scars of time. The endocrine effects on laryngeal structures are numerous: The actions of estrogens and progesterone produce modification of glandular secretions. Low dose of androgens are secreted principally by the adrenal cortex, but they are also secreted by the ovaries. Their effect may increase the low pitch and decease the high pitch of the voice at menopause due to important diminution of estrogens and the privation of progesterone. The menopausal voice syndrome presents clinical signs, which we will describe. I consider menopausal patients to fit into 2 broad types: the “Modigliani” types, rather thin and slender with little adipose tissue, and the “Rubens” types, with a rounded figure with more fat cells. Androgen derivatives are transformed to estrogens in fat cells. Hormonal replacement therapy should be carefully considered in the context of premenopausal symptom severity as alternative medicine. Hippocrates: “Your diet is your first medicine.”

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