Men and the Making of Modern British Feminism [Hardcover]

Men and the Making of Modern British Feminismcalls fresh attention to the forgotten but foundational contributions of men to the creation of modern British feminism. Focusing on the revolutionary 1790s, the book introduces several dozen male reformers who insisted that women's emancipation would be key to the establishment of a truly just and rational society. These men proposed educational reforms, assisted women writers into print, and used their training in religion, medicine, history, and the law to challenge common assumptions about women's legal and political entitlements.

This book uses men's engagement with women's rights as a platform to reconsider understandings of gender in eighteenth-century Britain, the meaning and legacy of feminism, and feminism's relationship more generally to traditions of radical reform and enlightenment.

Anyone interested in the early history of feminist contestation in the West should read [Men and the Making of Modern British Feminism]. Seeking to show how a commitment to women's rights fits into the discourses of reformist and radical culture more generally, Chernock carefully discriminates among the various arguments that were being developed in the name of reform, including Lockean liberalism, republicanism, rational dissent, Utilitarianism, sentimentalism, and constitutionalism, each of which advanced a different sense of what 'women's rights' meant or could mean and how and to what ends such rights should be affirmed and put into practice. [Chernock's] study reveals a firmly established feminist tradition, in which male radicals regularly made women's rights part of the reformist agenda. This is a fascinating and important study, which shows convincingly that nineteenth-century male feminists such as William Thompson and John Stuart Mill should not be seen as 'isolated or exceptional male spokesmen for women's rights', but, rather, that they were the successors to a surprisingly substantial clcc