Blushing Wives and Single Mothers; Femininity and Maternity in Wollstonecraft’s writing.

In John Gregory’s conduct manual of 1774, A Fathers Legacy to his Daughters, Gregory announces several problematic claims in attempt to produce daughters into modest, ‘blushing wives’. He asserts to “point out those virtues and accomplishments which render you most respectable and most amiable in the eyes of my own sex” (Gregory, 45). Yet his idealised, blushing female is barren one;

“I must create a system, or be enslav’d by another man’s”: Blake’s response to established institutions.

Why is liberty important to this period, and how does the concept of liberty shape the period’s writing?

Blake identifies the established and most dominant institutions of the Eighteenth-Century as both the state and the Church, institutions that he addresses in his Song of Liberty. These institutions are successful in so far as they enforce and regulate society, but this established authority is problematic.