ABSTRACT
Mary Anne Radcliffe’s The Female Advocate; or an attempt to recover the Rights of Women from Male Usurpation, provides a good example of the complex, sometimes contradictory, range of attitudes and discourses within which radical opinions are identifiable, and out of which more sharply differentiated radical positions may emerge in later texts. 1 Radcliffe’s text also reminds us of the particular difficulties experienced by women who wanted to initiate or contribute to public debate. Radcliffe’s prefatory remarks ‘To The Reader’ emphasise her educational disadvantages, her reluctance to publish, indeed her ‘timidity’ in this matter. Crucially, she disavows any notion of personal ambition: ‘The author, at the same time, wishes it to be understood, that she has not been stimulated, from vain and ambitious views, to appear in print, but rather from the pure philanthropic motive of throwing in her humble mite towards the much-wished-for relief of these most pitiable objects of distress’ [42]. This apologetic, defensive, self-effacing tone – sometimes, perhaps, as much strategic ruse as felt experience – is a conspicuous feature of this genre (witness the female correspondents to The Pioneer over thirty years later).
