ABSTRACT
This essay provides background information on the phenomenon of Rational Dissent in the mid to late eighteenth century in England and the ways in which it informed Wollstonecraft’s work. The first section explores the origins of Rational Dissent as the consequence of the resistance within the Dissenting community to the laws passed after the Restoration to severely limit the influence and power of nonconformists. The Dissenting academies that were formed as the result of the ejection of Dissenting ministers and tutors from their ministries and universities played a central role in the origins of Rational Dissent by exposing their students to the more radical contemporary works of John Locke and David Hartley. Rational Dissenters like Joseph Priestley and Richard Price who attended and taught at these academies incorporated these ideas in different ways in their perspectives on the social, religious and political climate in England in the last decade of the century. These two influential Rational Dissenters are the subjects of the following sections along with Anna Laetitia Barbauld, whose status as a woman and a Dissenter is helpful in unpacking Wollstonecraft’s complex relationship with the tenets of Rational Dissent. The second half of this essay points to the ways in which Wollstonecraft benefited from her exposure to Rational Dissent and how it contributed to the evolution of her thinking. Her defense of Price and Dissent in Vindication of the Rights of Man was a turning point in her career, and it also sharpened her understanding of the structural inequities that led to the cultural and political marginalization of women and Dissenters.
