ABSTRACT
This chapter presents selected examples of English women's writing on domestic economy, the economic dependence of married women, and women's access to paid professions. It illustrates that women around 1800 produced a gender-sensitive form of economic enquiry and developed ideas that would resurface again in twentieth-century social sciences. Mary Wollstonecraft's radical observations on marriage tie in with her less controversial suggestions for reforming female education. Reflecting the extent to which liberal ideas pervaded English intellectual circles in the 1790s, Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays' claims were radical and controversial, and drew censure from numerous contemporaries. With regard to women from the middle and lower ranks of society, Hays is more outspoken and advocates their admission to paid professions as a means of fostering their economic independence. The profession of a governess, briefly undertaken by Wollstonecraft and Mary Anne Radcliffe, indeed counted among the few income-earning and respectable occupations for educated, middle-class women.
