Although the writer Mary Hays is unknown to many today, she was an important early feminist, whose ideas were well ahead of her time. She lived in an era when women had few legal and social rights and their options were restricted by social convention.
Born in 1759, Hay came from a family of religious dissenters. Dissenters were Protestants who rejected the teachings and practices of the Church of England. They opposed state interference in religious matters and founded their own churches and educational establishments. They wanted to have a direct relationship with God, without the mediation of a priest or the Church. These ideas provided Mary with a scepticism of authority from an early age.
In 1778, Hays began a correspondence with John Eccles. Her letters to him reveal a growing disbelief in cultural assumptions surrounding sexuality, propriety and chastity. Although both of their families initially opposed their relationship, it was finally agreed that they could marry. However, Eccles died on the eve of their marriage. Following his death, Hays remained unmarried. Instead, she focused on gaining her independence, and in 1793, she made the unconventional decision to move out of her mother’s house, and to live alone in London.
In the eighteenth century there were few employment opportunities for unmarried middle-class women, other than becoming a governess. However, although writing for money was seen as a suspect activity for women, Hays was able to carve out for herself a successful career as a writer. As she wrote in 1807: “I sought and made to myself an extraordinary destiny” [1]. Her writings reveal her progressive views and she discussed women’s professional, physical, and social entrapment.
Ideas of Mary Hays
Hays felt that education should improve women’s mental capabilities as a means of improving their social and economic conditions. In 1793, she published Letters and Essays, in which she stated, “I doubt whether there will be any sewing in the next world, how then will those employ themselves who have done nothing else in this?” [2]. In her anonymous work, Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (1798), she wrote, “You may talk to women to eternity of the supreme felicity of pleasing you, though at her own expense, at the expense of her liberty, her property, her natural equality” [3]. Hays argued in her writing and letters that society did not give women enough scope to exercise their talents. In her second novel, The Victim of Prejudice (1799), she discussed the challenges that women faced in a patriarchal society: “I can think, write reason and converse with men and scholars, but I have not the talents for a legislator or a reformer of the world” [4].
Well ahead of her time, Hays believed that gender differences were constructed by society rather than based on biological differences. In The Victim of Prejudice, she wrote about female economic and social dependence and provided a critique of social hierarchy. She challenged the Enlightenment view of a man being someone reserved, authoritative and driven by reason, rather than emotion and passion. In her later works she wrote about women who had been successful despite prescribed gender roles. In 1803, she published Female Biography: or, Memoirs of Celebrated Women of all Ages and Countries. It consisted of six volumes and contained the lives of 294 women from ancient times to near contemporaries. In 1821 she published Memoirs of Queens, Illustrious and Celebrated.
Hays also made a distinction between companionate marriage and those made for convenience. Her first novel, and possibly her most famous work, was Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796). In this book, Hays draws on her desire to have an affair with Cambridge mathematician, William Frend. The heroine falls in love with a penniless man and offers to live with him as his wife, without getting married. This was incredibly controversial; free love was equated with social revolution and domestic repression, rather than upholding the political order.
Her works received many highly critical reviews from those who opposed her ideas about religion, gender, and society, and she wrote very little in the last twenty years of her life. She appears, as Terence Hoagwood has argued, to have been driven into “apparent compliance and conservatism in the early nineteenth century” by “governmental and public pressures” [5].
Conclusion
Hays died long before women achieved rights such as the vote, equal access to education, the ability to own property, access to the professions, and the right to divorce. Yet her works were significant for highlighting and discussing issues including gender roles within marriage, masculinity, female sexuality and the impact of the class system on women, as well as her belief that nurture is more important than nature. These are still issues which are alive and debated today; her contributions within the context of her time showed foresight and vision.
By Linda Austin, a U3A Shared Learning Project researcher for the Citizens Project
References
[1] Walker, G.L. (2006) The Idea of Being Free: A Mary Hays Reader, p. 318
[2] Ibid, p. 156
[3] Ibid, p. 254
[4] Ty, E. (2009) “Introduction,” in Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney, p. v
[5] Ibid, p. xxxii
Secondary Sources
Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, Pelican Books, 1977
Lynn McDonald, Women Founders of the Social Sciences, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013
Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney, edited with an introduction and notes by Eleanor Ty, Oxford World Classics, 2009
