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The period after the death of Mary Wollstonecraft raises many complex issues for historians of feminism. It is generally accepted that feminist debate and discussion ceased completely at this time. The French Revolution and the wars that followed them brought a powerful conservative reaction which made any suggestion of political and social reform all but impossible. And within this context, any suggestion of the need for women’s rights or for changes in sexual relations or family life invoked developments in France and raised fears, not only of revolution, but of contaminating British ways of life with French ideas. The sense of Britain as exemplified by manliness, which was accepted even by Wollstonecraft, had as its counterpart a sense of France as excessively feminine and as a country in which women had too much power. Thus traditional family structures and ideals of masculinity and femininity came increasingly to be seen as a central and defining part of British life. Godwin’s revelations about Wollstonecraft confirmed both the anti-French sentiment and the counter-revolutionary belief that the discussion of women’s rights-was inseparable from political subversion and personal immorality, ensuring that Wollstonecraft’s ideas were not generally discussed or elaborated for some decades. But this very conjunction of France with a fear of femininity and of women’s power raised sexual anxieties and made questions of gender central political ones.
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