Mary Hays contributed to reform writing as the second most important feminist writer of the revolutionary 1790s, after Mary Wollstonecraft. Throughout her career she elaborated her feminist views in a variety of ways, according to changing political climates, literary tastes, and publishing markets. Hays was also important to reform writing as one of the earliest professional women writers.

Mary Hays was born in 1760 in Southwark, a suburb of London south of the Thames River, to a large family of middle-class religious Dissenters. She seems to have had a modest education and little if any early contact with intellectual or literary circles, but her background did prepare her to sympathize with reform. The Dissenters, or Nonconformists, were those who chose to remain outside the established Church of England for various theological, moral, cultural, and political reasons. They were excluded by law from certain professions and public offices, and thus...