SOURCE: Rogers, Katharine M. “The Contribution of Mary Hays.” Prose Studies 10, no. 2 (September 1987): 131-42.

In the following essay, Rogers describes Hays's writings on women's rights, comparing them to those of her friend Mary Wollstonecraft, whose approach was more theoretical than Hays's.

Over a lifetime of writing, from her Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous (1793) to her Memoirs of Queens (1821), Mary Hays argued for women's rights and celebrated their achievements. Like her friend Mary Wollstonecraft, she was an ardent feminist whose assertion of the rights of women was reinforced by the ideals of the French Revolution. Mary Astell and other predecessors had argued that women have immortal souls to develop independent of their obligations to the family and that traditional marriage, requiring cheerful submission to a husband regardless of his character and behaviour, is oppression. But the political theorists of the French Revolutionary era legitimized a more radical interpretation...