Women, Politics and the Public Sphere explores the relationship between women, political discourse and political representation historically, contemporaneously and cross-culturally. The focus is historically in the United Kingdom (UK) and contemporaneously in the United States (US). The monograph hypothesizes the legacy of 18thcentury intellectual groupings that were dominated by women such as members of the ‘bluestocking circles’ and other more radical intellectual and philosophical thinkers such as Catherine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft. These individuals and groups that emerged in the 18th century established ‘intellectual spaces’ for the emergence of women public intellectuals in subsequent centuries.

While the bluestockings were formed by affluent and educated women, other more radical thinkers such as Macaulay and Wollstonecraft were not part of the bluestockings and had very different backgrounds socially and economically. Wollstonecraft and Macaulay had a significant impact on the emergence of women as leading public and political figures in later centuries. These groupings and individuals established a basis for the emergence of a range of social, political and literary movements such as the Bloomsbury Group, the suffrage movement and, latterly, feminism as a social and political movement as well as the civil rights movement.

This monograph is not meant to be a detailed and chronological historical analysis of the emergence of women within political representation, but intellectually it traces the legacy of 18th-century women thinkers, writers and political philosophers in understanding the emergence of women public intellectuals in the UK and the US. The kind of legacy established in the chapters of this book can be seen in considering the radical republican politics of Catherine Macaulay, as compared with the politics of a key Republican woman public intellectual in the US, Condoleezza Rice. The challenges posed to the conventional gender politics and normative structures by Wollstonecraft and Macaulay can be compared in political terms with the liberal equal opportunities feminism in the writings of politically active individuals such as Hillary Clinton and Sheryl Sandberg. Macaulay was more radical politically than Wollstonecraft. Both Wollstonecraft and Macaulay led more radical personal lives. The book focuses on the success of women public intellectuals in the US, as there is a much clearer pattern of women moving from high-level academic positions into different US administrations.