Jane Rendall

Profile

BA, PhD (London)

I am now an Honorary Fellow of the History Department and the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, after teaching at the University of York for many years.

Research interests

I have worked on the history of the Enlightenment, especially in Scotland, and on the history of western feminism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From 2005 to 2008 I was closely involved with the AHRC-funded research project based at the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies, ‘Nations, Borders and Identities: the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in European Experience’, and have jointly edited three volumes arising from the conferences associated with the project. At the same time I continue to be particularly interested in women’s activities and writing in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, and particularly Scotland. I plan to bring together previous articles with new work in a future study of the gender politics and legacies of the Enlightenment in Scotland.

Although as a retired member of staff, I am not involved in the supervision of research degrees, I would be very happy to meet and talk with anyone working in areas of common interest.

Publications

• (editor) The Origins of the Scottish Enlightenment 1707-76 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978)
• The Origins of Modern Feminism. Women in Britain, France, and the United States, 1780-1860 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985)
• (editor) Equal or Different. Women's Politics 1800-1914 (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1987)
• (ed., with Susan Mendus) Sexuality and Subordination. Representations of Women in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1989)
• Women in an Industrializing Society: England 1780-1880 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell for the Historical Association, 1991)
• (ed., with Karen Offen and Ruth Roach Pierson,) Writing Women's History. International Perspectives (Basingstoke: Macmillan and Bloomington: Indiana, 1991)
• with Catherine Hall and Keith McClelland, Defining the Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867 ( Cambridge University Press, 2000)
• (ed. with Mark Hallett), Eighteenth Century York : Culture, Space and Society (Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, 2003)
• (ed. with Alan Forrest and Karen Hagemann), Soldiers, Citizens and Civilians. Experiences and Perceptions of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1790-1820 (Palgrave, 2009)
• (ed. with Karen Hagemann and Gisela Mettele), Gender, War and Politics: Transatlantic Perspectives, 1775-1830 (Palgrave, 2010)
• (ed. with Richard Bessel and Nicholas Guyatt), War, Empire and Slavery. 1770-1830 (Palgrave, 2010)
• ‘Scottish orientalism: from Robertson to James Mill,' HistoricalJournal, 25, 1982: 43-69
• 'Virtue and commerce: women in the making of Adam Smith's political economy', in Ellen Kennedy and Susan Mendus (eds.) Women in Western Political Philosophy (Brighton: Wheatsheaf Press, 1987)
• 'Citizenship, Culture and Civilisation: the languages of British suffragists 1866-74', in Melanie Nolan and Caroline Daley (eds.), Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1994)
• 'Writing History for British Women: Elizabeth Hamilton and the Memoirs of Agrippina', in Clarissa Campbell-Orr (ed.) Wollstonecraft's Daughters (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996)'
• '"The Grand Causes which combine to carry men forward": Wollstonecraft, History and Revolution', Women's Writing 4, 2 (1997): 155-172
• 'Tacitus Engendered: Gothic Feminism and British Histories 1750-1800', in Geoffrey Cubitt ed. Imagining Nations (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998)
• 'Clio, Mars and Minerva: the Scottish Enlightenment and the Writing of Women's History', in T.M. Devine and J.R.Young (eds.), Eighteenth Century Scotland . New Perspectives , Tuckwell Press, East Linton, 1999, 134-151.
• 'Who was Lily Maxwell? Women's Suffrage and Manchester Politics, 1866-7' in Sandra Holton and June Pervis (eds.) Votes for Women, Routledge, 1999, 57-83.
• 'Women and the Public Sphere', Gender & History, 11 no. 3 (1999), 475-488.
• ‘John Stuart Mill and the Movement for Women's Suffrage, 1865-1873', in Amanda Vickery (ed.) Women, Privilege and Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).
• ‘”Friends of Liberty and Virtue”: Women Radicals and Transatlantic Correspondence 1789-1848’, in Caroline Bland and Máire Cross (eds) Gender and Politics in the Age of Letter-Writing, 1750-2000 ( Aldershot : Ashgate Press, 2004), pp. 77-92
• ‘The “Political Reveries” of Alexander Jardine (1739?-1799)’, in Malcolm Crook, William Doyle and Alan Forrest (eds), Enlightenment and Revolution ( Aldershot : Ashgate Press, 2004), pp. 91-113.
•  'Bluestockings and Reviewers: Gender, Power and Culture in Britain , c. 1800-1830', in Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 26, no. 3 (December 2004), pp. 1-20.
• ‘”Women that would plague me with rational conversation”: Aspiring Women and Scottish Whigs c. 1790-1830’, in Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (eds) Women, Gender and Enlightenment ( London : Palgrave, 2005), pp. 326-348.
• ‘Women and the Enlightenment in Britain c. 1690-1800’ in Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (eds), Women’s History: Britain , 1700-1850 ( London : Routledge, 2005), pp. 9-32.
• with Sue Innes, ‘Women, Gender and Politics’ in Lynn Abrams, Esther Breitenbach and Eleanor Gordon (eds), Gendering the Scottish Nation ( Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 2006), pp. 43-84.
• ‘The Condition of Women, Women’s Writing, and the Empire in Nineteenth-century Britain’, in Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose (eds), At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World ( Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 101-121.
• 'Prospects of the American Republic , 1795-1821: the Radical and Utopian Politics of Robina Millar and Frances Wright', in Peter France and Susan Manning (eds), Enlightenment and Emancipation (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007), pp.145-59.
• ‘The Progress of “Civilization”:Women, Gender, and Enlightened Perspectives on “Civil Society” c. 1750-1800’, in Gunilla Budde, Karen Hagemann and Sonya Michel (eds), Civil Society, Public Space and Gender Justice. Historical and Comparative Perspectives, Berghahn, 2008, pp. 59-78
• ‘Scottish Citizens of London: Whigs, Radicals, and the French Revolution, 1788-1795’, in Stana Nenadic (ed.) Scots in London in the Eighteenth Century: Patronage, Culture and Identity (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2010), pp. 272-299
• ‘ Women Writing War and Empire: Gender, Poetry and Politics in Britain during the Napoleonic Wars ’, in Karen Hagemann, Gisela Mettele and Jane Rendall (eds), Gender, War and Politics: Transatlantic Perspectives, 1775-1830 (London: Palgrave, 2010), pp. 265-83
• ‘Wollstonecraft, Vindications and Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution ’, in Pamela Clemit (ed.), Cambridge Companion to British Writing of the French Revolution, 1789-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 71-85
  

Professional Activities

I am an active member of the Women's History Network and Women’s History Scotland, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.