[3] Polwhele is hardly original in his opposition of "proper" and "improper" women writers and his criticism of Wollstonecraft is focused on her troubled and unconventional life as described in the frank biography by William Godwin[4] as much as on her writing.

Women's advocacy of access to education[5] was confused with the most outrageous actions ascribed to the revolutionaries: free love, irreligion, and violent upheaval.

Janet Todd wrote that "Britain, once priding itself on being the most politically enlightened and liberal state in Europe, came to define itself in increasingly conservative, patriotic, and anti-French terms.

According to Eleanor Ty, although feminist thought had existed for decades, the women of the 1790s seemed "particularly threatening to the anti-Jacobins" because of "the outspoken claiming of their 'rights' shortly after and coinciding with the events in France that culminated in the Revolution.

The American edition of 1800 also included A Sketch of the Private and Public Character of P. Pindar, an attack on the anti-monarchical satiric poet John Wolcott (1738–1819), a pairing publisher William Cobbett apparently saw as "a marketable combination" for a presumably Tory readership.

[12] One reviewer comments this "ingenious poem" with its "playful sallies of sarcastic wit" against "our modern ladies,"[13] though others found it "a tedious, lifeless piece of writing.

"[16] Of this transgressive group, Polwhele invites the reader: Survey with me, what ne'er our fathers saw, A female band despising NATURE's law, As "proud defiance" flashes from their arms, And vengeance smothers all their softer charms.

(ll.11–14) His remarks on Wollstonecraft, "whom no decorum checks" (l.63), stray from the literary and political into the personal; he invokes her complicated personal history and, of her death in childbirth, comments in a note: "I cannot but think, that the Hand of Providence is visible, in her life, her death… As she was given up to her 'heart's lusts,' and let 'to follow her own imaginations, that the fallacy of her doctrines and the effects of an irreligious conduct, might be manifested to the world; and as she died a death that strongly marked the distinction of the sexes, by pointing out the destiny of women, and the diseases to which they are liable" (29–30).

After a catalogue of the various evils of the age, the poem ends on a positive note when it turns to a group of writers, many of them Bluestockings, who reverse the dangerous literary, philosophical and political trends outlined in the earlier sections.

Anna Seward, Hester Thrale Piozzi, Ann Radcliffe, artist Diana Beauclerk, and, most centrally, Hannah More, who is set up as a sort of "anti-Wollstonecraft," complete the list of proper women writers: … round their MORE the sisters sigh'd!

(ll.203–206) In The Unsex'd Females, Polwhele initially seems to divide women writers according to their sexual reputations, but a closer examination reveals that he positions them largely symbolically.

While this may seem a strange preoccupation to a contemporary reader, Polwhele was in fact intervening in an ongoing, and quite heated debate about the propriety of girls and women learning about the reproduction of plants, a debate that arose in part after Erasmus Darwin published an English translation of the work of Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, as well as his own poem, "The Loves of the Plants" (1790): With secret sighs the Virgin Lily droops, And jealous Cowslips hang their tawny cups.

How the young Rose in beauty's damask pride Drinks the warm blushes of his bashful bride; With honey'd lips enamour'd Woodbines meet, Clasp with fond arms, and mix their kisses sweet.

(ll.15–20) To Polwhele this is practically pornography and he graphically depicts the repercussions should women and girls be allowed to practise botany: With bliss botanic as their bosoms heave, Still pluck forbidden fruit, with mother Eve, For puberty in signing florets pant, Or point the prostitution of a plant; Dissect its organ of unhallow'd lust, And fondly gaze the titillating dust.

His concerns about propriety dovetail neatly with what Robin Jarvis describes as the "intellectual backlash provoked by the French Revolution" whereby "by the mid-1790s scientific opinions were no longer ideologically neutral.