"The Age of Romanticism" Response

There are many ways in which Romanticism represents political movements.  For example: Men were revered as the more "popular" poets, while women's literary work was not as studied or well represented.  Revolutions helped shape perceptions of the Romantic era, and continue to form modern perceptions today.  Thoughts on social mobility provided the literary world with many topics of political discussion.  Barbauld's Thoughts on the Inequality of Conditions attempted to bring social inequality to the forefront.  Another female author, Yearsley, supported the abolitionist movement with A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade.  Many female writers of the time like Wollestonecraft were discussing the subjects of women's rights and education.  Women were often not taken seriously in their attempts to shed light on certain political and social movements.
The most common (and repeated) form of philosophical movement discussed throughout the reading was the idea that nature is central to existence.  Barbauld's "Eighteen Hundrend and Eleven" observes the relationship between humans and nature. 
Romanticism was heavily based on the ideas of imagination, originality and the parallels between emotion and reason.  This literary movement was helped characterized by writers such as: Mary Shelley (Frakenstein), Mary Robinson (Elegiac Sonnets) and Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility).  Poetry also played a huge role in the Romantic literary movement.  Robinson's Sapho and Phaon was a popular and acclaimed series of poems.  Not all female writers were taken seriously by male authors or the public, but they still played a major role in the progression of political, philosophical and literary movements.
The novel, Frakenstein is a prime example of how women's literature was successful and widely read, but still overlooked in comparison to men's literature.  Although women writers of the Romantic period received public attention, it seems to me as though their work is more appreciated in modern time.  Our current perceptions are affected more so now by women's literature than perceptions of the time period.