Women, Gender and Enlightenment

Women, Gender and Enlightenment Edited by Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor Women, Gender and Enlightenment Also by Ba...

Author: Barbara Taylor | Sarah Knott

134 downloads 3661 Views 3MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!

Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Women, Gender and Enlightenment Edited by

Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor

Women, Gender and Enlightenment

Also by Barbara Taylor EVE AND THE NEW JERUSALEM: SOCIALISM AND FEMINISM IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT AND THE FEMINIST IMAGINATION

Women, Gender and Enlightenment edited by

Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor

© Editorial matter, selection, general introduction, Enlightenment Biographies © Sarah Knott & Barbara Taylor 2005; ch. 1.2 © Introduction to section 7 © Barbara Taylor; ch. 9,5 © Sarah Knott 2005; Introduction to section 1 and ch. 8.1 © Karen O’Brien 2005; Introduction to section 2 and ch. 5.4 © Jane Rendall 2005; Introduction to section 3 © Dror Wahrman 2005; Introduction to section 4 and ch. 6.3 © Mónica Bolufer Peruga 2005; Introduction to section 5 © Carla Hesse 2005; Introduction to section 6 and ch. 5.3 © Clarissa Campbell Orr 2005; Introduction to section 8 © Harriet Guest 2005; Introduction to section 9 © Lynn Hunt 2005; ch. 1.1 © Mary Catherine Moran 2005; ch. 1.3 © Anne Vila 2005; ch. 2.1 © Silvia Sebastiani 2005; ch. 2.2 © Jenny Mander 2005; ch. 2.3 © Sylvana Tomaselli 2005; ch. 3.1 © Vivien Jones 2005; ch. 3.2 © Philip Carter 2005; ch. 3.3 © Robin Howells 2005; ch. 4.1 © Dena Goodman 2005; ch. 4.2 © Michèle Cohen 2005; ch. 4.3 © Jean Bloch 2005; ch. 5.1 © Paula Findlen 2005; ch. 5.2 © Elizabeth Eger 2005; ch. 6.1 © Ruth Perry 2005; ch. 6.2 & 7.1 © Siep Stuurman 2005; ch. 7.2 © Phyllis Mack 2005; ch. 7.3 © Norma Clarke; ch. 7.4 © Daniel White 2005; ch. 7.5 © Gina Luria Walker 2005; ch. 8.2 © Sarah Hutton 2005; ch. 8.3 © Caroline Franklin 2005; ch. 9.1 © Anna Clark 2005; ch. 9.2 © Arianne Chernock 2005; ch. 9.3 © Felicia Gordon 2005; ch. 9.4 © Suzanne Desan 2005; ch. 9.6 © Rosemarie Zagarri 2005; ch. 10.1 © John Robertson 2005; ch. 10.2 © Kate Soper All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identiﬁed as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–0493–5 ISBN-10: 1–4039–0493–6

hardback hardback

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Women, gender, and Enlightenment / edited by Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–0493–6 1. Women–History–Modern period, 1600– 2. Feminism–History. 3. Sex role–History. 4. Enlightenment. I. Knott, Sara, 1972– II. Taylor, Barbara, 1950 Apr. 11– HQ1150.W65 2005 305.4′09′03–dc22 10 14

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

2004059161

Contents Preface and Acknowledgements

ix

Notes on Contributors

xi

General Introduction

xv

PART 1

Women, Men, Enlightenment

SECTION 1

SEXUAL DISTINCTIONS AND PRESCRIPTIONS

Introduction Karen O’Brien 1.1 Between the Savage and the Civil: Dr John Gregory’s Natural History of Femininity Mary Catherine Moran 1.2 Feminists versus Gallants: Sexual Manners and Morals in Enlightenment Britain Barbara Taylor 1.3 ‘Ambiguous Beings’: Marginality, Melancholy, and the Femme Savante Anne C. Vila SECTION 2 GENDER, RACE, AND THE PROGRESS OF CIVILIZATION Introduction Jane Rendall 2.1 Race, Women, and Progress in the Late Scottish Enlightenment Silvia Sebastiani 2.2 No Woman Is an Island: The Female Figure in French Enlightenment Anthropology Jenny Mander 2.3 Civilization, Patriotism, and Enlightened Histories of Woman Sylvana Tomaselli SECTION 3

SEX AND SENSIBILITY

1 3 3 8

30

53

70 70 75 97

117

136

Introduction Dror Wahrman 3.1 Advice and Enlightenment: Mary Wollstonecraft and Sex Education Vivien Jones 3.2 Tears and the Man Philip Carter 3.3 Reading Rousseau’s Sexuality Robin Howells v

136 140 156 174

vi Contents

SECTION 4

GENDER AND THE REASONING MIND

Introduction Mónica Bolufer Peruga 4.1 L’Ortografe des Dames: Gender and Language in the Old Regime Dena Goodman 4.2 ‘To think, to compare, to combine, to methodise’: Girls’ Education in Enlightenment Britain Michéle Cohen 4.3 Discourses of Female Education in the Writings of Eighteenth-Century French Women Jean Bloch

SECTION 5 WOMEN INTELLECTUALS IN THE ENLIGHTENED REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

5.1

5.2

5.3

5.4

Introduction Carla Hesse Women on the Verge of Science: Aristocratic Women and Knowledge in Early Eighteenth-Century Italy Paula Findlen ‘The noblest commerce of mankind’: Conversation and Community in the Bluestocking Circle Elizabeth Eger Aristocratic Feminism, the Learned Governess, and the Republic of Letters Clarissa Campbell Orr ‘Women that would plague me with rational conversation’: Aspiring Women and Scottish Whigs, c. 1790–1830 Jane Rendall

Part II

189 189 195 224

243

259 259 265

288

306

326

Feminism, Enlightenment and Revolution

349

SECTION 6 CHAMPIONING WOMEN: EARLY ENLIGHTENMENT FEMINISMS

351

Introduction Clarissa Campbell Orr 6.1 Mary Astell and Enlightenment Ruth Perry 6.2 The Deconstruction of Gender: Seventeenth-Century Feminism and Modern Equality Siep Stuurman 6.3 ‘Neither Male Nor Female’: Rational Equality in the Early Spanish Enlightenment Mónica Bolufer Peruga

351 357 371

389

Contents vii

SECTION 7 FEMINISM AND ENLIGHTENED RELIGIOUS DISCOURSES

7.1

7.2

7.3

7.4

7.5

Introduction Barbara Taylor The Soul Has No Sex: Feminism and Catholicism in Early-Modern Europe Siep Stuurman Religion, Feminism, and the Problem of Agency: Reﬂections on Eighteenth-Century Quakerism Phyllis Mack Bluestocking Fictions: Devotional Writings, Didactic Literature and the Imperative of Female Improvement Norma Clarke ‘With Mrs Barbauld it is different’: Dissenting Heritage and the Devotional Taste Daniel E. White Mary Hays (1759–1843): An Enlightened Quest Gina Luria Walker

SECTION 8

WOMEN, LIBERTY AND THE NATION

Introduction Harriet Guest 8.1 Catharine Macaulay’s Histories of England: A Female Perspective on the History of Liberty Karen O’Brien 8.2 Liberty, Equality and God: the Religious Roots of Catherine Macaulay’s Feminism Sarah Hutton 8.3 Romantic Patriotism as Feminist Critique of Empire: Helen Maria Williams, Sydney Owenson and Germaine de Staël Caroline Franklin SECTION 9 WOMEN AND REVOLUTIONARY CITIZENSHIP: ENLIGHTENMENT LEGACIES? Introduction Lynn Hunt 9.1 Women in Eighteenth-Century British Politics Anna Clark 9.2 Extending the ‘Right of Election’: Men’s Arguments for Women’s Political Representation in Late Enlightenment Britain Arianne Chernock 9.3 Filles publiques or Public Women: the Actress as Citizen: Marie Madeleine Jodin (1741–90) and Mary Darby Robinson (1758–1800) Felicia Gordon

410 410 416

434

460

474

493

519 519 523

538

551

565 565 570 587

610

viii Contents

9.4 The Politics of Intimacy: Marriage and Citizenship in the French Revolution Suzanne Desan 9.5 Benjamin Rush’s Ferment: Enlightenment Medicine and Female Citizenship in Revolutionary America Sarah Knott 9.6 Women’s Rights in the Era Before Seneca Falls Rosemarie Zagarri SECTION 10

CONCLUSIONS

10.1 Women and Enlightenment: A Historiographical Conclusion John Robertson 10.2 Feminism and Enlightenment Legacies Kate Soper

630

649

667

692 692 705

Enlightenment Biographies

716

Index

752

Preface and Acknowledgements This book is the product of a research project, ‘Feminism and Enlightenment 1650–1850: A Comparative History’, which ran from 1998 to 2001, sponsored by the Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London, and the School of Cultural and Innovation Studies, University of East London, and supported by a generous grant from the Leverhulme Trust. The project was conceived and directed by Barbara Taylor; Sarah Knott was its research fellow. The ‘Feminism and Enlightenment’ project was designed as a dialogue between two vigorous ﬁelds of historical enquiry. Scholars working in many disciplines had for some years been engaged in a profound re-evaluation of the Enlightenment and its disputed legacy to modern thought. The history of feminism, meanwhile, was an expanding ﬁeld that over the last quarter of the twentieth century had moved away from partisan political disputes towards a more in-depth investigation into early feminism’s development and legacies. The connection between Enlightenment and the rise of feminism had long been recognised, but research into this relationship had been patchy and inconclusive, with little attempt to compare developments in different sites of Enlightenment. The project’s objective was to remedy this situation through a combination of detailed historical research and collective discussion. As the project developed, its research agenda underwent a signiﬁcant shift from an exclusive focus on Enlightenment feminism to a wider investigation of the gender dimension of Enlightenment. Revisionary gender attitudes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not come ready labelled as feminist or protofeminist, and conﬁning ourselves to the most obviously pro-woman elements in Enlightenment would have meant ignoring intellectual developments – such as changes in religious beliefs – which, while they could not be described as ideologically feminist, nonetheless carried important implications for women’s status. The shift of attention from feminism to the broader gender elements of Enlightenment also allowed the status of men and masculinity within Enlightenment thought and practices to be scrutinized: an important theme for any feminist study. At the project’s inception in the autumn of 1998, it involved twenty research associates, all based in the United Kingdom. By the time it formally ended in August 2001, this number had grown six-fold, with seventy-plus UK participants joined by some ﬁfty scholars from the United States, Canada, France, Spain, Holland, Germany, Italy, and Australia – making this probably the largest comparative study of Enlightenment ever undertaken. Approximately half the research associates were historians specialising in Enlightenment and/or gender history, with the rest working in adjacent disciplines, particularly English and French literature, women’s studies, philosophy, and political science. To facilitate collaboration among the research associates, twice-annual colloquia were organised where pre-circulated papers were discussed. A further conference, ix

x Preface and Acknowledgements

‘Women and Luxury’, was held in conjunction with the project at the University of Warwick in 1999, co-sponsored by the Warwick Luxury Project (director Maxine Berg; research fellow Elizabeth Eger); and a symposium, ‘Feminist Genealogies’, was organised by project associates from the University of California, Los Angeles, Felicity Nussbaum, Anne Mellor, and Lynn Hunt, and held at the Clark Library in Los Angeles in 2001. With the termination of the Leverhulme grant in the summer of 2001, the project converted into the Gender and Enlightenment Research Network, which has since run further colloquia on Enlightened masculinities, gender and Enlightened utopias, and Enlightenment and religion. A website for the network was set up and run by Sarah Knott with the help of Amy Lawson (Teaching and Learning with Technology) at Indiana University. Throughout the life of the project, an open research seminar has also been convened (by Barbara Taylor, Sarah Knott, Michèle Cohen, and Arianne Chernock, at different times) at the Institute of Historical Research in London, which is still ongoing. Timely support for writing the introduction, in a congenial setting, came from the Institute of Advanced Study at Indiana University. To all the individuals, groups, and institutions named above: our warmest gratitude. Particular thanks to the project’s research associates, especially those who have contributed to this volume; also to its Advisory Board (Marilyn Butler, Norma Clarke, Harriet Guest, Anne Janowitz, Vivien Jones, Karen O’Brien, Clarissa Campbell Orr, Monica Bolufer Peruga, Nick Phillipson, Jane Rendall, John Robertson, Silvia Sebastiani, Kate Soper, Siep Stuurman, Dror Wahrman, David Wootton); to Maud Ellman and Gareth Stedman Jones, who urged the project into existence; to Natalie Zemon Davis, for her advice and support; to Lise Henderson for late-stage assistance; to our partners, Norma Clarke and Konstantin Dierks; and, ﬁnally, to each other, for making a long and demanding collaboration a source of mutual enlightenment and pleasure. *** The following chapters are reproduced with the kind permission of their publishers: Barbara Taylor, ‘Feminists versus Gallants: Sexual Manners and Morals in Enlightenment Britain’, Representations, 87, summer 2004, University of California Press. Copyright: The Regents of the University of California. Dena Goodman, ‘L’Ortografe des Dames: Gender and Language in the Old Regime’, French Historical Studies, 25, 2002. Copyright: Society of French Historical Studies. Phyllis Mack, ‘Religion, Feminism and the Problem of Agency: Reﬂections on Eighteenth-Century Quakerism’, Signs, 29:1, 2003. Copyright: University of Chicago Press. We would also like to thank Cornell University Press for permission to reproduce ‘Suzanne Curchod Necker’ and ‘Marie-Thérèsa Rodet Geoffrin’, from Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: a Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Cornell University Press, 1994 and Houghton-Mifﬂin Co. for permission to reproduce ‘Immanuel Kant’ from Dena Goodman and Kathleen Wellman, The Enlightenment (Boston, 2004)). London Summer 2004

Notes on Contributors Jean Bloch is Senior Lecturer in French at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of Rousseauism and Education in Eighteenth-Century France (1995), and numerous articles on pedagogical theory in eighteenth-century France. Philip Carter is Publication Editor at the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He researches the interaction between manliness and social reﬁnement, and is the author of Men and the Emergence of Polite Society. Britain, 1660–1800 (2001). Arianne Chernock is assistant professor of writing at The George Washington University. She is currently revising her Berkeley dissertation, ‘Champions of the Fair Sex: Men and the Creation of Modern British Feminism’, for publication. Anna Clark is a professor of history at the University of Minnesota, and the editor of the Journal of British Studies. She is the author of Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (2004) and The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (1995). Norma Clarke teaches English at Kingston University. Her most recent book is The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters (Pimlico, 2004). She is currently writing a biography of Laetitia Pilkington to be published in 2006. Michèle Cohen is Professor in Humanities at Richmond, the American International University in London. She is the author of Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century and co-editor of English Masculinities 1660–1800. Her current project is a history of gender and education in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. Suzanne Desan is professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (2004). Her current project examines foreigners and émigrés in the French Revolution and aims to rethink French revolutionary politics, identity, and mobility in a transatlantic and Europe-wide context. Elizabeth Eger lectures in the English department at King’s College, London and is currently completing a book entitled Living Muses: Women of Reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism. Previous publications include, as co-editor and contributor, Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830 (2001). Paula Findlen is Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History at Stanford University. She is the author and editor of several books on science and culture in the early modern period and is completing a project entitled ‘In the Shadow of Newton: Laura Bassi and Her World’. xi

xii Notes on Contributors

Caroline Franklin is Reader in English at University of Wales, Swansea. She is author of Byron’s Heroines (1992) and Byron, A Literary Life (2000). Her latest book, Mary Wollstonecraft, A Literary Life was published in 2004 by Palgrave Macmillan. Dena Goodman is Professor of History and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, author of The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (1994), and editor of Marie-Antoinette: Writings on the Body of a Queen (2003). She is currently engaged on a study of the role of letter writing in the formation of modern female subjectivity. Felicia Gordon has published widely in French feminism, with monographs on Madeleine Pelletier, on the eighteenth-century actress and feminist, Marie Madeleine Jodin and a collection of writings of nineteenth and early twentiethcentury French feminists. She is currently a Senior Research Associate at Anglia Polytechnic University, Cambridge and is preparing a biography of France’s ﬁrst woman psychiatrist, Constance Pascal. Harriet Guest is Professor in the Department of English and Related Literature and the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York. She is the author of Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism 1750–1810 (2000), and a forthcoming book provisionally titled Second Sight: William Hodges, James Cook and Johann Forster in the South Paciﬁc, 1772–1775. Carla Hesse is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley and a member of the Editorial Board of Representations, an interdisciplinary journal in the humanities and social sciences. She is most recently the author of The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (2001). Robin Howells is Professor of French at Birkbeck College, University of London. He specialises in the literature of the French Enlightenment period, and his most recent major publication is Playing Simplicity: Polemical Stupidity in the Writing of the French Enlightenment (2002). Lynn Hunt is Eugen Weber Professor of Modern European History at UCLA. She was President of the American Historical Association in 2002. She is the co-editor with Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and Marilyn B. Young of Human Rights and Revolutions (2000). Sarah Hutton is Professor of Early Modern Studies at Middlesex University. Her books include Anne Conway. A Woman Philosopher (2004) and Women, Science and Medicine, edited with Lynette Hunter (1997). Vivien Jones is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Gender and Culture in the School of English, University of Leeds. Her many publications in the ﬁeld include Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity (1990) and Women and Literature in Britain, 1700–1800 (2000). Sarah Knott was research fellow on the ‘Feminism and Enlightenment’ project and now teaches early American and gender history at Indiana University. She is working on a book about sensibility in revolutionary America.

Notes on Contributors xiii

Phyllis Mack teaches history and Women’s Studies at Rutgers University. She is currently completing a book on eighteenth-century popular religion. Jenny Mander is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of French, University of Cambridge and Director of Studies in Modern Languages at Newnham College. Her areas of research cover the eighteenth-century novel and French Enlightenment thought. Her book, Circles of Learning: Narratology and the Eighteenth-Century French Novel, was published by the Voltaire Foundation in 1999. She is currently working on a critical edition of Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes and on a book on the metaphor of travel in the Enlightenment. Mary Catherine Moran works on gender and the Scottish Enlightenment and teaches in the Core Curriculum at Columbia University. She is editing the reprints of two works by Henry Home, Lord Kames: Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion and Historical Law-Tracts. Karen O’Brien is Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (1997) and of a forthcoming study, Feminist Debate in EighteenthCentury Britain. Clarissa Campbell Orr is Senior Lecturer in History at Anglia Polytechnic University. Her recent publications include two edited collections, Queenship in Britain 1660–1837: Royal Patronage, Court Culture and Dynastic Politics (2002) and Queenship in Europe: 1660–1815: The Role of the Consort (2004). She has also edited Mary Shelley’s French Lives (2002). Ruth Perry, Professor of Literature at MIT and past president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, is the author of a biography of Mary Astell. Her most recent book is Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture 1748–1818 (2004). Mónica Bolufer Peruga is a cultural historian specializing in Enlightenment studies and women’s history, both in Spain and in comparative European perspective. She is the author of Mujeres e Ilustración [Women and Enlightenment. The Construction of Femininity in Eighteenth-Century Spain, 1998]). Jane Rendall is an Honorary Fellow in the History Department at the University of York. Her publications include The Origins of Modern Feminism (1985); [with Catherine Hall and Keith McClelland], Deﬁning the Victorian Nation (2000); and [editor, with Mark Hallett] Eighteenth-Century York: Culture, Space and Society (2003). She is currently working on a study of the gendered legacies of the Enlightenment in Scotland. John Robertson teaches History at Oxford. His next book will be The Case for the Enlightenment. Scotland and Naples 1680–1760. Silvia Sebastiani is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Fondazione Firpo (Centro di Studi sul Pensiero Politico) in Turin, where she holds the Venturi scholarship. She has published widely on historical and anthropological themes

xiv Notes on Contributors

in the Scottish Enlightenment, and is currently working on a book, Race, Women and Progress in the Scottish Enlightenment. She is Editor of the bibliographical section of Cromohs, the Cyber Review of Modern Historiography. Kate Soper is Professor of Philosophy and researcher in the Institute for the Study of European Transformations at London Metropolitan University. Her most recent publication is (with Martin Ryle) To Relish the Sublime? Culture and Self-Realisation in Postmodern Times (2002) Siep Stuurman is professor of European History at Erasmus University (The Netherlands). His latest book is François Poulain de la Barre and the Invention of Modern Equality (2004). Barbara Taylor teaches history at the University of East London, and is the author of Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (1983) and Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (2003). She was Director of the ‘Feminism and Enlightenment’ project (1998–2001). Sylvana Tomaselli is a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge. She teaches the history of political theory and directs studies in History and Social and Political Sciences. Anne C. Vila teaches French at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (1998) and is currently completing a study on literature, medicine, and the cult of the intellectual in France (1700–1840). Dror Wahrman teaches British, European and cultural history at Indiana University. His most recent book, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England was published in 2004. Gina Luria Walker writes on women and enlightenment in the forthcoming Mary Hays: The Growth of A Woman’s Mind, ‘The Idea of Being Free’: A Mary Hays Reader, and with Felicia Gordon,’Intellectual Passions’: British Women and Scholarship: 1709–1899. She is Chair of the Department of Social Sciences, New School University, New York. Daniel E. White is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Toronto. He has published essays on Anna Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Mary Shelley, and S.T. Coleridge, and he is currently completing his ﬁrst book, Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent: Under the Eye of the Public (forthcoming), and beginning a second, British Romanticism and the Religions of Empire. Rosemarie Zagarri is Professor of History at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and author of A Woman’s Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution (1995).

General Introduction Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor

In 1794, in her history of the French Revolution, Mary Wollstonecraft depicted her times as a battleground between the forces of prejudice and Enlightenment: the ‘narrow opinions of superstition’ versus ‘the enlightened sentiments of masculine and improved philosophy’. 1 And it is an exponent and practitioner of Enlightenment that Wollstonecraft now appears in most scholarly accounts. Virtually every study of her intellectual career published in the last quarter-century presents her as a quintessentially Enlightened thinker: a guise that has enhanced her reputation while at the same time plunging her into ﬁerce intellectual controversy. If Enlightenment philosophy was ‘masculine’ – as many modern critics would characterise it and she herself denominated it – why would a feminist identify with it?2 ‘Vigorous minds,’ Mary Hays wrote in her obituary of Wollstonecraft, ‘are with difﬁculty restrained within the trammels of authority; a spirit of enterprise, a passion for experiment; a liberal curiosity, urges them to quit beaten paths, to explore untried ways, to burst the fetters of prescription, and to acquire wisdom by an individual experience’. 3 As an evocation of the eighteenth-century spirit of ‘innovation’ this can scarcely be bettered; but did Enlightenment itself encourage such iconoclasm in women, or was Wollstonecraft’s rights-of-women radicalism too bold even for enlightened opinion? What did Enlightenment offer to a pioneer feminist? Forty years ago, when Enlightenment was the prerogative of a few, mostly French, apostles of truth – Peter Gay’s ‘little ﬂock of philosophes’ – such questions did not arise. But over recent decades, as Enlightenment has expanded to encompass intellectual communities across most of eighteenth century Europe and parts of the Americas, women have steadily pressed forward. The Blackwell Companion to the Enlightenment (1991) contains entries on many women writers, while recent anthologies by David Williams (1999), and Dena Goodman and Kathleen Wellman (2004) include extracts from works by Wollstonecraft, Louise D’Epinay and Olympe de Gouges. The index of the Oxford University Press’s four-volume Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (2003) contains scores of references to women and women’s rights. Dorinda Outram’s excellent short synthesis, The Enlightenment (1995), devotes a chapter to Enlightenment thinking about gender, as does the late Roy Porter’s study of British Enlightenment (2000), which locates Wollstonecraft’s feminism in a general trend toward sexual liberalisation and pays tribute to Wollstonecraft and William Godwin as ‘the Enlightenment’s premier husband-and-wife team’. And Margaret Jacob – one of Enlightenment feminism’s most consistent defenders – in her brief history of Enlightenment (2001), has put debates over female education at the heart of the enlightened intellectual agenda.4 xv

xvi General Introduction

We could give many more examples in this vein, to say nothing of the dozens of recent books and articles by feminist scholars examining individual women writers of enlightened outlook, or tracing changes in gender attitudes from the mid-seventeenth to the late eighteenth century. All this is certainly very encouraging, yet it also poses some challenging questions about Enlightenment and its legacies. Enlightenment is contentious. Once an age of reason, tolerance and emancipation, today it is routinely characterised as repressive and incipiently totalitarian: a ‘conspiracy of dead white men in periwigs to provide the intellectual foundation for Western imperialism’, in Eric Hosbawn’s satiric formulation.5 Its record on women is indicted, with leading philosophes damned as misogynists in new dress while women who afﬁrm enlightened values – like Wollstonecraft – are condemned for colluding with the oppressor.6 Meanwhile champions of Enlightenment vigorously defend its progressive credentials, including its record on gender issues. Pointing to powerful French salonnières, to enlightened panegyrics to ‘female inﬂuence’, and to radical-enlightened women’s-rights arguments, pro-Enlightenment scholars depict a movement that was positive about women in theory and generous toward them in practice.7 On this reading, it is easy to see why a feminist like Wollstonecraft would have found Enlightenment congenial: but is the reading accurate? Taking our cue from such questions, and drawing on the deliberations of the London-based ‘Feminism and Enlightenment’ research project, this book explores the relationship between Enlightenment and feminism via a multifaceted examination of the gender dimension of Enlightenment thought and practice.8 No attempt has been made to impose a common ‘line’, but the book’s bias is evident, with the anti-Enlightenment position ﬁnding little support among contributors.9 Nor, however, does the pro position receive unqualiﬁed endorsement. Viewed from the perspective of modern gender attitudes, there is indeed much in Enlightenment thinking about women that appears wrongheaded and prejudicial. The distance separating the present from the past makes such critical assessments inevitable; yet it is important not to rush to judgement. Many of the themes explored below have never before been systematically investigated. Thus rather than merely adjudicating between existing views of Enlightenment, it is our hope that this volume will encourage fresh perspectives on this old, still challenging terrain. Did Enlightenment exist? Doubts have been expressed. ‘Like many other scholars,’ J. B. Schneewind writes in his magisterial The Invention of Autonomy (1998), ‘I … do not ﬁnd it helpful to think in terms of a single movement of Enlightenment … still less of anything that might be called a single project involving all those who claimed to be enlightened’.10 Opinions were so diverse, so strongly inﬂected by intellectual environments and antecedent traditions, that to imagine a unitary Enlightenment seems fatuous. At one level this is clearly right. Indeed, a focus on the gender element in Enlightenment – where ideas were not just disparate but often directly opposed – underlines the point. Yet when we examine these ideas, their spokespeople and media, on a wide, comparative basis,

General Introduction xvii

as this book does, we ﬁnd not a babel of contending voices but a world of interlocking inﬂuences and intellectual exchanges, an international network of advanced minds where, for example, a reformist argument about female education propounded by a minor French academician in 1772 could ﬁnd its way, barely a year later, into a two-volume Scottish essay on women, and from there migrate (unacknowledged) into a 1775 issue of the Pennsylvania Magazine.11 Not a monolithic Enlightenment, then, but a powerful movement of innovatory thought and practice whose tributaries and counter-currents demand, and here receive, no less attention than its would-be orthodoxies. *** Like the ‘Feminism and Enlightenment’ project from which it derives, this book is international in scope. The main focus is Franco-British, but with contributions on concurrent developments in Italy, Spain, and the young United States. (Germany is a major omission, and further research would almost certainly have taken us into Eastern Europe and the southern Americas.) The time-frame also is broad, reaching back to seventeenth-century Cartesian feminism and forward to women’s rights in the early American republic. The term ‘feminism’ did not come into use until the end of the nineteenth century – long after the Seneca Falls Declaration of the Rights of Woman, let alone the revolutionary-era treatises of Wollstonecraft and De Gouges – but its deployment here is justiﬁed given the existence at the time what was dubbed the ‘defence’ or ‘championship’ of women: a loosely pro-woman position encompassing a wide range of arguments and rhetorical strategies, from hagiographies of female worthies, to ﬁerce sex-war diatribes in the tradition of the querelle des femmes, to well-rehearsed demands for improvements in female education. Early modern champions of women were not movement-builders, they did not league together or publish manifestos; but this does not mean they lacked cultural inﬂuence. Indeed, by the late seventeenth century, as this book demonstrates, pro-women sentiment was an acknowledged (if not always reputable) feature of progressive opinion. Where were enlightened women and their supporters to be found? Enlightenment was a living world where ideas were conveyed not only through ‘high’ philosophical works but also through novels, poetry, advice literature, popular theology, journalism, pornography, and that most ﬂuid of eighteenth-century genres, the ‘miscellaneous essay’. 12 Women made a major contribution to many of these genres, particularly advice literature and the novel, while beyond the authorial scene many more women were to be found practising Enlightenment in less conspicuous ways. Conversation, reading (both private and communal), pedagogy: these were media of Enlightenment as much as the printed text, and ones moreover deemed particularly suitable for women, whose reﬁned tastes and improving cultural inﬂuence were key motifs of Enlightenment thought.13 Women as enlightened essayists, novelists, scientists, salonnières, teachers, translators, moral didacts, theologians, poets, philosophers – that is, as enlight-

xviii General Introduction

ened subjects in their own right – are therefore a key focus of this volume. But it was as objects of intellectual discourse that women loomed largest in Enlightenment, for reasons that have hitherto been under-explored but here receive sustained and detailed treatment. A number of themes stand out. First is the centrality of Woman to the civilisation paradigm that shaped both the famed optimism and the dark underside of Enlightenment. Often assumed to have been a marginal concern for Enlightenment theorists, the status of women was treated by most leading philosophes as a key barometer of social ‘improvement’. Philosophical history in particular placed much emphasis on respect for women as an index of civilised progress, while moral and educational theory focussed on women’s inﬂuence as a prime factor in the making of a polite, enlightened citizenry: ideas that were to prove vitally important to feminist theorists like Wollstonecraft, Hays and Condorcet.14 The cosmopolitanism of Enlightenment is also a central motif. Enlightenment ideas and personnel crisscrossed national boundaries constantly, taking with them revisionary ideas about women and gender relations. Translation practices; the transnational circulation of texts and epistolary exchanges; philosophical travels, both armchair and actual: all were crucial factors in the communication of pro-women arguments across the Enlightenment orbit.15 Perhaps the most revisionary theme of this volume, or certainly the one that most starkly contradicts standard views of Enlightenment, is the centrality of religious discourses to enlightened debates about gender. In Catholic as well as in Protestant settings, religion was a key site of enlightened discussion over women’s status and entitlements, while women’s own involvement in religious controversy, particularly in nonconformist churches in Britain and America, was important in shaping attitudes to female intellectualism. Taking religion seriously, as all enlightened minds did, requires us to reformulate some of our tooeasy alignments of the secular with the progressive, and to rethink our views on what constitutes a properly feminist mentality.16 A focus on belief opens up into wider issues about enlightened selfhood. Ideas about the self and personal identity underwent some dramatic changes during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Enlightenment psychology, medicine and moral philosophy posited new types of men and women, in whom gender and its psychic effects were imagined very differently from the past. The man of feeling and the woman of sensibility – vividly personiﬁed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Germaine de Stae¨ l’s ﬁctional Corinne – became key types, enacting enlightened versions of masculinity and femininity. The similarity between these ﬁgures, their shared emotional and ideational proﬁle, triggered divergent reactions in contemporaries: to some marking the birth of a brave new gender order, to others a sexist retreat from Enlightenment’s promise of universality rationality, to yet others a threat to psycho-social stability. These varying attitudes in turn had profound consequences for how both sexes were viewed politically, particularly during the decades of revolutionary upheaval. Could creatures of feeling be enlightened citizens? In an age of political transformation, might gender too be revolutionised?17

General Introduction xix

Britain’s most intransigent Enlighteners, the radical writers of the late eighteenth century – Wollstonecraft, Catharine Macaulay, William Godwin, Mary Hays, et al. – were also the most revisionary in their attitudes toward women. The links between Enlightenment, political radicalism, and feminism are some of the most difﬁcult for modern scholars to trace, given the cataclysmic events separating the mental world of the 1790s from that of preceding decades. The eruption of feminism onto the political stage during the revolutionary age is such a critical moment in women’s history that it has tended to obscure antecedent developments. But what one 1793 journalist dubbed ‘the new ﬁeld of the Rights of Woman’ had long roots in enlightened thought and cultural practices.18 Exploring these issues, the volume ends where this introduction began, with the dawning of feminism at the twilight of Enlightenment, and the legacies of this conjunction for modern western thought. *** Enlightened feminism in the 1790s was as convivial as it was iconoclastic. Mary Wollstonecraft and her radical associates loved to talk and argue, and allotted much time to these pursuits. Week after week, these women and men would meet, often in the home of Wollstonecraft’s publisher Joseph Johnson, to hammer out their new-world philosophy. The etiquette for these occasions was strictly egalitarian: as all present were deemed to possess reason, so all were entitled to the free expression of reasoned opinion, whatever their sex, education or social position. Women’s right to converse on the same terms as men was assumed, and – if the lively exchanges recorded in William Godwin’s diary and correspondence are any indication – vigorously exploited. Subsequent radicalisms have displayed similar enthusiasm for open, non-hierarchical discussion. Second-wave feminism, where many of those involved in the ‘Feminism and Enlightenment’ project cut their intellectual teeth, was even more uncompromising in its commitment to intellectual democracy than 1790s radicalism. During the ﬁfteen-plus years of Women’s Liberation, a host of educational forums – study groups, day-schools, evening classes, conferences – mushroomed, usually with little or no formal institutional support. The ethos of these gatherings was ﬁercely egalitarian: all participants were to be heard and respected, without regard for intellectual credentials. Expertise, where it existed, was to be freely shared. Discussion in these settings was usually well-informed and rigorous, and the results can be seen all around us today, having remoulded much of our contemporary thinking. The integration of women’s history – now more often gender history – into twenty-ﬁrst-century universities may seem to make such extra-institutional initiatives redundant. Yet this integration has been at a cost. Competitive pressure inside and between the universities has worked against the collaborationist ethos. Conferences today are often talent contests, showcasing star scholars while junior scholars struggle to make their mark. The sense of communal endeavour that characterised the engaged scholarship of the 1970s –

xx General Introduction

and the 1790s – is much diminished. The ‘Feminism and Enlightenment’ project was designed with the aim of re-stimulating such collaborative practices. The realisation of this ambition in its colloquia and other discussion forums, thanks to its research associates, was its ﬁrst achievement; this book is its second. The book is organised into two parts. Part One, ‘Women, Men and Enlightenment’ examines theoretical developments related to gender – with special emphasis on the revisionary content of Enlightenment history and pedagogy – and the role claimed by women intellectuals, testing what Karen O’Brien terms the ‘selfconscious gender progressivism’ of Enlightenment. Part II, ‘Feminism, Enlightenment, and Revolution’ investigates the contribution of Enlightenment principles to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century feminism and the impact of late eighteenth-century national, revolutionary and democratic politics on enlightened feminist demands and aspirations. A pair of conclusions reﬂect the two sides of the feminist–Enlightenment connection: the ﬁrst from the perspective of Enlightenment historiography; the second through the lens of modern feminist philosophy.

Notes 1. Mary Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution, 1794, in M. Butler and J. Todd, eds, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1989), vol. 6, pp. 6–7. 2. Wollstonecraft’s positive use of ‘masculine’ was common among eighteenth-century women writers, to whom it indicated virtues – strength, resilience, potency – characterising superior minds of both sexes. For further discussion of this, see Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 48–51. 3. Mary Hays, ‘Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft’, The Annual Necrology, 1797–1798 (1800), p. 411. 4. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York and London: Norton, 1966), ch. 1; John W. Yolton et al., The Blackwell Companion to the Enlightenment (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); David Williams, ed., The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Dena Goodman and Kathleen Wellman, eds, The Enlightenment (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin, 2004); A C Kors, ed., Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, four vols (Oxford University Press, 2003); Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 4; Margaret Jacob, The Enlightenment: A Brief History With Documents (Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2001). See also Isaac Kramnick, ed., The Portable Enlightenment Reader (New York: Penguin, 1995), pp. 560–628; Hans Erick Bodeker and Lieselotte Steinbrugge (eds), Conceptualising Woman in Enlightenment Thought (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 2001), and Siep Stuurman, François Poulain de la Barre and the Invention of Modern Equality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). 5. Eric Hobsbawm, On History (1997; London: Abacus Books, 1998), p. 336. For an excellent discussion of counter-Enlightenment from the 1780s to the present, including recent feminist criticism of Enlightenment, see Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, ‘Enlightenment Studies’, in Kors, Encyclopedia of Enlightenment, 4: 418–430. 6. For negative evaluations of Wollstonecraft as an Enlightenment thinker see, inter alia, Timothy J. Reiss, ‘Revolution in Bounds: Wollstonecraft, Women and Reason’, in L Kauffman, ed., Gender and Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), Moira Gatens, ‘The

General Introduction xxi

7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Oppressed State of My Sex”: Wollstonecraft on Reason, Feeling and Equality’, in M. L. Shanley and C. Pateman, Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 6–128; Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). For such positive evaluations, see the works by Porter and Jacob listed above, and also Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: a Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), chs 2–4; Pauline Johnson, ‘Feminism and the Enlightenment’, Radical Philosophy 63, 1993; Kate Soper, ‘Naked Human Nature and the Draperies of Custom’ in Eileen Yeo (ed.) Mary Wollstonecraft and 200 Years of Feminism (London: Rivers Oram, 1997), pp. 207–221; Jonathan I Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), ch. 4; Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 1700–1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 27–30. For the original agenda of the project and a mid-way assessment, see Barbara Taylor, ‘Feminism and Enlightenment 1650–1850’, History Workshop Journal 47 (1999), 261–72; Sarah Knott, Mo´nica Bolufer Peruga, Jenny Mander, Nicholas Phillipson, Vivien Jones, Siep Stuurman and Barbara Taylor, ‘Considering “Feminism and Enlightenment”’, Women: A Cultural Review 12 (2001), 236–48. See also the preface to this volume. For a fuller discussion of this, see Kate Soper’s conclusion to this volume. J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 8. For further discussion of this, see Dror Wahrman’s introduction to Section 3 of this volume, and John Robertson’s conclusion. For further discussion of this, see Dror Wahrman’s introduction to Section 3 of this volume, and John Robertson’s conclusion. For exactly this trajectory, see Mary Catherine Moran, ‘The Progress of Women’, History Workshop Journal, 59, spring 2005. See, for example, Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Harvard University Press, 1982); Roy Porter, Enlightenment, ch. 4; Carla Hesse, The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (Princeton University Press, 2001), John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination:English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (HarperCollins, 1997), part 2; Norma Clarke, The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters (Pimlico, 2004); Elizabeth Eger et al. (eds), Women, Writing, and the Public Sphere, 1730–1830 (Cambridge, 2000); Thomas Munck, The Enlightenment (Arnold, 2000), chs 3–5. See, for example, Lawrence E. Klein, ‘Gender, Conversation and the Public Sphere in Early Eighteenth-Century England’, in J. Still and M. Worton, eds, Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices (Manchester University Press, 1993); John Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse: Sensibility and Community in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh, 1987); Clarke, Rise and Fall; Goodman, Republic of Letters; Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere : An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (trans. Thomas Burger, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989); Sylvia Harcstack Myers, The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in EighteenthCentury England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760–1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). These issues are discussed in the essays below by Moran, Taylor, Sebastiani, Tomaselli, and Mander. For these issues, see especially the essays by Mander, Findlen, Orr, Peruga, Gordon, and Knott. The religious dimension of Enlightenment thinking on women is explored in Section 7. For these issues, see the essays in Sections 3 and 9. Critical Review, 4 (1792), p. 390.

This page intentionally left blank

Part I Women, Men, Enlightenment

This page intentionally left blank

SECTION 1 SEXUAL DISTINCTIONS AND PRESCRIPTIONS Introduction Karen O’Brien

The issue of the ‘distinction of sex’ was central to the Enlightenment attempt to understand the role of women in contemporary society, yet it was also one of the areas of most fundamental disagreement. On the one hand, the period from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries witnessed the development of a medical science which emphasised the enormous extent of physiological and psychological difference between men and women. On the other hand, Enlightenment sociologists dwelled upon the greater social and intellectual convergence between the sexes brought about by historical progress. Radical thinkers like Mary Wollstonecraft were suspicious of this idea of convergence, seeing it as a form of managed and veiled inequality; her wish was to see the distinction of sex altogether ‘confounded’ in society as far as biologically possible. Debates over the social convergence and natural differences between the sexes were themselves versions of the old question about the extent to which woman was to be understood primarily as a natural or as a social category, and they had a particularly pronounced effect on attitudes towards women’s intellectual endeavours. All three of the articles in this section explore the tension between the naturalist and sociological tendencies of Enlightenment gender debate with this question of women’s intellectual potential to the fore. Anne C. Vila’s essay on ‘Marginality, Melancholy and the Learned Woman’ explores the trend, in later eighteenth-century France, towards pathologising, rather than simply ridiculing, the learned woman. This trend stemmed from a long established suspicion of isolated, monkish scholars; a suspicion which, although particularly acute in the female case, was often extended to male writers. Male philosophes responded by rebranding themselves as ‘hommes de bien’, practically minded, socially aware intellectuals. This earlier parity of (dis)esteem for male and female intellectuals was complicated, in the late eighteenth century, by the rise of the dimorphic physiological model of human nature, one which emphasised the particular unﬁtness of the female constitution for mental labour. If women’s intellectual activity had often been regarded in the past as a distraction from their domestic and social duties, it was now also seen as a deviation from their biological nature, one which could lead to all sorts of undesirable medical symptoms. Male intellectuals, even rebranded 3

4 Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions

ones, were not exempt from similar accusations of physical debility, but they, at least, attracted compensatory ascriptions of troubled ‘genius’. It is in the context of these medicalised discourses of intellect and genius that Vila reinterprets Germaine de Stael’s novel Corinne (1807), and revisits the vexed question of Stael’s gender politics. Vila argues that Corinne, the eponymous heroine and artistic genius of the novel, conforms to the type of melancholic male genius which Stael had ﬁrst identiﬁed in Rousseau. Although female, Corinne is exempted by Stael from the usual pathologies of female artists, and diagnosed instead as possessing a highly exceptional, non-gender speciﬁc genius syndrome – the very syndrome which caused Rousseau so much inward suffering. Read this way, the melancholic, brilliant Corinne can be seen, not as an admonitory ﬁgure for female artistic or intellectual endeavour, nor yet as a shining example of women’s artistic potential. She is, rather, an explosive, ultimately tragic combination of ordinary femininity and genius. Vila gives a persuasive and expert reading of Stael’s novel as a work which leaves early nineteenth-century gender categories undisturbed, whilst nevertheless presenting a sensationally female embodiment of contemporary medical accounts of the nature of genius. Vila’s reading necessarily sidesteps the more sociological aspects of Stael’s work, and in particular the links made between Corinne’s melancholy and the national characteristics which come from her dual English and Italian heritage. For the novel also contains a strangely pathologised reading of national character and national liberty as it is allegorised in the character of Corinne’s English lover Lord Nelvil and in the contradictory AngloItalian ﬁgure of Corinne herself. This side of the novel is insightfully explored in Caroline Franklin’s chapter on ‘Gender Roles and Post-Revolutionary Patriotism’. If Nelvil partly represents the English idea of liberty embodied in law and civil order, Corinne stands for Italy as the subjugated land of art. Through the ﬁgure of Corinne, Stael deploys the Enlightenment idea of woman as the (politically disempowered) bearer of culture and civilisation, but with the radical twist that, in conditions of oppression or colonialism, her voice and actions may take on a more potent political symbolism than those of her fellow men. An attempt to synthesise these two readings of Corinne would further illuminate the early nineteenth century categorical contradictions inherent in the analysis of femininity. As Stael herself commented in On Literature (1800), women ‘belong neither to the natural nor to the social order’. We need to know more about the interaction between medical/physiological models of the feminine and moral and sociological discourse. How far was it the case, as Lieselotte Steinbrugge argued in her valuable study, The Moral Sex: Woman’s Nature in the French Enlightenment (1992), that medical and anthropological models of innate female difference shaped and dominated the social and historical understanding of femininity? The relationship between these different spheres of discourse is no more straightforward than in our own time when socio-biology, neuroscience and genetics have offer us sharply differentiated accounts of male and female nature which have nevertheless not substantially modiﬁed prevailing normative assumptions about the intellectual and functional equality of the sexes. The

Introduction 5

Enlightenment, too, was wedded to a gender functionalism of sorts: one in which accounts of the nature and role of women were strongly driven by ideas about the kinds of economic, social and political function which states required of them. Montesquieu’s account of the different kinds of women required by different kinds of polity is certainly the best example of this kind of functional view of femininity. Yet Rousseau, also, was as much interested in the effects as in the biological origins of sexual difference, and in particular in the ways in which those relatively minor innate differences could be nurtured and accentuated for the good of the political realm. It is the tension, in Enlightenment thinking, between functionalist and biologically essentialist ideas of femininity which placed the conduct book on the front line of gender debate. A person offering advice to women in this format had to negotiate between what he or she thought a woman was, and what society required of her. In her chapter ‘Between the Savage and the Civil’, Mary Catherine Moran gives an illuminating account of a best-selling conduct book, John Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (1774). Known to most of us principally through Mary Wollstonecraft’s excoriating attack in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the work’s real originality and signiﬁcance becomes clear in Moran’s balanced assessment. She reveals its roots, not only the conduct book tradition, but in the Scottish Enlightenment science of man. Gregory, as well as being a Scottish moralist and concerned parent, was also himself something of a natural historian of the human species. What lay behind his advice and prescriptions was a naturalistic account of the progress of man from savagery to reﬁnement. For him, women were both the embodiment of the natural against which the evolution of man might be measured, and the repository of civilisation. There is a palpable tension in Gregory’s work between what Moran describes as the ‘simultaneous naturalization and historicization of the female sex’, and his concern with the loss of naturalness entailed by the civilising process. Although Gregory does not advocate a return to man’s ‘natural’ state of society, he frequently invokes the natural as the yardstick for some of civilisation’s worst distortions: the straight-lacing of women, for example, or the swaddling of infants. Gregory’s double perception of civilisation as, at once, a partial distortion and also a positive effect of the natural energy and sociability of women lies behind the infuriating contradictoriness of his advice to his daughters: his anxious, conventional warnings that they should mask their intelligence, ideas and desires in deference to public suspicion of women of ‘great parts and […] cultivated understanding’, and his insistence that they should nevertheless remain true to their natural feelings. If Gregory’s work exempliﬁes the ‘paradoxes involved in the Enlightenment depiction of woman as both the embodiment of the natural and the repository of civilisation’, Wollstonecraft’s writing attempts to show how those very paradoxes stem from a covert and concerted male attack on even the remote possibility of female equality. In her chapter on ‘Feminists versus Gallants: Manners and Morals in Enlightenment Britain’, Barbara Taylor explores a particular bugbear of Wollstonecraft, male ‘gallantry’, in a way which greatly illuminates her sophisticated

6 Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions

critique of broader Enlightenment ideas of femininity. In the later eighteenth century, gallantry, as Taylor rightly points out, represented, not the old-fashioned, patronising courtesy of older men towards young women, but a modernised set of rules for sexual interaction. Dismissed by Shaftesbury and other commentators in the early eighteenth century as French, foppish and effeminate, the notion was rehabilitated by the mid-century by philosophers such as David Hume who declared it (of all things) ‘natural in the highest degree’. Gallantry acquired new historical burnish from the 1770s, according to Taylor, when it became associated with the system of deference to the virtue, modesty and superior moral sensitivity of the ladies known as ‘chivalry’. The qualities deferred to took on an increasingly normative aspect; social, domestic and religious sensitivities elicited male esteem; erudition and argumentativeness broke the rules of chivarlous engagement. Taylor cites James Fordyce’s brother David as a Scottish example of the growing contemporary hostility towards bookish women, a hostility which, as Jane Rendall shows in her chapter on later eighteenth- to early nineteenth-century Scotland, set the tone in the social circles of a number of the Edinburgh reviewers. Taylor’s main question is a far-reaching one: ‘Why did a renovated chivalry … achieve such ascendancy among eighteenth-century British progressives?’ She concurs with the most recent historians in seeing a loosening, rather than a hardening, of gender distinctions and divisions in the late eighteenth century. She therefore interprets the new ‘gallantry’ as a covert backlash, an attempt to shore up traditional distinctions between the sexes by redescribing them in terms more ﬂattering to the female sex. Wollstonecraft saw the gallantry game for what it was, as did other feminists such as Mary Hays and Helen Maria Williams. Yet, outside the scope of this essay, it is striking how many other (not easily placated or patronised) women saw possibilities and feminine resources in revived chivalry, among them Elizabeth Montagu, Susannah Dobson (the translator of seminal texts in medieval history) Clara Reeve and Hannah More. Lexically speaking it is hard to ﬁnd any positive uses of the word ‘gallantry’ by women writers, and it never shed its connotations of Frenchiﬁed insincerity or strategic seductiveness. Yet the word chivalry was often a different matter. Chivalry, as it was understood in the later eighteenth century, embedded respect for women within a wider system of morality, public responsibility and philanthropy, and, as such, provided a language of shared social concern for both men and women. Moreover, the notion of chivalry served to complicate, and even, to some extent, disaggregate, Enlightenment narratives of progress by celebrating a gothic cultural system which had declined with the coming of the commercial age, and now stood in need of revival. The fact that, in the sphere of gender relations, chivalry was little more than gallantry masquerading as a sort of nostalgic gentlemanliness was not lost on Wollstonecraft, but the similarities between gallantry and chivalry still needed a clearer statement. In an essay of 1826, John Stuart Mill wrote, with an apparent air of discovery, that ‘there is one feature in the chivalrous character which has yet to be noticed; we mean its gallantry. And that we shall think it necessary to examine more fully, because we are persuaded that nine-tenths of the admiration of chivalry are grounded upon it’. Mill goes on to

Introduction 7

doubt openly ‘whether these fopperies contributed much to the substantial happiness of women, or indicated any real solicitude for their welfare’. His dismissiveness is refreshing and iconoclastic, and clearly presented as such. Looking back from this point, it enables us to see how far Wollstonecraft was ahead of her time in seeing that the self-conscious gender progressivism of the Enlightenment was never more insidious than when decked out in historical costume. She would certainly have appreciated Lucy Aikin’s warning, in her Epistles on Women (1810): ‘Learn, thoughtless woman, learn his arts to scan,/ And dread that fearful portent, kneeling man!’ Wollstonecraft could not have foreseen the extent to which, in the following century, a new ceremonious, deferential, patronising tone in men’s address to women would take on a self-consciously English character, or the ways in which that historical costume would become, in the following century, a kind of national dress. But she would have been appalled.

1.1 Between the Savage and the Civil: Dr John Gregory’s Natural History of Femininity Mary Catherine Moran

Professor [Adam] Ferguson told me that he was present the second time Dr. Gregory attended the Poker [Club], when, enlarging on his favourite topic, the superiority of the female sex, he was so laughed at and run down that he never returned. (Alexander Carlyle, Autobiography of Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk, 1722–18051) Dr John Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters was easily the best-selling female conduct book of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, both in Britain and America. First published posthumously in March 1774, the work was an immediate and enduring success, selling 6000 copies between 1774 and 1776 alone,2 and running through scores of reprints well into the nineteenth century, with an edition published as late as 1877. It was frequently excerpted in periodicals and miscellanies, was often published alongside Hester Chapone’s Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773), and sometimes served as a companion piece to Lord Chesterﬁeld’s Letters to His Son (1774). The Legacy also ran through dozens of American editions and was translated into French, Italian and Russian. It is little wonder, then, that the London-based (but Scottish-born) printer William Strahan might view the success of the work as something of a standard, against which it would be unreasonable to hold everything that he and his partners published: commenting on the disappointing sales of another book, Strahan reminded his Edinburgh partner William Creech that, ‘We cannot expect everything to ﬂy like Gregory’s Legacy’.3 Nor is it surprising, given this enormous popularity, that the Legacy is now seen as the paradigmatic eighteenth-century female conduct book: Gregory is frequently mentioned in passing as a typical eighteenth-century moralist, while his Legacy is often cited brieﬂy or parenthetically as an obvious example of the period’s conventional pieties surrounding women and gender. If Gregory’s Legacy is most often invoked as a byword for conservative male didacticism, those who have looked more closely at the text tend to characterize it as a ‘seemingly’ liberal and enlightened work. Compared with James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women (1765), writes Janet Todd, Gregory’s Legacy 8

Dr John Gregory’s Natural History of Femininity 9

‘seems positively enlightened. His tone is less assured, his attitude less complacent’. Yet Gregory’s ‘seeming enlightenment’, she continues, ‘only goes so far, and he is soon referring to women’s “natural softness and sensibility”’.4 For Vivien Jones, to cite another example, the point of comparison is Thomas Gisborne’s Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (1797): ‘Compared with Gisborne’s stern Evangelicalism, Gregory seems to represent a liberal and enlightened version of masculinity’. But if Gregory’s view of women initially ‘seems almost Wollstonecraftian’, argues Jones, ‘his assumptions about sexual difference begin to undermine the egalitarian implications of “companions and equals”’, for instead of viewing women as equals, Gregory sees them as ‘designed to soften our hearts and polish our manners’. 5 Beneath its seeming enlightenment, then, the work reveals a less than liberal concern to deﬁne and demarcate a properly female nature. This chapter places the ‘seemingly enlightened’ Legacy within the context of the Enlightenment’s interest in the role of women in the natural history of the species. More speciﬁcally, I seek to demonstrate that the Legacy’s assumptions about female nature are best understood when placed alongside the account of human nature that Gregory offered in his earlier Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with Those of the Animal World (1765). Gregory himself asserted the link between the two works when, in the Preface to his Legacy, he referred his daughters to ‘a little treatise of mine just published’. In this ‘little treatise’ (that is, the lengthy Comparative View), Gregory explains, he had already outlined ‘your natural character and place in society’, from which ‘there arises a certain propriety of conduct peculiar to your sex’ that is the immediate concern of the Legacy.6 Gregory’s own understanding of the connection between his two works points us toward an important Enlightenment context that has largely been obscured by the tendency to interpret the remarkable proliferation of writings on female conduct as a relatively minor chapter in the history of the rise of the novel. Recovering this context, I will argue, requires attending to Gregory’s engagement with Enlightenment accounts of human progress, his reliance on Scottish Enlightenment theories of sociability and his anxiety over the threat of Enlightenment scepticism. By interpreting Gregory’s notion of female nature in light of his account of the natural history of species, this chapter proposes that Gregory considered the female sex as the human standard against which to measure the progress of man. My aim here is not to recuperate Gregory as a proto-feminist, for Gregory’s belief in the superior humanity of women did not imply any sort of commitment to granting them legal and political equality. Instead, I want to highlight some of the paradoxes involved in the Enlightenment depiction of woman as both the embodiment of the natural and the repository of civilization. The association of women with nature is of course an ancient one: according to a conception that can be traced back to Aristotle, it is the identiﬁcation of the female with the natural which marks women as inferior, for it is precisely the extent to which he escapes from the realm of necessity that man is fully human. The association of women with civilization, on the other hand, was an eighteenth-century idea, the

10 Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions

novelty of which can too easily be overlooked in part because the idea was so endlessly rehashed and recycled as to achieve the status of a truism. Eighteenthcentury attempts to write the natural history of the species insist that man is an animal like any other animal, while placing his progress within the overarching framework of the progress from savagery to civilization. A focus on the civilizing role assigned to woman both as agents of culture and as bearers of the species can shed light on the emergence of the notion of woman as morally superior – a notion that has been linked to both to a conﬁning ideology of domesticity and to the emergence of feminism on the basis of a peculiarly feminine mission to moralize the public sphere.

Nature versus artiﬁce: an eighteenth-century context I do not want to make you anything: I want to know what Nature has made you, and to perfect you on her plan. (John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters7) Readers of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman may recall that Gregory’s Legacy is one of the works that she singles out for censure in her treatment of ‘Writers Who Have Rendered Women Objects of Pity, Bordering on Contempt’, and, as Margaret Hunt has noted, ‘Dr. Gregory is usually encountered today by way of [Wollstonecraft’s] scathing critique’.8 Wollstonecraft had in fact included extracts from the Legacy in her miscellany The Female Reader (1789), and even in her Vindication she began her critique of Gregory’s book by acknowledging its ‘many attractions’. Gregory’s Legacy is rendered in ‘an easy familiar style [that] is particularly suited to the tenor of his advice’, while his ‘respect for the memory of a beloved wife’ diffuses the work with a ‘melancholy tenderness’. Indeed, such ‘paternal solicitude’ pervades Dr. Gregory’s Legacy to His Daughters that Wollstonecraft ‘[enters] on the task of criticism with affectionate respect’. It is these very attractions, however, which make the work so dangerous, for they serve to disguise the ‘system of dissimulation’ that Gregory recommends. As Wollstonecraft reads him, Gregory is torn between ‘two objects’, between respect for his daughters and respect for the opinion of the world. He wants to make his daughters amiable, but ‘fears lest unhappiness should only be the consequence’ of such a plan. He thus hints at, only to stop short of endorsing, ‘sentiments that might draw them out of the track of common life’ because he cannot or will not ‘[enable] them to act with consonant independence and dignity’. Instead, he comes down on the side of worldliness, emphasizing ‘seemliness’ and ‘starched rules of decorum’ over ‘something more substantial’. Decorum, Wollstonecraft complains, ‘is to supplant nature, and banish all simplicity and variety of character out of the female world’. Signiﬁcantly, Wollstonecraft registers this move from the substantial to the superﬁcial, or from nature to decorum, in terms of a shift in voice: ‘He checks the natural ﬂow of his thoughts’, she explains, and ‘a degree of concise elegance conspicuous in many passages ... disturbs [the work’s] sympathy’, so that ‘we pop on the author when

Dr John Gregory’s Natural History of Femininity 11

we only expected to meet the – father’.9 While Gregory as father is easy, spontaneous, and ‘natural’, as he recommends dissimulation Gregory writes as an author and his language becomes correspondingly artiﬁcial and insincere. Modern critics have followed Wollstonecraft in discovering a dual character to the work. As some commentators have noted, Gregory’s tone is strikingly different from the attitude of condescension which characterizes so much of the period’s male-authored female conduct literature: unlike such authors as James Fordyce and John Bennett, who adopt a paternalistic stance that alternates between stern admonition and unctuous ﬂattery, Gregory addresses his daughters as rational beings and equals – even as he informs them that they cannot expect to be considered as such by most other men. Some of his precepts, moreover, have struck the modern reader as ‘unusually liberal’.10 When Gregory informs his daughters that a married state will make them ‘the most useful members of society’, for example, he adds that since he is ‘not enough of a patriot to wish you to marry for the good of the public’ he therefore plans to leave his daughters in ‘independent circumstances’, so that they will never be tempted to ‘relinquish the ease and independence of a single life, to become the slaves of a fool or a tyrant’s caprice’.11 At the same time, however, in pointing out ‘those virtues and accomplishments which render you most respectable and most amiable in the eyes of my own sex’, 12 Gregory refers the question of female conduct to the desires of men and in so doing, does indeed suggest the need for a good deal of dissimulation. In recommending ‘exercises’ that will give ‘vigour to your constitutions, and a bloom to your complexions’, for instance, Gregory cautions that good health is a blessing that must be enjoyed ‘in grateful silence’: ‘We so naturally associate the idea of female softness and delicacy with a correspondent delicacy of constitution’, he explains, ‘that when a woman speaks of her great strength, her extraordinary appetite, her ability to bear excessive fatigue, we recoil at the description in a way she is little aware of’. 13 As modern readers have recognized, throughout the Legacy Gregory alternates between what Wollstonecraft identiﬁed as ‘two objects’, encouraging the cultivation of qualities that will enable his daughters to become ‘capable of judging for [themselves]’ while at the same insisting on the importance of the appearance of feminine softness and delicacy. There is, however, at least one striking difference between Wollstonecraft’s perspective and that of the modern reader. In the Vindication, Wollstonecraft contrasts dissimulation with something that she calls ‘nature’, and faults Gregory for abandoning this nature in favour of ‘artiﬁce’. For modern critics, on the other hand, it is of course a given that any account of femininity is an artiﬁcial construct, while the invocation of nature is in itself a measure of the work’s artiﬁce. Although Gregory writes ‘in affectionate and seemingly liberal terms to his daughters’, asserts Betty Rizzo, ‘he endorses a view of women’s “naturally” submissive and retiring nature that he himself belies in the strength of his caveats against all behaviour that was unsubmissive or unretiring’.14 It is, then, his very concern to deﬁne a female nature that makes Gregory’s Legacy a ‘seemingly’

12 Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions

liberal and enlightened work. And in both describing and prescribing a female nature, Gregory can be seen, so to speak, to give the game away. Wollstonecraft’s reliance on the category of ‘nature’ even as she criticizes Gregory’s particular account of female nature reminds us of an eighteenthcentury vocabulary sufﬁciently different from our own anti-essentialist sensibilities to warrant closer attention. Given the long and ongoing history of reductive and repressive accounts of female nature (and the work of denaturalizing femininity continues to play an important role in feminist struggles for equality) it is understandable that contemporary scholars will view the categories of nature and natural with suspicion. Yet the tendency to equate invocations of nature with a conservative or anti-enlightenment stance is, from an eighteenth-century perspective, profoundly misleading: recourse to ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ cut across political, religious and intellectual commitments and allegiances, and indeed those whom we would call liberals and radicals were among the strongest adherents to notions of natural justice, natural rights, and laws of nature. In the area of gender, while the eighteenth century saw vigorous debate over the nature of female nature, we will scarcely ﬁnd anyone who did not subscribe to some notion of natural differences between the sexes: indeed, advocates of greater equality for women often adopted terms remarkably similar to those of their opponents, while seeking to re-order (or perhaps even to invert) the conventional valuation of putatively natural feminine and masculine attributes. For Wollstonecraft, who famously outdid Rousseau in her attacks on feminine luxury and reﬁnement, it was an artiﬁcial system of manners that prevented women from realizing ‘the perfection of our nature’.15 For many eighteenth-century thinkers there was no inherent tension between factual and normative accounts of nature. When human nature was understood within a providential framework, there was no contradiction in at once describing the inclinations and faculties that had been implanted by a creator and prescribing the means by which those living in a corrupt and sinful world could aim at realizing this divine plan. Yet, as Gregory himself was only too well aware, a gap had opened up between prescriptive and descriptive accounts of human nature. When David Hume, for example, argued in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739) that justice was not a natural but an artiﬁcial virtue, he undermined one of the basic premises of natural law theory and posed the question of nature versus artiﬁce in a particularly incisive – and for many of his readers, a particularly unsettling – way. Opponents of Hume – and this category would include Gregory, who maintained a friendship with Hume even as he encouraged his friend James Beattie in the production of his anti-Humean Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth – made much the same moves that we ﬁnd in the Legacy, anxiously asserting as ‘natural’ that which they believed essential to the foundations of morality. The question of nature versus artiﬁce, then, was by no means peculiar to the attempt to deﬁne and prescribe a female nature, but was also an important area of debate and discussion over the nature of man in general. And it is within the broader contexts of arguments over the nature of man that the concern to deﬁne a peculiarly female nature can be best understood.

Dr John Gregory’s Natural History of Femininity 13

The recovery of such broader contexts requires detaching the conduct book somewhat from its close association with the feminine genre of the novel in order to reconnect the literature of conduct with a much wider array of eighteenth-century discourse, both feminine and masculine, domestic and civic. For the most part, scholarly treatment of female conduct literature has been the work of feminist literary scholars, who have identiﬁed the conduct book as a valuable source of insight into the ideology of femininity which underlies the novel and which the novelist works both to subvert and to uphold. While this approach has greatly enriched the discussion of eighteenth-century works of ﬁction, particularly of works by women novelists, the tendency to approach the conduct book as the subliterary background to the literary text has obscured rather than uncovered many of its fundamental assumptions and underlying concerns.16 Indeed, as Vivien Jones reminds us, the term ‘conduct book’ is a modern, and a ‘homogenising’ label that would not have been recognized by the authors, publishers and readers of this literature.17 While the term nicely captures the purpose and echoes the language of much of the period’s writings for and about women, it should be understood not as a distinctive genre but as a kind of shorthand referring to a variety of female-oriented works united by their common concerns with female education, with ‘character and conduct of the female sex’ and with the ‘improvement of manners and morals’ of both sexes. In its style and mode of address, the conduct book might be modeled after any number of eighteenth-century forms of writing, including the sermon, the Addisonian essay, and the familiar letter; in its content, eighteenth-century conduct literature borrowed freely from a range of genres, including the novel of sentiment, moral philosophy, and Enlightenment historiography. For our purposes, Gregory’s interest in the question of female nature should be linked to the Enlightenment attempt to offer a naturalistic account of the progress of man from savage to civil society. Scottish Enlightenment accounts of civil society derived in part from the seventeenth-century natural law tradition that included Locke, Hobbes, Grotius and especially Pufendorf, whose On the Duty of Man and Citizen served as the standard textbook in moral philosophy at the Scottish universities throughout the eighteenth century.18 In charting the movement of societies through successive stages of material subsistence, often according to a ‘four-stages theory’ of the progress from hunting to pasturage to agriculture to commerce, these works sought to provide an empirical basis to the effort of imagining the movement of man from the state of nature into civil society. In place of a social contract account of the creation of civil society, however, the Scottish historians offered a narrative of the gradual progress through various stages of human society, a slow but inexorable process that was not consciously willed but was rather the unintended outcome of the complex interaction of a range of material and cultural factors. In their emphasis on incremental improvements, they not only explicitly rejected the notion of a social contract but also unsettled the idea of an original state of nature. Since ‘art itself is natural to man’, as Adam Ferguson put it in his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), ‘if we are asked therefore, Where is that state of nature to

14 Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions

be found? we may answer, It is here; and it matters not whether we are understood to speak in the island of Great Britain, at the Cape of Good Hope, or the Straits of Magellan’.19 Yet for all their emphasis on historical diversity, such works typically adhere to the notion of a uniﬁed human nature, the unfolding of which over the course of human history represented man’s impulse toward the perfection of his providentially ordered nature. This tension between the natural and the artiﬁcial is particularly evident in the Scottish historians’ treatment of women, which might be viewed in terms of a simultaneous naturalization and historicization of the female sex. Take, for example, Lord Kames’s chapter on ‘The Progress of the Female Sex’ in Book I (‘The Progress of Men Independent of Society’) of his Sketches of the History of Man.20 While each of the sketches in Book I in fact moves from ‘savage’ to ‘civil’ society, by treating of men ‘independent of society’ Kames means to set forth those circumstances which obtain at every stage in the development of the species, regardless of men’s state of political union. To this end, Book I contains seven ‘sketches’ on the progress of man in the following areas: food and population; property; commerce; the arts; manners; the female sex; and luxury. The progress of the female sex thus takes its place among such other branches as ‘the progress of food and population’ and ‘the origin and progress of commerce’. If men’s progress is shaped, even determined, by this set of conditions, the ‘female sex’ is to some extent naturalized as one of the conditions. At the same time, the arrangement of the chapters suggests something of a continuum from the material (food and population, property, commerce) to the social and cultural (the arts, manners, the female sex and luxury), which would place women at the social and cultural end of the spectrum. The move from manners to female sex to luxury, moreover, is suggestive of a narrative in which the female sex becomes an agent of civilization through manners but then threatens to become source of corruption through luxury. If Enlightenment historians and philosophers interpreted their own interest in the ‘progress of the female sex’ as at once an instance of, and a further contribution to, the progress of politeness, politeness and its progress was also the central preoccupation of eighteenth-century works aimed at the improvement of the female reader. As Jane Rendall ﬁrst argued in her Origins of British Feminism, the arguments and assumptions of the Scottish thinkers are strikingly evident in the period’s literature on female conduct and education, which drew upon an Enlightenment scheme of historical development in which woman as moral guardian of the domestic and as moral arbiter of the social denotes the progress of British man from rudeness to reﬁnement.21 These works typically contrasted the favourable position of woman in civil society with the degraded status of her ‘primitive’ sister, often recommending works of Enlightenment history as a morally improving branch of study and sometimes citing directly from works by Robertson, Millar and Kames in their appeals to the female reader. In urging the female reader to ‘enlighten’ her mind through the reading of history, for example, Hester Chapone (Letters on the Improvement of the Mind [1773]) promised ‘much advantage and delight’ from William Robertson’s account of the ‘progress

Dr John Gregory’s Natural History of Femininity 15

of civilization’, while Jane West similarly assured the female reader that it was ‘delightful’ to ‘[trace] the progress of society through the gradations of barbarism, improvement, civilization, reﬁnement, luxury, degradation, corruption, and decay’.22 Indeed, Enlightenment historiography must be seen as one of the most important discursive contexts for the literature of female conduct, for the Enlightenment’s progressive account of the history of society provided conduct book authors with a language and a conceptual framework to address questions and concerns relating to the rise of commercial society and the reformation of the manners and morals of both sexes. In the case of Gregory, we have an example of an author who contributed both to the eighteenth century’s literature of female conduct and to the Scottish Enlightenment’s natural history of the species. And in both his Legacy and his Comparative View, the question of women’s proper position is also a matter of the right relationship between the natural and the artiﬁcial. In what follows, I will argue that Gregory’s account of female nature must be understood as an attempt to adjudicate between the claims of nature and those of civilization, or between the natural and the artiﬁcial, and that this attempt represented an important part of his response to Humean scepticism.

Women and the natural history of man It is evident that in comparing Men with other Animals, the Analogy must fail in several respects, because they are governed solely by the unerring principle of Instinct, whereas Men are directed by other principles of action along with this, particularly by the feeble and ﬂuctuating principle of Reason. But altho’ in many particular instances it may be impossible to ascertain what is the natural and what is the artiﬁcial State of Man, ... yet all Mankind agree to admit, in general, such distinctions, and to condemn certain actions as trespasses against Nature, as well as deviations from Reason. Men may dispute whether it be proper to let their beards and their nails grow, on the principle of its being natural; but every Human Creature would be shocked with the impropriety of feeding an infant with Brandy instead of its Mother’s Milk, from an instant feeling of its being an outrage done to Nature. (John Gregory, Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with Those of the Animal World, 1765)23 First published in 1765, the Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with Those of the Animal World was based on a series of papers delivered to the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, of which Gregory, along with his cousin Thomas Reid and his close friend James Beattie, was a founding member. Though it never achieved the extraordinary commercial success of the Legacy, the Comparative View enjoyed a considerable and enduring popularity, with at least eleven editions printed in Britain between 1765 and 1798, along with numerous American reprints. Indeed, if Gregory is now most frequently cited as the author of the female conduct book that was published only after his death, in his own lifetime

16 Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions

it was the Comparative View that brought him to prominence as an author of polite and improving literature. Celebrated in reviews, excerpted in periodicals, and often cited by other authors, the Comparative View ‘met with a very ﬂattering reception’, wrote the antiquarian scholar John Ramsay of Ochtertyre, with his characteristic wryness, ‘from philosophers and ladies, who vied who should praise it most’.24 It also enjoyed a comparable success in America, where, as Lisbeth Haakonssen records, Thomas Jefferson presented his daughter with a copy of the Comparative View on the birth of her ﬁrst child.25 If the Comparative View has received relatively little scholarly attention, this neglect probably stems in part from the fact that the work does not conform to the modern conventions by which we divide and classify areas of study and ﬁelds of knowledge. Natural philosophy; moral philosophy; medicine; aesthetics; theology: the Comparative View might be considered under any or all of these rubrics – although I would agree with Paul Wood that the Comparative View represents an example of the Scottish Enlightenment’s interest in ‘the natural history of man’.26 The work begins with a ‘comparative Animal Oeconomy of Mankind and other Animals’, ends with a defense of religion against the growing scepticism of the age, and treats a diverse and sometimes disconnected range of topics in between. Over the course of two lengthy volumes Gregory takes up, to name just a few of his many themes, the care and management of infants, the progress of music among the ancient Greeks, the position of women in savage and civil society, and the peculiarly jealous temperament that characterizes the man of letters. The juxtaposition of such different concerns mirrors the organization of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, where members met to discuss topics ranging from the consequences of national debt to the immortality of the soul to the use of loam as a fertilizer.27 More directly, it reﬂects Gregory’s own contributions to the Society over the course of ﬁve or six years, which he loosely connected – in what he himself called ‘an imperfect and desultory manner’28 – to form a two-volume book. As Gregory anxiously noted in a Preface attached to the second (1766) and to all subsequent editions of the work, The title of the book does not well express its contents... . The truth is, the subjects here treated, are so different, that it was impossible to ﬁnd any title, that could fully comprehend them. Yet unconnected as they seem to be, there was a certain train of ideas that led to them, which it may not be improper to explain.29 Gregory’s explanation of this ‘train of ideas’ suggests that his French translator hit upon a more ﬁtting title when she rendered the Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with Those of the Animal World as an ‘essay on the means of rendering the faculties of man more useful to his happiness’ (L’Essai sur les moyens de rendre les Facultés de l’Homme plus utiles à son bonheur.30 Working on the assumption that the ‘civil and natural history of Mankind’ is a ‘study not merely ﬁtted to amuse, and gratify curiosity, but a study subservient to the noblest views, to the cultivation and improvement of the Human Species’, in

Dr John Gregory’s Natural History of Femininity 17

his Comparative View Gregory seeks to integrate the best parts of the ‘savage’ and the ‘civil’ state into an ideal combination that will include all of the advantages and avoid all of the disadvantages that pertain to each stage of human history. ‘The consideration of Mankind through the successive stages of society’, explains Gregory, ‘led to the idea, perhaps a very romantic one, of uniting together the peculiar advantages of these several states, and cultivating them in such a manner as to render human life more comfortable and happy’. In savage society, Gregory argues, man possesses ‘bodily strength, agility, health, and what are called the Animal faculties, in greater perfection, than Man in the more advanced stages of society’, but his ‘nobler and more distinguishing features lie dormant’.31 At the other end of the spectrum of progress, the rise of civil and commercial society produces a number of advantages: ‘a free and social intercourse is promoted among Mankind; knowledge is enlarged, and prejudices are removed’. This enlargement of commerce, however, is accompanied by the constant acquisition of new wants, which are ‘endless and insatiable’ and which tend both to ‘corrupt’ the sentiments and to ‘enfeeble’ the constitution. Gregory’s object, then, is to arrive at a kind of intermediary condition that is somewhere between savage and civil, and that combines the physical vigour and moral simplicity of an earlier stage of development with the increase in knowledge and improvement of manners that characterizes an advanced stage of societal progress. It is worth noting that Gregory identiﬁes just such an intermediary stage in the state of society that is ‘exhibited in the words of Ossian’. Gregory’s description of the age of Ossian is a perfect example of a peculiarly Scottish version of the eighteenth-century notion of the ‘sentimental savage’, which valorized a Gaelic martial culture in which the warrior was as tender and humane in his domestic relations as he was brave and heroic on the battleﬁeld. The men of Ossian, Gregory writes, displayed the same martial valour ‘which has rendered the memory of the Greek and Roman Heroes immortal’, but surpassed the ancients in their humanity, displaying ‘dignity without ostentation, courage without ferocity, and sensibility without weakness’. An important measure of this humanity, of course, is their exemplary treatment of women: As they required no slaves to do the laborious and servile ofﬁces of life, they were still less disposed to degrade their Women to so mean and so wretched a situation. How humane, how noble does this conduct appear, when compared with the ungenerous treatment which Women meet with among all barbarous nations, and which they sometimes have met with among people who have been always displayed to the world as patterns of wisdom and virtue! Ossian’s female counterparts, moreover, display ‘a character as singular as that of his Heroes’, combining ‘the high spirit and dignity of Roman Matrons’ with ‘all the softness and delicacy ever painted in modern Romance’.32 Yet he is uneasily aware that the Ossianic warriors and maidens are at least partly the stuff of romance, and in any case does not seriously credit the notion that his

18 Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions

own society could ever return to this heroic past. But while it may be ‘impossible’, Gregory concedes, ‘to realize this idea in large Societies of Men’, it is, on other hand, ‘surely practicable’ for individuals to cultivate that combination of qualities that would represent an intermediary ideal. Like other eighteenth-century accounts of the natural history of man, Gregory’s work has a good deal to say about women. The most extensive discussion of women occurs in the ﬁrst volume of the Comparative View, much of which is devoted to what Gregory calls a ‘comparative Oeconomy’ of man with the other animals. Most of those who have studied ‘the philosophy of the Human Mind’, Gregory explains, ‘have been little acquainted with the structure of the Human Body, and with the laws of the Animal Oeconomy’. Man has mistakenly been considered as a being ‘that had no analogy to the rest of the Animal World’, a position that Gregory attributes to a misguided conceit: ‘The pride of man is alarmed ... with too close a comparison, and the dignity of philosophy will not easily stoop to receive a lesson from the instinct of the Brutes’. The mind and body are ‘so intimately connected’, however, that neither can be understood in isolation from the other.33 In his combination of a stadial scheme of history with a medico-moral understanding of the animal nature of man, Gregory thus makes explicit an analogy between humans and other animals that is at least implicit in other Scottish attempts to write the natural history of the species. And in his focus on man as species, Gregory places his emphasis on women. Gregory’s ‘comparative oeconomy’ speaks to the period’s intensiﬁed interest in mothers and rehearses many of the themes found in numerous other eighteenthcentury scientiﬁc and medical writings on maternity and infant care: concerns over population; medico-moral advocacy of breastfeeding; the need to replace midwives and old wives’ tales with (male) medical expertise. He begins by citing Britain’s high infant mortality rate as evidence that civilization tends toward enfeeblement: As this mortality is greatest among the most luxurious part of Mankind, and gradually decreases in proportion as the diet becomes simpler, the exercise more frequent, and the general method of living more hardy, and as it doth not take place among wild Animals, the general foundations of it are sufﬁciently pointed out. The extraordinary havock made by diseases among Children, is owing to the unnatural treatment they meet with.34 According the principle of analogy on which his ‘comparative oeconomy’ is based, a ‘natural’ treatment will follow the examples set by other animals and by peoples who live in a less cultivated condition. To be sure, Gregory concedes that where mankind are concerned there is, properly speaking, no such thing as a state of nature and acknowledges that ‘there has never yet been found a class of Men who were entirely governed by Instinct, by Nature, or by common sense’.35 Nevertheless, he insists, some peoples do live closer to nature in their economy, and the vigour and hardiness of their constitutions offers as instructive counterpoint to the enfeebled constitutions of those who live in a condition of over-reﬁnement.

Dr John Gregory’s Natural History of Femininity 19

In place of the unnatural regimen that is characterized by luxury and overreﬁnement, Gregory urges a programme, much of which is obviously and explicitly derived from Buffon and Rousseau, that includes breast-feeding, cold air, simple diet, and an end to the practice of ‘swathing’ (i.e. swaddling). Predictably enough, the ﬁrst item on his agenda is nursing, the neglect of which by an infant’s own mother constitutes an ‘open violence to Nature’ that is ‘unknown among all the inferior Animals; [and] among the most barbarous nations’.36 Swaddling offers another instance of the inferiority of civilized practice both in relation to the inferior animals and to less improved peoples. Since ‘all young Animals naturally delight in the open air, and in perpetual motion’, and human infants are in part a type of ‘young animal’, the practice of swaddling is a ‘cruel’ and ‘absurd’ form of ‘bondage’ which not only runs counter to the child’s natural instincts but also results in deformities that are peculiar to civilization. Savages, Gregory explains in a passage derived from Buffon’s De L’homme, do not swaddle their infants but ‘lay them out in a kind of cradle, lined and covered with skins and furs’; in marked contrast to the enfeebled children of civilized nations, the children of savage nations ‘improve’ their limbs so quickly that ‘in two or three months they crawl about on their hands and knees, and in less than a year walk without any assistance’. Throughout this section, then, Gregory condemns an ‘artiﬁcial System of management’ that is ‘contrary to the Analogy of nature among all the other Animals, and among the uncultivated part of the human species’.37 Where works by John Millar, Lord Kames and William Robertson place their emphasis on a series of slow but steady improvements in women’s status, Gregory’s comparisons with other animals and with less civilized peoples are intended to mark some of the losses involved in a process of civilization that involves a move from the natural to the artiﬁcial. Thus the hardiness of savage mothers, who ‘recover easily and speedily, after bringing forth their young’, is contrasted with the feebleness of mothers in civil society, whose pregnancies are attended by diseases that are unknown in savage life. When he concedes that ‘absurd’ and ‘unnatural’ practices can sometimes be found amongst ‘barbarous’ nations (there is no people, after all, who live in a purely natural state), it is to insist on an analogy with the absurd and unnatural fashions of his own society: Some nations have fancied that Nature did not give a good shape to the head, and thought it would be better to mould it into the form of a sugar-loaf. The Chinese think a Woman’s foot much handsomer if squeezed into a third of its natural size. Some African nations have a like quarrel with the shape of the nose, which they think ought to be laid as ﬂat as possible with the face. We laugh at the folly and are shocked with the cruelty of these barbarians; but think, with equal absurdity, that the natural shape of a Woman’s chest is not so elegant, as we can make it by the conﬁnement of stays. But nature, Gregory insists, ‘has shewn her resentment of this practice in the most striking manner, by rendering above half the Women of fashion deformed

20 Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions

in some degree or other’. By contrast, ‘the Turkish and Asiatic women, who are distinguished for their elegance of form, and the gracefulness of their carriage, are accustomed from their Infancy to wear no dress, but what is perfectly loose’. Indeed, ‘deformity is peculiar to the civilized part of Mankind, and is almost always the work of our own hands’. Throughout this section, the health and well-being of the mother–infant dyad serves as an analogue to the health and well-being of the species, for it is the strength or weakness of women and their children that will determine the ‘vigour’ or ‘effeminacy’ of man. The women ‘who inhabit the isthmus of America’, Gregory writes, ‘are plunged in cold water, along with their Infants, immediately after their delivery, without any bad consequence’. As a result of this practice, ‘an Indian, in the pursuits of war or hunting, would plunge into a river whilst in a profuse sweat, without fear and without danger’.38 In Gregory’s ‘comparative economy’, woman emerges not so much as the carrier of civilized values as the bearer of the species. While the Comparative View devotes a considerable amount of attention to ‘advantages enjoyed by the lower animals’, Gregory is also concerned with ‘the faculties which chieﬂy render Man superior’ to the rest of the animal creation. Unlike the other animals, mankind enjoy advantages that are ‘principally derived from Reason, from the Social Principle, from Taste, and from Religion’, and the human species is ‘distinguished by the Moral Sense, and the happiness ﬂowing from religion, and from the various intercourses of social life’.39 In his ‘comparative animal economy’, as we have seen, for the most part it is the female sex that serves as the standard by which to measure the gains and losses of civilization. In treating of the faculties that distinguish man from other animals, on the other hand, while women enter into his discussion at key points, the standard of measurement is men. While the tendency to highlight the importance of the social passions over the role of reason is characteristic of eighteenth-century Scottish thought in general, it is fair to say that Gregory’s attitude toward reason is one of hostility. After a brief acknowledgment of the advantages of reason, he presents a lengthy argument in support of his claim that ‘a superior degree of Reason and Understanding does not usually form a Man either for being a more useful member of society, or more happy in himself’. Although he allows a few exceptions – most notably Bacon and Buffon – he insists that most genius is wasted on fruitless attempts at system-building and that most books lie on the shelves unread and ‘remain only as monuments of the pride, ingenuity, and impotency of Human Understanding’.40 Moreover, if a ‘great Understanding’ is generally of ‘little consequence’ to the public, nor does it tend to ‘promote the happiness of the individual’. While those who spend their time in pursuit of knowledge enjoy ‘the pleasure arising from the pursuit and discovery of Truth’, Gregory concedes, they deprive themselves of the pleasure of the social affections: People who devote most of their time to the cultivation of their Understandings, must of course live retired and abstracted from the world. The social affections (those inexhaustible sources of happiness) have therefore no

Dr John Gregory’s Natural History of Femininity 21

play, and consequently lose their natural warmth and vigor. The private and selﬁsh affections however are not proportionably reduced. Envy and Jealousy, the most ungenerous and tormenting of all passions, prevail remarkably among this rank of Men. Hence perhaps there is less friendship among learned Men, and especially among Authors, than in any other class of Mankind.41 It is not reason, Gregory insists, but rather sociality that promotes both the good of society and the happiness of the individual. The principle ‘which unites them into societies, and attaches them to one another by sympathy and affection’ is, Gregory declares, ‘the source of the most heart-felt pleasure which we ever taste’. The most signiﬁcant of these social ties is of course the ‘delicate and interesting attachment between the sexes’. In elaborating on its importance, Gregory seems to imagine an opposition on the part of an unsocial cabal of learned men: Many of our sex, who, because possessed of some learning, assume the tone of superior wisdom, treat this attachment with great ridicule, as a weakness below the dignity of a Man, and allow no kind of it but what we have in common with the whole Animal Creation. They acknowledge, that the fair sex are useful to us, and a very few will deign to consider some of them as reasonable and agreeable companions. Since ‘no Man ever despised the sex who was a favourite with them’ and no one ever spoke ‘contemptuously of love, who was conscious of loving and being beloved by a Woman of merit’, such language betrays either ‘a heart insensible to the most reﬁned and exquisite pleasures Human nature is capable of’ or a ‘disappointed Pride’. Interestingly, while Gregory’s comparative ‘oeconomy’ involves a view of women in terms of ‘what we have in common with the whole Animal Creation’, in his discussion of the social principle he explicitly denounces such a view: those men who consider the attachment between the sexes as solely an animal one have failed to develop their own humanity. Indeed, Gregory’s elaboration of this point suggests the extent to which his natural history of the species is also intended as a work of conduct literature for men. In considering the ‘attachment of the sexes’ as a ‘natural principle’ which ‘forms in an eminent degree the happiness of Human Life in every part of the world’, Gregory attributes the diverse forms that this attachment takes not only to cultural but also to climactic differences. In the Eastern countries, where ‘no other accomplishments are thought necessary to the Women, but such as are merely personal’, women are ‘cut off, by the most cruel exertion of power, from all opportunities of improvement, and pass their lives in a lonely and ignominious conﬁnement, excluded from all free intercourse with human society’. In a northern climate, however, ‘the power of Beauty is very limited’, and ‘to give it any force or permanency, we must connect it with sentiment and esteem’. Yet climate alone is apparently an insufﬁcient guarantee for a proper estimation of

22 Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions

women, for on this topic Gregory seems to believe that British men are in need of exhortation: But it is not in our power to do this, if we treat Women as we do Children. If we impress their minds with a belief that they were only made to be domestic drudges, and the slaves of our pleasures, we debase their minds, and destroy all generous emulation to excel; whereas, if we use them in a more liberal and generous manner; a decent pride, a conscious dignity, and a sense of their own worth, will naturally induce them to exert themselves to be what they would wish to be thought, and are entitled to be, our companions and friends. But he immediately qualiﬁes this statement with the disclaimer that he does not wish to see women ‘leaving their own natural characters and assuming ours’.42 At ﬁrst glance, Gregory’s account of the ‘natural characters’ of the sexes is entirely conventional. ‘Nature’, Gregory asserts, intended men ‘to protect the Women, to provide for them and their families’ and to engage in ‘all the rougher and more laborious parts in the great scene of human affairs’. Women, on the other hand, are intended for the domestic sphere, and are assigned the tasks of regulating ‘the whole œconomy of the family’, of educating children and of civilizing men: ‘they are designed to soften our hearts and polish our manners’. And while men possess ‘greater bodily strength, greater personal courage, and more enlarged powers of Understanding’, Gregory grants women a superiority in the following: They possess, in a degree greatly beyond us, sensibility of heart, sweetness of temper, and gentleness of manners. They are more chearful and joyous. They have a quicker discernment of characters. They have a more lively fancy, and a greater delicacy of taste and sentiment; they are better judges of grace, elegance, and propriety, and therefore our superiors in such works of taste as depend on these. In addition, as I will discuss below, women display a superiority in their attachment to religion. There is of course nothing unusual or surprising about this gendered division of attributes, which reads like a textbook example of the eighteenth century’s naturalization of women and domesticity. But the account of sexual difference becomes more interesting when we place it alongside Gregory’s characterization of the faculties of man. Recall that the four categories of faculties which distinguish man from the other animals are derived from reason, sociability, taste and religion. With the exception of reason, a faculty which Gregory tends to devalue, women are granted a superiority in all of those faculties that render ‘man’ superior to the other animals. It begins to look as though the female sex is the standard not only in the comparative economy of man with other animals, but also in Gregory’s account of the conditions that man should cultivate in order to return to the ideal intermediary state between savage and civil society. I would like to explore this possibility

Dr John Gregory’s Natural History of Femininity 23

by pointing to some of the striking similarities in the advice offered in the Legacy and that proffered to men in the Comparative View.

Female nature as human nature Mr. Hume was boasting to the Doctor, that, among his many disciples in Edinburgh, he had the honour to reckon many of the fair sex. ‘Now, tell me,’ said the Doctor, ‘whether, if you had a wife of a daughter, you should wish them to be your disciples? Think well before you answer me; for I assure you, that, whatever your answer is, I will not conceal it’. Mr Hume, with a smile, and some hesitation, made this reply: ‘No; I believe scepticism may be too sturdy a virtue for a woman’. Miss Gregory will certainly remember, that she has heard her father tell this story. How different is Doctor Gregory’s ‘Legacy’ to Mr Hume’s! (James Beattie to Elizabeth Montagu, 25 June 1779).43 In what is perhaps the most notorious of the Legacy’s precepts, Gregory cautioned his daughters to be: even cautious in displaying your good sense. It will be thought you assume a superiority over the company. But if you happen to have any learning, keep it a profound secret, especially from the men, who generally look with a jealous and malignant eye on a woman of great parts and a cultivated understanding. Although Gregory was quick to add that a man of ‘genius and candour’ is ‘far superior to this meanness’, he also warned that ‘such a one will seldom fall your way’. Even as he took rather a dim view of male sex, he advised his daughters to accommodate themselves to the common run of men (although they were not to accommodate themselves so far as to marry such a man: ‘do not marry a fool’, he warned, ‘he is the most intractable of all animals’).44 Understandably, this is one of the passages that Wollstonecraft singles out for censure, and in contemporary discussion, it is probably the most frequently cited of the Legacy’s passages. But it is interesting to note that Gregory had also offered a similar piece of advice to a male readership in his Comparative View. One of the ‘inconveniencies attendant on superior parts’, he writes, is that ‘solitude in which they place the person on whom they are bestowed, even in the midst of society’. To the ‘few, who are judges of his abilities, his is an object of jealousy and envy’. This leaves him with the society of the many, who will ‘consider him with that awe and distant regard that is incompatible with conﬁdence and friendship’ unless he accommodates himself to the common level: Men of great abilities, therefore, who prefer the sweets of social life and private friendship to the vanity of being admired, ought carefully to conceal their superiority, and bring themselves down to the level of those they converse with.

24 Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions

This advice stems from a theory of sympathy which requires one to ‘accommodate and assimilate’, as Adam Smith put it, ‘as much as we can, our own sentiments, principles, and feelings, to those which we see ﬁxed and rooted in the persons whom we are obliged to converse a great deal with’.45 In Gregory’s formulation, is should be emphasized, the superiority of parts is given a lower valuation than a desire for society: one should prefer social life and friendship, and to prefer awe and distant regard is a form of male vanity. Though the Legacy is concerned with a ‘certain propriety of conduct peculiar’ to the female sex, when its precepts are read against those of the Comparative View, some interesting parallels emerge. Much of what is presented as peculiar to female conduct in the Legacy had already been offered as advice for ‘man’ in the Comparative View. The most signiﬁcant parallel between the two works, I would suggest, is in Gregory’s treatment of religion. In the Legacy, religion is deﬁned as a particularly feminine province. Arguing that religion is ‘rather a matter of sentiment than of reasoning’, Gregory suggests that women are ‘peculiarly susceptible to the feelings of devotion’. Although religious duties are ‘equally binding on both sexes’, Gregory explains, ‘the natural hardness of our hearts’ make us ‘less susceptible to the ﬁner feelings’, while ‘the natural softness and sensibility of your dispositions particularly ﬁt you for the practice of those duties where the heart is chieﬂy concerned’. Not only are women particularly susceptible but they are also particularly in need of religious consolation: There are many circumstances in your situation that peculiarly require the supports of religion to enable you to act in them with spirit and propriety. Your whole life is often a life of suffering. You cannot plunge into business, or dissipate yourselves in pleasure and riot, as men too often do, when under the pressure of misfortunes. You must bear your sorrows in silence, unknown and unpitied. You must often put on a face of serenity and chearfulness, when your hearts are torn with anguish, or sinking in despair.46 Here religion is depicted in highly feminized terms, as a matter of feeling and sentiment that offers compensatory consolations for the restrictions and limitations of the female life. If religion is a particularly feminine province, improper attitudes toward religion are correspondingly deﬁned as unfeminine. In warning his daughters not to ‘meddle with controversy’, Gregory asserts that religious controversy not only ‘plunges’ the reader into a ‘chaos’, but also ‘spoils the temper, and, I suspect, has no good effect on the heart’. Even worse than controversy over doctrine is an abandonment of religion altogether: Women are greatly deceived, when they think they recommend themselves to our sex by their indifference about religion. Even those men who are themselves unbelievers dislike inﬁdelity in you. Every man who knows human nature, connects a religious taste in your sex with softness and sensibility of

Dr John Gregory’s Natural History of Femininity 25

heart; at least we always consider the want of it as a proof of that hard and masculine spirit, which of all your faults we dislike the most. Besides, men consider your religion as one of their principal securities for that female virtue in which they are most interested. If a gentleman pretends an attachment to any of you, and endeavours to shake your religious principles, be assured he is either a fool, or has designs on you which he dare not openly avow.47 While there is nothing new or original about positing a link between religious and sexual inﬁdelity, the fact that Gregory would even raise the possibility of religious inﬁdelity in a work addressed to his daughters is surely a measure of the extent to which Gregory viewed religious scepticism as a threat. Indeed, the threat of irreligion is a major concern of the Comparative View. Like Thomas Reid and James Beattie, Gregory was concerned to defend the principles of religion against Humean scepticism. Gregory does not engage with the problem of scepticism in philosophical or theological terms: ‘It is not my intention’, he writes, ‘to consider the evidence of Religion as founded in truth’ – and Gregory certainly makes good on his lack of any such intention. Instead, he examines religion as ‘a principle founded in Human Nature’ and traces the ‘inﬂuence it actually has, or may have, on the happiness of Mankind’. In so doing, he offers a set of precepts – directed to man in general – very similar to those proffered in the Legacy. As in the Legacy, in the Comparative View Gregory asserts that religion is more a matter of sentiment than of reason. Likewise, when Gregory warns men against meddling with works of religious controversy, he argues – using terms identical to those found in the Legacy – that, in addition to diminishing reverence for the Deity and distracting people from their practical duties, ‘the worst effects of speculative and controversial theology are those which it produces on the Temper and Affections’.48 Moreover, the question of ‘Temper and Affections’ is central to Gregory’s argument against inﬁdelity. While ‘some philosophers have been Inﬁdels’, Gregory writes, ‘few Men of taste and sentiment’ have been. And though ‘Absolute Inﬁdelity or settled Scepticism in Religion we acknowledge is no proof of want of Understanding or a vicious disposition’, he asserts, ‘it is certainly a very strong presumption of the want of Imagination and sensibility of Heart, and of a perverted Understanding’. For just as some men of learning mistakenly treat the attachment between the sexes ‘with great ridicule, as a weakness below the dignity of man’, so too do some philosophers ‘who have surmounted what they call religious prejudices themselves, affect to treat such as are not ashamed to avow their regard to Religion, as Men of weak Understandings and feeble Minds’. For Gregory, the charge of ‘feebleness of mind’ clearly rankles, and he indignantly counters that the accusation is ‘frequently thrown, not only upon such as have a sense of Religion, but upon all who possess warm, open, chearful Tempers, and Hearts peculiarly disposed to love and friendship’.49 If Gregory’s account of the importance of religious sentiment seems to feminize human nature, he also seeks to redeﬁne strength of mind in masculine terms. ‘Strength of mind’, he insists, consists not ‘in a peevish Temper, in a hard,

26 Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions

inﬂexible Heart, and in bidding deﬁance to God Almighty’, but rather in ‘an active resolute Spirit, in a Spirit that enables a Man to act his part in the world with propriety, and to bear the misfortunes of life with uniform fortitude and dignity’. It is a spirit, Gregory adds, which ‘breathes in the writings of the ancient Stoics’. His elaboration on this point is worth citing in detail: Can it be pretended that Atheism or Universal Scepticism ... tend to inspire that magnanimity and elevation of Mind, that superiority to selﬁsh and sensual gratiﬁcations, that contempt of danger and of death, when the cause of virtue, of liberty, or their country require it, which distinguish the characters of Patriots and Heroes? or is their inﬂuence more favorable on the humbler and gentler virtues of private and domestic life? Do they soften the heart, and render it more delicately sensible of the thousands of nameless duties and endearments of a Husband, a Father, or a Friend? Do they produce that habitual serenity and chearfulness of temper, that gaiety of heart, which makes a Man beloved as a Companion?50 In arguing for the importance of religion in forming the (male) character, Gregory begins with masculine terms (‘magnanimity and elevation of Mind’, a ‘contempt’ of danger and death in the service of an implicitly male ‘virtue, liberty, and country’), but ends with terms very similar to those found in the Legacy (‘the humbler and gentler virtues of private and domestic life’, a heart that is ‘delicately sensible of the thousands of nameless duties and endearments’ of the domestic circle). And when he cites ‘the general opinion of Mankind, that there is a strong connection between a religious disposition and a feeling heart, [which] appears from the universal dislike, which all Men have to Inﬁdelity in the fair sex’,51 Gregory suggests that the fact that no man would want a sceptic for a wife is proof that men themselves should not be sceptics. For all his anxious insistence on sexual difference, Gregory offers remarkably similar accounts of conduct in his Comparative View and his Legacy. In the Legacy, Gregory sums up the issue of conduct as follows: ‘In all important points of conduct, shew a determined resolution and steadiness – This is not the least inconsistent with that softness and gentleness so amiable in your sex. On the contrary, it gives that spirit to a mild and sweet disposition, without which it is apt to degenerate into insipidity. It makes you respectable in your own eyes, and digniﬁes you in ours’.52 It is just such combination of resolution and softness, of course, that Gregory ﬁnds in the heroines of Ossian. But this ideal is clearly meant to apply to both women and men. In the Comparative View, Gregory asserts that ‘Simplicity may be united with elegance of manners; a humane and gentle temper may be consistent with the most steady and resolute spirit, and religion may be viewed without bigotry or superstition’.53 Here Gregory is referring to an ideal of male conduct and character that combines the advantages of ‘savage’ and ‘civil’ society. ‘I do not want to make you anything’, writes Gregory in the Legacy, ‘I want to know what Nature has made you, and perfect you on her plan’.54 When

Dr John Gregory’s Natural History of Femininity 27

Gregory’s naturalization of femininity is read against his account of the natural history of man, it seems that women are ‘naturally’ in that stage between savage and civil to which Gregory wants to return men. That which is depicted in the Comparative View as the outcome of an historical progress is presented in the Legacy as a set of givens about female nature. I would suggest that this position stemmed in part from the challenge of philosophical scepticism. Gregory’s hostility to what he deﬁned as an overvaluation of reason, and his refusal to answer religious scepticism with a philosophical defense of religious truth, are highly suggestive. Might it be that women are the safeguards of the properly human precisely because of their association with an earlier, pre-rational, pre-enlightened universe that is under threat? While this may sound like another way of saying that Gregory’s work is only ‘seemingly’ enlightened, I want to propose rather that Gregory’s work – and the Enlightenment position on women more broadly – is both an expression of Enlightenment interests and values, and a response to some of the unsettling directions that Enlightenment might take.

Notes 1. John Hill Burton, ed., The Autobiography of Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk, 1722–1805 (London and Edinburgh, 1910; reprint, ed. Richard B. Sher, Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1990), 484. 2. Gregory’s Legacy was one of the most successful of all Strahan’s publications. Sandra Naiman, ‘William Strahan’, in James K. Bracken and Joel Silver, ed., Dictionary of Literary Biography: British Literary Book Trade, 1700–1820 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1995), 275. 3. William Strahan to William Creech, 14 July 1774, ‘Creech Letter Books’, Dalguise Muniments, Scottish Record Ofﬁce, RH 4/26/3. 4. Janet Todd, Introduction, Female Education in the Age of Enlightenment, Vol. 1 (London: William Pickering, 1996), xviii. 5. Vivien Jones, Introduction, The Young Lady’s Pocket Library, or Parental Monitor [1790], For Her Own Good, A Series of Conduct Books (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995), xxvi. 6. John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (1774); reprint, ed. Janet Todd, Female Education in the Age of Enlightenment, 6 vols, (London: William Pickering, 1996), 3–4. 7. Ibid., 25. 8. Margaret Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender and the Family in England, 1680–1780 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 247–8, note 8. 9. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792); reprint, ed. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 178–9. 10. Kathryn Shevelow, ‘Fathers and Daughters: Women as Readers of the Tatler’, in Gender and Reading, ed. Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patricinio Schweickart (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 107. 11. Gregory, Legacy, 49–50. 12. Ibid., 4. 13. Ibid., 23. 14. Betty Rizzo, Companions Without Vows: Relationships Among Eighteenth-Century British Women (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 13. Chapter 6 of this book, entitled ‘Parent and Child: Montagu and Gregory’, offers a fascinating account of the fraught relationship between Gregory’s eldest daughter Dorothea and the Bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu.

28 Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions 15. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 79. On this point, see Sylvana Tomaselli’s chapter in this volume. 16. In Nancy Armstrong’s inﬂuential formulation, the conduct book was a form of writing which ‘awaited the substance that the novel and its readers ... would eventually provide’. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 60. 17. Vivien Jones, ‘The Seductions of Conduct: Pleasure and Conduct Literature’, in Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century, eds. Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Roberts (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 109. 18. James Moore and Michael Silverthorne, ‘Gershom Carmichael and the natural jurisprudence tradition in eighteenth-century Scotland’, in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, eds. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 74. 19. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767); reprint, ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 12, 14. 20. Henry Home (Lord Kames), Sketches of the History of Man (4th edn. 1778; reprint, ed. John Vladimir Price, Bristol, 1993). 21. Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism in Britain, France, and the United States, 1780–1860 (London: Macmillan, 1985). 22. Hester Chapone, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773); Jane West, Letters to a Young Lady, 3 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1806), II: 427–8. 23. Dr John Gregory, A Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with Those of the Animal World, 2 vols, 6th edn. (London: J. Dodsley, 1774; reprint, The Scottish Enlightenment: Third Series [Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994]), I: 24–5. 24. John Ramsay, Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Alexander Allardyce (Edinburgh, 1888; reprint, Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996), I: 479. 25. Lisbeth Haakonssen, Medicine and Morals in the Enlightenment: John Gregory, Thomas Percival and Benjamin Rush, (Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1997), 51. 26. Paul Wood, ‘The Natural History of Man in the Scottish Enlightenment’, History of Science 28 no. 79 (March 1990), 90–123. 27. See Lewis H. Ulman, The Minutes of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1990). 28. Gregory, Comparative View, I: xxiii. 29. Ibid., I: iii–iv. 30. Essai sur les moyens de rendre les Facultés de l’Homme plus utiles à son bonheur. Traduit de l’Anglois de M. Jean Grégory, Professeur de Médecine en l’Université d’Edimbourg, & premier Médecin de Sa Majesté en Écosse, par Mademoiselle*** (Lausanne: De L’Imprimerie de la Société Typographique, 1781). In the Preface to this work, the translator explicitly linked the Comparative View to the Legacy: ‘On a eu l’attention de le faire imprimer de même format, & de même caractère que le Legs d’un Père à ses Filles, aﬁn qu’on puisse, si l’on veut, reunir les deux Ouvrages, & les faire relier ensemble’ (‘We have been careful to print this book in the same format and character as the Legacy to His Daughters, so that we could, if you will, unite the two works and bind them together’). 31. Ibid., I: v–vi. For Ossian as a ‘sentimental savage’ see John Dwyer, ‘The Sentimental Savage: a Re-appraisal of the Poems of Ossian’, in his The Age of the Passions (East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 1998). 32. Comparative View, x–xii. The mention of ‘Romance’ immediately raises the possibility that, as Samuel Johnson and Hume maintained, the Ossianic verses were spurious, and Gregory is well aware that ‘some people pretend to doubt of their veracity’. But while he admits that Ossian’s depictions might be somewhat idealized, Gregory insists that their basis must be in ‘actual society’, for ‘tho’ we make the largest allowance for the painting of a sublime poetic Genius, yet we must suppose, that the manners and sentiments he describes had their foundation in real life, as much as those described by Homer’ (xii–xiii).

Dr John Gregory’s Natural History of Femininity 29 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

Ibid., I: 7–8, 9–10. Ibid., I: 36. Ibid., I: 22–3. Ibid., I: 47–8. Ibid., I: 35. Ibid., I: 89–90. Ibid., I: 109. Ibid., I: 114. Ibid., I: 131–2. Ibid., I: 154–5. Quoted in Sir William Forbes, An Account of the Life and Writings of James Beattie, LL.D., 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1807), II: 211–12. Gregory, Legacy, 55. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982), 224. Gregory, Legacy, 5–6. Ibid., 6, 10–11. Gregory, Comparative View, II: 177–9. Ibid., II: 152–3. Ibid., II: 157–8. Ibid., II: 158–9. Gregory, Legacy, 28. Gregory, Comparative View, I: xxii. Gregory, Legacy, 25.

1.2 Feminists versus Gallants: Manners and Morals in Enlightenment Britain Barbara Taylor

‘The male sex among a polite people, discover their authority in more generous, though not a less evident manner; by civility, by respect, and in a word by gallantry.’ (David Hume, Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences, 1742)1 ‘Many of the sentiments [in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman] are undoubtedly of a rather masculine description. The spirited and decisive way in which the author explodes the system of gallantry, and the species of homage with which the sex is usually treated, shocked the majority.’ (William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1798)2 Mary Wollstonecraft’s status as an Enlightenment philosophe earns her divided notices. For admirers of Enlightenment, Wollstonecraft’s identiﬁcation with what she described, signiﬁcantly, as the ‘masculine and improved sentiments of an enlightened philosophy’ wins her kudos. 3 By contrast, those who condemn Enlightenment as sectarian – a ‘conspiracy of dead white men in periwigs to provide the intellectual foundation for Western imperialism’, in Eric Hobsbawm’s satiric formulation4 – criticise her complicity in it. The judgements, until recently, have been more polemical than substantively historical, with little detailed attention to Wollstonecraft’s place in the constellation of writers, ideas, and intellectual practices retrospectively labelled Enlightenment.5 Probably for this reason, both sides in the argument tend to exaggerate her Enlightenment allegiances, and to underestimate the complexities of her intellectual position. Far from an uncritical spokeswoman for a monolithic ‘Enlightenment’, Wollstonecraft elaborated her philosophical stance against the grain of mainstream enlightened opinion. This was particularly evident in her major feminist work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) where, far from echoing Enlightenment perspectives, she mounted a systematic assault on ‘modern’ writings on women which, in her view, portrayed women ‘as a kind of subordinate beings, and not as a part of the human species’.6 If the Rights of Woman is a work of Enlightenment philosophy, in other words, it is one that 30

Feminists versus Gallants 31

highlights important tensions in Enlightenment thought, particularly in enlightened thinking on gender issues.7 As a democratic utopian dedicated, as her friend Mary Hays put it, to ‘guiding, enlightening, and leading the human race onward to felicity’, Wollstonecraft had a strong sense of radical–philosophical pedigree.8 Her two Vindications are crammed with enlightened borrowings – from Bacon, Locke, Adam Smith, Voltaire, Leibniz, Buffon, Hume, Monboddo, Hutcheson, Kant, Joseph Priestley, Richard Price, and, above all, Rousseau, whose inﬂuence permeated her thought from 1788 on. Her Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794) – written in terrorist France and clandestinely shipped to her London publisher chapter-by-chapter – interwove a detailed chronicle of the early stages of the revolution with a triumphalist account of Enlightenment’s advance across Europe and America. Tracing an intellectual trajectory from Locke to Mirabeau, Wollstonecraft showed how the ‘bright lines of philosophical truth’ purveyed by ‘men of genius of the last and present ages’ – natural jurists, physiocratic economists, Encyclopedists – had penetrated and dispelled the moral darkness of despotism till now arrived at the point when sincerity of principles seems to be hastening the overthrow of the tremendous empire of superstition and hypocrisy, erected upon the ruins of gothic brutality and ignorance.9 Elsewhere, however, a more critical note was sounded. ‘[E]nlightened philosophers’ who ‘talk most vehemently of the native rights of men’ were often less democratic in practice, she claimed in 1790 in A Vindication of the Rights of Men. ‘They bow down to rank and are careful to secure property; for virtue, without this adventitious drapery, is seldom very respectable in their eyes – nor are they very quicksighted to discern real dignity of character when no sounding name exalts the man above his elbows.’10 Two years later, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, it was these philosophes’ old-world attitudes to women which earned her wrath: a theme dramatised in her ﬁnal novel, The Wrong of Woman, or Maria, where various men of ‘philosophical disposition’ are depicted expatiating on ‘the evils which arise in society from despotism of rank and riches’ while treating the women around them with cruelty or indifference.11 ‘I may be accused of arrogance,’ Wollstonecraft wrote in the Rights of Woman, ‘still I must declare what I ﬁrmly believe, that all the writers who have written on the subject of female education and manners from Rousseau to Dr Gregory, have contributed to … degrade one half of the human species, and render women pleasing at the expense of every solid virtue.’12 Wollstonecraft’s criticism of her contemporaries’ attitudes to women usually focuses on her quarrel with Rousseau – and with good reason. No late eighteenthcentury champion of sexual equality could avoid tackling Rousseau; certainly not a fellow philosophe like Wollstonecraft, whose point-by-point refutation of the notorious Book Five of Emile, ‘Sophie, or the Woman’, was the most systematic and inﬂuential of the period. But even as she excoriated Rousseau for his ‘partial’, ‘crude’ views on women, Wollstonecraft showed herself to be as much disciple as detractor, drawing heavily on his critical–utopian philosophy for her own radical perspectives.

32 Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions

No such subtle play of inﬂuence and antagonism was detectable, however, in her assault on inﬂuential works on women emanating from the British Enlightenment, whose ‘baneful effect on the morals and manners of the female world’ she roundly condemned.13 The element in these works that earned her ﬁercest criticism was their ‘gallantry’, meaning their sentimental homage to the ‘fair sex’ which had so ‘bubbled’ women’s minds, she complained, that they aimed only ‘to inspire love, when they ought to cherish a nobler ambition, and by their abilities and virtues exact respect.’14 The writers foremost in her sights here were Dr John Gregory – Scottish Enlightenment medical man and author of the best-selling A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters – and Reverend James Fordyce, another Scottish enlightener and author of several hugely popular works of advice to women, with various other likeminded oracles, male and female, rebuked along the way. ‘If women be ever allowed to walk without leading-strings, why must they be cajoled into virtue by artful ﬂattery and sexual compliments?’ she demanded after quoting at her readers a particularly smarmy passage from Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women: ‘Speak to them the language of truth and soberness, and away with the lullaby strains of condescending endearment!’15 This chapter explores Wollstonecraft’s relationship to Enlightenment via her critique of enlightened (‘modern’) British gallantry. Modernist exponents of gallantry advanced their case through a wide range of genres: moral philosophy, educational treatises, history, sermons, novels, poetry, as well as conduct books like those of Fordyce and Gregory. Advice manuals like Fordyce and Gregory’s are not usually read as Enlightenment texts, but in fact (as Mary Catherine Moran shows in the preceding discussion of Gregory’s Legacy) such writings were a key route by which new moral-philosophical discourses reached general audiences. Ideas originating as high-philosophical interventions were reworked – often, as in Fordyce’s case, by clergymen – into didactic recipes for feminine morals and manners. Elsewhere I have discussed the pro-women current within British Protestantism which, ﬂowing into eighteenth-century writings on women, lent them a distinctly femalechauvinist ﬂavour,16 which in some cases was not just rhetorical: John Gregory, as Moran describes, was publicly ridiculed on one occasion for his feminine biases.17 Placing the Rights of Woman alongside these works, the points of resemblance are striking, which no doubt partly explains why Wollstonecraft’s attack on them was so vitriolic. In-house quarrels – as this contest between Enlightenment gallants and feminists deﬁnitely was – are often the ﬁercest. Wollstonecraft’s ﬁrst shot at gallantry was ﬁred at Edmund Burke in 1790 when, replying to his Reﬂections on the Revolution in France (1790), she ridiculed his enthusiasm for French chivalry, that ‘homage to [women] in general’ which he championed as the apex of cultured civility, in deﬁance of ill-bred revolutionaries’ dismissal of it as mere ‘romance and folly’.18 Romance and folly ‘indeed’ was Wollstonecraft’s retort, because such homage vitiates [women], prevents their endeavouring to obtain solid personal merit; and in short, makes those being vain inconsiderate dolls, who ought to be prudent mothers and useful members of society.19

Feminists versus Gallants 33

Chivalric reverence for women was an old-regime fatuity which, like all aristocratic follies, belonged in the dustbin of history. The Rights of Woman took up this theme, attacking Louis XIV for having introduced into French society that ‘prince-like’ adulation of women which, spreading throughout Europe, had proved ‘fatal to reason and virtue’. ‘[Y]et this heartless attention to the sex is reckoned so manly, so polite,’ Wollstonecraft wrote despondently, ‘that, till society is very differently organised, I fear, this vestige of gothic manners will not be done away …’.20 Deriding gallantry as a courtly archaism was good polemics, given the antielitist biases of most of Wollstonecraft’s readership. Tackling middle-class proponents of gallantry, Wollstonecraft scorned them as vulgar arrivistes aping elite manners, and there was certainly some truth to this. But the constellation of ideas described as ‘gallant’ by eighteenth-century British writers, while owing much to elite etiquette traditions, was not in itself a ‘gothic’ residue but an innovation linked to the development of middle-class intellectual culture. The enlightened gallants criticised in the Rights of Woman were not sexual dinosaurs but literary New Men seeking fresh grounds for masculine authority. As one leading historian of Scottish Enlightenment has written of James Fordyce, he did not ‘merely reinforce a patriarchal structure which he found already existing in British society, but … helped to lay an entirely new foundation for male superiority’.21 This innovative element in enlightened gallantry was not acknowledged, possibly not recognised, by Wollstonecraft, yet she struck hard at its most vulnerable points, of which there were plenty. For as a defence of male supremacy, gallantry was about as leaky as a notion can get and still remain aﬂoat. Only ﬁerce determination born of anxiety could prevent it from capsizing. Yet at the time Wollstonecraft took it on, it was fast becoming middle-class orthodoxy: a salient reminder (contra Enlightenment optimism) of the small role that truth plays in the fate of most ideas. *** The roots of enlightened British gallantry lay principally in seventeenth-century French salon society which, as Siep Stuurman discusses in Chapter 6.2 of this volume, was famously pro-women.22 It was women, according to the salonnier Saint-Evremond (whose translated writings did much to convey this ideal into Britain) who infused social life with the ‘Sweetness … Charms and Agreements’ so essential to polite conviviality; or as one early eighteenth century English – probably female – enthusiast for French gallantry put it, it was female ‘Company and Conversation’ that induced in men that ‘Kindness and Good Will’ which was the ‘Perfection of Civility’: ‘there is a tender Softness in the Frame of our Minds, as well as in the Constitution of our Bodies, which inspires Men, a sex more rugged, with the like Sentiments and Affections, and infuses gently and insensibly a Care to oblige …’.23 French salons, with their ethos of discursive complaisance enforced by a network of powerful hostesses, embraced this code practically as well as rhetorically. Initial

34 Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions

British reception of the ideal, however, was more equivocal. Elite society discovered in itself a new appreciation of the feminine virtues, with ladies of fashion preening themselves on their innate elegance and reﬁnement. Outside the beau monde however accusations of ‘French foppery’ and ‘coxcombery’ abounded. Aspirational bourgeois commentators, fearing of being accused of arriviste absurdities while straining after polite sophistication, faced a dilemma. The ambivalence displayed by Joseph Addison’s Spectator, that jaunty spokespiece of all things modern, was typical. Bowing gallantly to his female readership in 1711, Addison promised them the proper ‘Awe and Respect’ denied them elsewhere, while at the same time ridiculing the gallant as an effete rake who, endeavouring to please the ladies, becomes an aﬁcionado of all things feminine: ‘He knows the History of every Mode, and can inform you from which of the French King’s Wenches our Wives and Daughters had this Manner of curling their Hair …’.24 Writing in the same year, the eminent theorist of manners, Lord Shaftesbury, excoriated the ‘modern growth’ of gallantry as a risible, un-English anachronism, ‘the mere dregs of chivalry’. [A]t a time when this mystery of gallantry carried along with it the notion of doughty knighthood, when the fair were … won by dint of lance and manly prowess, it was not altogether absurd … to pay [women] homage and adoration, make them the standard of wit and manners and bring mankind under their laws. But in a country where no she-saints were worshipped by any authority from religion, it was as impertinent and senseless as it was profane to deify the sex, raise them to a capacity above what nature had allowed and treat them with a respect which, in the natural way of love, they were themselves the aptest to complain of.25 Looking back nostalgically to ancient Greece’s exclusion of women from male company, Shaftesbury bewailed women’s predominance in ‘modern conversations’ which, depriving men of ‘masculine helps of learning and sound reason’, rendered them ‘effeminate’. ‘Our sense, language and style,’ he concluded petulantly, ‘… should have something of that … natural roughness by which our sex is distinguished.’26 Criticisms of this kind persisted throughout the century. Alongside them however there grew up a pro-gallantry position that acquired increasing popularity from the 1730s. A key locus for this development was the enlightened Scottish intelligentsia, in both its ‘learned’ and ‘conversible’ manifestations – to use terms employed by David Hume in a series of 1740s essays celebrating the rise of modern politeness. ‘Conversible society’, that realm of ‘easy and sociable’ discourse among civilised men and women, was a natural site of gallantry, Hume insisted. Setting himself against Shaftesbury and other ‘zealous partisans of the ancients’ who condemned gallantry as effete and ridiculous, Hume championed it as a ‘credit to the present age’. Nothing … can proceed less from affectation than the passion of gallantry. It is natural in the highest degree. Art and education, in the most elegant courts,

Feminists versus Gallants 35

make no more alteration on it, than on all the other laudable passions. They only turn the mind more towards it; they reﬁne it; they polish it; and give it a proper grace and expression.27 In the 1770s and 80s this argument acquired a historical gloss. In a series of works documenting the beneﬁcial impact of the civilising process on European women, Scottish Enlightenment historians identiﬁed medieval chivalry as a decisive stage in women’s transition from barbaric oppression to their current happy position as the ‘friends and companions of man’. It was the ‘respect and veneration’ for women characteristic of the ‘gothic age’ which still exerted a ‘considerable inﬂuence upon our behaviour towards them’, the Glasgow historian John Millar explained in his seminal The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771). Looking back to feudal warrior society, Millar anatomised its ‘manifest tendency to heighten and improve the passion between the sexes’: To be in love was looked upon as one of the necessary qualiﬁcations of a knight; and he was no less ambitious of showing his constancy and ﬁdelity to his mistress, than of displaying his military virtues. He assumed the title of her slave, or servant … [and this] sincere and faithful passion … was naturally productive of the utmost purity of manners, and of great respect and veneration for the female sex.28 Several centuries later, this reverence for women was still to be found, albeit in soberer form, in that well-founded respect for women’s ‘useful talents and accomplishments’ which for Millar, as for a host of other late eighteenth-century enlighteners, was a key index of Britain’s civilised status. Savages might treat their wives as childbearing slaves, or ancient Greeks and Romans imprison them in the home, or Eastern despots exploit them sexually in their seraglios, but eighteenthcentury British men, absorbing and modernising chivalric traditions, knew how to properly appreciate their womenfolk. The message – delivered with great historical élan by Millar, Lord Kames, William Robertson, William Alexander, and many other Scottish exponents of the civilisation paradigm29 – became a staple of writings by custodians of manners, English and Scottish alike. It was the ‘spirit of ancient chivalry’, the enlightened Manchester cleric John Bennett told his female readers in 1788, which was responsible for that species of gallantry, that ‘moulded by increasing knowledge … still … pervades … every part of the continent of Europe’, elevating women’s status and inducing men to view themselves as ‘subservient to [women’s] ease and … protection’.30 The cultural prestige enjoyed by eighteenth-century Englishwomen was a ‘Gothic extract’, Lord Shaftesbury wrote on a complaining note earlier in the century: ‘gallantry and ladies must have a part in everything that passes for polite in our age’.31 Or as James Fordyce put it, more positively, it was women’s ‘wonderful inﬂuence’ over men in ‘ancient days’ which had laid the ground for enlightened sexual attitudes: ‘There cannot, I am persuaded … be many worse symptoms of degeneracy, in an enlightened age … than … indifference about the regards of reputable women.’32

36 Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions

As well as introducing a relativist element into enlightened thinking about gender–power relations, historicist accounts like these served to counter doctrines of innate female character. After all, if women’s way of life was amenable to historical transformation, might not their personality traits be equally susceptible to change? Might not qualities like delicacy and weakness, generally attributed to women’s ‘original constitution’, result rather from their circumstances and education, as John Millar mooted in 1778?33 The idea was not new – the Cartesian feminist Poulain de la Barre, among others, had canvassed it a century earlier34 – but it gained greater weight and currency. Thus according to William Alexander’s popular History of Women (1779), the physical weakness of women in modern commercial societies was due to their ‘sedentary life, low abstemious diet, and exclusion from fresh air’. Any inferiority displayed by modern women was ‘entirely an offspring of … culture’, Alexander insisted. 35 Likewise the Scottish traveller–soldier, Alexander Jardine, who in 1788 reported the wide variety of traits displayed by women of different nations, concluding that ‘[m]ost of the present striking differences between the male and female character, are more the effect of art than nature’.36 Disparities of ‘virtue and understanding’ between the sexes were mostly due to ‘diversity of education’, another Scottish luminary, James Beattie, wrote in his Elements of Moral Science (1790–93), while a half-century earlier Hume had controversially declared that even chastity, the deﬁning quality of feminine virtue, was a cultural artefact, a product of that ‘peculiar degree of shame’ that society attached to female inﬁdelity in order to ensure legitimate paternity: ‘and when a general rule of this kind is once established … [it] makes us extend the notions of modesty over the whole sex …’.37 None of these thinkers denied innate sexual difference tout court: ‘each sex … is ﬁtted by the Author of nature for accomplishing different purposes’.38 But if women were designed for home life, men too, it was emphasised, were domestic creatures in whom the civilising process had meant an enhancement of family feeling. Nor should female domesticity be understood as an unchanging fact of nature but rather as a historical phenomenon whose forms and consequences varied over time. Here the contrast between the status of married women in the Graeco-Roman world and their position in eighteenth-century British society was a popular theme, migrating rapidly from philosophical-historical texts into prescriptive works. Thus whereas in ancient Greek society, James Fordyce told his readers, ‘married women were in a manner secluded from society, being mostly conﬁned to the interior apartments of their houses, and wholly engrossed by domestic occupations’, to modern British minds such practices seemed ‘so uncourteous to the ladies, as well as unanimating to the men’ that it was hard to imagine how they ‘could obtain amongst a people highly polished …’.39 For John Bennett likewise, the ancient sequestration of women in the home appeared ‘a low and inglorious condition of servility’ that made men ‘rough and insolent’ and women ‘awkward and inelegant’.40 How much better, as David Hume argued against admirers of classical patriarchy, to encourage women to leave their ﬁresides to mingle freely with men, thereby producing in both sexes ‘an increase

Feminists versus Gallants 37

of humanity, from the very habit of conversing together, and contributing to each other’s pleasure and entertainment’.41 The home was women’s realm, enlightened opinion-makers agreed, but so too the world of polite sociability, for which certain traits ideally ﬁtted them, namely love of peace, natural reﬁnement of manner, and, most crucially, instinctive tenderness or sympathy for others – attributes characteristic of all good Christians but present in women to an exceptional degree. Women, British Enlightenment thinkers all agreed, were primary bearers of the ‘affections’, meaning not just love of family and other intimates but the ‘social sympathies’ on which civilised progress depended, since it was through feminine inﬂuence that men, that bellicose and uncivil sex, became ‘softened’ into social beings. After all, what ‘better school for manners’ could there be, Hume demanded, ‘than the company of virtuous women’: where the mutual endeavour to please must insensibly polish the mind, where the example of female softness and modesty must communicate itself to their admirers, and where the delicacy of that sex puts every one on his guard, lest he give offence by any breach of decency?42 Hume’s emphasis here on sexual modesty was a core theme of enlightened gallantry, with men urged to act as true knights by curbing licentiousness and eschewing ‘loose women’ in favour of those ‘who join good breeding, and liberal sentiments, to purity of mind and manners’.43 In stressing erotic propriety in this way, modern gallants were setting their faces against the well-established tradition of amatory gallantry still current in elite circles in the second half of the eighteenth century, as emblematised by that notorious work of paternal advice, Lord Chesterﬁeld’s Letters to his son, in which the young heir was urged to behave gallantly, that is, to engage in erotic dalliance with fashionable ladies, as part of his worldly education. Published in 1774, the Letters were an ideal foil for enlightened moralists seeking to distinguish their decorous sexual code from this dissolute, aristocratic, and – above all – French-inspired tradition (it was ‘the graceful and bewitching inﬂuence’ of French politesse which had corrupted Chesterﬁeld, it was widely alleged).44 Virtually every British enlightened-gallant text contrasted Gallic, lascivious gallantry to its own native code of female modesty and male self-restraint. Chaste conviviality, with ‘the highest subjects of morality treated of as natural … discourse’, was true British politeness, it was decreed.45 This was not a counsel for coldness and constraint. British enlighteners were keen on the passions, believing their energies ought not to be repressed but harnessed to the demands of modern civility, for ‘the more men reﬁne upon pleasure, the less will they indulge in excesses of any kind.’46 Thus, whereas in primitive societies unrestrained mingling of the sexes had led to licentiousness, among civilised peoples, John Millar explained, ‘the pleasures which nature has grafted upon the love between the sexes, become the source of an elegant correspondence’.47 Far from inimical to virtuous sociability, Hume similarly argued, in

38 Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions

polite societies the ‘friendship and mutual sympathy’ generated by erotic desire becomes a fount of social sentiment. Men are ‘commonly proud and selﬁsh’; desire for women softens this egoism and arouses consideration for others, partly by stimulating a ﬂow of natural sympathy but also through women’s example, as female ‘complaisancy’ inspires in men a similar generosity of manner.48 Male desire and women’s natural civility combine to produce what David Fordyce – James Fordyce’s elder brother, an Aberdeen moral philosopher – described as that ‘softened intercourse’ characteristic of truly civilised societies. ‘Now I ask,’ David Fordyce demanded in his 1760 Dialogues Concerning Education, a classic statement of the enlightened gallant position, what an insipid thing were human life, were it not seasoned with the elegant reﬁnements of love and gallantry, and all those tender delicacies of conversation, which are inspired by female softness, and directed by good manners?’49 Like his brother James, David Fordyce was a clerical philosophe and minor scion of Scottish Enlightenment. His Dialogues record a series of conversations held in an imaginary rural academy between ‘Cleora’, an enlightened young woman of intellectual tastes, and a group of young male scholars. Sexual manners are a leitmotif, with the distinction between vicious and virtuous gallantry – ‘the wanton effusions of an indiscreet and excessive complaisance’ versus ‘sober expressions of a genuine esteem’ – analysed in detail.50 ‘May we not be polite and agreeable without polishing ourselves out of our old British plainness and sincerity?’, Cleora wants to know, or is male address to women inevitably a ‘conveyance of lies’ designed to ‘ﬂatter and impose’? Her companions respond by denouncing amatory gallantry as beau-monde venality, a ‘system of fraud … to ruin the innocent’, and insisting that gallant sentiment must be tempered by ‘rules of honour and humanity’. Nor is it women’s sexual allure that attracts true gallants, they claim, but rather their ‘moral charms’. It is only rakes or men of low understanding who are ‘caught with mere show, and imagine that a ﬁne complexion, or a handsome set of features, include every virtue and perfection’.51 Like all enlightened-gallant works, the Dialogues carry a deﬁnite feminist charge. ‘Cleora’, while lovely and sweet-mannered, is no shrinking violet but a self-respecting woman conscious of her dignity, telling off her young admirers when they become too ﬂirtatious (‘we shall converse more freely if we do it on equal terms’, she instructs one particularly importunate lad), and dismissing chivalric compliments as ‘ﬁne toys and Gew-gaws’ intended by men ‘to amuse us, and when you see us taken with the shining triﬂes … carry us off in triumph and reduce under the order of domestic discipline.’ Yet she is no enemy to conventional femininity, believing that women’s chief social duty is to ‘delight and polish the men’, and expressing shock at women who are ‘forward in conversation, vain and arrogant, rough and boisterous’. Women should receive a good education, she insists, but only to prepare them to be ‘good wives and women’. She herself has been well taught, but so discreetly that no whiff of scholarship is detectable in her sentiments, which appear rather ‘pure dictates of nature’.52

Feminists versus Gallants 39

Bookish women who ﬂaunt their erudition are singled out for attack, as they were in most modernist writings on women. Animus against learned women, particularly those displaying their wisdom in print, was a long-standing feature of British intellectual life that few Enlightenment writers sought to challenge. Again, the nightmare scenario was France, where ‘female literature is swelled beyond its natural dimensions’ and femmes philosophes ruled unchallenged, reducing men of letters to craven fops: a terrifying spectre of intellectual emasculation.53 ‘Women were not formed for … literary reﬁnement,’ John Bennett harangued his female readers: ‘The wife, the mother, and the oeconomist of a family … [is] lost in the literary pedant; the order of nature [is] totally reversed …’.54 Satirical sketches of such viragos – Cleora’s evil sisters – dotted enlightened educational treatises, such as ‘Corinna’, drawn by Vicesimus Knox in 1779, who when in ‘company with enlightened people’ expatiates on the happiness of possessing a philosophical turn … .Voltaire, Rousseau, Bolingbroke, and Hume, are her oracles. She is dreaded by her own sex, and indeed voluntarily gives up their society. But the men she thinks more entertaining …55 ‘How forbidding an object!’ James Fordyce exclaimed of such women: ‘Feminality is gone: Nature is transformed … [into] a clamorous, obstinate, contentious being … ﬁt only to be chased from the haunts of society’.56 David Fordyce’s Cleora endorses this sentiment, condemning out of hand ‘female philosophers and virtuosos’. ‘A woman [is] in a dangerous way, who runs after the secrets of learning’, she tells her young men friends, who want little convincing.57 Fordyce’s Cleora is an enlightened-gallant pin-up: intelligent without being intellectual, modest but not priggish; self-respecting while remaining ever mindful of her feminine weaknesses and natural dependence on men. The courtesies her young interlocutors pay to her are a respectful tribute to her virtues but also a tactful expression of their innate superiority. For just as ‘superior affability’ toward social inferiors is the hallmark of a true gentleman, so such ‘condescension … is still more decent and necessary’ with women, Fordyce counsels his male readers: ‘We can hardly shew them too much Respect, or pay them too much Deference, that we may conceal, and, in some degree, compensate to them the Superiority which Nature has given us over them.’58 Such frank endorsements of male dominance littered British Enlightenment texts. It was the ‘superiority vested by law in … men’ for which modern women were happily recompensed by ‘that superior complaisance which is paid to them by every man who aspires to elegance of manners’, James Beattie explained; or as Alexander Jardine put the matter, more bluntly, ‘all the romantic nonsense of modern gallantry’ was the polite mode by which modern men ‘act[ed] the tyrants over the female part of society’.59 In civilised nations, it is rituals of deference rather than brute coercion with which men enforce their dominion over women: gallantry is the non-violent expression of male ascendancy.

40 Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions

This principle of power-turned-polite – ‘contempt … disguised; authority concealed’, in Hume’s trenchant formulation – was at the heart of British Enlightenment: which is why Wollstonecraft’s attack on it, as we shall see in a moment, had a signiﬁcance that went beyond her feminism.60 But before turning to this, let us consider further the motives behind this new sexual politesse. Why did a renovated chivalry – and its derivatives, those mass-market panegyrics to femininity of which Wollstonecraft complained so bitterly – achieve such ascendancy among eighteenth-century British progressives? Or to put the question differently, what was the problem that enlightened gallantry was designed to solve? Modernity as conceived by British enlighteners had at its heart a character type – the polite or civilised personality – most of whose key attributes (peaceability, sensibility, sympathy, sociability) belonged on the feminine side of the gender axis. As the innately reﬁned sex, women set the standard for cultivated humanity, their delicate responsiveness to others (‘social sympathy’) the sina qua non of true civility. As Moran shows in the preceding chapter, many of the behavioural diktats issued to women by enlightened advice-givers – to hide superior intellectual ability, to avoid shows of egoism, to display a tender interest in others – applied equally to civilised men: and here of course a considerable dilemma arose.61 For if men were to emulate women, what became of virility and its associated prerogatives? ‘As a code,’ Amanda Vickery has noted, ‘politeness was always in danger of collapsing into effeminacy’: a peril loudly trumpeted by conservative moralists but widely acknowledged too by enlightened thinkers, who worried about the spread of foppery and an attendant collapse of national virility.62 ‘[T]he delicate sensibility required in civilised nations sometimes destroys the masculine ﬁrmness of the character’, Adam Smith warned.63 Discussing this feminisation of modern personhood, scholars like John Pocock, Carol Kay and Terry Eagleton have pointed to the political forces propelling it.64 In a nation still licking its wounds from decades of civil strife, gentle manners were deﬁnitely at a premium. ‘When the polite man of commercial and cultivated society looked back into his past,’ John Pocock writes, ‘what he saw … [were] passions not yet socialised’;65 and it was as exemplars of civilised emotion, with its attendant promises of peace and stability, that British philosophes turned to women, arguing that without women’s soothing inﬂuence men were ‘dangerous animal[s] to society’.66 Enlightenment images of a brave new world of independent-minded, self-determining citizens rubbed up against still-fresh memories of sanguinary sectarianism and civil war: constant reminders of the hazards posed by unchained minds and emotions. As the sex whose survival depended on the ability to please and conciliate others, women offered an apparent solution to this Hobbesian dilemma: an other-attuned subjectivity that became the template for a properly socialised selfhood. The self-suppression, the relentless self-policing that constituted the properly feminine ego became the hallmark of modern civility. In one sense of course, this elevation of Woman into the paradigmatic modern subject had little to do with women or gender at all, serving rather as a metaphoric frame for the complex psychic changes required by a commercialising society. Yet the anxieties to which these changes

Feminists versus Gallants 41

gave rise, the fear of widespread emasculation or even a total collapse of sexual boundaries, seem to have been sharp enough – especially among men of letters. No reader of eighteenth-century male-authored cultural commentary can fail to be impressed by the reams of print devoted to the threat posed by women’s actual or potential predominance in polite society, especially polite literary society. What do we make of this? Until recently, historians of gender were agreed in depicting the eighteenth century as a time of hardening gender divisions, a period when men and women’s lives biﬁcurated into ‘separate spheres’. But closer examination of the evidence – by, among others, Amanda Vickery, Margaret Hunt, Linda Colley and Olwen Hufton – shows that far from becoming more entrenched, by the second half of the century ‘the boundaries supposedly separating men and women were … unstable and becoming more so.’67 In the case of men and women of the rising middle class, I would put the argument even more strongly, and propose that the ‘gender panic’ (to borrow Dror Wahrman’s phrase) expressed by moralists during this period signalled an unprecedented cultural convergence between the sexes.68 Separate-spheres propaganda notwithstanding, by the mid eighteenth century men and women of the British middle ranks were becoming more like each other – in social attitudes and behaviour, in educational and professional aspirations, in conversational codes, even in their reading matter – than at any previous point in history.69 This was particularly true in enlightened intellectual circles where female participation in ‘rational discourse’ was a point of pride. Historians of Enlightenment Britain have drawn attention to the near-absence of women from key sites of learning and debate: academies, political associations, taverns, coffeehouses. But against this must be set women’s active presence in networks of enlightened sociability, like those of Edinburgh Whig society (where the leading topics of female conversation, according to one hostile observer, were the ‘Resumption of Cash-payments, Borough Reform, and the Corn-Bill’);70 or the bluestocking salons of London and similar literary coteries in provincial centres of Enlightenment like Lichﬁeld (Dr Johnson’s home village in the Midlands, where the poet and critic Anna Seward reigned over a lively circle of intellectual iconoclasts that included Erasmus Darwin and Richard Edgeworth); or the high-minded, politicised world of Rational Dissent where feminists of both sexes found ready support. But it was among literary professionals that sexual barriers were weakest, as the exploding market for popular literature turned women into scribblers at such a rate that by the mid eighteenth century their presence in some genres, especially novel-writing, threatened to eclipse that of men. ‘Amazons of the pen’ were everywhere ‘contest[ing] the usurpations of virility’ Samuel Johnson warned with nervous jocosity in 1753.71 Surveying these developments, enthusiasts declared it women’s ‘golden age’. But plenty of opinion-makers were far from enthusiastic, decrying this reversal of the natural order and calling on men to reassert their God-given dominance over the fairer but inferior sex. For men of enlightened views, the dilemma was plain: how to promote female excellence as a standard of modern civility while holding

42 Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions

the line against ‘Amazonianism’, especially against the pretensions and successes of literary women?72 How to encourage the spread of Enlightenment values while keeping at bay Enlightenment Woman, the freethinking, independent femme philosophe? ‘[S]ince ladies have had to do out of their chambers … philosophy has gone to wreck,’ Lord Shaftesbury wailed in chorus with scores of like-minded defenders of male privilege, ‘and there has been sad havoc among the men of sense.’ Responding to this ‘havoc’, enlightened gallants purveyed sentimentalised images of women that, regarded from this vantage-point, do indeed appear – as Wollstonecraft denominated them – archaic. Repudiating traditional misogynist stereotypes of women as weak, superﬁcial, emotionally incontinent, what gallant moralists offered in their stead were not realistic images of femininity but idealised inversions of these defamatory portrayals: feminine foibles sentimentalised into sex-speciﬁc virtues in a rearguard effort to stave off the equalising pressures of commercial society, to shore up a ‘sexual distinction’ that, natural or not, was clearly in need of some vigorous reinforcing.73 It was fear of ‘having women declared their equals’ which prompted men’s endless panegyrics to women, Wollstonecraft’s friend and fellow feminist, Mary Hays, insisted: Then it is that we hear of the heavenly softness of the sex, that with a glance can disarm authority and dispel rage. Then it is that we hear them tell, with as much earnestness and gravity as if it were true, or even possible, consistently with human nature; that in woman’s weakness consists her strength, and in her dependence her power … [and] that upon the whole, what women lose of power in an acknowledged way … they make up for in the private scenes of life, etc, etc, etc … ‘[U]nmeaning, impotent, romantic ravings … [that] have not a leg to stand upon’ was Hays’s ﬁerce concluding verdict on this sweet-talk, ‘ when examined upon the principles of reason and commonsense …’.74 If one were looking for a ﬂashpoint in British feminism’s relationship to Enlightenment, this would seem a good candidate. From the moment when enlightened-gallant propaganda began appearing in Britain, it came under ﬁre from sexual egalitarians. ‘[F[or what are all these ﬁne Speeches and Submissions,’ Mary Astell demanded, ‘but abusing [us] in a well-bred way?’.75 Many midcentury literary women echoed her sentiments.76 But it was with the publication of the Rights of Woman, and the new alignments this created, that the issue became polarised between feminists and anti-feminists, with women like Hays and Mary Robinson, another of Wollstonecraft’s feminist intimates, lining up with Wollstonecraft against the ‘philosophical sensualists’,77 while defenders of gallantry attacked her ‘de-sexing’ extremism. This wider controversy, and the ripples rolling out from it into the nineteenth-century Woman Question, are beyond the remit of this chapter, but they represented a signiﬁcant element in Wollstonecraft’s legacy to later feminist generations. ***

Feminists versus Gallants 43

From the moment Wollstonecraft set foot in the political arena, she inveighed against politeness, that ‘Gothic affability’ that cloaked inequalities in phoney sentiment.78 Turning to that other great enemy of politeness, Rousseau, she endorsed his view of modern manners as ‘vile’ and ‘corrupting’, and, echoing his ‘admirable’ Discourse on the Origin … of Inequality, insisted that true civility could only exist among equals.79 In fact without equality ‘there can be no society; – giving a manly meaning to the term’, she declared, since without equality there could be no genuine community of interests among individuals but only oppression, power-mongering and conﬂict.80 Continuing inequalities of wealth and rank make civilisation in its proper sense – that is, ‘that state of [social] perfection necessary to secure the sacred rights of every human creature’ – impossible. ‘For all the advantages of civilisation cannot be felt, unless it pervade the whole mass, humanising every description of men – and then it is the ﬁrst of blessings, the true perfection of man.’81 This was a long way from the viewpoint of a David Hume or Adam Smith. When critics charged Wollstonecraft with wanting ‘to bring all to the most perfect equality, and, by establishing absolute democracy, annihilate every species of subordination’,82 they were pointing to a level of radical aspiration that placed her well to the left of most British enlighteners. It was this ultraradicalism that lent her attack on gallantry its sharp political edge. For if politeness were a corrupt social idiom, the lingua franca of ‘false civilisation’, then gallantry was politeness’s nastiest manifestation, substituting ‘insolent condescension’ for true respect and fellow-feeling. It was from this perspective that Wollstonecraft called on all ‘reasonable men’ to eschew gallantry in favour of egalitarian camaraderie: Those writers are particularly useful, in my opinion, who make man feel for man, independent of the station he ﬁlls, or the drapery of factitious sentiments. I then would fain convince reasonable men of the importance of some of my remarks … I appeal to their understandings; and, as a fellow-creature, claim, in the name of my sex, some interest in their hearts. I entreat them to assist to emancipate their companion, to make her a help meet for them!83 Describing Wollstonecraft’s attack on gallantry in his 1798 Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, William Godwin recalled how disconcerting its readers had found it, not least because of its rebarbative tone. The ‘spirited and decisive’ way that Wollstonecraft set about her adversaries had ‘shocked the majority’ he claimed.84 And indeed Wollstonecraft’s savagery, as she dismembers the gallant position, is rather shocking. Declaring her intention to ‘severely’ expose ‘those writers [who] insidiously degrade the sex while they are prostrate before their personal charms’, she tears into Fordyce, Gregory et al., with no trace of ladylike decorum, sneering at their ‘melliﬂuous’ style (especially Fordyce’s) and charging them with rank hypocrisy, a ‘libidinous mockery’ of the sex they claim to admire.85 She quotes a satirical passage from Hume, comparing French gallantry to an Athenian saturnalia, a festival where masters

44 Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions

served slaves in a ritual inversion of chatteldom. It’s a very good analogy for her purposes, presenting chivalry as a carnivalesque transposition of gender power relations. Hume’s point in drawing the comparison – to distinguish good British gallantry from the bad French variety – is swept aside as she damns tout court the ‘specious homage’ men offer to women ‘when, in fact, they are insultingly supporting their own superiority’.86 If this is French manners, then British gallants are true Frenchmen, she implies. ‘It is vain to expect much public or private virtue, till both men and women … treat each other with respect … I mean … the modest respect of humanity, and fellow-feeling, not the libidinous mockery of gallantry.’87 As always in the Rights of Woman, the polemic is directed as much at women as at men, or at least at those women who, their minds and morals deformed by ‘mutable prejudices’, ‘adopt the sentiments that brutalise them, with all the pertinacity of ignorance’.88 The accusation of female collusion, central to her case, is spelled out unﬂinchingly: Exalted by their inferiority (this sounds like a contradiction), they constantly demand homage as women, though experience should teach them that the men who pride themselves upon paying this arbitrary insolent respect to the sex, with the most scrupulous exactness, are most inclined to tyrannise over, and despise, the very weakness they cherish.89 The ‘passions of men’ have ‘placed women on thrones’, she writes, from which they preside like caged songbirds ‘stalk[ing] with mock majesty from perch to perch’. Caressed and spoiled, such women luxuriate in their sexual reign, but ‘health, liberty and virtue are given in exchange’. ‘Ah!’ she sighs with profound exasperation, why do women permit themselves to be thus ‘deluded by hollow respect, till they are led to resign … their natural prerogatives?’.90 The condemnation is harsh – so harsh that Wollstonecraft has sometimes been described as misogynistic. Why is she so tough on feminine susceptibilities? The answer lies partly in the anti-elitist thrust of her argument, her condemnation of gallantry as courtly licentiousness, the charge that middle-class gallants and coquettes are merely aping ‘the great’. Woman as portrayed in the Rights of Woman is sister to the emblematic ‘lady of fashion’, favourite target of all eighteenth-century bourgeois philippics against elite luxury and lasciviousness.91 Giving this ﬁgure a radical spin, Wollstonecraft denounces her as an emblem not just of aristocratic vice but of ‘false civilisation’ in general, of commercial modernity and its arriviste social codes. But more than this, this benighted Woman, this ﬂattered, deluded coquette, is also – and here is where she becomes a feminist instrument – an exposé of the enlightened-gallant female ideal, the ‘fair sex’ as seen in the clear light of feminist reason. Viewing gallantry’s model woman without her rhetorical ﬁg-leaf, what Wollstonecraft ﬁnds is a sexualised monolith, a ﬁgure stripped of everything but her physical charms and ‘negative virtues’: ‘patience, docility, good-humour, and ﬂexibility, virtues incompatible with any vigorous exertion of intellect’.92 ‘All women are … levelled, by

Feminists versus Gallants 45

meekness and docility, into one character of yielding softness and gentle compliance.’93 Like ‘artiﬁcial politeness’ in general, which enforces the very divisions of rank and power that its ritual obsequies are meant to obviate, gallantry imposes on women a ‘sexual distinction’ which is as fake as it is destructive, displacing female human beings with eroticised ‘fair creatures’, ‘lovely goddesses’, ‘angels’ – ‘chimeras’ of the male imagination, as Wollstonecraft summarily dismisses such images. ‘Why are girls to be told that they resemble angels,’ she demands but to sink them below women? … Yet they are told, at the same time, that they are only like angels when they are young and beautiful; consequently, it is their persons, not their virtues, that procure them this homage … happy would it be for women, if they were only ﬂattered by the men who loved them; I mean, who love the individual, not the sex … .94 As objects of male fantasy and desire, women are ‘the sex’, with every aspect of their lives invested with erotic meaning – even the charming postures they adopt when praying, according to James Fordyce. ‘She was quite feminine, according to the masculine acceptation of the word,’ Wollstonecraft writes of one woman who was so captivated by male attentions that the ‘wife, mother, and human creature [were] … all swallowed up’ in the coquette.95 It’s a hyperbolic, surreal image – but then so is the one to which it responds. Both are polemical constructs fashioned at the cutting-edge of Enlightenment opinion, at the point where it splintered between a re-fashioned, polite male supremacism and a feminist vision of womanhood unencumbered by ‘feminalities’, to use a phrase current among pro-woman writers of the day – a ‘wild wish’, as Wollstonecraft put it, to ‘see the distinction of sex confounded’, and women free to pursue virtue and truth on equal terms to those of men. Dismissing then those pretty feminine phrases, which the men condescendingly use to soften our slavish dependence, and despising that weak elegancy of mind, exquisite sensibility, and sweet docility of manners, supposed to be the sexual characteristics of the weaker vessel, I wish to show that elegance is inferior to virtue, [and] that the ﬁrst object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex …’96 For Enlightenment to triumph, women too must become enlightened, abandoning false femininity for the ‘practical virtues’ of rationality, independence, self-reliance: merits that Wollstonecraft sometimes labels – to the dismay of present-day readers – as ‘manly’, an adjective that in the eighteenth century, when manliness was virtually synonymous with personal strength, had more universal application than today. It would be naïve to suggest that such language carried no male bias (recognising this, in the Rights of Woman Wollstonecraft deliberately amended her earlier description of the republican historian Catherine Macaulay as a ‘masculine writer’, saying that she would no longer ‘admit of such an arrogant assumption of reason’ by men).97 But the real

46 Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions

signiﬁcance of these prescriptions lay in their refusal of sexual divisions, their drive toward an impolite world where men and women would co-exist as equals. Describing her own conversations with men, Wollstonecraft boasted about their frankness, including on sexual topics: I have conversed, as man to man, with medical men, on anatomical subjects; and compared the proportions of the human body with artists … yet … was never reminded by word or look of my sex. … And I am persuaded that in the pursuit of knowledge women would never be insulted by sensible men … if they did not by mock modesty remind them that they were women …98 The claim, given the attitudes of the time, may seem over-optimistic. But the circle of radical intellectuals to which Wollstonecraft belonged regularly infringed gender norms. An intensely sociable band, in the early 1790s these men and women met frequently for dinner, often at the home of Wollstonecraft’s publisher, Joseph Johnson, where they would remain talking and arguing (the poet Anna Barbauld later recalled) long into the night.99 From the fragmentary evidence we have of these occasions, women seem to have participated in them on an equal basis. Certainly Wollstonecraft did: encountering her for the ﬁrst time over Johnson’s table in November 1791, Godwin soon found himself embroiled in a ﬁerce dispute over religion that lasted the entire meal.100 Later, travelling in Scandinavia, Wollstonecraft enjoyed startling the men she met there by quizzing them on political and economic issues (‘men’s questions’, as one Danish naval man described her interrogations).101 ‘We indulged little in common society chitchat,’ the writer Helen Maria Williams wrote of the little Paris community of radical Britons to which she and Wollstonecraft belonged in the early 1790s, ‘The women seemed to forget concern to please, and the men thought less about admiring them … In that salon there was something better than gallantry. What appeared most were mutual esteem and a shared interest in the great issues of the day.’102 Thus whereas among the bon ton ‘decorum is to supplant nature, and banish all simplicity’, in Wollstonecraft’s world it was open-handed sincerity – ‘the simplicity and generosity of republican manners’, as one man eulogised them – that earned social kudos.103 What all this really amounted to was a particularly uncompromising version of the Enlightenment ethos. While literary gallants hymned feminine propriety and bleated about the perils of over-enlightened Amazons, among British radicals camaraderie of equals became the keynote of an enlightened sexual etiquette. 104 *** ‘Vigorous minds,’ Mary Hays wrote of Wollstonecraft, ‘are with difﬁculty restrained within the trammels of authority; a spirit of enterprise, a passion for experiment … urges them to quit beaten paths … to burst the fetters of prescription.’105 As a reminder of what Enlightenment could mean to a woman – and what enlightened gallants feared it would mean – this cannot be bettered. And it

Feminists versus Gallants 47

reminds us of Wollstonecraft’s importance not just as a feminist polemicist but as an incarnation of dissident womanhood, the Learned Lady turned jacobin subversive. When Hays wrote these words, a few months after Wollstonecraft’s death in September 1797, Wollstonecraft’s reputation stood high among progressive-minded Britons. Even the repression blighting British politics after 1793 had not diminished her standing. But very soon this changed. The publication of Godwin’s Memoirs, with its unblushing account of her outré sexual history, unleashed a torrent of right-wing abuse, transforming her from a respected philosophe into an emblem of revolutionary depravity, a ‘philosophical wanton’, a ‘hyena in petticoats’. Feminism, always at the radical edge of liberal opinion, was driven beyond its borders, into the wilder territory of leftwing Unitarianism, utopian socialism and plebeian democracy, where it was to remain for the next half century. Opinion-makers of both sexes who had once applauded the ‘champion of female equality’ now spurned her.106 As the age of Enlightenment drew to a close, a ragbag of anti-feminist ideas – Evangelical renovations of Pauline doctrine, quasi-scientiﬁc arguments for female inferiority, political defences of male prerogative – attached themselves to the remnants of enlightened gallantry to generate that unwholesome blend of myth and prejudice that was to become Victorian sexual ideology. The feminist protest against femininity, against the ‘factitious character’ foisted on women by new-wave defenders of male privilege, was silenced for a time, as dogmas of Women’s Place took centre-stage, pushing the women’s-rights banner into the dust.107 What then was the true Enlightenment legacy: the anti-feminist dogmas that acquired such inﬂuence in the years following Wollstonecraft’s death, or the opposition to them that appeared nearly a century later, in the late nineteenth/ early twentieth century women’s movement? The answer of course is both, as with the rise of a mass feminist politics the contest between sexual egalitarians and polite male supremacists waged in the 1790s, and pushed to the sidelines of political life after 1798, found its next point of engagement. Gallantry, always a fragile contrivance, acquired a host of vociferous new opponents who, stripping away its unctuous rhetoric to expose its brutality – its ‘sentimental and savage’ view of women, to quote the suffragette Cicely Hamilton108 – pushed it closer to oblivion. When in 1792 Wollstonecraft called for a feminist Enlightenment, British femmes philosophes – tiny in number, socially disadvantaged, politically marginal – were in no position to realise this ambition. Several generations later, with women hammering at the doors of parliament, the prospects looked better, and better still at the end of the second millennium. Historians worry that Enlightenment, once the monopoly of an Olympiad of male philosophers, has become too broad, too imprecise to retain any historical meaning. But if we think of Enlightenment not as single historical entity, which it clearly was not, but as a constellation of aspirations evolving and democratising over time, under the pressure of incoming intellectual constituencies, then its real historic signiﬁcance becomes evident. The triumph of truth over prejudice, liberty over despotism, meant something different when demanded by women than by men, something more subversive of quotidian realities, and it was this difference that

48 Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions

divided feminists from their Enlightened opponents. The difference remains: two centuries after the Rights of Woman, western women still need an equal-rights Enlightenment. Perhaps Mary Wollstonecraft’s twenty-ﬁrst century daughters will ﬁnally inaugurate it.

Notes Thanks to Michèle Cohen, Sarah Knott, Mary Catherine Moran, Karen O’Brien, Jane Rendall, and the editors of Representations for helpful comments on this essay. Thanks also to Cora Kaplan, organiser of the conference, ‘Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1830’ (Chawton House Centre for Early English Women’s Writing) for which the essay was originally written. M. Butler and J. Todd, eds, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1989) is cited below as Works. 1. David Hume, ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’, Essays: Moral, Political and Literary (1741–52; Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), p. 133. 2. William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 231. 3. Mary Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution, 1794, Works, vol. 6, pp. 6–7 [hereafter French Revolution]. 4. Eric Hobsbawm, On History (1997; London: Abacus Books, 1998), p. 336. 5. For negative evaluations of Wollstonecraft as an Enlightenment thinker see, inter alia, Timothy J. Reiss, ‘Revolution in Bounds: Wollstonecraft, Women and Reason’, in L. Kauffman (ed.), Gender and Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), Moira Gatens, ‘“The Oppressed State of My Sex”: Wollstonecraft on Reason, Feeling and Equality’, in M. L. Shanley and C. Pateman, Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), pp. 6–128. For more positive accounts, see Pauline Johnson, ‘Feminism and the Enlightenment’, Radical Philosophy 63, 1993; Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 2000); Kate Soper, ‘Naked Human Nature and the Draperies of Custom’ in Eileen Yeo (ed.) Mary Wollstonecraft and 200 Years of Feminism (London: Rivers Oram, 1997), pp. 207–221. 6. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792; Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 74 [hereafter VRW]. 7. For a brief but illuminating discussion of these issues, see Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1995). 8. Mary Hays, quoted in William St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: the Biography of a Family (London: Faber, 1989), p. 146. 9. Wollstonecraft, French Revolution, Works, vol. 6, pp. 15–23, 7. 10. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790; Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 64 [hereafter VRM]. 11. Mary Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria, 1798, Works, vol. 1, pp. 115–6. 12. Wollstonecraft, VRW, p. 90. 13. Ibid., p. 178. 14. Ibid., p. 74. 15. Ibid., p. 175. 16. See my Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 98–110, for a discussion of the pro-woman dimension of British Protestantism. 17. See above, p. 8. In the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft is much gentler in her handling of John Gregory than of Fordyce, acknowledging with ‘affectionate respect’ the

Feminists versus Gallants 49

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

‘paternal solicitude’ that pervades Gregory’s Legacy while insisting that she cannot ‘speciously support’ his bad opinions. (p. 178) And indeed Gregory’s conduct toward his daughters – he ensured that they had sufficient income to live as independent spinsters, if they chose – would certainly have won her approval. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790; Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987) p. 67. Wollstonecraft, VRM, p. 25. Wollstonecraft, VRW, p. 179. John Dwyer, The Age of the Passions: an Interpretation of Adam Smith and Scottish Enlightenment Culture (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1999), p. 127. See below, pp. 371–88. Lawrence E. Klein, ‘Gender, Conversation and the Public Sphere in Early EighteenthCentury England’, in J. Still and M. Worton, eds, Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices (Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 106; [?Judith Drake], An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (4th edn; 1721), p. 130. Spectator (1711; London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1958), vol. 1, pp. 33, 9. Anthony A. Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711; Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 237. Ibid, p. 233. Hume, ‘Arts and Sciences’, p 131. The focus on chivalry was not conﬁned to Scottish Enlightenment writings, but was also to be found in literary criticism: eg Thomas Warton, A History of English Poetry (1774–1781); Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762); Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765). On this, see Lionel Gossman, Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment (Johns Hopkins Press, 1968): thanks to Jane Rendall for these references. John Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1779), pp. 78–9. While virtually all Scottish historians concerned themselves with the impact of the civilising process on women, their views on the matter were complex and various. For this see Silvia Sebastiani, ‘”Race”, Women and Progress in the Scottish Enlightenment,’ chapter 2.1 of this volume, and also Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘The Enlightenment Debate on Women’, History Workshop Journal, 20, 1985, pp. 101–24; J. Rendall, ‘Introduction’ to W. Alexander, History of Women, 2 vols, reprint of the III ed, (Bath, 1994); J. Rendall, ‘Tacitus engendered: “Gothic feminism” and British histories, c. 1750–1800’. in G. Cubitt, ed., Imagining Nations (Manchester University Press, 1998) pp. 57–74. A Clergyman of the Church of England [John Bennett], Strictures on Female Education, 1788, pp. 33–4. Shaftesbury correspondence; quoted in Brian Cowan, ‘Reasonable Ecstasies: Shaftesbury and the Languages of Libertinism’, Journal of British Studies, 37, April 1998, p. 118. James Fordyce, The Character and Conduct of the Female Sex (2nd edn, 1776), pp. 7–8. Millar, Origin of Ranks, p. 89. For Poulain, see Siep Stuurman, ‘The Deconstruction of Gender: Seventeenth-century Feminism and Modern Equality’, chapter 6.2 in this volume. William Alexander, The History of Women, 2 vols (1779), vol. 2, pp. 41, 36. Alexander Jardine, Letters from Barbaray, France, Spain. Portugal, 2 vols (1788), vol. 1, p. 320. David Hume, A Treatise of Hume Nature (1739–40; Harmondworth: Penguin Books, 1987), pp. 620–24. Mary Catherine Moran has pointed out to me that there were two meanings for nature/natural in Enlightenment narratives of civilisation: ‘in terms of innate characteristics, or a “scientistic” notion of nature as that which pertains to the physical/material world in the absence of intervention, their comparative/historical perspective did tend to undermine the ‘naturalness’ of certain feminine traits. But they also used ‘nature’ to refer to that which is ﬁtting and appropriate in a

50 Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64.

65. 66.

manner that did allow for human intervention/human history. Thus Hume on justice (and on female chastity): justice/chastity are artificial and conventional in the sense that there is no innate sense of justice/chastity; these virtues are rather the product of complex social/historical interactions. But he allowed that they were ‘natural’ in a secondary sense, ie, that their historical evolution was entirely in accordance with those other virtues which were natural in a primary sense. What makes these authors hard to pin down is that they move from meaning to another as it suits their purposes’ (personal communication). Alexander, History, p. 40. James Fordyce, The Character and Conduct of the Female Sex (1776), p. 24. Bennett, Female Education, pp. 21–2. David Hume, ‘Of Reﬁnement in the Arts’ (1748), Essays, p. 271. Hume, ‘Arts and Sciences’, p. 134. Fordyce, Character of Female Sex, p. 88. For opposition to Chesterfield, see Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society in Britain, 1660–1800 (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2001), pp. 78–80, 128–9; Michèle Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 43–6. Spectator, vol. 3, 191. In an unpublished paper, Michele Cohen makes a related argument, tracing a shift from politeness to chivalry in the late eighteenth century: I am grateful to her for sharing her ideas on this subject with me. Hume, ‘Reﬁnement in the Arts’, p. 271. Millar, Origins of Ranks, pp. 101–3. Hume, ‘Arts and Sciences’, pp. 131–3. David Fordyce, Dialogues Concerning Education (1760), p. 87. For an illuminating discussion of this text, see Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity, pp. 46–50. Ibid., p. 84. Ibid., pp. 45, 46, 89, 92, 81. Ibid., pp. 150, 47, 111, 118, 5. Bennett, Female Education, pp. 50–2. Ibid., p 123. Vicesimus Knox, Essays, Moral and Literary, 2 vols (1779), vol. 2, p. 362. Fordyce, Character of Female Sex, p. 83. David Fordyce, Dialogues, p. 107. Ibid., p. 90. Alexander Jardine, Letters from Barbary, France, Spain, Portugal, Etc, 2 vols (1788), vol. 1, p. 323. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751; New York: New American Library, 1969), p. 221. See above, pp. 22–7. Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (London: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 217. See also Carter, Men and Polite Society, ch. 4; G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in EighteenthCentury Britain (University of Chicago Press, 1992), ch. 3. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), p. 209. J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History (Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 114–18; Carol Kay, ‘Canon, Ideology and Gender: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Critique of Adam Smith’, New Political Science, 15 (1986); Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990). See also John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: the Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). Pocock, Virtue, p. 115. Alexander, History, vol. 1, p. 325.

Feminists versus Gallants 51 67. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 250. See Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter; Margaret Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender and the Family in England, 1680–1780 (University of California Press, 1996); Olwen Hufton, The Prospect Before Her: a History of Women in Western Europe (London: HarperCollins, 1995). 68. Dror Wahrman, ‘Percy’s Prologue: from Gender Play to Gender Panic in Eighteenth Century England’, Past and Present, 159, May 1998, pp. 113–60. 69. For this, see Hunt, Middling Sort, pp. 166–71; Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, pp. 1–12; John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997), pp. 76–83. 70. Jane Rendall, ‘ “Women that would plague me with rational conversation”: Aspiring Women and Scottish Whigs, c. 1790–1830’, this volume, pp. **. Rendall discusses in detail the controversies aroused by women’s involvement in Edinburgh Whig society. 71. Samuel Johnson, The Adventurer, 115, Dec 1753, Works (Yale University Press, 1958), vol. 2, p. 458. For the growth of female authorship in eighteenth-century Britain see, inter alia, Cheryl Turner, Living By the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1992); Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: the Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (University of California Press, 1994); Elizabeth Eger et al. (eds), Women, Writing, and the Public Sphere, 1730–1830 (Cambridge, 2000); Norma Clarke, The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters (London: Pimlico, 2004). 72. For ‘Amazonian’ as an eighteenth-century ‘code word for female pride and gender crossing’, see Barker Benﬁeld, Culture of Sensibility, pp. 351–2, 377–80. 73. For an alternative view, emphasising the strong support some British literary men gave to female authorship, see Arianne Chernock, ‘Champions of the Fair Sex: Men and the Creation of Modern British Feminism’ (unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2004). Chernock’s excellent thesis focuses on the minority feminist tendency of British Enlightenment. 74. Mary Hays, Appeal to the Men of Great Britain on Behalf of Women (1798), pp. 116–7. 75. Mary Astell, ‘Reflections Upon Marriage’ (1700), in The First English Feminist, Reﬂections Upon Marriage and Other Writings by Mary Astell, ed. Bridget Hill (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1986), p. 100. 76. Laura Runge, ‘Beauty and Gallantry: a Model of Polite Conversation Revisited’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 25 (2001), pp. 43–63. However, see Karen O’Brien’s introduction to this section for a discussion of positive attitudes to chivalry among some British literary women (pp. **). 77. Anne Frances Randall [Mary Robinson], A Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Mental Subordination (1799), p. 1. 78. Wollstonecraft, VRM, p. 16. 79. Wollstonecraft, French Revolution, Works, vol. 6, p. 61. 80. Wollstonecraft, VRM, p. 39. 81. Wollstonecraft, French Revolution, Works, vol. 6, pp. 183, 220. 82. General Magazine and Impartial Review, 4 (1791), p. 26. 83. Wollstonecraft, VRW, p. 240. 84. Godwin, Memoirs, p. 231. 85. Wollstonecraft, VRW, pp. 173–8, 211. 86. Ibid., p. 132. 87. Ibid., p. 211. 88. Ibid., p. 184. 89. Ibid., p. 130. 90. Ibid., p. 130. 91. For a discussion of this, see my Wollstonecraft, Introduction and chs ﬁve and seven. 92 . VRW, p. 133.

52 Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104.

105. 106. 107

108.

Ibid., p. 177. Ibid., p. 176. Ibid., p. 269. Ibid., pp. 76–7. Wollstonecraft, VRW, p. 188. Ibid., p. 209. Gerald P Tyson, Joseph Johnson: a Liberal Publisher (University of Iowa Press, 1979), p. 118. Godwin, Memoirs, pp. 235–6. Wollstonecraft, Short Residence, Works, vol. 6, p. 248. Quoted in Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstoncraft (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), p. 147. George Dyer, letter to Mary Hays, n.d., in A. F. Wedd, The Love Letters of Mary Hays (London: Methuen, 1925), p. 238. Recalling good times spent at Joseph Johnson’s home, Anna Barbauld described her fellow radical literati as ‘a chosen knot of lettered equals’ (Anne Janowitz, ‘Amiable and Radical Sociability: Anna Barbauld’s ‘Free Familiar Conversation’, G. Russell and C. Tuite, eds, Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770–1840 (Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 71. Mary Hays, ‘Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft’, The Annual Necrology, 1797–1798 (1800), p. 411. For a discussion of this, see my Wollstonecraft, epilogue. The image of Wollstonecraft’s banner in the dust comes from William Thompson, Appeal of One-Half the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political and Thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery (1825; London: Virago, 1983), p. xxiii. Cicely Hamilton, Marriage as a Trade (1909; London: Women’s Press, 1981), p. 23.

1.3 ‘Ambiguous Beings’: Marginality, Melancholy, and the Femme Savante Anne C. Vila

Few personae seemed to vex the French Enlightenment quite so deeply as that of the overtly cerebral woman: although learned women enjoyed a prominent role both at court and in the Parisian salon, they were nonetheless vulnerable to the biting ridicule made popular years earlier by Molière’s satire of pretentiously intellectual précieuses, Les Femmes savantes (The Learned Ladies; 1672).1 Despite efforts made by Madame de Lambert, Mercier, Thomas, and others to refute the notion that learning was nothing more than a vainglorious fad among women, Molière’s comedy still cast a long shadow in eighteenth-century France: it inspired numerous stage spin-offs, permeated biomedical discussions of sexual difference, and tainted the public image of women like Émilie du Châtelet, who was viciously attacked after her death for having appeared too ‘singular’ in both her scholarly aspirations and her love life.2 The double bind that confronted learned women is evident in Voltaire’s ‘Eloge historique de Madame du Châtelet,’ where he simultaneously lauded his late mistress’s quest for intellectual glory and praised her lady-like ability to hide her erudition from everyone except her fellow geometers and Newton specialists. In a comment that shows how ﬁrmly social demands circumscribed the exercise of the reasoning female mind in Enlightenment France, Voltaire declared: ‘never was a woman more scholarly than she, and never did anyone deserve less that one say of her: “she’s a femme savante” … amidst a mass of projects that the most laborious scholar would scarcely have undertaken, who would have believed that she found time not just to fulﬁll all the duties of society but avidly seek out all of its amusements? She devoted herself to high society as she did to study.’3 In other words, a woman like Châtelet might be just as adept as a man in cultivating knowledge, but her scholarly achievements had to be counterbalanced by an equal degree of success in the elite social realm. To some extent, those conditions also applied to the successful male scholar as deﬁned by the philosophes, who took considerable pains to fashion themselves as public-spirited, convivial fellows as comfortable in the salon as they were in the library.4 Although Enlightenment writers from Fontenelle to Condorcet strove tirelessly to depict intellectual pursuit as perfectly harmonious with society’s pleasures and responsibilities, they met with resistance on several fronts. Jesuits 53

54 Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions

and other adversaries accused the new philosophes of undermining love of God and country through their insistence on secular, cosmopolitan, individualist values; old-style erudites adhered stubbornly to a neo-Stoical, anti-worldly image of the scholar; populationists accused scholars of engaging in a ‘professional bachelorhood’ that sapped the strength of the population; and physicians portrayed gens de lettres as a sickly bunch who often fell prey to nervous ailments like hypochondria and the vapors.5 The philosophes nonetheless persisted in portraying the new-style intellectual as the personiﬁcation of polite, enlightened sociability – an ‘homme de bien’ who eschewed metaphysical speculation in favor of useful knowledge, and who was so committed to the cause of improving humanity that, like Dorval in Diderot’s drama Le Fils naturel (The Bastard Son; 1757), he did not shrink from his bio-social duty to father future members of the race.6 However, the very effort to align the life of the mind with the life of the world created vexing problems for the thinker as a type: although illustrious minds were the object of an almost cultish gloriﬁcation during the French Enlightenment, they were often placed in a marginal position in relation to norms of social comportment, health and sexuality.7 No group suffered more acutely from the perceived peculiarity of the thinker than did women intellectuals, particularly after vitalist physicians like Pierre Roussel began to insist in the 1770s that the ‘soft,’ hyper-sensitive, wombcentered female constitution was altogether unsuited for intense study.8 Roussel and followers such as the medical Ideologue Cabanis frequently praised JeanJacques Rousseau for drawing attention to the radical speciﬁcity of women’s ‘nature’ in Book V of his famous pedagogical ﬁction Emile (1762); they did not, however, slavishly follow Rousseau’s dictum that there is ‘no parity between the sexes as regards the consequences of sex.’9 To the contrary, just as they perceived the marks of femininity in every organ and character trait of a true woman, so, too, they saw manly qualities throughout the entire body and mind of the true man – a phenomenon they sometimes attributed to the all-pervasive effects of the ‘aura seminalis.’10 These physicians’s sexually dimorphic model of human nature was designed to establish the rightful place of men and women, respectively, on a naturally determined chain of physical, moral and intellectual being. At the same time, it was meant to give greater precision to the contemporary theory of sensibility, the diverse property of feeling and reaction which eighteenth-century biomedical thinkers held to be the key to all aspects of human experience. By differentiating this property of the nervous system along gender lines – assigning a physiologically and morally heightened sensibility to women, and a ‘higher,’ mentally concentrated sensibility to men–Roussel and like-minded physicians believed they had devised a new way of explaining how sensibility could determine ideas and inspire virtue, on the one hand, while also triggering emotional excess and physical debilitation, on the other.11 The upshot of their sexual differentiation was that women ended up, in their doctrine, with an acute but volatile sensitive constitution, one that was highly conducive to empathy, maternal tenderness and social sagacity, but at the same time incompatible with what Roussel called the ‘dangerous labors involved in intense study.’12

Marginality, Melancholy, and the Femme Savante 55

These physicians thus gave a gender-speciﬁc spin to Samuel-Auguste Tissot’s grave account of the health effects of ‘literary intemperance,’ presented a decade before Roussel’s work in the best-selling treatise De la santé des gens de lettres (A Treatise on the Diseases Incident to Literary and Sedentary Persons; 1766). Although they did not exempt men from the medical risks of sustained mental application – quite the contrary, Roussel described the vapors or hypochondriasis as all too familiar to male scholars – they nonetheless maintained that full intellectual development was an exclusively masculine achievement.13 Sustained thinking, as they portrayed it, required not just a manly sensibility ‘that retains profoundly the impressions of objects,’ but also a strong will and physical fortitude.14 Not all human beings met those criteria: their organs might be too weak to sustain the tension that thinking seemed to cause in the epigastric region, producing hypochondria; the brain might have to compete for its dose of sensibility with another, less elevated center of vital activity, like the uterus or the digestive system; or the ‘cerebral pulp’ might simply be too soft, as Cabanis maintained regarding female brains. These physio-anatomical claims served to support a blanket condemnation of book-learning in women: although women’s sparkling, uncultivated natural intelligence was, as Roussel described it, perfectly designed for the sort of reﬁned social intercourse characteristic of the salon, it was altogether unsuited for the ‘sweeping views of politics,’ ‘great principles of ethics’ and ‘scientiﬁc erudition’ that occupied the best male minds.15 Thanks to the widespread inﬂuence of the dimorphism which these writers made standard to late eighteenth-century medical thinking, women with serious intellectual aspirations became so aberrant in both social and biological terms that Cabanis branded them ‘ambiguous beings [“des êtres incertains”] who are, properly speaking, of neither sex.’16 The intimations of monstrosity that had long been implicit to the literary tradition of ‘femme-savante’ parodies thus burst into the open during the Revolution and the Bonapartist era, the period that ushered in a new anatomy and physiology of incommensurability between men and women, along with widespread attempts to exclude women from politics, education, and most other areas of the public sphere.17 Rejecting the notion that poor education and a restrictive social life could be blamed for women’s inferior intellectual performance, French physicians of this period issued stern medical warnings to women who might be foolish enough to undertake mental activities inappropriate for their sex.18 However, in the spirit of Tissot, they were also alarmed about the effects of over-study in men – suggesting that the anxiety over book-learning involved more than gender alone. A key factor in that anxiety was the new deﬁnition of genius which emerged in the ﬁnal decades of the eighteenth century, when, as Christine Battersby has argued, the ancient Latin concept of genius (male procreativity, or the begetting spirit embodied in the males of a clan) merged with that of ingenium (innate or god-given mental capacity, wit, artistic talent) to form a single model in which creative energy and vigor of mind were seen as deriving from male strength – indeed, quite literally from male sperm.19 Revolutionary-era biomedical researchers like Bichat grafted this model of genius onto their theory of limited vital

56 Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions

energy, according to which an individual with highly developed intellectual faculties was necessarily underdeveloped in other areas – genital function, for example.20 Without question, the resulting medical philosophy had devastating effects for women of letters, who now seemed destined by nature never to enjoy what the nineteenth-century medical vulgarizer Virey called ‘the ardent transports of genius.’21 Equally intriguing, however, is the odd dilemma it created for gens de lettres as a general species, a group that physicians increasingly depicted as having to choose between their intellectual aspirations, on the one hand, and robust physical and social ﬁtness, on the other. To explore that dilemma in both its general and its gender-speciﬁc dimensions, I shall focus in the rest of this chapter on the case of Germaine de Staël, one of the most inﬂuential thinkers of early French Romanticism. Given Staël’s literary fame and very public persona, we might expect her to have posed a willful, ﬂeshand-blood challenge to the Bonapartist era’s narrow deﬁnition of women’s social role and mental abilities. However, Staël’s work, like her life, was full of contradictions: she fashioned herself as both a daughter of the Enlightenment and a social exile who identiﬁed deeply with her literary idol, Rousseau; and she championed the cause of the ‘exceptional’ woman even while accepting the constraints which Rousseau had imposed on women’s capacities for study and creative achievement. As a public ﬁgure, Staël was branded a virago by Napoleon, among others; yet she did not make gender the major issue in her effort as a literary and social theorist to uphold the principles of genius, reﬁned sensibility, and individual self-improvement.22 Staël’s most famous ﬁctional work, her novel Corinne, ou L’Italie (Corinne, or Italy; 1807), is likewise rife with ambiguity: written against the backdrop of the French Enlightenment cult of the great creative genius, Corinne stands out as a rare literary attempt to celebrate a great woman genius, but it spends as much time evoking Corinne’s beauty, femininity, and amorous longings as it does describing what makes her so exceptional as a thinker. In other words, Corinne conﬁrms rather than resolves Staël’s peculiar combination of a conservative stance toward women with a radical vision of genius’s potential role in society.23 Many critics have already grappled with Staël’s ambivalence toward women – and her confounding reverence for Rousseau, who undoubtedly did as much as physicians like Roussel to popularize the idea that deep thinking is physiologically abnormal, if not pathological, for women.24 Few, however, have considered in historical context the syndrome that Staël attributes not just to Rousseau, but also to herself and to Corinne, her ﬁctional woman genius: melancholy. Far from being a feminine or feminizing condition (as some have argued), melancholy was fast becoming an essential trait of the masculine scholarly constitution as deﬁned in early nineteenth-century physiological and psychiatric discourse. The play of gender in Corinne is thus most intriguing when considered in relation to the concept of melancholy – the trait that both attracts Corinne to her splenetic English lover, Lord Oswald Nelvil, and dooms her to a fate to which only a genuine genius could succumb. By sketching how Staël deploys melancholy as a characteristic both of her idol Rousseau and of her brilliant, deep-feeling ﬁctional

Marginality, Melancholy, and the Femme Savante 57

heroine, I hope to propose a new reading of Corinne while also restoring Staël to her rightful place in the French cultural debate over thinking and pathology. *** Melancholy was, of course, a culturally saturated term in Staël’s day, one that still carried some of its Old Regime connotations of upper-class ennui, or of the ‘sweet,’ tender languor associated with love or pity in sentimental literature.25 It also had distinct national associations carried over from the Enlightenment, as Staël herself showed in her literary–historical essay De la littérature (On Literature; 1800), where she attributed the melancholic imagination of English poets to t hat nation’s penchant for meditation as well as its political liberty.26 Although those varied resonances lingered in turn-of-the-century French writings on melancholy, they were generally supplanted or absorbed by the redeﬁnition of melancholy that was occurring in the nascent medical ﬁeld of psychiatry.27 As deﬁned by the French physicians who participated in the effort to establish psychiatry – or ‘alienism,’ as it was more generally known – as a distinct science, melancholy retained some of its polysemous qualities: C.A.T. Charpentier’s 1803 Essai sur la mélancolie (Essay on Melancholy) listed a strange hodgepodge of causes, including climate, age, bad diet, suppressed evacuations, over-study, idleness, celibacy, heredity, violent chagrin, religious or political terrors, unrequited love, superstition, and stormy social passions such as hate or ambition.28 In his case histories, however, Charpentier showed a clear preference for the special, ‘Aristotelian’ class of melancholics – those who seemed predisposed to contract the disease because they were ‘endowed with a sensibility that is excessive and profound, an ardent imagination, who feel the most intense moral affections, the most violent emotions, men of genius, whose vast conceptions are the fruit of the deepest meditations, men of letters, whose unrelenting work ends up producing mental exhaustion, those who cultivate the ﬁne arts with enthusiasm, and whose overly exalted imagination is not counter-balanced by an adequate exercise of the other functions of the understanding.’29 Charpentier thus devoted his most detailed clinical narratives to famous thinkers who fell victim to the obsessive delirium characteristic of melancholy: Huyghens, Pascal, Tasso, the eighteenth-century Swiss physician Zimmermann, the anti-philosophe poet Gilbert, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.30 Charpentier’s reference to Rousseau as an example of the melancholic, poetic temperament is hardly coincidental: quite the contrary, Mme de Staël herself did much to popularize it through her Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractère de JeanJacques Rousseau (Letters on the Works and Character of Jean-Jacques Rousseau) – a work ﬁrst published in 1788, but more widely diffused in a second edition that appeared in 1798, the same year as Philippe Pinel’s pioneering Nosographie philosophique, ou la méthode de l’analyse appliquée à la médecine (Philosophical Nosography, or The Method of Analysis Applied to Medicine).31 Rousseau’s particular brand of melancholy was, moreover, a topic of great interest for Pinel and the other early nineteenth-century French physicians who sought to advance the

58 Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions

medical study and treatment of mental disorder. Alarmed by what they perceived as an epidemic of mental /nervous diseases in contemporary society – but also staunchly committed to the then-dominant epistemology of ‘Idéologie’ – these physicians believed that the only way to treat those diseases was by ﬁrst classifying them according to the ‘analytical’ method.32 Thus, in the interest of both linguistic and therapeutic reform, they undertook to establish clear-cut distinctions among the species of mania they deemed most prevalent among their patients: mania, melancholy, hypochondria, hysteria, dementia, and idiotism.33 To lend authority to their nosographic classiﬁcations, they drew on three primary sources: the extensive bank of clinical observations they were amassing at newly formed asylums like Bicêtre and la Salpêtrière; patient histories gleaned from earlier works on nervous maladies; and, ﬁnally, famous literary or historical examples of mental alienation.34 Chief among those famous examples was Rousseau, whose status as a medical prototype was boosted considerably by the early alienists’s fascination with his autobiographical display of psychological suffering in the Confessions and in the Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (Reveries of the Solitary Walker). Although these physicians sometimes cited Rousseau directly in constructing their medical interpretations of his self-professed melancholy, they were apt to rely more heavily on ‘writers who have judged him with a ﬁtting severity’ – most particularly, Madame de Staël.35 Staël passes her judgment on Rousseau’s melancholy in ‘Sur le caractère de Rousseau’ (‘On the Character of Rousseau’), the sixth and ﬁnal letter of her Lettres sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau – an early work that, although written in the Enlightenment tradition of the laudatory ‘great-man’ eulogy, also has an implicit clinical tone.36 This is evident in the physiognomic analysis with which Staël opens Lettre VI, where she interprets Rousseau’s perpetually bowed head as a product of both his temperament and the years he had spent in pensive reverie: ‘He almost always had his head lowered, but it was not ﬂattery or fear which had bowed it; meditation and melancholy had made it lean over like a ﬂower bent by its own weight or by storms.’37 The letter’s diagnostic ﬂavor becomes even more pronounced when Staël turns to the subject of Rousseau’s real or reputed moral transgressions (the most notorious being his reputed abandonment of his ﬁve children), which she argues must be understood in the context of his exalted, ‘delirious’ genius: ‘Rousseau was not mad, but one of his faculties, the imagination, was in a state of dementia; he had a great power of reason over abstract matters, over objects that have no reality except in thought, and an absolute extravagance regarding all objects whose measure is taken outside of ourselves; he had too great a dose of everything: by dint of being superior, he was close to being mad.’38 Although Staël clearly sympathizes with the moral pain which Rousseau endured as a result of his deep-feeling but unsocial temperament, she also infantilizes him, resolving the question of his lack of virtue by contending that ‘he was a man who should have been led around like a child, and heeded like an oracle; whose heart was profoundly sensitive and should have been handled, not with the ordinary precautions, but those which such a character demands.’39

Marginality, Melancholy, and the Femme Savante 59

Moreover, by dwelling at length on Rousseau’s ‘demented’ imagination, she transforms the question of his genius into a properly medical conundrum. First, reversing the order of inﬂuence on which Rousseau himself had insisted, Staël declares that his passions derived not from his heart but from a mind that was, at times, entirely overrun by the often pathogenic faculty of his imagination.40 Second, although she describes melancholy as the sentiment naturally felt by anyone who ‘considers at length the destiny of man,’ she depicts Rousseau’s case as pathological in its intensity, its self-destructiveness, and the generalized mistrust it triggered in him: ‘Rousseau increased through reﬂection all of the ideas that afﬂicted him; soon a look, a gesture from a man he met, a child who ran away from him, seemed to him to be new proof of the universal hatred of which he thought himself the object […] he believed himself destined to suffer, and did not act against his destiny.’41 Finally, although she brieﬂy entertains the fantasy that she might have saved Rousseau, had she been there to console him and steer his thoughts back to happier, more hopeful subjects, Staël clearly believes that his melancholy was most likely incurable and led, ultimately, to suicide: ‘Rousseau’s despair was caused by that somber melancholy, that discouragement over living, that can seize all isolated men, whatever their destiny. His soul was withered by injustice; he was afraid of being alone, of not having a heart near to his own, of returning incessantly to himself, of neither inspiring nor feeling any interest, of being indifferent to his glory, tired of his genius, tormented by the need to love, and the unhappiness of not being loved.”42 Staël ends Lettre VI by shifting out of the clinical register and assuming a tone of lament more conventional in a eulogy: she exhorts all sensitive souls to cry with her over Rousseau’s tomb and make a common cause of defending genius against the insidious forces of envy and mediocrity.43 That same appeal is, of course, also made throughout Corinne, a novel whose heroine ends her life in a state of loveless despondency close to that attributed here to Rousseau. It would be going too far to say that Staël designed Corinne to be a ﬁctional, feminized Rousseau – or that she makes melancholic delirium a necessary end-product of genius. Staël’s portrait of Rousseau is nonetheless highly signiﬁcant as an intertext to Corinne, because it demonstrates that she applied a politics of exception not just to herself and other intellectually distinguished women, but to everyone endowed with the superior faculties of the genius.44 It also suggests that, for all of her gloriﬁcation of genius, she viewed it as a quality as inseparable from suffering as it was from reﬁned sensibility; she would later remark that ‘genius in the midst of society is a pain, an intermittent fever that one would have to have treated like a malady, if the compensations of glory didn’t ease its sorrows.’45 Staël did receive a sort of glorious compensation from nineteenth-century medical writers, who generally portrayed her as an invaluable source of insight into Rousseau’s suffering genius, an expert on suicide, and a brilliant case-history ﬁgure in her own right.46 Her relationship to contemporary medical constructs of the thinker was, however, as ambiguous as was her stance on women. On the one hand, through her much-cited Lettres sur Rousseau, Staël contributed to the medical revival of ‘scholar’s melancholy,’ a revival that rescued this nervous

60 Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions

disorder from the second-class status it had suffered during the Enlightenment, when hypochondria was the more fashionable afﬂiction of distinguished minds.47 On the other hand, although Staël clearly identiﬁed with melancholy as both a philosophical stance and an esthetic quality, she did not take a stand on the sex-speciﬁc manner in which her contemporaries deﬁned the brand of melancholy most closely associated with intellectual and creative talent.48 Although melancholy, by virtue of its polysemous quality, had somewhat more ﬂuid gender associations in early nineteenth-century psychiatric discourse than did hypochondria (almost exclusively male) or hysteria (almost exclusively female), alienists like Charpentier viewed ‘poetic’ melancholy as an afﬂiction arising from a masculine sensibility that “deeply retains the impressions of objects and produces durable determinations.’49 For Staël, by contrast, melancholy was a genderless trait inherent to the sensitive, intellectually superior person living in an inhospitable world – a quality that simultaneously imbued that ﬁgure with a tragic glory, and placed it on the margins of society. The brilliant Corinne of Staël’s novel does not start out melancholic: that role falls to her admirer Lord Oswald Nelvil, whose melancholy stems both from his typically English, splenetic constitution and from familial trauma. Nor, contrary to the typical medical scripting of this disease, does Corinne contract her melancholy from excessive mental application: although she periodically whips herself into a state of frenzied enthusiasm while doing a poetic improvisation, we do not see her absorbed in study or isolating herself from society in pursuit of learning. Indeed, education does not play a major role in this novel: in ‘Histoire de Corinne,’ the four-chapter epistle she writes to Oswald to explain the mysteries of her half-Italian, half-English heritage (Book LIV), Corinne passes quickly over the instruction she received as a youth, declaring simply that when she arrived in England to rejoin her father at the age of ﬁfteen, ‘my talents, my tastes, my very character were already formed.’50 Initially, at least, Corinne’s temperament is as sunny as the climate of Italy: she is, in Oswald’s estimation, ‘a miracle of nature,’ an astonishing person who possesses ‘diverse charms that would seem mutually exclusive: sensibility, gaiety, depth, grace, abandonment, modesty.’51 Staël seems as intent to avoid making Corinne constitutionally melancholic as she is to avoid giving her heroine even the slightest air of pedantry. Corinne is consequently very lady-like for a genius: amidst all the joyous fanfare that accompanies her opening appearance as ‘the most famous woman of Italy, […] poet, writer, improvisatrice, and one of the most beautiful people of Rome,’ she performs her every gesture–even that of receiving a crown on the steps of the Capitol – with such touching “nobility, modesty, sweetness and dignity” that her main observer, Oswald, is moved to tears.52 This tableau of Corinne at her greatest moment of public triumph ends, moreover, by introducing the narrative’s key terms for describing relations between men and women: Oswald – soon to become the love of Corinne’s life – looks in her eyes and sees a gaze that implores ‘the protection of a [male] friend, protection that no woman, however superior she may be, can do without; and he thought to himself that it would be sweet to be the defender of one who would need a defender solely because of her sensibility.’53

Marginality, Melancholy, and the Femme Savante 61

The narrator’s delineation of sex roles in this passage – the male as strong, valiant protector, the woman as meek, sensitive, and in need of protection – is identical to that of separate-sphere advocates like Rousseau or Roussel; and Staël goes to great lengths to depict Corinne as a woman who could be a wonderful domestic companion to the sensitive, somber Oswald. Corinne is a hybrid, but she does not defy the gender stereotypes of the day: rather, she fuses typically feminine qualities with what her creator saw as the mythic, super-human qualities of genius. Nor, contrary to what some critics have contended, is Lord Nelvil a gender hybrid: far from feminizing him, Oswald’s melancholy and tendency to cry easily place him squarely in the tradition of the noble-hearted male as deﬁned in the sentimental tradition.54 It is, precisely, Oswald’s sensitive, suffering qualities (in addition to his handsome ﬁgure and heroic feats) that make him deeply appealing to Corinne: ‘There existed, between Oswald and Corinne, a singular and all-powerful sympathy: their tastes were not the same, their opinions rarely agreed, and yet, deep down in their soul, there were similar mysteries, emotions drawn from the same source, in short a sort of secret resemblance that supposed a same nature, even if all external circumstances had modiﬁed it differently.’55 In other words, Staël both adheres to gender conventions in constructing the novel’s lovers, and designs them to be ‘sister souls,’ morally superior beings whose heightened capacity for feeling and reﬂection draws them together even as it sets them apart – fatally, for Corinne – from contemporary society. Although his melancholy originates in his natural temperament as an Englishman and is exacerbated by his remorse over memories of his dead father, Oswald also suffers from the ‘contrast between his soul and society, such as it is in general.’56 This, the narrator underscores, is the sign of a noble spirit: ‘Pain in our modern times, in the midst of our social state, so cold and oppressive, is the most noble thing there is in man; and, in our day, a person who has not suffered, has never felt or thought.’57 At a certain level, this ‘cold and oppressive’ social state is represented by the rigidly proper English country life from which Corinne ﬂed during her adolescence. However, we should not overlook the narrator’s insistence on ‘modern times,’ nor on the era to which modernity is contrasted in the next sentence: antiquity, an age when ‘there was something nobler than pain: it was heroic calm, it was the sense of one’s strength that could develop in the midst of free and open institutions.’58 There is a distinctly antique quality that attaches to Corinne, in the admiration she expresses for ancient Roman statues and monuments throughout the long walking tours she and Oswald take in Books IV to IX, in the Sapphic undertones of her role as improvisatrice, and above all in the lengths to which she goes to develop her intellectual strengths in the relative freedom of Italy. This aspect of Corinne’s persona is conﬁrmed by Oswald’s late father in the letter he writes to Corinne’s father to explain why he has rejected her as a match for his son: ‘Your daughter is charming; but I seem to see in her one of those beautiful Greeks who enchanted and subjugated the world.’59 Corinne is, in short, larger than life, not of this world; and the all consuming passion that kills her and her genius once Oswald abandons her for her younger half-sister Lucile has an explicitly mythic, Phaedra-like quality.

62 Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions

Corinne, ou l’Italie thus seems less concerned with gender than with the misfortunes of genius and sensibility in the modern world: the aspect of Corinne that Staël wants most ardently to defend and illustrate is her status as a ‘superior being’ – one who, like Rousseau, should be admired for her immense creative powers, heeded like an oracle, and handled with the precautions beﬁtting a profoundly sensitive heart. However, as Corinne underscores in her long epistolary self-portrait, that world is full of mediocre people who, slavishly devoted to what they call duty, are incapable of appreciating an intellectually distinguished person’s enthusiasm, delicate moral sensibility, and need for respect and expansive expression – whether the person in question is a man or a woman.60 The novel ﬂirts with the idea that Corinne’s brilliance makes her not only inimitable but above convention: as the admiring Oswald exclaims, “Who could resemble you? And can one make laws for a unique person?”61 If one disregarded the ominous elements that shade the lovers’s brief, intense scenes of bliss, one might think that Oswald and Corinne could marry happily if only the austere mores of his English homeland were softened to accommodate Corinne’s exceptional gifts.62 However, because the enemy camp of unfeeling or mediocre characters not only outnumbers but resents deep-feeling, deep-thinking souls, neither Corinne nor Oswald can ﬁnd enduring happiness. Corinne, obviously the more intriguing of the pair, is too much of an anomaly to exist outside of the tolerant, art-loving, but – as the novel underscores – politically impotent, emasculating climate of contemporary Italy.63 Lady Edgermond, Corinne’s hostile, rigidly English stepmother, is assigned the task of passing the most damning judgments on Corinne and her genius. In a heated debate with Oswald over Corinne’s respectability, Lady Edgermond declares ‘I set no store by talents that divert a woman from her true duties” and insists that, because Corinne has forsaken her family name for a public life, she is as good as dead in the eyes of proper society.64 She goes on to warn Oswald that Corinne will have a corrupting, denaturing inﬂuence on his character if he proceeds with his plan to marry her. In the end, however, Corinne is not so much an agent as a victim of moral contagion: she begins to exhibit a melancholic despondency much like Oswald’s as soon as he reads her self-portrait and swiftly falls ill to the unspeciﬁed contagious malady that happens to be raging through Rome.65 Although Corinne recovers from that malady, it nonetheless hastens her deﬁnitive decline into melancholy: moved by Oswald’s passionate devotion to her while she is ill, Corinne resigns herself to loving him with ‘idolatry’ and resolves to follow him without knowing what fate awaits her. As the narrator observes: ‘when passion takes over a superior mind, it entirely separates reason from action’ – a way of foreshadowing the morally reckless acts Corinne is about to commit out of amorous devotion to Oswald.66 Undertones of both fanaticism and mental derangement are woven into the language with which she addresses Oswald from hereon in: ‘I regard you as an angelic being, as the purest and noblest character who has appeared on the earth; […] all this genius, which in the past inﬂamed my thought, is now nothing more than love. Enthusiasm, reﬂection, intelligence, I no longer have anything except what I share with

Marginality, Melancholy, and the Femme Savante 63

you.’67 Corinne’s melancholy, like many aspects of her character, borrows from different gender categories: on the one hand, it carries unmistakable traits of the amorous and religious brands of melancholy which were deﬁned as feminine in contemporary medical discourse.68 Yet it also has a creative, ‘Aristotelian’ dimension: ‘Lord Nelvil was wrong to believe, as he often did, that the brilliant faculties of Corinne could give her means of happiness independent of her affections. When a person of genius is endowed with a true sensibility, her sorrows are multiplied by her very faculties: she makes discoveries in her own pain, as in the rest of nature, and the unhappiness of the heart being inexhaustible, the more one has ideas, the more one feels it.’69 Corinne’s melancholy is thus another of her hybrid qualities, a malady rooted in her futile amorous passion but driven to pathological extremes by her exquisite sensibility and highly developed mind: ‘If anyone can guess how a person reaches madness, it is surely when a single thought seizes hold of the mind and no longer allows the succession of objects to vary its ideas. Corinne was, moreover, a person with such a lively imagination that it would consume itself when her faculties no longer had any outside source.’70 Obsessed as she is with Oswald, Corinne blames the loss of her talents not on him but on her melancholic passion – the quality that absorbs her genius and makes her imagination turn solely around her idealizing cult for her lost lover.71 Corinne ﬁnally wastes away from moral anguish, but not before reproducing herself (after a fashion) by transforming Oswald’s little girl Juliette into a Corinne-like artistic talent and instructing his wife Lucile on how to live harmoniously with him.72 She also manages to stage a somber public recital in which a young woman dressed in white sings Corinne’s swan song: ‘my genius, if it still subsists, can be felt only through the force of my pain […] of all the faculties of the soul I received from nature, that of suffering is the only one that I fully exercised.’73 In the end, Staël’s ﬁctional woman genius is, indeed, an ambiguous being – but not in the terms contemporary medical thinkers had in mind when they applied the term to women intellectuals. Corinne, ou l’Italie can certainly be read as a indictment of the separate-sphere doctrine of the sexes, most particularly its tendency to invoke ‘nature’ in order to relegate learned women to the realm of the wondrous, the absurd, or the monstrous.74 At the same time, however, this novel responds to a distinct but related biomedical theory that was just as prevalent in Staël’s day: namely, the alarmist idea that genius could be cultivated only at the price of one’s health, sexuality, and social identity. Thanks to the inﬂuence of that theory, highly developed female intellect was perceived as denatured not merely because it was female, but because thinking itself was seen as a risky, pathogenic business. In that sense, Corinne is twice damned by nature: the tender-hearted, physically weak nature with which she is endowed in keeping with contemporary deﬁnitions of normative femininity; and the intense, deep-feeling, reﬂective nature that makes her brilliant – and that destines her, as much as social circumstances, to succumb to a ‘poetic’ melancholy that rivals Rousseau’s in its spectacular, pathetic dimensions. Nature, as Germaine de Staël depicted it, conspired with culture on several

64 Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions

fronts to make life exceptionally difﬁcult for intellectuals of both sexes in postEnlightenment Europe: not only were they increasingly marginalized in relation to polite society, but thought (to paraphrase Balzac) was now a glorious but volatile force that could very well kill the thinker.75

Notes 1. Molière’s Femmes savantes is directly targeted in Madame de Lambert, Réflexions nouvelles sur les femmes (1729); Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Le Bonheur des gens de lettres (1766); and A. L. Thomas, Essai sur le caractère, les moeurs et l’esprit des femmes dans les différents siècles (1772). See Jean Bloch’s discussion of Lambert in her chapter for this volume. On the longer tradition of ‘femme savante’ parodies, see Linda Timmerans, L’Accès des femmes à la culture (1578–1715) (Paris: Champion, 1993), esp. 320–35. See also Michèle Cohen’s short but incisive discussion of précieuses in Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1996), 22–5. On the related term ‘femme philosophe,’ see Erica Harth, Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (Cornell, 1992), esp. 168. Elise Goodman examines the positive iconography of the ‘femme savante’ as embodied by Mme de Pompadour, in The Portraits of Madame de Pompadour: Celebrating the Femme savante (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Dena Goodman offers a more mixed perspective on women’s prominence as salonnières, in The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightement (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). See also D. Goodman’s discussion of how the specter of ‘femme savante’ pedantry shaped elite women’s attitudes toward writing and spelling, in her chapter for this volume. 2. Châtelet’s detractors were just as incensed by the fact that she got pregnant at the unseemly age of 42 as by her efforts to gain a place in the scientific pantheon for her work on Newton; see Élisabeth Badinter, Les Passions intellectuelles (Paris: Fayard, 1999), 399–401, and Badinter’s biography of Châtelet, Emilie, Emilie: l’ambition féminine au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1983). 3. Voltaire, ‘Éloge historique de Madame la Marquise du Châtelet’ (1752) in Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire (Paris: Garnier, 1879), vol. 23, 515–21, citation on 519–20. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 4. See, for example, the famous text Le Philosophe, first published in the anonymous Nouvelles libertés de penser (1743) and later included in abridged form in the Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1765). Both are reprinted in Herbert Dieckmann, ‘Le Philosophe’: Text and Interpretation (Saint Louis: Washington University Studies, 1948), 30–65. 5. On Jesuit hostility toward the new definition of the ‘philosophe,’ see Dieckmann, Le Philosophe, 69–73; Ira Wade, The Philosophe in the French Drama of the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1926), 11–29; and Didier Masseau, Les ennemis des philosophes: L’antiphilosophie au temps des Lumières (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000). On the perceived epidemic of nervous disorders among scholars, see SamuelAuguste-André-David Tissot, De la santé des gens de lettres (1768; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1981); and, by the self-designated hypochondriac Pierre Pomme, Traité des affections vaporeuses des deux sexes (1760). On Enlightenment anxieties over depopulation, see Jacqueline Hecht, ‘From “Be Fruitful and Multiply” to Family Planning: The Enlightenment Transition’ in Eighteenth-Century Studies 32:4 (Summer 1999), 536–51. On the old-style, erudite Republic of Letters which the Enlightenment movement displaced, see Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) and Peter N. Miller, Peirsec’s Europe: Learning and Virtue in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000).

Marginality, Melancholy, and the Femme Savante 65 6. The original English translation of this play bore the discreet title Dorval, or, The test of virtue (London: J.Dodsley, 1767). Diderot’s determination to make intellectual pursuit compatible with worldly life may explain a comment he made on Thomas’s Essai sur le caractère des femmes: ‘Thomas doesn’t say a word about the advantages of frequenting women for a man of letters, and he’s an ingrate;’ Denis Diderot, ‘Sur les femmes,’ in Thomas, Diderot, and Madame d’Epinay, Qu’est-ce qu’une femme?, intro. Elisabeth Badinter (Paris: POL, 1989), 184. 7. On the eighteenth-century French cult of great writers and scientists, see Jean-Claude Bonnet, Naissance du Panthéon: Essai sur le culte des grands hommes (Paris: Fayard, 1998). 8. Pierre Roussel, Système physique et moral de la femme, ou Tableau philosophique de la constitution, de l’état organique, du tempérament, des moeurs et des fonctions propres au sexe (1775). I give a fuller account of Roussel’s sex-specific medical philosophy and its legacy in Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 225–57. 9. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile in Oeuvres complètes, 5 vols. (Paris: Pléiade, 1959–95), vol. 4, 697. 10. Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme (Slatkine, 1980 [1802]); On the Relations between the Physical and Moral Aspects of Man, ed. George Mora, trans. Margaret Duggan Mora (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), vol. I: 225. On Cabanis’s preoccupation with virility and reproduction, see Daniel Teyssière, ‘Lien social et ordre politique chez Cabanis,’ Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 267 (1989), 353–400. 11. See Sarah Knott’s related study of the role of sex in Benjamin Rush’s writings on sensibility, in her chapter for this volume. 12. Roussel, Système physique et moral de la femme, 7th edn (Paris: Caille et Ravier, 1820), 59. Paul-Victor de Sèze makes a similar argument about women’s constitutionally determined inclinations and limits in Recherches physiologiques et philosophiques sur la sensibilité ou la vie animale (Paris: Prault, 1786), 217–27. 13. On the syndrome of vapors in studious men, see Roussel, 62. 14. Cabanis, I, 237. At the same time, Cabanis linked the aptitude for sustained study to illness: ‘The greatest aptitude for work requiring either much strength and activity of the imagination, or persistent and profound meditations, often depends on a generally ill state introduced into the system by the disturbance of the functions of certain abdominal organs’ (I, 224). 15. Roussel, 79. As Elizabeth A. Williams underscores, Roussel’s trivializing account of women’s mental capacities closely resembles contemporary descriptions of Mme. Helvétius, the amiable but intellectually disengaged hostess of the salon d’Auteuil, which Roussel and other vitalist physicians frequented in the 1780s; see Williams, ‘Physicians, Vitalism, and Gender in the Salon’ in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 29 (2000), 1–21. That thesis is confirmed by Roussel’s posthumously published ‘Notice sur Madame Helvétius,’ in Roussel, Système physique et moral de la femme (7th edn), 400–7. However, Roussel apparently admired Mme de Staël and wrote a flattering review of her book De la littérature in two issues of the Clef du cabinet des souverains (1800); see Staël, Correspondance générale (Paris: Pauvert, 1976), vol. V, 302, n. 5 and 305, n. 11. 16. Cabanis, I: 242. Martin S. Staum notes that Cabanis’s dismissive attitude toward ‘femmes savantes’ is paradoxical, given his cordial social relations with intellectually gifted women such as Mme de Staël and Mme Condorcet; see Cabanis: Enlightenment and Medical Philosophy in the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 216. See also Williams, ‘Physicians, Vitalism,and Gender in the Salon,’ 13–14. 17. Sylvain Maréchal, for example, declared in his virulent Projet d’une loi portant défense d’apprendre à lire aux femmes (1801) that ‘A woman poet is a little moral and literary monstrosity just as a woman sovereign is a political monstrosity;’ cited by Geneviève Fraisse in Muse de la raison: La Démocratie exclusive et la différence des sexes

66 Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions

18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

(Aix-en-Provence: Alinéa, 1989),151, Maréchal’s emphasis. On the emergence of dimorphism in late 18th- to early 19th-century anatomy and physiology, see Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990); Londa Schiebinger, The Mind has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989) and Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993); and Yvonne Kniebehler, ‘Les Médecins et la ‘nature féminine’ au temps du Code civil’ in Annales: Economies, Societes, Civilisations 4 (1976), 824–45. Roussel, 61–5. See Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1989), 71–90. Tissot had already implied that the physiological effect of intense reading and meditation is tantamount to castration; De la santé des gens de lettres, 77–8. I discuss the legacy of that idea – for example, Virey’s notion of ‘cerebral-genital antagonism’ – in ‘Sex, Procreation, and the Scholarly Life from Tissot to Balzac,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 32:2 (2001), 239–46. On the biomedical theory of limited vital energy, see Elizabeth A.Williams, The Physical and the Moral: Anthropology, Physiology and Philosophical Medicine in France, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 85–105. Julien-Joseph Virey, De l’influence des femmes sur le goût dans la littérature et les beaux-arts, pendant le XVII et le XVIII siècle (Paris: Déterville, 1810), 16. Madelyn Gutwirth cites the many misogynist comments that Napoleon made about Staël – including his slur about her genitalia – in Madame de Staël, Novelist: The Emergence of the Artist as Woman (University of Illinois Press, 1987), 287. Balzac called Mme de Staël a ‘virago of the nineteenth century’ and repeated Napoleon’s allegation that she had made a ‘vulgar attempt’ to marry the Emperor; Honoré de Balzac, La Physiologie du mariage in La Comédie humaine (Paris: Pléiade, 1980), vol. XI, 1022. On the latter topic, see particularly Staël’s De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (1800; Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1991) where she argues that great thinkers and writers are crucial for advancing both human ‘perfectibility’ and the cause of political freedom. Staël refuted Rousseau’s claim that women can only write ‘coldly’ but accepted his insistence that women cannot have ‘that potent strength of mind, that profound faculty of attention with which great genius are endowed; their [women’s] weak organs are opposed to that, and their heart, too often preoccupied with their feelings and misfortunes, constantly takes hold of their thinking and does not allow it to focus upon meditations different from their dominant idea’; Lettre I in Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractère de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in Madame de Staël, Oeuvres de jeunesse (Paris: Desjonquères, 1997), 47–8. On Staël’s ‘timid’ feminism, see Gutwirth, Madame de Staël, Novelist, 295–301. For a more hopeful interpretation, see Mary Trouille, ‘A Bold New Vision of Woman: Staël and Wollstonecraft Respond to Rousseau,’ Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 292 (1991), 293–336. On melancholy’s association with aristocratic boredom and idleness, see Wolf Lepenies, Melancholy and Society, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris Jones (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). On amorous melancholy in Staël, see Jean Starobinski, ‘Suicide et mélancolie chez Madame de Staël,’ in Madame de Staël et l’Europe. Actes du Colloque de Coppet (juillet 1966) (Paris: 1970), 242–52. On Staël’s use of pity and other notions central to the Enlightenment sentimental tradition, see David J. Denby, Sentimental Narrative and the Social Order in France, 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 194–239. Staël, De la littérature, 241–2. Eric Gidal includes Staël among the philosophes who identified English melancholy as a sign of civic virtue and political freedom; see Gidal, ‘Civic Melancholy: English Gloom and French Enlightenment,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 37:1 (Fall 2003), 23–45.

Marginality, Melancholy, and the Femme Savante 67 27. See Jean Starobinski, Histoire du traitement de la mélancolie des origines à 1900 (Basel: J.R.Greigy, 1960), 44–88. On the social and intellectual history of nineteenth-century French psychiatry, see Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). See also Dora B. Weiner, Comprendre et soigner: Philippe Pinel (1745–1826), la médecine de l’esprit (Paris: Fayard, 1999). 28. Charpentier, Essai sur la mélancolie (Paris: Farge, an XI [1803]), 54–122. Although it was merely a student thesis, Charpentier’s essay was cited approvingly in more prominent works like Pinel, Nosographie philosophique, 5th edn (Paris: Brosson,1813), Jean-Baptiste Louyer-Villermay, Traité des maladies nerveuses ou vapeurs, et particulièrement de l’hystérie et de l’hypocondrie (Paris: Méquignon, 1816), and P. J.-P. Falret, De l’hypocondrie et du suicide, considérations sur les causes, sur le siège et le traitement de ces maladies, sur les moyens d’en arrêter les progrès et d’en prévenir le développement (Paris: Croullebois, 1822). 29. Charpentier, 6; he cites here Aristotle’s famous Problem XXX, which launched melancholy’s association with creative and intellectual superiority. See Aristotle (or a follower of Aristotle), ‘Brilliance and Melancholy,’ in Janet Radden, ed., The Nature of Melancholy, From Aristotle to Kristeva (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 55–60. 30. Charpentier, 54–6, 73–5. 31. Philippe Pinel, Nosographie philosophique, ou la méthode de l’analyse appliquée à la médecine (ﬁrst edition Paris: Maradan, an VI [1798]). 32. Broadly speaking, ‘Idéologie’ meant the science of ideas: its Revolutionary-era adherents viewed themselves as disciples of the eighteenth-century sensationalist philosopher Condillac, who emphasized both the empirical analysis of the mind and the importance of clear language in all philosophical systems. On ‘Idéologie’ in turn-of-the century French medicine, see François Picavet, Les Idéologues (Paris: Alcan, 1896), Staum, Cabanis: Enlightenment and Medical Philosophy, esp. 4–5 and 39–41; E. Williams, The Physical and the Moral, 76–85; and Sergio Moravia, ‘Philosophie et médecine en France à la fin du XVIIIe siècle,’ Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century LXXXIX (1972) 1089–1151. 33. Pinel accorded varying degrees of importance to the five latter disorders in his synthetic discussion of mania, Traité médico-philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale, ou la manie (Paris: Richard, Caille et Ravier, An IX [1800]). 34. As Pinel put it, ‘Can the physician remain a stranger to the history of the most intense human passions, since these are the most frequent causes of mental alienation? And from that point on, mustn’t he study the lives of men who have been the most famous through their ambition for glory, their enthusiasm for the fine arts, the austerities of a monastic life, the delirium of an unhappy love?;’Traité de la manie, 44–5. AnthelmeBalthasar Richerand made a similar argument in his very inﬂuential textbook Nouveaux éléments de physiologie (1801), where he argues that the mysteries of melancholy and other mental disorders could well be solved if physicians paid closer attention to ancient and modern biographies of illustrious men; Nouveaux éléments de physiologie (3rd edn, Paris: Crapart, Caille et Ravier,1804), 456–7. On the early alienists’s predilection for tapping literary texts for nosographic purposes – and, more broadly, the rich interaction between nineteenth-century French literature and psychiatric discourse – see Juan Rigoli, Lire le délire: Aliénisme, rhétorique et littérature en France au XIX siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2001). 35. Louyer-Villermay, Recherches historiques et médicales sur l’hypocondrie, isolée, par l’observation et l’analyse, de l’hystérie et de la mélancolie (Paris: Méquignon, An X [1802]), 61. 36. Jean Starobinski notes the stylistic similarities between the Lettres sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the academic eulogies composed by Thomas; see ‘Critique et principe d’autorité (Madame de Staël et Rousseau)’ in Paul Vialleneix, ed., Le Pré-Romantisme: Hypothèque ou hypothèse? (Paris: Klincksieck, 1975), 326–43. 37. Staël, Lettres, 83. 38. Staël, Lettres, 84–5.

68 Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions 39. Staël, Lettres, 86. 40. ‘It may be true that a great man, dominated by the genius of thought, that Rousseau especially, never experienced a passion that came uniquely from the heart: it would have distracted him, it would not have served his imagination. The faculties of his mind had to be involved in some way in his sentiments’ (90). By contrast, the Rousseau interlocutor of the Dialogues insists, regarding ‘Jean-Jacques,’ that ‘for an object to make an impression on him, the simple sensation must be joined by a distinct sentiment of pleasure or pain....The same is true of the ideas that may strike his brain; if the impression doesn’t penetrate right to the heart, it is nil;’ in Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, 808. 41. Staël, Lettres, 94. 42. Staël, Lettres, 95–6. Claude Wacjman refutes the theory of Rousseau’s suicide and blames Staël both for disseminating it and for making madness an integral part of the posthumous history of Rousseau’s life; see his monograph Les Jugements de la critique sur la ‘folie’ de Rousseau, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 337 (1996), 39–41. Roger Barny, by contrast, underscores the role of Staël’s Lettres sur Rousseau in forging the Revolutionary myth of Rousseau as virtuous hero; see Rousseau dans la Révolution, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 246 (1986), esp. 56–60, 66–7. 43. Staël, Lettres, 97–8. 44. Geneviève Fraisse uses the notion of ‘politics of exception’ to frame her remarks on Staël in Muse de la raison: La Démocratie exclusive et la différence des sexes, 176–227. 45. This passage, from the journal Staël wrote while traveling in Germany in 1808, is cited by Simone Balayé in ‘Le génie et la gloire dans l’oeuvre de Mme de Staël’in Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate vol. 20 (Sept.–Dec. 1967), 202–14, here 211. 46. Staël was frequently cited by nineteenth-century French physicians, particularly those preoccupied with mental medicine or the health of scholars. Her portrait of Rousseau as melancholic was liberally paraphrased by Louyer-Villermay in Recherches historiques et médicales sur l’hypocondrie (64), Richerand, Nouveaux éléments de physiologie, 454–6, and Maurice Roubaud-Luce, Recherches médico-philosophiques sur la mélancolie (Paris: Le Normant, 1817), 22–3. Her treatise De l’Allemagne was cited in Etienne-Jean Georget, De la physiologie du système nerveux, et spécialement du cerveau (Paris: Baillière, 1821), and by Victor-Auguste Le Monnier, Influence du travail et des impressions littéraires sur le développement des névroses (Paris: Didot le Jeune, 1835). The most extraordinary evocation of Staël in alienist discourse may be B-A. Morel’s use of two pages from Corinne as a descriptive model of ‘primitive lypemania,’ in Etudes cliniques. Traité théorique et pratique des maladies mentales (1853), cited in Juan Rigoli, Lire le délire, 437 n.193. The armchair medical philosopher Joseph-Henri Réveillé-Parise was also a great fan of Staël: he cited her several times in Physiologie et hygiène des hommes livrés aux travaux de l’esprit (Paris: Dentu, 1834) and included her in his gallery of thinkers found, during autopsy, to have possessed extraordinarily large brains (298). 47. See Henri Ellenberger’s succinct, amusing account of the ‘three major historical neuroses,’ melancholy, hypochondria, and Morel’s ‘emotive delirium;’ in ‘Psychiatry and its Unknown History,’ Beyond the Unconscious (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 240–1. On ‘scholar’s melancholy,’ see also Janet Radden’s suggestive introduction to The Nature of Melancholy, esp. 12–16. 48. See, for example, the scene of ‘sweet melancholy’ which Corinne and Oswald experience while strolling in Venice, discussing poetry and listening to gondoliers singing verses from Tasso; in Germaine de Staël, Corinne ou l’Italie (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 427–31. 49. Essai sur la mélancolie, 68–9. 50. Staël, Corinne, 361. Emphasizing Corinne’s status as an improvisatrice, Joan de Jean underscores the spontaneous, fugitive quality of her literary genius and notes that, outside of this letter to Oswald, we rarely see her engaged in writing; ‘Staël’s Corinne: The Novel’s Other Dilemma,’ in Stanford French Review 11 (Spring, 1987), 77–87, esp. 84.

Marginality, Melancholy, and the Femme Savante 69 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75.

Staël, Corinne, 166, 93. Staël, Corinne, 49, 54. Staël, Corinne, 54. Cf. Margaret Waller’s debatable evaluation of Oswald as effeminized by his sensitivity, in The Male Malady: Fictions of Impotence in the French Romantic Novel (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 37–92. The relationship between sensibility and masculinity in the sentimental tradition was, in fact, highly complex, as Philip Carter shows for the British national setting in his chapter for this volume. Staël, Corinne, 398–9. Staël, Corinne, 308. Staël, Corinne, 216. This chapter ends with Corinne noting the striking resemblance between Oswald and the ‘Genius of pain, lying on a lion, emblem of strength’ as represented on a funerary statue by Canova (221). Staël, Corinne, 216–17. Staël, Corinne, 466. Staël, Corinne, 366. Staël, Corinne, 86. Corinne raises the possibility that she would have found a more hospitable climate in the company of the superior beings drawn to more cosmopolitan places like London or Edinburgh (369). Staël, Corinne, 156–65. Staël, Corinne, 458. Staël, Corinne, 394–5, 401–6. Staël, Corinne, 410. Staël, Corinne, 440, 443. Charpentier, for example, agreed with Roussel that women were so naturally prone to ‘sweet passions’ – and so ill-suited for deep thought – that they were less susceptible to melancholy than men: he contended that women suffered only from forms of the disorder which arose from thwarted love or religious superstition (Essai sur la mélancolie, 68–9). François Jean-Pierre Letual advanced a similar argument in his Essai sur la mélancolie (Strasbourg: Levrault, 1810), limiting the types of melancholy that affected women to erotomania, religious melancholy, and other species that involved the pathological exaltation of the imagination (17). Staël, Corinne, 419. Staël, Corinne, 470. Staël, Corinne, 565. Staël, Corinne, 575, 578. As Joan de Jean notes, Staël’s emphasis on Corinne’s literary posterity via Juliette can be seen as a response to contemporary anxieties over biological posterity; Fictions of Sappho, 1546–1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 185–8. Staël, Corinne, 583–4. See Lorraine Daston, ‘The Naturalized Female Intellect,’ Science in Context 5, 2 (1992), 209–35, esp. 228–30. This idea, which inspired all of the novellas in Balzac’s Etudes philosophiques, is formulated most concisely by the old provincial doctor of Les Martyrs inconnus: ‘Thought is more powerful than the body, it consumes it, absorbs it, destroys it; thought is the most violent of all the agents of destruction, it is the true exterminating angel of humanity, which it kills and viviﬁes, for it both viviﬁes and kills;’ in Honoré de Balzac, La Comédie humaine (1837; Paris: Gallimard, 1981), vol. XII, 744.

SECTION 2 GENDER, RACE AND THE PROGRESS OF CIVILIZATION Introduction Jane Rendall

The history of women is a central theme in the comparative historical perspectives of writers of the Enlightenment, most notably in Scotland and France. The condition of women was treated as an ‘index’ or even a ‘thermometer’ registering the stage of development, the level of civilization, the standard of politeness, achieved in a particular society. It was assumed that all societies would progress through a series of stages, economic, political and cultural, and that manners and social institutions of those stages – including the gender relations and structures of marriage – were distinctive. Even more significantly, the relations of the sexes became a central theme in understanding the significant motors of progress, the pursuit of desires to be met through different forms of commerce, in the acquisition of land and property, in the fulfilment of sexual desire and in the refining exchanges of conversation and sociability. In the same way, the situation of women was particularly significant in the representation of those who were not part of the modern commercial societies of western Europe, whether these were the native Americans or African slaves of the eighteenth century, or the early peoples of the European past, German, Caledonian or Scandinavian. The importance of gender relations in such histories was to have a lengthy legacy, to nineteenth-century liberal views of progress and to liberal feminism, as well as to a discipline such as anthropology. As Tomaselli points out, the direct response of Friedrich Engels to that legacy in 1888 was a socialist and materialist, yet also romantic, version of the history of women. Each of the papers in this section explores this central theme in the historical writing of the Enlightenment, but also the ambiguities which surround this prominence, ambiguities which Moran has already begun to demonstrate in her study of John Gregory above. Each of them examines particularly the oppositions between virtue and commerce, race and nation, cosmopolitanism and patriotism. The pursuit of material needs and of the appearance of civility and refinement were not necessarily compatible with what continued to remain a central concern for enlightened writers, the maintenance of a virtuous and morally ordered society. The virtuous society could be imagined more effectively within the patriotic context of one’s own nation, and such a possibility was to be frequently defined through a growing ‘racial imagination’, to use Sebastiani’s 70

Introduction 71

phrase. For the universalism of the four-stages theory was not always sustained in the light of increasing interest in racial distinctions, and in cultural classiﬁcations which drew upon histories of specific peoples and nations, whether the native Americans or African slaves of the eighteenth century, or the Caledonians, Scandinavians or Germans of the distant past. Sylvana Tomaselli illuminates eighteenth-century historical writing by posing the simple question: why was it only men who wrote histories of women? As she suggests, a few women were both familiar with and ready to address that history. We do need much more research into women’s reading and writing in order to understand better their relationship with narratives such as Antoine Thomas’ Essai sur le caracte` re, les moeurs et l’esprit des femmes (1772) and William Alexander’s History of Women (1778). In 1763 Jemima Kindersley, the wife of an ofﬁcer in the Bengal Army, embarked upon a lengthy voyage which took her to Teneriffe, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope, and India. Some years later, in 1777, after her husband’s death, she published her journal. In it she had written of her desire to understand what she calls ‘such a barbarous exertion of virtue’, the custom of sati, and mused on the condition of women in the societies which she encountered, drawing parallels with the European past. She condemned practices such as sati, yet also questioned whether she was not simply ‘in the true spirit of an Englishwoman’ condemning ‘whatever is contrary to the customs of my country’. On balance, following Montesquieu, she rejected an explanation which relied on the innate inferiority of black people to white for the corrupting effects of oriental despotism, as damaging to the condition of women as it was to all other institutions.1 In 1781, in her own translation of Thomas’ Essai, she wrote directly of her own desire to account for the character and manners of women in different ages and countries.2 Tomaselli points us to the major problem we face in connecting theories of civilization with women’s writing. She suggests the difﬁculties that women faced in engaging with histories which rested on determinist premises, in which women like men were governed by appetite and need, not viewed as moral and rational individuals capable of freely willed action. The civilizing process was the product of unintended outcomes, determined though never predictably through the slow growth of and conflicts between social forms. Progress in civility and politeness were linked in such histories to artiﬁce, propriety and appearance. This story of modernity was conservative, encouraging neither the pursuit of virtue nor the radical reshaping of social and political institutions. In her two Vindications Mary Wollstonecraft refused to recognise the limits of such a predetermined history, looking rather for a moral transformation of a partial civilisation in a spirit of patriotism. In Jenny Mander’s exploration of the relationship between Diderot’s Sur les femmes and the Abbé Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes, she emphasises the materialist perspectives of eighteenth-century French anthropology, in which women’s physical characteristics determined their universal subordination. At the same time, progress towards civilization could improve the situation of women, as lust became sentimental love, and as property was acquired, though with it also the

72 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization

dangers of decadence. Civilization was only compatible with moral worth if it allowed women to retain their natural role as mothers. Women’s association with maternal love and emotion in the Histoire des deux Indes can be read as crossing racial and national boundaries, symbolizing the cosmopolitanism of the text. But there is an anxiety associated with the eroticism of the young Amerindian women, who rescued an Englishman only later to be sold by him. In Diderot’s Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville one Tahitian narrator defends the free sexual commerce of the islanders as a way of initiating cosmopolitan exchange and reproduction. But the other voice, the Old Man, suggests the corrupting effects of civilization brought by both love and property. For Tahiti and for France the preferable future might rather lie in the rejection of such global commerce in sex and goods, and in the pursuit of their individual, patriotic routes to moral worth. If for Diderot women were the site of a deep-seated anxiety about Enlightenment values, for Scottish historians the history of women provided an arena for debating not only the significance of progress, but also the relationship between national character and racial difference. Sebastiani here demonstrates how such themes are integrally related, even in continuously contested historical narratives. The central importance of the coming of chivalry, in heralding more modern manners in the relations of the sexes, was stressed by Millar, Robertson and Kames although strongly resisted by Gilbert Stuart who argued for a higher place for women in the distant past, as in the ancient German tribes among whom respect for women could be identified along with the origins of liberty. James Macpherson also emphasised the high situation of women and the refinement and elegance of manners among the ancient Caledonian tribes. At the same time the universalist and stadial theories of history of John Millar and William Robertson were challenged by Lord Kames, as he wrote of the distinctive effeminacy of native Americans. The Caledonians clearly provided a second exception to universal principles of development, in the extraordinary refinement presented in such an early stage of society. Such exceptions were naturalising the concept of national character, and this is particularly evident in the work of Kames, who had defended the concept of polygenesis, taking up David Hume’s ‘original distinction between these breeds of men’. The situation of women was central to these complex arguments. The status of even European women as slaves in the distant past, equated to non-Europeans of the present, was reiterated in the work of stadial writers like Millar. Women, as mothers, were encouraged to produce the physical characteristics desired by different peoples. The racial characteristics attributed to non-Europeans included especial reference to the ways in which they deviated from European norms of sexual relations, just as the exceptional beauty and purity of Celtic or ‘northern’ validated the idea of a northern European race. Conversely Stuart and Dunbar, who specifically disagreed with Kames’ polygenetic views did so through stressing cultural and historical differences between peoples. One question which remains is about the fate of comparative history in the early nineteenth century, and, more specifically of the focus on women and the

Introduction 73

history of gender relations. I would suggest, speculatively, three possible shifts. One would stress the disappearance of the relativism of comparative history. The tensions which have been noted in these three essays, between the culturally constructed and the materially determined elements in the condition of women, in the work of Diderot, Kames and Millar, are much less evident in the writings of their successors. In the lectures of Dugald Stewart, the heir of Ferguson, Smith and Millar, there is no doubt that the attributes of the sexes, and the institutions of marriage and property, were divinely ordained, and that the lessons of the distant past were entirely irrelevant to the understanding of the gender relations of a commercial society. Similarly, in France, the liberal historical perspectives of the Marquis de Condorcet or Charles Theremin were to be overtaken in the first decade of the nineteenth century by the medical and philosophical discourses associated with Pierre Cabanis and the French ideologues, in which women’s future and moral potential were shaped above all by their reproductive duties. Women writers may not have found eighteenth-century comparative history a congenial genre. Yet after 1800, Wollstonecraft’s emphasis on the moral transformation of the nation could no longer be easily pursued. As Gregory Claeys has argued, the pursuit of republican virtue came to appear anachronistic, and the progress of commercial society even more rapid.3 Under such circumstances women might turn towards the writing of historical narratives, which would still be informed by the goal of a virtuous nation, now more likely to be shaped by religious principles, and by a sense of location in a progressively improving civil society. Such attempts are more likely to be found in novels, educational works, travel literature and even poetry as they are in more formal histories. Gary Kelly, in his study of women’s writing in Britain in the period after the French revolution has discussed the ways in which liberal women writers – like Elizabeth Hamilton, Jane Porter, Sydney Owenson and Lucy Aikin – approached historical issues through historical biography, the national and the regional tale, the novel of antiquity, the Anglo-Saxon drama or the chivalric romance.4 Caroline Franklin addresses this aspect of Owenson’s work below. Finally, the theme of civilization could itself be rewritten from a different perspective. Mary Catherine Moran, writing of John Millar’s Origin of the Distinction of Ranks as implying the progressive reﬁnement of men, but an assumed passivity for women, also identified Millar’s qualified endorsement of a social role for women in a modernising commercial society as in ‘an intermediary social sphere that was thought to guarantee both civic and domestic virtue’.5 Robert van Krieken has suggested with reference to the work of Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process, that there may be an argument as to whether we should speak of civilizing processes or civilizing offensives.6 Middle-class women reﬂecting on their situation in a commercial society could seek to rewrite progressive narratives to demonstrate that progress had not gone far enough in one important respect. They could conceive their role in that ‘intermediary social sphere’ as part of a ‘civilizing offensive’ in the service of a larger whole, the nation. Different forms of intervention in a modern commercial society could forward that process, whether through writing and the better education of women, or through a

74 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization

broader mission of philanthropic action. That could be extended towards an imperial mission and particularly the campaign for the abolition of slavery. In all these directions and for their own purposes, early nineteenth-century women activists and feminists were to draw upon the discourses of comparative history and its construction of both national and racial differences.

Notes 1. Mrs [J.] Kindersley, Letters from the island of Teneriffe, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope, and the East Indies, London, 1777, pp. 124–5, 138. 2. [Mrs Kindersley], An Essay on the Character, the Manners and the Understanding of Women in Different Ages: translated from the French of Mons. Thomas, London, 1781, Introduction. 3. G. Claeys, ‘The French Revolution and British Political Thought’, History of Political Thought 11 (1989), pp. 52–80. 4. G. Kelly, Women, Writing and Revolution 1790–1827 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 5. M. C. Moran, ‘ “The Commerce of the Sexes”: Civil Society and Polite Society in Scottish Enlightenment Historiography’, in F. Trentmann (ed.), Paradoxes of Civil Society. New Perspectives on Modern German and British History (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2000), p. 80. 6. R. van Krieken, Norbert Elias (London: Routledge, 1998).

2.1 ‘Race’, Women and Progress in the Scottish Enlightenment* Silvia Sebastiani

A great deal of thinking in Scotland during the second half of the eighteenth century was devoted to the problem of the diversity and differences among peoples of the earth. The idea of ‘progress’, which has been considered the speciﬁc contribution of the Scottish Enlightenment to the European Enlightenment, was one result.1 Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, William Robertson, John Millar and Lord Kames all contributed to a new historical approach, which shifted attention from chronology to manners, and from kings and heroes to the path of peoples towards civilization. Through the comparison of different societies, progress was shown to emerge from changes across economic, political, social and cultural spheres. Differences between peoples were explained within a scheme of historical development: from simple, rough and lawless to reﬁned, polite and commercial societies.2 The nature and condition of women were crucial themes in these discourses of historical progress. In the Enlightenment, the female sex symbolized the spirit of intercourse, the ‘ethos’ of transaction and conversation of commercial society, which contributed to a full humanity.3 The route women followed from their initial condition as slaves to that of companions to men became a model of historical progress. In this process, women emerged from a condition of intolerable fatigue and misery to become friends and companions to the male sex, while men’s manners were reﬁned from the rudeness of ‘savage’ warriors to sociability and sensibility. History, therefore, was read by the mainstream of the Scottish Enlightenment as a process of ‘feminization’, that is, as one of reﬁnement and civility.4 The condition of women appeared, in fact, as the measure of civilization for other Scottish thinkers too, particularly Gilbert Stuart, who used it to expose the failings of Hume’s, Robertson’s and Millar’s historical views.5 This perspective was accompanied by anxieties about the limits on the progress of civilization. The positive process of ‘feminization’ could degenerate into corrupt ‘effeminacy’ if the ‘natural’ limits of monogamous marriage and the private sphere, to which women were meant to be conﬁned, were infringed.6 The anxiety and ambiguity that this gendered discourse conferred on the concept of progress also emerged in relation to ‘race’. For where the discourse of progress intersected with physical anthropology, ideas about women contributed to a 75

76 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization

fragmented image of humankind. Among the Scottish literati, the European debate on the natural history of man generated reasoning about human ‘races’ and differences between polygenists, on the one hand, who asserted the original division of the human stock in different ‘species’ and opposed the Bible and, on the other hand, monogenists who defended the universal descent from Adam in line with the Mosaic account.7 The condition of women and the relationship between the sexes became key elements in new conceptualizations of ‘races’ and ‘nations’ – a development that was particularly marked in debates over the barbarians of Tacitus and the Ossianic Celts.

1 Women in historical discourse. Man, secluded from the company of women is not only a rough and uncultivated, but a dangerous, animal to society.8 The progressive Enlightenment view of history depended on an emerging ‘other’ against which the European subject measured himself. Comparison with the animal world permitted assessment of man’s diversity and, by analogy, placed social characteristics in a natural order. ‘Civilized’ man was then contrasted to the ‘savage’, in whom he found a mirror of his past, and from whom he felt separated by a great divide. Here ideas about women played a crucial role. Through feminine inﬂuence, ‘civilized’ man came to appreciate the virtues of an advanced and reﬁned society and discovered a crucial historical caesura between himself and non-European peoples. The condition of women was considered the ﬁrst form of slavery in the history of humankind, as Antoine Leonard Thomas, a member of the French Academy and a frequent attendant of the salons of Suzanne Necker and Mme Geoffrin, had stated in his seminal Essai sur le Charactère, les mœurs et l’esprit des Femmes: ‘the Women among the Indians of America are what the helots were among the Spartans, a vanquished people obliged to toil for their conquerors’. 9 Servitude associated the image of women with that of colonized peoples. The term ‘slavery’ described the past history of women, their present in some countries, and the recent history of non-Europeans. Women had travelled the path to modern ‘liberty’ in European society, whereas the independence of ‘savages’ had ended in their subjugation to colonizers. According to David Hume, who established the standard view of the female sex in the Scottish intellectual context, women were capable, unlike both savages and animals, of resisting the force of ‘conquerors’: in time this broke male confederacy, and women came to share ‘with the other sex all the rights and the privileges of society’. They had a history, while animals and ‘savages’ did not.10 The history of women was, therefore, a fundamental but ambiguous chapter in the history of civilization. Their peculiar position at the heart of eighteenth-century consumer society and its community of ‘taste’ also placed women in a central role in the European shift from an economy of subsistence to that of the international market. Despite the fact that in Scotland

‘Race’, Women and Progress in the Scottish Enlightenment 77

women were excluded from clubs, and that there were no salons comparable to those of Paris or London, women had greater social visibility. For better or worse, whether in apologies or critiques of the new values of consumer society, they came to represent ‘commerce’ as economic and intellectual exchange.11 In a crowded urban world – Hume wrote in an inﬂuential essay published in 1752 – men leave behind their solitary existences and enter the society of conversation, with new tastes in clothes and furniture, ‘both sexes meet in an easy and sociable manner’. By receiving and communicating knowledge, and by ‘conversing together and contributing to each other’s pleasure and entertainment’ men become more sociable, and develop their humanity.12 Already in 1742, Hume sought to unite conversation – the dominion of women – with the male world of culture, so that men could leave the closed worlds of the university and the monastic cell to develop reﬁned taste and good manners. Looking to the French example, where ‘the Ladies are, in a Manner, the Sovereigns of the learned World, as well as the conversible’, Hume appealed for a collaboration between scholars and ‘Women of Sense and Education’ to render conversation less frivolous and tedious, and culture more meaningful and enjoyable.13 Hume’s ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’ sharply contrasted the relationship of the sexes in eighteenth-century society to that in ‘barbarous’ and ‘savage’ societies. Among ‘savages’, the male ‘natural superiority’ over woman in body and mind was displayed ‘by reducing … females to the most abject slavery, by conﬁning them, by beating them, by selling them, by killing them’. By contrast, amongst a ‘polite’ people, men expressed their authority in a ‘more generous’ manner, ‘by civility, by respect, by complaisance, and in a word by gallantry’. This was the result of the reﬁnement of manners, in which the inﬂuence of women fundamentally shaped men through female values and habits like sympathy and sensibility. ‘Civilized men’ were educated at the ‘school of virtuous women’, where the mutual endeavour to please ‘insensibly’ polished minds, and where softness, delicacy and modesty were transmitted universally. Female values were necessary for an harmonious and virtuous society: only by acquiring them, men became ‘civilized’.14 Dr John Gregory followed a similar logic, despite his distaste for Hume’s scepticism, which he shared with the other members of the Wise Club in Aberdeen.15 Author of one of the most renowned conduct books for women in late eighteenth-century Scotland, Gregory believed in the importance of women for society: isolation from female company occasioned ‘great ignorance of life and manners’, and deprived men ‘of all those little accomplishment and graces which are essential to polished and elegant Society, and which can only be acquired by mixing with the World’.16 The improvement of women’s conditions was an advantage for all of society. Gregory framed this as an economic transaction between individuals, ranks and sexes, which received its full realization in the Parisian salons: Nature has made no individual nor no class of people independent of the rest of their Species, or sufﬁcient for their own happiness. Each sex, each character,

78 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization

each period of life, have their disadvantages, and that union is the happiest and most proper, where wants are most supplied. The fair sex should natural expect to gain from our conversation, knowledge, wisdom and sedateness; and they would give us in exchange, humanity, politeness, cheerfulness, taste and sentiment.17 The judge of the Court of Session of Edinburgh Henry Home, Lord Kames, a versatile and proliﬁc author who dedicated one of his Sketches of the History of Man (1774) to the ‘Progress of Female Sex’, agreed. Kames asserted that a society could not arrive at any degree of reﬁnement or perfection if women were excluded, whereas ‘in a society of men and women, every one endeavours to shine: every latent talent and every variety of character, are brought to light’. So too ran the arguments of the Edinburgh physician William Alexander, who published two volumes on the history of women in 1779: only ‘female society’ could generate ‘polite manners’, ‘sentimental feeling’ and ‘ﬁne arts’.18 For all of these thinkers, material development and the reﬁnement of manners were closely related to the progress of the female sex: the relationship between men and women was an indicator of progress itself. It was through their relationships that human sociability – once merely potential – developed. By the 1770s the history of women had become a crucial element of the history of society as stadial progress. In 1771, before Kames’s and Alexander’s contributions as ‘historians of women’ had been published, John Millar had opened his Observations concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society (1771) with an important chapter on the historical changes in the relationship between the sexes. Finally, two Scottish editors, the self-educated printer William Russell and the female travel writer Jemima Kindersley translated, elaborated and enlarged Thomas’s Essai sur les Femmes. Russell typically supplemented Thomas’s account with excerpts from the works of the enlightened Scottish historians Kames, Millar and Adam Ferguson.19 In this way, Hume’s observations about the distance between ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’ in the relationship between the sexes found a niche in the ‘diachronic’ scheme of stages. Due to the immediate necessities of survival in a hostile environment, it was the war-making values of physical force, agility and military courage that were thought to predominate in ‘savage’ societies. Their ‘inferiority’ in this respect led women to be treated ‘as beings of an inferior order’.20 In a renowned paragraph of his History of Civil Society, Adam Ferguson argued that in tribal societies all women were submitted to real servitude, despite reports of the existence of matrilinearity: they ‘are in fact the slaves and helots of their country’. The description of ‘native’ American societies, provided by William Robertson’s History of America, suggested the paradigm for the universally miserable condition of women in the ﬁrst stage: ‘to despise and degrade the female sex, is the characteristic of the ‘savage state’ in every part of the globe’. In the most ‘uncivilised’ stages, according to Alexander, ‘women being considered only as the slaves and drudges of the men’, were the proprietary goods of their husbands or fathers, were merely objects of animal desire and the instruments of population.21

‘Race’, Women and Progress in the Scottish Enlightenment 79

Thus, the stadial scheme of progress framed the natural difference between the sexes as condemning women to a miserable state amongst ‘savages’, but it promised women’s liberation from servitude by means of the gradual development of manners. The fundamental transition was the agricultural stage, which represented the end of nomadism and the assertion of the principle of property, assuring greater security of life and sustenance. Solid matrimonial ties protected the female person, whilst laws allowed inheritance through the female line. For Robertson – as for Ferguson, Kames and Millar – chivalry marked the change of outlook. It gave ‘an air of reﬁnement to the intercourse of the sexes’, bringing politeness, delicacy, honour and humanity in manners to a level unknown to the Greeks and Romans, and perhaps to all antiquity, as well as to non-European peoples. Chivalry was a ‘revolution of manners’, a turning point in the evaluation of women, and it characterized and distinguished modern Europe in terms of superiority. The extension of commerce and craftsmanship then brought a further change in outlook. Paciﬁc tendencies, suited to the new demands of merchants and tradesmen, began to prevail; the duel fell into disuse; and in literature everyday life was preferred to heroic deeds. These transitions to agricultural and then to commercial stages allowed women to assume the role which ‘nature’ had foreseen: they became companions to men, responsible mothers of their families, and prepared teachers for their children. ‘They are’ – in the words of John Millar – ‘more universally regarded upon account of their useful or agreeable talents. […] In this situation the women become, neither the slaves, nor the idols of the other sex, but the friends and companions.’22 Thus European society was distinguished both from primitive ‘savage’ communities and from luxurious Asiatic countries where women, locked up in the seraglio, received education sufﬁcient only to become voluptuous instruments of sexual pleasure.23 Because progress was understood to be linear and uniform, the way in which women were treated served as an index of social development. According to William Alexander’s well-known statement, ‘the rank, therefore, and condition of women mark out with the greater precision, the exact point in the scale of civil society, to which the people of such country have arrived’. Historical development represented a process of ‘feminization’. For many Scottish historians, society had moved from being characterized by masculine features – a prevalence of aggression, strength, courage and bravery – and had come rather to embody feminine values – those of sociability, gentleness, emulation and conversation.24

2 The limits of progress in the history of women Although the spirit of opulent and trading nations tends evidently to improve the intercourse of mankind, in their more general and distant connections, it must be confessed, that when we turn our eyes to the private and intimate relations of human life, we are led, in some respects, to a different conclusion.25 The idea of historical progress sketched above was not, however, unanimously followed. Journalist and radical historian Gilbert Stuart sought in particular to

80 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization

challenge the Scottish mainstream historians, because they positively interpreted the process of the concentration of power in European history. Stadial history, nonetheless, was not without its own ambivalence: loss of liberty and the prevalence of individual egoism worried the supporters of commercial society, too. Though their historical interpretations differed, both theirs and Stuart’s diagnoses of modern society were based on the discourse on female sex. From its very title, A View of Society in Europe in its Progress from Rudeness to Reﬁnement, Stuart challenged A View of the Progress of Civil Society in Europe, the introduction to the history of Charles V, where William Robertson charted the progressive steps of the European states in their ‘positive’ transition from antiquity to modernity, from feudality to commercial society. In contrast, Stuart assessed feudalism as a system of liberty rooted in Germanic customs and responsible for the peculiarly European ‘system of manners’. In the wake of Rousseau, he inverted the main Scottish historical paradigm by associating liberty with the absence of commerce and property. The feudal distribution of lands entailed reciprocity and freedom, while self-interest, tyranny and despotism were the consequences of its dissolution under the pressure of social change. The progress of arts destroyed social harmony.26 By reconstructing a Whig perspective, Stuart strongly opposed what he considered to be the ‘neo-torism’ of Hume and Robertson, who in their historical accounts had linked civil liberty to centralized monarchy.27 Within this very distinctive historical framework, Stuart outlined a rather different account of woman and her condition. ‘The state of society, which precedes the knowledge of an extensive property and the meannesses which ﬂow from reﬁnement and commerce’, he told, ‘is in a high degree propitious to women’. Stuart, thus, related the good condition of women to gothic-feudal liberty and from this perspective underlined the failings of civilization.28 Accordingly, his account of chivalry deliberately contested the analysis Robertson had bequeathed to the Scottish historians of the 1770s. For him, chivalry was neither a late medieval institution, nor a key element in the transition to modernity, but had its roots in the ‘manners of ages, which we too often despise as rude and ignoble’. The pleasing company of women was not in any sense the result of a linear progress towards the commercial stage, but an important subject in the historical struggle between liberty and tyranny, begun in the German woods. In feudal Europe, women inspired the warrior in battle and in religion with their beauty and charm. Christianity stressed their natural modesty and strengthened the value of chastity and the sanctity of marriage. ‘Concerned in great affairs’ and ‘agitated with great passions’, women instilled in men the highest virtues of generosity, humanity and gallantry. In this version of the European past, then, sensibility and tenderness developed in the era of knights when men ‘smoothed over the roughness of war with politeness’. Elegant manners and politeness – characteristics that others had seen as typical of the commercial age – were distinctively knightly virtues.29 Using the same comparative method as the other Scots, Stuart supported the principle that the condition of women was a historical measure. For him, it was

‘Race’, Women and Progress in the Scottish Enlightenment 81

an index not of social development but of liberty. The main subject of his analysis were the ancient Germans, but his positive evaluation of the female condition was extended to all pre-commercial societies: to the Egyptians, the ancient Greeks, the Hindus and to the ‘native’ Americans. According to Stuart, his fellow historians made inexcusable errors on the subject because they ‘wanted’ to demonstrate ‘that the women, in rude times, are of so little consideration, that they are objects of trafﬁc’. Recalling the similarity between the customs of ancient Germans and those of ‘native’ Americans, Stuart concluded with a declaration of relativism: ‘in all times, the men and women are to be judged of by different standards’.30 The stakes here were not so much the role and nature of women, but the diagnosis of modern society, commercial capitalism, and the concept of liberty. All the Scottish literati saw the complementary roles of the sexes as a dynamic and positive factor in encouraging the evolution of society. This analysis of the female role in society and of familial relationships was grounded in the decline of patriarchal political theory at the end of the seventeenth century, and the new relations between husband and wife which ensued. Francis Hutcheson described these changes as deﬁning marriage as a state of ‘equal partnership or friendship’, envisaged by the ‘intention of nature’ and Providence. The relationship between man and woman in marriage was based on reciprocal respect and on sentiments of affection which sublimated the mere reproductive instinct.31 In the Scottish Enlightenment, both supporters of the modern age like Millar and apologists of the German woods and the chivalrous past like Stuart, believed that women ought not only to be chaste and modest mothers attending to domestic duties, but also the worthy companions and educators of men. Whether this vision was an expression of a providential order, as in the case of Kames, or an expression of a natural or rational order, as found in the works of Alexander and Millar, women’s place crucially functioned as a limit which ‘nature’ imposed to the historical process of progress. ‘From the lowest state to which a human creature can be reduced’, Kames asserted, ‘women were restored to their native dignity’. According to Millar, with progress ‘the wife obtains that rank and station’, which appears ‘most agreeable to reason’ and most appropriate to her character and natural inclinations. Her weak body and ‘peculiar delicacy and sensibility’ ‘naturally’ assigned to her the management of the family, the soothing of her husband’s misfortunes, and the sharing of his joys.32 Thus the ‘nature’ of woman established the necessary limit of her own ‘history’. Awareness of this limit was one aspect of a more general tension about historical development as progress. The division of labour, which the Scottish literati considered to be a key element of the wealth of modern nations, possibly also produced Ferguson’s ‘nation of helots’, where all political virtue is lost. This fear, which was always present in Scottish discourse if in different intensities and strengths, had a clear gender dimension precisely because the history of women was strictly linked to the history of social reﬁnement. If, segregated from the company of woman, man remained coarse and unreﬁned, conﬁned to it he became ‘effeminate’ and a ‘coward’, devoid of ‘manhood’ and of ‘patriotism’.33

82 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization

Therefore, the attainment of a highly civilised state implied the possibility of decline and regression, which was measured on the same ‘feminine’ scale. For all that it was praised, chivalry itself had threatened to reverse ‘the order of nature by elevating women far above men’. Princes and warriors, trying to realize the legends they had studied on the books, submitted the fortunes of nations to gallantry, and, as Ferguson put it, turned what was originally ‘singular’ to ‘extravagance’.34 While Hume and Robertson considered luxury positively as the principal cause of the collapse of feudalism, for Stuart this process caused a dramatic acceleration in the corruption of society. For him too, this corruption was gendered: feudal disorder and the decadence of chivalry and of liberty were reﬂected in the prostitution of beauty, in the loss of the sacredness of marriage, and in a profane and ‘fantastic’ gallantry. Public prostitution marked the end of an age of purity and freedom, a sign of universal corruption, rapacity, depravation, and all the classic characteristics of moral decadence.35 William Alexander partly shared Stuart’s positive view of the feudal past and argued that the most important female virtues, modesty and chastity, ﬂourished where reﬁnement was still at its beginnings. According to these criteria, he identiﬁed the diverse paths civilisation had taken within Europe. In Alexander’s history, as in the new chapter that William Russell added to his translation of Thomas’s Essai sur les femmes, the possible negative effects of progress assumed the form of gendered warnings. The danger of destroying the balance between ‘commerce’ and ‘conversation’, and anxiety about the future were expressed in the fear that manners in Britain would sink to the effeminate, impudent and corrupt standards of the French.36 Despite having indicated that France was the country in which ‘culture’ and ‘conversation’ had met, Hume agreed with the widespread opinion that French effeminacy involved an inversion of roles whereby women had power over men. Kames put further emphasis on this theme: ‘Good government and the happiness of a nation depend not less upon the manners of the women than of the men.’ According to him, Paris was a clear example of depravity, in which women, ‘abandoning themselves to love and gallantry, lead the way to every corruption’. This was a ‘disease’ that should be prevented in Britain. Kames seemed to share, if not the rhetoric then the apprehension expressed by Russell about the confusion of ‘ranks, ages and sexes’ of the ‘present state of sociability, luxury, and vicious reﬁnement’. This real danger could be defeated only by the traditional duties of the mother and by a morality strongly biased by ‘country ideology’.37 In this way, the classic paradigm of Roman decadence, which associated excessive progress in wealth and well-being with dissolute customs, lasciviousness, unbridled sensuality, and prostitution, was coupled with examples of modern European countries such as France and Italy. Even Millar concluded the ﬁrst chapter of his Origins of the Ranks with this association, thus drawing attention to the possible limits to progress. His tolerant and liberal evaluation did not prevent him from reasserting some ‘traditional fears’ about the close associations between women, luxury and decadence. There was clearly an unsolved and profound tension between ‘the language of corruption and the language of market and interests’.38 Millar believed that

‘Race’, Women and Progress in the Scottish Enlightenment 83

in ‘opulent’ and ‘luxurious’ nations, free communication between the sexes gave rise to ‘licentious and dissolute manners’, ‘sensual enjoyment’, ‘gallantry’ and ‘intrigue’, which were ‘inconsistent with good order, and with the general interest of society’. His An Historical View of the English Government further emphasized the contrast between the general progress of society and its negative effects within the domestic sphere. Sympathy, friendship and benevolence, the basis of human happiness, did not improve with the manners of ‘a mercantile and luxurious age’, while limits and obstacles in the relationship between the sexes were necessary for the welfare of society as well as for the dignity of women themselves.39 Gender confusion, concern for masculinity, and familiar complaints about feminisation and commodiﬁcation thus became integrated within the progressive historical scheme.40 ‘Feminization’ of society could only too easily spell ‘effeminacy’, and the subversion of the ‘natural’ roles between the sexes. Praise of female qualities led to a demand for their control. Gallantry could be a good form of education for the sexes, if it was strongly regulated. Hume made a coherent distinction between the negative French gallantry ‘of amours and attachments’ and the positive English gallantry ‘of complaisance’.41 In his footsteps, Kames considered it was necessary to educate and instruct women to be pleasing companions for men. In order to hold an interesting conversation they were expected to have some knowledge of history. They could be good readers and translators, but, because of the ‘tenderness of their complexion, and the weakness of their education’, were not made for more ‘severe’ studies. It was sufﬁcient for women to be educated in ‘taste’.42 Ultimately, women were expected to beneﬁt the progress of man, as Alexander stated: ‘Woman […] was not intended solely to propagate and nourish the species, but to form us for society, to give an elegance to our manners, a relish to our pleasures, to soothe our afﬂictions, and to soften our cares.’43 The equality between the sexes was based on their ‘complementarity’: their physical and mental diversity gave them different roles in society. Though a great advocate of female qualities and of the French salons, even John Gregory was a great believer in the relocation of women to the private sphere.44 In the new ‘secular’ discourse of history, women were made for men; love and conjugal affection were the foundation of political society. The ‘empire of sentiment’ implied a different and more sophisticated justiﬁcation of the male dominion, based on the clear separation of the private sphere – the domain of women – and the public sphere – reserved for men.45 This ambiguous gendered view of progress expressed the tension between the recognition of a history of progress and the enduring desire to maintain ﬁrm secular hierarchies and conventional restraints.

3 Women, ‘race’ and progress: related themes Does Nature operate in other modes in Scotland, than in the rest of the world?46 The new stadial approach of the Scottish Enlightenment presented history as a universal and common process, with social and cultural diversity the result of

84 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization

different degrees of development. That is, while holding out universal principles, it also emphasised human diversity. The existence of ‘savages’ in the eighteenthcentury world broke open the universalistic discourse on progress to a hierarchical discourse contrasting the stasis of non-European peoples and the dynamism of Europe.47 Combining history and physical anthropology, ‘race’ was the result. For those who did not follow the Biblical account to the letter, such as the polygenist Kames, the differences between peoples who progressed and those who remained ‘savage’ were easily explained: they were different ‘races’/’species’ from the very beginning. But the distance between the ‘savage’ and the ‘civil’ was also stark in monogenetic discourse, which stamped inferiority powerfully on the physical and moral constitution of ‘uncivilized’ peoples, as exempliﬁed by William Robertson’s analysis of ‘native’ Americans.48 For both monogenists and polygenists, women contributed not only to the formation of culture but shaped ‘races’. Contemporary travel literature and the natural history of man asserted that women moulded the body, skeleton and skull of the diverse ‘races’. From a monogenetic outlook, the two most important scientiﬁc authorities in eighteenth-century Europe, the French naturalist Buffon and the physician of Göttingen Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, maintained that the physical aspect of ‘Negroes’ depended on the practice of nursing children whilst going about their daily tasks. Reacting to the polygenetic hypothesis, they noted that the aesthetic criteria of different societies required women to produce desired characteristics by artiﬁcial means. Thus for the sake of ‘beauty’, Tartars compressed the eyes and elongated the ears of their children; Hottentots ﬂattened the nose ‘by violence’ and anointed the body with ‘ﬁlthy unguents’; Chinese parents reduced the size of baby girls’ feet and in India they sought to broaden the forehead.49 For the polygenists, by contrast, the discourse of the racial ‘other’ and that of women enjoyed parallel roles in the classiﬁcatory scheme of nature. According to Alexander, ‘the human genus’ was divided ‘into several distinct species’, each characterized by both physical and intellectual differences, and the species were subdivided again into sexes that were distinguished on a physical level and by ‘different sentiments and faculties, adapted to the different purposes for which they were intended’. In order to reinforce his polygenetic thesis, also Kames had linked together ‘races’ and ‘sexes’, arguing that the distinctive characteristics of different peoples could not be the fruits of chance anymore than ‘the uniformity of male and female births in countries and at all times’.50 There was, however, another issue on which monogenists and polygenists were not so clearly separable: sexuality. As Michéle Duchet has noted, the habits and rites of sexuality were a central element on which the European Enlightenment constructed distinctions between ‘races’.51 The characters of those eighteenthcentury pariahs, the Hottentots, were seen as strongly inﬂuenced by the ‘monstrous deformities’ of their sexual organs, both in women and men. Monogenists regarded these as the result of hot climates; for Voltaire and Kames they were a speciﬁc, racial peculiarity. In both cases the Hottentot woman was represented as a ‘sexual’ though not ‘sensual’ object, arousing only disgust in the European

‘Race’, Women and Progress in the Scottish Enlightenment 85

man. This perception established a fracture in humankind for which it was difﬁcult to account, since the natural attraction between the sexes of fellow creatures was strongly doubted. It was not by chance that key themes in the discussion of the total difference of ‘Negroes’ and of Hottentots were their presumed proximity to apes, and the myth of the rape of the Hottentot women by the orang-utan. Blacks were commonly described as characterised by a constant and excessive sexuality. Deprived of modesty, lascivious, dissolute and depraved, they attributed no value to virginity and practised polygamy.52 Their relationship with the opposite sex was represented as akin to animals, radically different from the sublime European ideal of Love. At the other end of the spectrum was the feeble sexuality of ‘native’ male Americans whose exterior appearance resembled women, with their long hair and lack of facial and bodily hair. According to some, this explained why American women threw themselves into the arms of their conquerors. In the footsteps of Cornelius de Pauw’s (in)famous Recherches Philosophiques sur les Américains, a vast Enlightened literature declared the indigenous inhabitants of the New World an ‘effeminate race’.53 Elaborating Buffon’s suggestion that a people’s sexual attraction was related to the status and condition enjoyed by women, Robertson asserted that the contempt and supreme disregard of male Americans for their women were probably caused by the ‘coldness and insensibility which has been considered as peculiar to their constitution’: they were ‘destitute of one sign of manhood and strength’.54 The demographical scarcity – which allegedly characterized the New World at the time of Columbus and had obstructed progress in America – could be, according to Kames, the consequence of ‘native’ Americans’ ‘biological’ deﬁcit in virility. This was expressed by indifference to the female sex and by cowardice in war.55 As in the great revolution of chivalry which had created modern Europe, love and war went together. The ‘ignoble savage’ was an ‘insensitive savage’, in contrast to the image of the medieval knight as a brave and sensitive lover. The racial characteristics of non-European peoples were constructed and explained, therefore, through a whole series of deviations from the human norm, and especially via the relationship between the sexes. ‘Native’ Americans constituted a conspicuous ‘exception’ in human history because they had not developed beyond their ‘savage state’. Their ‘asexuality’ and the miserable condition of women in their societies conﬁrmed this, above all when compared with the Caledonians, the other great ‘exception’ in the history of humanity: an exception which is worth exploring in some depth. The myth of Ossian, initially accepted by the most of the Scottish intellectuals, described the Caledonian society as a perfect balance between the sentimental character of commercial societies and the heroism of antiquity. The masculine hero of Ossian was a savage who was ‘sociable rather than independent, genuine rather than merely hospitable, humane rather than hard’.56 This ideal found its place within stadial theory as the ﬁrst stage of hunting, as Hugh Blair, professor of belles-lettres at the University of Edinburgh, demonstrated in his standard introduction to the Poems, the Critical Dissertation.57 Drawing on this, John

86 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization

Gregory focused on the exceptional sensibility and sentiments of the Caledonians: these signalled the existence of ‘a certain period in the progress of society, in which Mankind appears to the greatest advantage’. Ossianic society – the sixth edition of Gregory’s Comparative View (1774) lingered on – embodied the balance between ‘nature’ and ‘civilization’, where the ancient warrior met the modern man of feeling. But the ‘natural’ progress of society soon overcame this ‘very romantic’ equilibrium, which remained, through literary ﬁction, simply a moral pattern for the individual.58 Caledonian exceptionalism assumed a wider and more radical meaning than Gregory’s literary ideal in Kames’s Sketches of the History of Man. Kames placed it within a vision of the differences between civilisations which united the historical-sociological method of stages with a polygenetic theory. His defence of the ‘Poems of Ossian’ was therefore a coherent discussion of an original European ‘race’, separate and superior to its successors, which accounted for Europe’s success. Compared to the ‘great uniformity in the progress of manners’ evidenced by the other nations of hunters, the world of Ossian constituted ‘one exception extraordinary’. The manners of the Caledonians were ‘so pure and reﬁned as scarce to be paralleled in the most cultivated nations’. Warrior courage and heroism, mixed with the purity of loving sentiments and high respect for women, were a ‘miracle’.59 Kames’s interest in natural history and his polygenetic approach intertwined here with that of the principal creator of the Ossian myth, James Macpherson. Macpherson’s Introduction to the History of Great Britain and Ireland set the Poems of Ossian in a historical dimension, providing a speciﬁc genealogy and a peculiar physical and cultural character for the Caledonians. In asserting that ‘among mankind, as in other animals, there seems to be a variety of species’, Macpherson showed his preference for polygenetic perspectives: the common origin of mankind was contradicted by the history of ‘many regions in Europe’, which seemed destined to produce ‘a race of men, that might, in the progress of time, have polished themselves’ in an independent way, without learning the arts from any other nation. The origins of Great Britain and Ireland, on which the myth of Ossian was constructed, were then immediately contrasted with the ‘natural’ and ‘permanent’ barbarism of Africa, America and Eastern Asia, but also to other ancient European peoples. 60 Accordingly, in Macpherson’s antiquarian reconstruction, the Caledonians were part of the Celts, and differed strongly from the Sarmates, another European ‘race’ distinguished by short stature, laziness, polygamy, cruelty and little consideration for women. For both Macpherson and Kames Caledonian culture was particularly advanced, with sophisticated religious beliefs such as immortality of the soul and the perfect unity of the supreme being, and strong poetic and philosophical traditions. The Caledonians did not ﬁght in order to loot, nor did they make cowardly use of the ambush as native Americans did: their wars were fought in the open and in the name of honour. They were also distinguished by ‘humanity blended with courage’, refraining from the humiliation of adversaries.61

‘Race’, Women and Progress in the Scottish Enlightenment 87

Finally, these ‘original’ characters coalesced around the Caledonian attitudes to women. For Kames and Macpherson the condition of women was the leading indicator of the superiority of this distinct race to all other ‘savage’ peoples. Though they were hunters, the Caledonians respected, esteemed and loved their women. Caledonian women had signiﬁcant social importance, voted in assemblies and took part in all important decisions. In contrast, the typically undeveloped manners of ancient Greeks – despite the fact they belonged to the shepherd stage – were ‘such as may be expected from a people living among their slaves, without any society with virtuous women’. Greeks were ‘strangers to that polite society with women, which reﬁnes behaviour and elevates manners’. While among other ‘savages’ women were held as ‘beings of an inferior rank; and as such are treated with very little respect’, the society of Ossian was an absolute and superior ‘exception’.62 Among the Scottish polygenists, the position of women was the key piece of evidence for the existence of a single ‘race’ of Nordic peoples. Combining the pretend antiquity of the Ossianic age with an ‘engendered’ reading of the main historical source for ancient Europe, Tacitus’s Germania,63 Kames extended the noble portrayal of Caledonian women to that of all Celt and German women, while Macpherson used Tacitus to maintain that even ‘the most unpolished Germans’ ascribed something of the divine to the female mind, admitted women to public deliberations, and greatly respected their advice and opinions. Also a polygenist, William Alexander sought to distinguish the ancient Germans, notwithstanding his belief in principle in the universal servitude of women in the ﬁrst stages of history: whilst ﬁerce and brutal, as all ancient peoples, they were very respectful of women who beneﬁted from being regarded as ‘of equal, and sometimes even of greater, consideration and consequence than their men’.64 Nordic European women stood out for their beauty, even if deprived of the sumptuous and expensive clothes which other ages could supply. They had ‘lively blue eyes, large but regular features, a ﬁne complexion, and a skin which, for whiteness, equalled the snow upon their mountains’. Magniﬁcent also in their temperaments, Celtic women often took part in battles. ‘No wonder’ therefore that they formed ‘a capital ﬁgure in every public entertainment’.65 Alexander certainly had them in mind when he afﬁrmed, in contrast with the cruel customs of ancient Greek and ‘native’ American women, that ‘there are many of the fairsex, whose constitutions are so humane and tender, that even custom could not reconcile them to barbarity’. Chastity, monogamy, and the sanctity of marriage, together with the quality of women in Ossianic civilisation and in the Celtic society of Northern Europe, ‘could not fail to produce mutual esteem and love between the sexes’, sentiments always generated when the ‘women equal the men’.66 The exceptional character of the Caledonians therefore revealed the exceptional character of all the ‘Northern nations of Europe’, with a uniformity that must be attributed to ‘nature’ only, as Kames had theorised in his ‘Preliminary Discourse’ to the Sketches. The status of Celtic women and the excellence of the sentiments and relationships between the sexes deﬁned their ‘national character’. This was

88 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization

not the culturally-shaped set of characteristics outlined by Hume, but an ‘original’ character connected with ‘nature’ and extending to all the populations of northern Europe.67 The Caledonians were not an ‘original tribe’ ‘who may be supposed to have had manners peculiar to themselves’, but those who, thanks to the barrier of the Scottish mountains, had longest preserved the purity of Celtic original customs.68 Macpherson, who focused his investigation more on the differences between the ancient European peoples, explained that in continental Europe the Celtic characteristics were lost by the mixing of their blood with that of the Sarmates, or – as Kames also insisted – where Roman colonisation took place. But despite some differences, both Macpherson and Kames converged in imagining ‘a pure ‘Nordic race’, preserved for longer in the Scottish Highlands. Polygenism and stage theory together created ‘race’. But stadial history’s emphasis on differential development split the unity of humankind. It was precisely this aspect that Stuart’s critique was intended to expose. According to him, stadial progress was ﬁrst construed on the denigration of the ‘savages’ and ‘barbarians’ as ignoble and insensitive, through an instrumental interpretation of Tacitus’s account of German women, to which Millar mostly contributed.69 Then, on the basis of this negative paradigm, Robertson had lowered ‘native’ Americans to the rank of semi-animals, while Kames argued for the exceptions of the Caledonians. In their stark opposition between ‘primitive’ and ‘civilised’ stages, therefore, it was not only the polygenist Kames, but also the monogenists Robertson and Millar who tended to construct two different ‘natures’: the ‘savage’ and the ‘civilised’ man. For Stuart, instead, just like ‘civil’ man, ‘uncivilised’ man was attracted to beauty and knew the pleasure and signiﬁcance of love: both were ‘susceptible of tenderness and sentiment’. Stuart thus attenuated the natural distance in sensibility between the sexes, implied by the Scottish mainstream historians. At the same time, he re-established the parallel between modern ‘savages’ and ancient Europeans and denied those arguments about ‘exceptions’. Just as he argued that woman was notably respected in all ‘savage’ societies, and not merely amongst the ancient Germans, he also rejected the contrast between the military customs of ancient Europeans and those of ‘native’ Americans that was central to Kames. ‘Cunning and stratagem’ were part of the wisdom of all ‘savages’; ‘deceit’ and ‘surprise’ were common military methods. Both the ‘native’ American and the ancient Germans mixed active and passive courage, and both knew how to ﬁght in the open. Stuart vindicated the uniformity of human nature against the theory of ‘different original dispositions’.70 His critique thus went to the heart of the mainstream racial construction of the ‘other’ through the ﬁgure of the woman, both in the explicit form of the ‘Celticism’ of Macpherson and Kames, and in the less evident form resulting from the emphasis on the differences produced by progress. In his Whiggish historical approach, Stuart considered the differences in civilisation as the product of the differential historical circumstances. The patrimony of liberty, common to all primitive peoples, had been modiﬁed and channelled into diverse ‘national’ historical paths. Robertson’s ten steps of progress were the

‘Race’, Women and Progress in the Scottish Enlightenment 89

steps of continental monarchies towards absolutism.71 The British world had instead, Stuart declared, been happily preserved by several successful moments of resistance to the centralisation of power. Further back in history, part of the British world had remained outside the inﬂuence of the Roman empire, thus retaining more the customs of Germanic liberty. ‘A native of Great Britain […] must feel, in a lively degree, the happy advantages of our free constitution’, he afﬁrmed.72 Civilisation and liberty were therefore not contained in the blood of a people, but in their history. Stuart’s objections to mainstream Scottish histories of women were rightly recognized by James Dunbar as a means of reviewing the past in national context. Professor of Moral Philosophy at the King’s College in Aberdeen and member of the Wise Club, Dunbar insisted on a history of humanity which did the least possible violence to what he termed the ‘common prerogatives’ of the species, in opposition to polygenism.73 Dunbar, therefore, considered Stuart ‘a Writer who has illustrated the liberal genius of feudal associations, and vindicated, in some material points, the character of our remote ancestors’. Even in contemporary Africa women took part in public assemblies and in votes on important decisions, as in many other uncivilised nations. Celtic women were not an exception, but one of the many examples of the better conditions women enjoyed amongst peoples closer to nature. The comparison between the Greeks and the barbarians of their age corresponded to that between the ‘native’ Americans and more advanced Mexicans and Peruvians, with women clearly occupying the most advantageous position in lesser developed societies.74 At this stage, Whig history and the anti-sceptical stance of the Aberdonian Wise Club, of which Dunbar was the youngest member, combined: in the case of the female condition, Gregory asserted, deformity was more rightly associated with civilised society, and normality and good health with the ‘savage’.75 Stuart’s revision of the history of women merged into Dunbar’s rewriting of the history of civil society to form part of a critical approach to colonial ideology and to demystify the opposition on which the European self-image was constructed: use of the terms ‘barbarous’ and ‘civilised’, critics charged, was based on a misunderstanding of the state of mankind. The opposition ‘supposes the difference between one nation and another may be prodigiously great’, and opens a divide between peoples ‘in all respects, generous, liberal, reﬁned, and humane’ and peoples who, due to ‘their hard fate, or their perverseness […] remain in all respects illiberal, mischievous, and rude’. One such critic, Dunbar, sought to confront the arrogance of Europe, personiﬁed as a vain woman who ‘affects to move in another orbit from the rest of the species’, ‘even offended with the idea of a common descent’, and moving round the world, spreading corruption, establishing frontiers, distributing pedigrees, granting certiﬁcates of humanity, ‘imagining speciﬁc differences among men’. History only divides peoples, as the American Revolution was there to demonstrate.76 Imagining ‘nations’ and imagining ‘races’ were closely connected intellectual activities at the end of the eighteenth century.77 Both concerned the deﬁnition of the progress of society. The condition of women, the relationship between the

90 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization

sexes, and the customs of sexuality determined in a variety of ways the ‘racial imagination’ of eighteenth-century Scottish culture, because ‘race’ naturalised cultural characteristics by rendering them innate or inscribing them on the body. But the female image was also crucial in shaping an alternative historical discourse on ‘nations’. Here, Gilbert Stuart’s critiques of the prevailing history of women met Dunbar’s defence of human prerogatives. Their vindication of universalism, which censured both the polygenetic construction of ‘race’ and the tendency of the stage theory to construct overt differences between more and less advanced peoples, exalted ‘national’ particularities. The issue of women here was a decisive means of demonstrating that history produces and differentiates the cultural patrimony of peoples. The discussion of the female sex assumed its particular importance because of the close connection with the deﬁnition of progress. Its relevance was also due to the fact that many of Scottish literati at the time were engaged in the cause of Ossian, which had introduced ‘exceptions’ in the accounts of even the most convinced supporters of a modern and progressive history.78 A mirror of the values and literary taste of the time, Ossianic society was an aesthetic myth based on the projection into the past of certain European nations of the values of the society of ‘conversation’ and ‘sentimental discourse’. The exceptional balance of liberty and sociability, and the unique equilibrium and uncontaminated relationship between the sexes were elements of a myth that could strike appeal to the pious Gregory and the ambivalent Kames alike. But the historical analysis of Macpherson was reinterpreted through Kames’s eclectic reasoning into the progressive ‘history of a race’, in contrast with the static histories of other ‘races’. The beauty of the white Celtic woman was contrasted with the repulsiveness of the female Hottentot. The Ossianic hero was cast as the opposite of the ‘native American savage’, who was indifferent to humanity, effeminate and sexually impotent. Above all, however, the ideal of free and equal intercourse between the sexes in the Ossianic sagas expressed the ambiguity of the Scottish historians with respect to modernity, dominated by commodity and by appearances. ‘The picture we have drawn will not probably please the reﬁned ideas of the present times’, Macpherson wrote. The high temperament of the Celtic women was contrasted directly with the ‘ﬁctitious respect’ paid to women in modern Europe, and with the inﬂuence that ‘our modern beauties derive from all the elegant timidity and delicacy of manners’.79 The themes of gender and ‘race’ intersected therefore in establishing the limits of progress and the hierarchical relationships in European history. The projection of the values of ‘conversative society’ and ‘sentimental discourse’ in the past of some European nations shaped, deﬁned and differentiated history as progress. This could explain the existence of peoples without progress and, at the same time, mark out the limits beyond which history could reverse into decadence. Therefore, the unequal geography of progress was doubled in the inconstant geography of the sentimental world. This was what Alexander constructed around differing relationships between the sexes and the idea of the most desirable balance of civilisation: northern Europe was the place

‘Race’, Women and Progress in the Scottish Enlightenment 91

of Love, compared to American ‘sexual deﬁciency’, African ‘animal practices’, Asiatic ‘depraved luxury’, and the ‘libertine degeneration’ of southern Europe.80

Notes *

I would like to thank all the participants of the working group on Feminism and Enlightenment for their useful and stimulating observations and comments; and John Robertson, John Brewer, Hans Bödeker, Luciano Gueri, and Mario Caricchio for having read and commented more versions of this chapter. I’m also grateful to Carina Bischoff, Zoe Bray, Jacqueline Gordon, and Jacob Cameron who, while correcting my English, also helped me to clarify my argument. 1. H. R. Trevor-Roper, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, Studies on Voltaire and Eighteenth Century, 58 (1967), 1635–58; J. Robertson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment’, Rivista Storica Italiana, CVIII (1996), 792–829; Id., ‘The Scottish Contribution to the Enlightenment’, in P. Wood, ed., The Scottish Enlightenment: Essays in Reinterpretation (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2000), pp. 37–62. 2. M. S. Phillips, ‘Reconsideration on History and Antiquarianism: Arnaldo Momigliano and the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 57, n. 2, (1996), 297–316; Id., “If Mrs. Mure Be Not sorry For the Poor King Charles’: History, Novel, and The Sentimental Reader”, History Workshop Journal, 43, (1997), 110–31; Id., Society and Sentiment. Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton, 2000); R. L. Meek, Social Science and Ignoble Savage (Cambridge, 1976); R. B. Sher, ‘From Troglodytes to Americans: Montesquieu and the Scottish Enlightenment on Liberty, Virtue, and Commerce’, in D. Wootton, ed. by, Liberty and Commercial Society 1649–1776 (Stanford, 1994), pp. 378–402. 3. For a gendered deﬁnition of the ‘ethos of commerce’ in the British context, see: J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Clergy and Commerce: The Conservative Enlightenment in England’, in L’età dei lumi: Studi storici sul settecento europeo in onore di Franco Venturi (Napoli, 1985), vol. I, pp. 525–62; for the French context, see Janny Mander’s contribution to this volume. 4. S. Tomaselli, ‘The Enlightenment Debate on Women’, History Workshop Journal, 20 (1985), pp. 101–24; Ea, ‘Woman in Enlightenment Conjectural Histories’, in H. E. Bödeker, L. Steinbrügge, eds, Conceptualising Woman in Enlightenment Thought (Berlin, 2001), pp. 7–22. 5. J. Rendall, ‘Clio, Mars and Minerva: The Scottish Enlightenment and the Writing of Women’s History’, in T. M. Devine, J. R. Young, eds, Eighteenth-Century Scotland: New Perspectives (East London, 1999), pp. 134–51. 6. G. J. Barker-Benﬁeld, The Culture of Sensibility. Sex and Society in Eighteenth Century Britain (Chicago-London, 1992); I. H. Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815 (Ithaca/London, 1996). 7. For a general survey of this debate in enlightened Europe, see: C. Blanckaert, ‘Monogénisme et polygénisme’, in P. Tort, dir., Dictionnaire du darwinisme et de l’évolution, 3 vols (Paris, 1996), vol. II, pp. 3021–37; J. S. Slotkin, ed., Readings in Early Anthropology (Chicago, 1965); M. Duchet, Anthropologie et Histoire au Siècle des Lumières (Paris, 1971); P. J. Marshall, G. Williams, The Great Map of Mankind. British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (London, 1982); A. Gerbi, La disputa del nuovo mondo. Storia di una polemica: 1750–1900 (1972) (Milano/Napoli, 1983); G. Gliozzi, ‘L’insormontabile natura: clima, razza, progresso’, Rivista di ﬁlosoﬁa, LXXVII, (1986), 73–107; T. Todorov, Nous et les autres. La réﬂexion française sur la diversité humaine (Paris, 1989) ; H. F. Augstein, ed., Race: the Origins of an Idea, 1760–1850 (Bristol, 1996); S. Moussa, L’idée de ‘race’ dans les Sciences humaines et la littérature (XVIIIe et XIX siècles). Actes du colloque international de Lyon (16–18 novembre 2000) (Paris, 2003).

92 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization 8. W. Alexander, The History of Women, from the Earliest Antiquity, to the Present Time; giving some Account of almost every interesting Particular concerning that Sex, among all Nations, ancient and modern, 2 vols (London, 1779), vol. I, p. 492. 9. A. L. Thomas, Essai sur le Caractère, les mœurs et l’esprit des Femmes dans les différent siècles (Paris, 1772), pp. 2–3; English translation by W. Russell, Essay on the Character, Manners and Genius of Women, enlarged from the French of Mr. Thomas, 2 vols (London, 1773), vol. I, p. 4. 10. D. Hume, An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), in Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. by L. A. Selby-Bigge, 3rd edn with text revised and variant readings by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1983) p. 201. 11. A. Murdoch, R. B. Sher, ‘Literary and Learned Culture’, in T. M. Devine, R. Mitchison, eds, People and Society in Scotland 1760–1830 (Edinburgh 1988) pp. 127–42; D. Goodman, ‘The Enlightenment Salons: the Convergence of Female and Philosophic Ambitions’, Eighteenth Century Studies, XXII, (1989), 329–50; The Republic of Letters. A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, 1994); J. Brewer, ‘Commercialization and Politics’, in N. McKendrick, J. Brewer, J. H. Plumb, eds, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington, 1985), pp. 197–262. For an account of the presence of women in the Scottish literary circles between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, see J. Rendall’s chapter in this volume. 12. D. Hume, ‘Of the Reﬁnement in the Arts’ (1752), in Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, ed. by E. F. Miller (Indianapolis, 1987) p. 271; A. C. Baier, ‘Hume on women’s complexion’, in P. Jones, ed., The Science of Man in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh, 1989) pp. 33–53. 13. D. Hume, ‘Of Essay Writing’ (1742), in Essays, p. 536. 14. D. Hume, ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’ (1741), in Essays, pp. 133–4. 15. On the Wise Club, see: H. L. Ulman, The Minutes of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society 1758–1773, Aberdeen, 1990; S. A. Conrad, Citizenship and Common Sense: The Problem of Authority in the Social Background and Social Philosophy of the Wise Club of Aberdeen (New York, 1987). 16. J. Gregory, A Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with those of the Animal World, 1st edn (London, 1765) pp. 51–52; VI edn, 2 vols (London, 1774), vol. I, p. 139; Id., A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (London, 1774). See, M. C. Moran’s contribution to this book: ‘Between the Savage and the Civil: Dr. John Gregory’s Natural History of Femininity’; L. B. McCullough, John Gregory and the Invention of Professional Medical Ethics (Dordrecht London, 1988), pp. 88–96; Id., ‘John Gregory Medical Ethics and Humean Sympathy’, in R. Baker, R. Porter, D. Porter, eds, The Codiﬁcation of Medical Morality: Historical and Philosophical Studies of the Formation of Western Medical Morality in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Boston, 1993) pp. 143–160. 17. J. Gregory, A Comparative View, p. 166. The very importance of the mutual exchange of difference for the welfare of the species had been already stressed by Adam Smith: A. Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. by R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, P. G. Stein (Oxford, 1978) pp. 348–49; Id., An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, (1776), 2 vols, ed. by R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner (Oxford, 1976) vol. I, p. 30. 18. Kames, Sketches on the History of Man (1774), 4 vols (Edinburgh, 1778), Book I, Vol. I, p. 273; W. Alexander, History of Women, vol. I, p. 492. 19. W. Russell, Essay on the Character, Manners and Genius of Women; J. Kindersley, An Essay on the Character, the Manners and the Understanding of Women in different ages, from the French of Mr. Thomas, with two original essays (London, 1781). Jemima Kindersley had travelled with her husband to Calcutta in 1765 and wrote the Letters from the Island of Teneriffe, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope, and the East Indies (London, 1777), which dealt with slavery in the Cape of Good Hope and offered a comparative perspective on female manners. The same comparative approach on the behaviour of women and the

‘Race’, Women and Progress in the Scottish Enlightenment 93

20.

21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

male attitude towards the female sex was the core of the ‘two original essays’ that Kindersley added to her translation of Thomas’s Essay. J. Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (III rev. edn, 1779), reprint in W. C. Lehmann, John Millar of Glasgow 1735–1801. His Life and Thought and his Contributions to Sociological Analysis (Cambridge, 1960) p. 192; Kames, Sketches, Book I, Vol. II, p. 27; in similar terms, G.-T. Raynal, Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et des commerces des Européens dans les Deux Indes, (Ist edn 1770), 4 vols (Genève, 1780), vol. IV, pp. 113–114 and D. Diderot, ‘Sur les femmes’ (1772), on which see Jenny Mander’s contribution to this volume. See also: P. Bowles, ‘John Millar, the four-stages Theory, and Women’s Position in Society’, History of Political Economy, Vol. XVI, 4, (1984) 619–38. A. Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), ed. by D. Forbes, (Edinburgh, 1966), pp. 82–3; W. Robertson, The History of America, (1777), 3 vols (London, 1788), Book VII, Vol. III, p. 103; W. Alexander, History of Women, vol. I, pp. 43 and 90. J. Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, pp. 218–19; Kames, Sketches, Book I, Vol. II, pp. 90, 92–7; W. Robertson, The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V. With a view of the progress of civil society in Europe from the Subversion of the Roman Empire to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century, 3 vols (London, 1769) pp. 69–72; A. Ferguson, History of Civil Society, pp. 199–202. W. Alexander, History of Women, vol. I, pp. 90, 421; Kames, Sketches, Book I, vol. II, p. 79. Alexander, History of Women, vol. I, p. 151; S. Tomaselli, ‘The Enlightenment Debate on Women’; ‘Woman in Enlightenment Conjectural Histories’; J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Clergy and commerce. The conservative Enlightenment in England’. J. Millar, An Historical View of the English Government, from the Settlement of the Saxons in Britain to the Revolution in 1688. To which are subjoined, some dissertations connected with the History of the Government, from the Revolution to the Present Time, ed. by J. Craig & J. Mylne, 4 vols (London, 1803), vol. IV, p. 255. G. Stuart, A View of Society in Europe in its Progress from Rudeness to Reﬁnement: or, Inquiries concerning the History of Law, Government, and Manners (Edinburgh, 1778), p. 2; Id., An Historical Dissertation concerning the Antiquity of the English Constitution (London, 1768); J. J. Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1754), éd. par J.L. Lecercle (Paris/Bordeaux, 1971) W. Zachs, Without regards to Good Manners. A biography of Gilbert Stuart 1743–1786 (Edinburgh, 1992). C. Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past. Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an AngloBritish Identity 1689–1830 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 239–46. G. Stuart, A View of Society in Europe, p. 13, emphasis added; J. Gregory, A Comparative View, I ed.; p. 130. G. Stuart, A View of Society in Europe, pp. 54, 61–2. G. Stuart, A View of Society in Europe, pp. 226, 183. F. Hutcheson, A System of Moral Philosophy, in three books, 2 vols (Glasgow 1755), vol. II, p. 163; J. Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and United States 1780–1860 (London, 1985) pp. 11–12; for the German intellectual context, see: I. H. Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society, p. 163. Kames, Sketches, Book I, vol. II, p. 38; J. Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, p. 219. A. Ferguson, History of Civil Society, pp. 202–3, 218–19, 225–7; Kames, Sketches, Book I, Vol. I, pp. 84, 123, 126; W. Alexander, History of Women, vol. I, pp. XIII and 63. See also: A. Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, pp. 539–41; Id., Wealth of Nations, vol. II, book V, pp. 781–2; J. Millar, An Historical View, IV vol, esp. ch. IV and VI; D. Spadafora, The idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Yale, 1990); M. Jack, Corruption & Progress. The Eighteenth-Century Debate (New York, 1989); D. Forbes, ‘Introduction’ to A. Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, pp. xiii–xli; R. L. Heilbroner, ‘The Paradox of Progress: Decline and Decay in The Wealth of Nations’ in A. Skinner and

94 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization

34. 35. 36.

37.

38.

39. 40.

41.

42.

43. 44

45.

46.

47.

T. Wilson, eds, Essays on Adam Smith (Oxford, 1975) pp. 524–39; G. W. Stocking, Scotland as a model of mankind: Lord Kames’ philosophical view of civilisation, in T. H. H. Thorensen, ed., Towards a science of man: essays in the history of anthropology (The Hague, 1975) pp. 75–89. A. Ferguson, History of Civil Society, pp. 202–03; see also: Kames, Sketches, Book I, vol. II, p. 84; W. Alexander, History of Women, vol. I, pp. XIII, 63. G. Stuart, A View of Society in Europe, p. 144. W. Alexander, History of Women, vol. I, p. 440; W. Russell, ‘Of the Progress of Society in Britain, and of the Character, Manners, and Talents of the British Women’, in Essay on the Character, Manners and Genius of Women, vol. II, pp. 107–73. This chapter was written by Russell himself. D. Hume, ‘A Dialogue’, in The Philosophical Works of David Hume, ed. by T. H. Green & T. H. Grose, 4 vols (Darmstadt, 1964), vol. IV, pp. 300–302; Kames, ‘Second of sixteen letters addressed to Miss Catherine Gordon’ (Edinburgh 17 June 1764), in W. C. Lehmann, Henry Home, Lord Kames and the Scottish Enlightenment: a Study in National Character and in the History of Ideas (The Hague, 1971), pp. 309–13; W. Russell, Essay, p. 179; see K. Rogers, ‘The View from England’, in S. I. Spencer, ed., French Women and the Age of Enlightenment (Bloomington, 1984) pp. 357–68. M. Ignatieff, ‘John Millar and individualism’, in I. Hont, M. Ignatieff, eds, Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 113, 143. J. Millar, Origin of Ranks, p. 225; Id., An Historical View of the English Government, vol. IV, p. 255. For a discussion of the gendered anxiety in eighteenth-century Britain, see: J. Brewer, ‘“The most polite age and the most vicious”. Attitudes towards culture as a commodity, 1660–1800’, in A. Bermingham and J. Brewer, eds, The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800 (London/New York, 1995), pp. 354–8. D. Hume, ‘Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences’, in Essays, p. 133. Id., ‘A Dialogue’, in Philosophical Works (Darmstadt, 1964), vol. IV, p. 302; G. J. Barker-Benﬁeld, The Culture of Sensibility, p. 139. The limits of the Enlightenment’s concept of ‘gallantry’ were strongly felt by Mary Wollstonecraft, on which see: B. Taylor, ‘Feminists versus Gallants: Manners and Morals in Enlightenment Britain’ in this volume. D. Hume, ‘Of the study of History’, in Essays, p. 565; Kames, Sketches, Book I, Vol. II, p. 3; Id., Loose Hints upon Education: Chieﬂy Concerning the Culture of the Heart (Edinburgh, 1782) pp. 162–3. Kames, like Gregory, strictly followed Rousseau’s deﬁnition of the ‘nature’ and education of women, stated in his book V of the Emile. W. Alexander, History of Women, vol. I, p. 475, emphasis added; G. J. Barker-Benﬁeld, The Culture of Sensibility, pp. 104 ff. J. Gregory, Comparative View, VI ed., vol. I, pp. 153–60. On the ‘triumph of complementary’ in late eighteenth century, see: L. Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge Mass., 1989) pp. 214–44. As contemporary sentimental literature and conduct books taught. See, J. Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse: Sensibility and Community in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh, 1987) pp. 130–7; Id., The Age of the Passions. An Interpretation of Adam Smith and Scottish Enlightenment Culture (East Linton, 1998); M. C. Moran, ‘“The Commerce of the Sexes”: Gender and the Social Sphere in the Scottish Enlightenment Account of Civil Society’, in F. Trentman ed, Paradoxes of Civil Society (New York, 2000), pp. 61–84. Elizabeth Montagu’s letter to Lord Kames, 3 October 1771, in A. F. Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee, Memoires of the Life and Writings of the Honourable Henry Home of Kames, 2 vols (London, 1807, reprinted London, 1993), vol. II, p. 95. Here, Kames’s interpretation of the Poems of Ossian was under discussion. J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion. Narratives of Civil Government, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 1999), vol. II, pp. 316–28.

‘Race’, Women and Progress in the Scottish Enlightenment 95 48. On racial discourse in the Scottish Enlightenment, see S. Sebastiani, ‘Storia universale e teoria stadiale negli Sketches of the History of Man di Lord Kames’, Studi Storici, 39, (1998), 113–36; Ead, ‘Progress, National Characters, and Race in the Scottish Enlightenment’, Eighteenth-Century Scotland, 14 (2000), 11–15; Ead, ‘Razze, donne e progresso nell’Illuminismo Scozzese’, Passato e Presente, 50, (2000), 45–70; K. O’Brien, ‘Between Enlightenment and stadial history: William Robertson on the history of Europe’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. XVI, 1 (1993), 53–63; Ead, Narratives of Enlightenment. Cosmopolitan history from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge, 1997); S. J. Brown, ed., William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire (Cambridge, 1997). 49. L. Schiebinger, ‘The Anatomy of Difference: Race and Sex in Eighteenth-Century Science’, Eighteenth Century Studies, 23 (1990), 387–96; Ead, Nature’s Body. Sexual Politics and the Making of Modern Science (London, 1994), esp. ch. 5; G. L. L. Buffon, Histoire Naturelle Générale et particulière, 15 vols (Paris, 1749–67); J. F. Blumenbach, De Generi humani varietate nativa (Göttingen, 1776). 50. W. Alexander, History of Women, vol. II, pp. 44–5; Kames, Sketches, Book I, Vol. I, p. 39. 51. M. Duchet, ‘Racisme et sexualité au XVIII siècle’, in L. Poliakov (ed.) Ni juif ni grec. Entretiens sur le racisme (Paris, 1978) pp. 127–38. 52. M. Duchet, Anthropologie et Histoire; J. Rendall, ‘Introduction’ to W. Alexander, History of Women, 2 vols, reprint of the III ed. (Bath, 1994); L. Brown, ‘Reading Race and Gender : Jonathan Swift’, Eighteenth Century Studies, 23, n. 4 (1990) 440–1; Ead, ‘The Feminisation of Ideology: An Introduction’, in Ends of Empire. Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Ithaca/London, 1993) pp. 1–22. 53. Kames, Sketches, Book I, Vol. I, pp. 45–47 ; C. de Pauw, Recherches Philosophiques sur les Américains, ou Mémoires intéressants pour servir à l’Histoire de l’Espèce humaine (1768–69), 3 vols (Berlin, 1771); M. Duchet, ‘Cornelius De Pauw ou l ‘Histoire en défaut’, in Le Partage des savoirs. Discours historique et discours ethnologique (Paris, 1985) pp. 82–104; A. Gerbi, La disputa del nuovo mondo, pp. 75–116. 54. Buffon, Histoire Naturelle (1761), vol. IX, pp. 103–4; W. Robertson, The History of America, Vol. II, Book IV, pp. 63–64, 103. 55. Kames, Sketches, vol. I, pp. 40–1, 44–5, 50; Book II, Vol. III, pp. 148–9. 56. J. Dwyer, ‘The Melancholy Savage: Text and Context in the Poems of Ossian’, in H. Gaskill, ed., Ossian Revisited (Edinburgh, 1991) pp. 164–206; in particular pp. 196. 57. H. Blair, A Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian, the Son of Fingal (1765), in J. Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian and related works, ed. by H. Gaskill, with an ‘Introduction’ by F. Stafford (Edinburgh, 1996) p. 353; R. B. Sher, The Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment, pp. 213–61. 58. J. Gregory, A Comparative View, VI ed., pp. X–XXII, 6. 59. Kames, Sketches, Book I, Vol. I, pp. 420–1. By contrast, consistent with his general scepticism for miracles, Hume discredited the Ossian myth: ‘Of the Authenticity of Ossian’s Poems’, in The Philosophical Works of David Hume, ed. by T. H. Green, T. H. Grose, vol. IV, pp. 415–24. 60. J. Macpherson, An Introduction to the History of Great Britain and Ireland: or, An Inquiry into the Origins, Religion, Future State, Character, Manners, Morality, Amusements, Persons, Manner of Life, Houses, Navigation, Commerce, Language, Government, Kings, General Assemblies, Courts of Justice, and Juries of the Britons, Scots, Irish and Anglo-Saxons, I ed. 1771; (London, 1773) pp. 13–14, 264. 61. J. Macpherson, An Introduction, pp. 212 ff; Kames, Sketches, Book I, Vol. I, pp. 438–9. 62. Kames, Sketches, Book I, Vol. I, pp. 371–2, 382, 438, 472. By contrast, Hugh Blair distinguished Celt ‘high sentiments’ from their ‘savage manners’, less reﬁned and varied than those of the Greek shepherds – as Smith did consistently with the general rule of progress. Millar, instead, relocated the society of Ossian in the shepherd stage, because of its great respect for women. See, H. Blair, A Critical Dissertation, p. 353; A. Smith, ‘Early Draft of the Wealth of Nations’, in Lectures on Jurisprudence, p. 573; J. Millar, Ranks, pp. 206–7; Id., An Historical View, vol. IV, p. 322.

96 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization 63. J. Rendall, ‘Tacitus engendered: ‘Gothic feminism’ and British histories, c. 1750–1800’, in C. Cubitt, ed. Imagining Nations, pp. 57–74; Ead, ‘Clio, Mars and Minerva’. This was not true of John Pinkerton’s polygenism, which emphatically separated the ‘savage’ Celt from the ‘civilized’ Scythian: A Dissertation on the Origin and Progress of the Scythians or Goths. Being an Introduction to the Ancient and Modern History of Europe (London, 1787); C. Kidd, ‘Teutonist Ethnology and Scottish Nationalism Inhibition, 1780–1880’, The Scottish Historical Review, vol. LXXIV, n. 1, n. 197 (1995) pp. 45–68. 64. Kames, Sketches, Book I, Vol. I, pp. 471 ff; J. Macpherson, An Introduction, pp. 13–14, 16, 264–5; W. Alexander, History of Women, vol. I, p. XV. 65. W. Alexander, History of Women, vol. II, pp. 158–9; Kames, Sketches, Book I, Vol. I, pp. 457, 472. 66. W. Alexander, History of Women, vol. I, p. 369. Emphasis added. It is interesting to note the contrast between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’; Kames, Sketches, Book I, Vol. I, p. 487. 67. For Hume’s sociological approach, see: D. Hume, ‘Of National Characters’ (1748), in Essays, pp. 197–215; N. Hudson, “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’: the Origin of Racial Classiﬁcation in Eighteenth-Century Thought”, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 29, n. 3, (1996), 247–64. Anyway, Hume made a strong exception to this approach in a famous ‘racial’ footnote, added in 1753, revisited in 1777 and destined to have a long historiographical history: see, pp. 208, 629–30. I deeply discuss this aspect in the 2nd chapter of my PhD thesis: ‘’Razza’, donne, progresso: tensioni ideologiche nel dibattito dell’Illuminismo scozzese’, European University Institute, Florence, October 2003. 68. Kames, Sketches, Book I, Vol. I, pp. 453–4, 457, 491–2. 69. J. Rendall, ‘Tacitus engendered’; Ead, ‘Clio, Mars and Minerva’. 70. G. Stuart, A View of Society in Europe, pp. 12, 160–161. 71. W. Robertson, A view of the progress of civil society in Europe. 72. G. Stuart, A View of Society in Europe, p. 195. On the complex meaning of ‘Britishness’, see J. Brewer, ‘The Eighteenth-century British State. Contexts and Issues’, in L. Stone, ed., An Imperial State at War. Britain from 1689 to 1815, (London-New York 1994), pp. 52–71. 73. J. Dunbar, Essays on the History of Mankind in Rude and Cultivated Ages (1780), (London, 1781) p. 439. This was a mostly debated issue in the Wise Club: Aberdeen University Library, MSS 145 and 539; see, in particular, the ‘Question 96’ – ‘Whether that superiority of understanding, by which the inhabitants of Europe and of the nations countries immediately adjoining imagine themselves to be distinguished, may not easily be accounted for, without supposing the rest of mankind of an inferior species?’, discussed in 1768: Aberdeen University Library, Ms 540 Skene’s Papers, “Notes of Discourses in the Philosophical Society”. See, my PhD thesis, ch. 5. 74. J. Dunbar, Essays on the History of Mankind, p. 54. 75. J. Gregory, A comparative view, VI ed., pp. 61, 91–2. 76. J. Dunbar, Essays on the History of Mankind, pp. 151–2, 161, 451. 77. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reﬂections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983); G. Cubitt, ed., Imagining Nations (Manchester/New York, 1998); D. Wahrman, Imaging the Middle Class: the Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840 (Cambridge, 1995); E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, 1983); E. Hobsbawm, Nations and nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge, 1990); N. Hudson, ‘From “Nation” to “Race”’. 78. J. Rendall, ‘Tacitus engendered’, p. 66; R. B. Sher, The Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment. The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1985) pp. 213–61. 79. J. Macpherson, An Introduction, p. 265. 80. W. Alexander, The History of Women, vol. I, pp. 440, 460.

2.2 No Woman Is an Island: The Female Figure in French Enlightenment Anthropology Jenny Mander

In April 1772 Denis Diderot penned a short but impassioned piece on the subject of women which was published by his close friend Friedrich-Melchior Grimm in his Correspondance Littéraire.1 Conceived as a review of Antoine-Léonard Thomas’s Essai sur le caractère, les mœurs et l’esprit des femmes dans les différents siècles which had appeared in print less than a month earlier, Diderot’s Sur les femmes quickly became a vehicle for his own musings on the female sex at a time in his life when he saw women as a source of personal difﬁculties and disappointments.2 Although brief, unsystematic, even chaotic in its exposition, the piece was clearly more than a simple piece of hack work: the philosophe returned to it at least three times in the ﬁnal years of his life, strategically bolstering parts of its argument with passages which he had originally prepared for the abbé Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes. In the same year as Diderot published the ﬁrst version of his essay on women, he started work on another short text which also bore the mark of his labours for Raynal. This text was the Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville.3 Like Sur les femmes, it too began as a review, this time of Bougainville’s account of his voyage to Tahiti. But once again, the reviewed work soon became the pretext for the exploration of his own ideas about women and the role played by female sexuality in the development of society. Diderot’s thinking on women did not, of course, begin or end in 1772. As Blandine McLaughlin puts it, ‘His deep personal involvement with women – his wife, his daughter, his mistress and her sisters, as well as their mother, among others, made the woman a constantly felt presence in his life and a frequent object of his reﬂection.’4 Writing variously from the viewpoint of psychologist, moralist, philosopher, father, lover, or friend, Diderot repeatedly approached the subject of women from different angles, not only in his philosophical works but also in his correspondence and above all in his novels which bring to life extraordinary heroines like Suzanne Simonin of La Religieuse and Mme de la Pommeraye of Jacques le Fataliste. This chapter does not aim at a comprehensive study of Diderot’s reﬂections on femininity. Instead, by exploring points of connection between the philosophe’s two ‘review’ articles of 1772 and the Histoire des deux Indes, to which he contributed many of the revisions to the second edition of 1774 and up to a third of the text of the substantially augmented edition of 97

98 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization

1780, we can examine – through the example of Diderot – the ﬁgure of woman in the anthropology of the French Enlightenment. It is, of course, somewhat anachronistic to speak of anthropology in the age of Enlightenment. For most of this period the word ‘anthropology’ still referred to the ﬁeld of anatomy and was understood to mean the study of the human body.5 Nonetheless, as Michèle Duchet has argued, the foundations of what would become the modern discipline of anthropology – the comparative study of human societies – were being laid down within the eighteenth century’s general philosophy of human nature which sought to integrate data about different peoples from around the globe as recounted by missionaries, traders and explorers.6 Underpinned by the sensationist epistemology of John Locke, popularised in France by Etienne-Bonnot de Condillac, this new ‘science of man’ was shaped by a philosophy of history that accounted for racial differences in terms of successive stages of social development. Viewed from this perspective, savage man – that key ﬁgure of so many eighteenth-century texts – was transformed into primitive man, the ancestor of the civilised European, offering the latter a path to self-understanding.7 Notwithstanding the ostensibly non-gendered use of ‘man’ in this context to refer to the human species as a whole, the avatars of ‘savage man’ in literary and philosophical writing were indeed typically male.8 Women nonetheless occupied a signiﬁcant position in this anthropological system. In the words of Diderot, writing in Sur les femmes, members of the female sex functioned as ‘thermometers’.9 Their behaviour and the way in which they were treated by men was an index to how far a society had advanced along the path of civilisation. Women thus offered the eighteenth-century thinker a concrete and economical means of characterising the distinctions between societies in different times and places and they were indeed used in this way in many of the conjectural and universal histories that proliferated in Europe after 1750. Some histories, like that of Thomas which was reviewed by Diderot, even cast women as the primary focus of study.10 This cannot be said of Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes, or, to give it its full title, the Histoire philosophique et politique des établissemens et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes.11 While differences between the roles played by men and women are noted in virtually every culture to which Raynal and his team of contributors turn their attention, the space allotted to the female ﬁgure is far from extensive. In a sense this is only to be expected given that this is a history of European colonialism and its associated trade, the protagonists of which were almost exclusively male. Travel was the prerogative of men. Women, as we shall see, were expected to stay at home and in France at any rate, this was largely the case.12 Those who did travel to the colonies were mostly convicted prostitutes, like the eponymous heroine of Prévost’s novel, Manon Lescaut, who is deported to New Orleans. Signiﬁcantly, the role of these ‘ﬁlles de joie’ was to consolidate the settlement of previously nomadic men.13 From another point of view, however, the limited interest in women in Raynal’s œuvre is a little more surprising. The Histoire is more than just an

The Female Figure in French Enlightenment Anthropology 99

account of European colonialism: drawing on a vast archive of ethnographic documents compiled over previous centuries, the text systematically frames each arena of colonial activity with a natural history of the region, surveying the ﬂora, fauna and indigenous peoples. It is true that the reader occasionally learns about local customs regarding the treatment of women and is treated to some general anthropological reﬂections on relations between the sexes. There are also a small number of what Anthony Strugnell has aptly described as ‘strongly proﬁled cases of individual women which […] have gained an emblematic status, even if this was not the original intention’.14 Nonetheless, in comparison with other protoanthropological works of the time and even with some of the sources exploited by the editorial team, the speciﬁcity of woman is not particularly foregrounded. This can indeed be quickly ascertained from merely glancing at the index where there are very few entries under the heading of ‘Woman’. Signiﬁcantly, three of these passages refer the reader to sections of the text that had been prepared by Diderot and that were reused by him in his revision of Sur les femmes. Hence the value of a close study of this short piece in conjunction with the Histoire. Despite, or perhaps because of its brevity, setting the recycled passages within a more focussed context serves to crystallise the philosophical thought regarding women that more or less implicitly shapes the nineteen books that constitute Raynal’s best-seller. The passages incorporated into later versions of Sur les femmes from the Histoire contribute to its resolutely materialist representation of women. This is a feature not only of Sur les femmes but more generally of the emerging anthropological thought of the Enlightenment and crucially, one which helped forge a new sex-speciﬁc characterisation of women.15 As Thomas Laqueur has argued in his comprehensive survey of historical attitudes towards biological sex, the eighteenth-century focus on women as physical creatures marked a signiﬁcant shift from earlier theories of gender in the Cartesian tradition which sought to preserve the mind as a separate realm from the body, as epitomised by Poulain de la Barre’s much quoted aphorism in favour of female education: ‘the mind has no sex’.16 In the eighteenth century the unique physiology of the female sex was used to explain or, more to the point, to assert fundamental differences in the ways that men and women think, and to give a natural, that is to say, material foundation to the divergent social destinies of the two sexes. Sur les femmes reﬂects this trend resulting from the shift from rationalist to sensationist epistemology and emphasises the radically different nature of men and women. Like Thomas and many others before him, Diderot presents women as more sensitive creatures than men: nature has given them more delicate organs with the result that they are more easily moved but also less able to control their sensations. On account of their different physiology, women think differently and their ideas are of a different order. They are less rational: their knowledge relies on instinct rather than logic. Furthermore, the female head, he says, is dominated by a woman’s uterus, that organ ‘peculiar to her sex’ that is ‘subject to terrible spasms’ and which ‘rules her and rouses up in her phantoms of every sort’ giving her ideas an inherently hysterical quality.17 It is only a woman’s

100 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization

brain, he argues, which can be sufﬁciently exalted to reach the heights of the divine and to generate the frenzied language of prophecy. But for the irreligious author of the essay such ecstasy is but an extreme manifestation of the female hysterical imagination and can be traced back to the problems women are generally perceived to have in achieving physical satisfaction. Unable to fulﬁl their desires on earth, they have recourse to the world of the imagination and the philosophe intimates that if it is not religious devotion, it is just as likely to be madness that lies in wait for the female sex as she grows older. For Diderot, a woman is unable to free her mind from the inﬂuence of her body; her relationship to the world and her role in society is therefore primarily deﬁned by her body. Like Voltaire, he portrays her as a slave to her physiology which destines her for pregnancy, childbirth and nursing, bringing her forms of suffering unknown to man.18 Like Rousseau, he suggests that everything deﬁnes the female – contrary to the male – in terms of her sexual organs, at least until the menopause which is in turn seen as a ‘long and dangerous illness’.19 And once she is beyond her childbearing years, all he can offer is a yet more dismal portrait: her beauty gone, neglected by her husband, ignored by her children, she becomes quite simply a social non-entity. The bottom line of Sur les femmes is that a woman’s role in society is circumscribed by her physical nature. The latter destines her for motherhood; beyond motherhood she is nothing. Diderot sympathises with the sorry lot of the female sex and claims that were he to have been a legislator he would have sought to compensate women for their suffering by the curious route of making them ‘sacred’ – a word which we should not forget stems from the notion of ‘setting apart’.20 Nonetheless, by placing female anatomy at the centre of his analysis, his materialist approach to gender establishes the subjugation of ‘the weaker sex’ by ‘the stronger sex’ as a law of nature. This is a point where the French philosophe inserts one of the passages originally prepared for the History, using the broader ethnographic purview of that text to support his argument by suggesting that the submission of women is an anthropological fact pertaining to all societies throughout the globe. As is so often the case with Diderot, it is paradoxically to the exception that he turns in order to ‘prove’ the rule, the exception on this occasion being the women of the Marianne Islands in the West Paciﬁc who, according to travellers’ reports, ruled over their menfolk.21 He takes it as axiomatic that nature places woman beneath the command of man on account of her relative weakness. Thus, unless the women on these remote islands were both physically stronger and also more intelligent than the men – and it is implied that this is a hypothesis that lacks any possible foundation given the assumption that female nature is universally constant – he cannot accept that there is any natural means by which they could wield such power over the opposite sex. The only plausible way in which their unusual ‘tyranny’ can be accounted for is in terms of a perversion of nature. Religious superstition, he explains, can make men do anything; it can even make them bow down before women. Somewhat ironically, given Diderot’s antipathy towards religion, he conjectures that it does this by the very same process that a few lines earlier he

The Female Figure in French Enlightenment Anthropology 101

claimed he would have himself exploited on behalf of women were he a lawmaker, namely by making them ‘sacred’. If the universal subordination of woman is a function of her physical nature, it is logical that the author of Sur les femmes should also argue that in distancing society from the purely physical, the process of civilisation improves the status of women. It is precisely because of this that the female sex can be used as an index to social progress. Taking a second passage from the Histoire which closely follows a schema to be found in many eighteenth-century conjectural histories, most notably that of John Millar, Diderot begins by arguing that amongst barbarous peoples, relations between the sexes are governed purely by animalistic reproductive instincts and because physical strength determines power, women live in a state of opprobrium and servitude.22 Importantly for the purposes of my argument, what can also be noted in this sketch of ‘savage man’ is how the activities of this male hunter-gatherer, roaming forests and seas in search of food and using his strength and courage to protect his kinsfolk, are set against the sedentary tasks left to female members of his community: Among people who hold nothing in estimation but strength and courage, tyranny is always exercised over weakness, in return for the protection that is afforded it. The women live in a state of disgrace. Labours, considered as the most abject, are their portion. Men, whose hands are accustomed to the handling of arms, and to the management of the oar, would think themselves degraded, if they employed them in sedentary occupations, or even in the labours of agriculture.23 According to Diderot’s analysis, social evolution ameliorates the status of women but without substantially altering these primitive gender roles. That men travel and women stay at home is an accepted norm for the philosophe, underpinning his moral evaluation of modern commercial society. He implies that in its early stages, commercial society enabled both sexes to fulﬁl their ‘natural’ roles but in a new, civilised way: Business is then increased, and connections are complicated. Men, who are often obliged, from more extensive affairs, to quit their manufactures and their home, are under the necessity of adding to their talents the vigilance of their wives. As the habit of gallantry, luxury, and dissipation, hath not yet entirely disgusted them of solitary or serious occupations, they devote themselves, without reserve, and with success, to functions with which they think themselves honoured. The retirement which this kind of life requires, renders the practice of all the domestic virtues dear and familiar to them. The inﬂuence, the respect, and the attachment of all those that are about them, are the reward of a conduct so estimable.24 Just as the savage leaves sedentary tasks to his womenfolk, the above quotation shows how business activities distance bourgeois man from the family home,

102 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization

forcing him to leave domestic duties to his wife. In what way can the commercial world be said therefore to improve the condition of bourgeois woman in comparison with her more savage ancestors? The crucial difference from Diderot’s point of view is that the domestic duties that woman is left to perform are no longer viewed by men as abject tasks but as speciﬁcally female virtues. The woman who performs these tasks and demonstrates these virtues becomes a ﬁgure worthy of male admiration and respect. Commercial society confers new authority on the female sex but women had already begun to acquire some importance in less advanced pastoral and agricultural societies. Two particular developments are seen as instrumental to this process: the ﬁrst is the transformation of the physical desire of the savage into sentimental or ‘moral’ love – said to take place as a result of the greater leisure afforded by easier lifestyles and beginning with the appreciation of female physical beauty; second is the introduction of the concept of property with the practice of agriculture. Diderot implies that both endow women with individual worth, so that they are better treated by men.25 Women – at least some women – acquire greater dignity insofar as men need to make themselves pleasing in order to obtain the partner of their choice. Wealth, leisure and love are thus the means, we are told, by which women acquire greater power in society. Yet Diderot’s resolutely bourgeois analysis suggests that each of these things also carries the seeds of decadence. The accumulation of too much wealth gives rise to a society of leisure; in such a society love becomes a major pastime and women are granted an unprecedented centrality that threatens to reverse the process of civilisation. What needs to be stressed at this juncture is how this decadence is implicitly associated with the transgression of the ‘natural’ gender roles manifest in barbaric societies. With the growth of fortunes, men no longer need to work: they turn away from the commercial activities which had hitherto taken them out into the world and look instead to women for entertainment. Women, conversely, are encouraged to leave the secluded space of the home and enter ‘the stage of the world’. Business transactions between men are replaced by commerce between men and women – ‘le commerce des femmes’. ‘Moral’ love that had been seen as a positive phenomenon insofar as it had endowed physical pleasures with more noble sentiments now gives way to gallantry and from Diderot’s perspective this begins to unravel the very fabric of society to a state beneath even that of the savage: Then it is, that the freedom which exists between the two sexes in a state of nature is revived, with this remarkable difference, that in polished cities the husband is often less attached to his wife, and the wife to her husband, that in the midst of the forests; that their offspring, trusted, at the instant of their birth, to the hands of mercenaries, are no longer a tie; and that inﬁdelity, which would be attended with no fatal consequences among most savage people, affects domestic tranquillity and happiness amongst civilized nations; where it is one of the principal symptoms of general corruption, and of the extinction of all decent affections.26

The Female Figure in French Enlightenment Anthropology 103

The implication would seem to be that whereas the ﬁrst stage of commercial society improves on savage nature, this later stage goes against nature by allowing men and women to step outside the social role prescribed by their sex. As has already been noted, Diderot’s analysis of the moral rise and fall of commercial society, originally prepared for Raynal’s Histoire, draws heavily on the work of John Millar. In reusing this same material for Sur les femmes he in fact stops just short of the critique of gallantry to which we have just been referring, noting the inﬂuence of women in wealthy society with apparently greater neutrality.27 The deliberate omission of his earlier critique of the worldly woman is perhaps indicative of a rather more complex attitude in this essay towards the position of women in his own society. Indeed, the essay seems to work towards an acknowledgement of the positive rather than negative effects of commerce between men and women, observing – not without a hint of irony – the civilising effects of women of beneﬁt especially to a writer. It is in talking to women that a man of letters learns to express himself clearly and decently; Thomas, he complains, says nothing of these advantages and that is ungrateful of him.28 Yet, notwithstanding this conclusion, the essay as a whole betrays how the philosophe remains ambivalent with regard to such commerce. From his point of view the distinction between social and sexual intercourse is hard to maintain: the worldly woman is almost by deﬁnition a ‘woman of gallantry’ and virtually synonymous in his discourse with the courtesan and the adulteress. Drawing on a further passage originally prepared for the philosophical conclusion of the Histoire, he explains just why ‘connections of gallantry’ are to be feared: Under the inﬂuence of such manners, conjugal love is disdained, and that contempt weakens the sentiment of maternal tenderness if it doth not even extinguish it. The most sacred, and the most pleasing duties become troublesome; and when they have been neglected, or broken, nature never renews them. The woman who suffers any man but her husband to approach her, hath no more regard for her family, and can be no more respected by them. The ties of blood are slackened; births become uncertain; and the son knows no more his father, nor the father his son.29 Conjugal love is not, of course, a sentiment that Diderot or his contemporaries attribute to the primitive savage. He does, however, ascribe to the inhabitants of barbaric societies maternal and paternal tenderness, arguing that these natural feelings lie behind the development of the family unit which in turn is the natural basis of more organised society.30 Once again the implication is that civilisation only brings moral value to savage nature if it does not undermine ‘natural’ gender roles, and once again it is emphasised that a woman’s natural vocation is motherhood which should keep her at the centre of restricted family relationships. The passages that Diderot incorporates from the Histoire into his essay on women suggest that Raynal’s work is governed by a prescriptive image of woman as wife and mother. This is, for the large part, generally true but I would now like

104 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization

to argue that it is not the whole story. The tension that exists in Sur les femmes in the representation of what in French is referred to as ‘le commerce des femmes’ reappears in the Histoire in the ﬁgure of what might be termed ‘cosmopolitan’ woman. The latter is elevated into a powerful symbol of particular Enlightenment ideals that inspire the text, notably those parts contributed by Diderot, such as the lines written by him for the introduction in which he proclaims his desire that future generations of reader be unable to identify his country of origin: O holy Truth! thou hast been the sole object of my veneration! If, in afterages, this work should still be read, it is my wish, that, while my readers perceive how much I am divested from passions and prejudice, they should be ignorant of the kingdom which gave me birth; of the government under which I lived; of the profession I followed in my country; and of the religious faith I professed: it is my wish, that they should only consider me as their fellow-citizen and their friend. 31 This cosmopolitan ethos runs through all nineteen books of the Histoire, supporting its commercial ideology and illuminating the proper ethical principles on which international trade should be founded. While it is acknowledged that a great nation like Sparta owed its superior strength, grandeur and permanency to the state of separation in which it kept itself, such insularity is nevertheless condemned. It is perceived as both symptom and cause of barbaric behaviour which does not beneﬁt mankind.32 By contrast, ‘the spirit of intercourse’ that leads to travel and trade is presented as a civilising force that is ‘useful to all nations, as it promotes a mutual communication of their productions and knowledge’.33 Japan is identiﬁed as a case in point. Its tyrannical rulers ‘look upon all intercourse with strangers as dangerous to their authority’ and allow only very limited contact with the outside world. As a result, the Japanese have a ferocious temperament. Travel, we are told, would have softened the national character: By a frequent change of place and climate, he [the man from Japan] would insensibly have altered his opinions, manners and character; and this alteration would have been as fortunate for him as it is for the generality of the people. What he might have lost by this intercourse as a citizen, he would have gained as a man.34 For men to travel is perceived as natural and beneﬁcial for the species as a whole. We have seen, however, that women are deﬁned in close association with the home. It is by restricting their relationships to those within the family that the moral fabric of society is preserved. How, then, do women ﬁt into this cosmopolitan discourse which is predicated on the crossing of national frontiers? The emblematic role given to women is this context is captured particularly clearly in a frontispiece to be found in a number of the English editions of the Histoire (Figure 1).35 As the caption provided in one edition explains, this

The Female Figure in French Enlightenment Anthropology 105

Figure 1

Frontispiece to volume three of the London edition of 1813.

106 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization

engraving depicts ‘nature in the character of a woman [who] suckles, at the same time and with equal affection, a white and black child, while she regards with an eye of compassion the negro slaves, who are seen at a distance toiling in the plantation, where they experience the inhumanity of their task master’. In this image of maternal love that crosses racial boundaries the humanitarian perspective of the Histoire is thus given speciﬁcally female embodiment. Female love becomes a positive symbol set in stark relief against the inhumanity of the slave trade, that dark side of colonial commerce that the text so passionately condemns. What is represented in this pictorial form is not something that has been added to the text by the illustrator. Within the text itself woman is associated with a form of unbounded love which takes her beyond her own nation and makes her a cultural mediator. As Anthony Strugnell has argued in his study of women in the Histoire, Raynal’s œuvre is inspired by what he calls ‘a superior female principle of reconciliation and union’.36 Identifying a number of emblematic women in the text he shows how each represents a ‘common vision implicit in the vast diversity of subjects running through the Histoire des deux Indes: without the civilising and softening nature of women, the colonising European male […] represents barbarism triumphant’.37 It is certainly the case, as Strugnell observes, that the Histoire, like so many other eighteenth-century French texts, sees women as a civilising inﬂuence. They are said to be the ﬁrst to become civilised: In general we observe, that in the ﬁrst beginning of all societies, the women are sooner civilized than the men. Even their weakness, and their sedentary life, their being more taken up with various details, and with cares of a less important nature, furnish them sooner with that knowledge and experience, and incline them to those domestic attachments, which are the ﬁrst promoters and the strongest ties of society.38 It is to be noted in these lines, however, that the civilising force of women is explicitly attributed to her sedentary existence. It is here that an interesting and revealing tension can be explored. The ﬁgure of ‘cosmopolitan’ woman whose love transcends national frontiers cannot, I suggest, be fully reconciled with this normative image of the sedentary female, even though the maternal vocation of the female sex appears to be similarly foregrounded in both cases. This can be illustrated by reconsidering one of Diderot’s emblematic women, an anonymous Amerindian who ﬁgures brieﬂy in the context of the account of the slave plantations in the English Caribbean (Book 14, chapter 8). This native woman rescues a young Englishman who has ﬂed into the forest from the Caribs. She saves his life, secretly cares for him, feeds him and ﬁnally guides him back to his boat whereupon she elects to follow him to Barbados. Immediately on arrival, however, we are told that, ‘the monster sold her who had saved her life, and had bestowed her heart as well as her person upon him’.39 As Strugnell notes, the symbolic signiﬁcance that this anecdote assumed for contemporary readers is out of all proportion to the few lines that it occupies in the text. The

The Female Figure in French Enlightenment Anthropology 107

tragic conclusion to the Amerindian’s story is repeatedly the subject for illustration: it is the topic of the frontispiece engraving for volume three of the prestigious quarto edition of 1780 (Figure 2) and it ﬁgures again in the plates accompanying the English editions of 1813 and 1820. Not least from the caption provided

Figure 2

‘Un Anglais de la Barbade, vend sa Maitreffe.’

108 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization

in the latter, Strugnell is undoubtedly right to conclude that this ‘story of love that knows no bounds of culture and race and its defeat by the most cynical treachery [came] to symbolise the condemnation in the name of humanity of both the enslavement of nation by nation and the subjugation of the New World to the Old’.40 Seen from this point of view, the Amerindian seems to have nothing in common with the worldly libertine who is so negatively portrayed elsewhere in the Histoire and again in Sur les femmes. I would like to suggest, however, that the distinction is rather more precarious than might ﬁrst appear. It is possible to trace a problematic continuity between the two ﬁgures which betrays an uneasiness on the part of Diderot and his fellow Enlightenment historians not only with the ﬁgure of Woman but also with the ideal of cosmopolitanism of which she is emblematic. The moralising interpretation of the Amerindian’s story focuses on her compassion towards the Englishman and his callousness. Yet her love, which as Strugnell aptly puts it, ‘knows no bounds of culture and race’, is not purely philanthropic: her story is a love story and the text does not conceal this erotic dimension. It is Eros not Charity which motivates her to leave her own people for a foreign land; moreover, the man for whom she undertakes this journey is a sworn enemy of her people insofar as he was a member of a raiding party who had come to enslave them. From this perspective, the love that brings her to cross national boundaries and to travel is as much a threat to the survival of her own society as the gallant liaisons of the worldly libertine who, as we have seen above, is perceived by Diderot as undermining the nation and sapping its patriotic spirit.41 In the Amerindian’s case, love – both philanthropic and erotic – brings her to cross cultural boundaries in a way that could be seen as a betrayal of her own people. While this perspective is certainly not encouraged in the Histoire, it is one that ﬁnds support in Sur les femmes. If we return to this essay we can observe that it is not just the dangerous sexual liaisons of the libertine which are identiﬁed as detrimental to the security of her society: in a more far-reaching way, women are characterised as inherently subversive ﬁgures with a natural tendency to form alliances that cut across the interests of the state. In a intriguing formulation Diderot describes members of the female sex as instinctively reaching out to each other beyond the limits of the state, forming a sort of seditious international league: Impenetrable in dissimulation, cruel in vengeance, persevering in their schemes, unscrupulous in the methods they employ, animated by a profound and secret hatred of male despotism, they seem linked by a loose plot for domination, in a sort of league such as that which subsists between the priests of every country; they know the articles of their bond without its having to be ﬁrst communicated to them.42 It would have been a promising line of analysis on Diderot’s part to explore further how this ‘league’ might be understood as a response to male tyranny but

The Female Figure in French Enlightenment Anthropology 109

this is not the direction that his argument takes. If women tend not to identify with the interests and boundaries of the state, he implies that this is once again ultimately a function of their natural physiology. Woman is by nature a creature of excess and her emotions, whatever they may be, carry her to further extremes and her ‘mouvements’ are more violent.43 Physiologically then a woman is deﬁned in terms of her mobility, which makes her prone to transgression; but Diderot, following others like Thomas, argues that nature has also given woman an innate sense of modesty or shame with which to regulate her own behaviour. Paradoxically, this speciﬁcally female quality makes the excessive sex also the moral guardians of society’s limits.44 In the light of this tension between woman’s emotional nature and unbridled sexuality, on the one hand, and her natural pudeur on the other, it is intriguing to note that illustrators of the Histoire chose to depict the Amerindian covering her eyes with her hands in a classical posture of shame. Shame for what, one might ask? Is she averting her gaze from the scandalous behaviour of the men who exchange her for money, or is she possibly ashamed of having been led astray by her heart? When read in this way against the backdrop of Sur les femmes, the Amerindian woman emerges as a morally ambiguous ﬁgure. On the one hand, she gives positive symbolic expression to cosmopolitanism and its humanitarian viewpoint that extends to all nations, but her ‘love that knows no bounds’ is uncomfortably close to the unbounded sexuality of the libertine that needs constant checking for the good of society. It is at this stage of my argument that the Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville acquires particular interest. In this text – which like Sur les femmes assumes a symbiotic relationship with the Histoire – Diderot unambiguously unites the two differently charged female ﬁgures which the Histoire tries to keep separate but which, I have argued, begin to converge in the ﬁgure of the Amerindian. In the Supplément women are given the ‘cosmopolitan’ role of bridging nations explicitly through sexual intercourse. As Orou, the younger of Diderot’s two Tahitian mouthpieces, explains to the scandalised French chaplain: We are more robust and healthy than you; but we perceived you surpassed us in intelligence and immediately we decided that some of our fairest wives and daughters should gather in the seed of a race which is better than our own. It is an experiment we have made which may well be proﬁtable.45 This sexual commerce is presented by Orou quite literally as a form of trade.46 It is one he hopes will proﬁt his nation by improving their gene pool and providing them with children, possibly more intelligent ones, who will be able to serve the community by working the ﬁelds, defending the island from its enemies and more generally rebuilding the population that has been decimated by epidemics. Sexual relations on Tahiti – as represented by Diderot – are regulated yet more generally by economic considerations, betraying the philosophe’s sympathies for the theories of the physiocrats. From a European perspective the Tahitian women appear to enjoy a state of natural libertinage: free sexual interaction is permitted

110 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization

between men and women, even between siblings or children and their parents. The only restrictions governing sexual commerce on the island are revealed by Orou in his discussion of the veils worn by some of the women. He explains to the French chaplain that sexual relations are forbidden before a girl or boy comes of age and, in the case of women, after the menopause. Recognising children as the true wealth of the nation, sexual intercourse is only permitted in the context of reproduction, but the children born to any individual woman can be fathered by any number of different men, dissolving any sense of closed family structures. Needless to say, against the productive picture of Tahitian libertinage, European sexual propriety is made to appear counterproductive and unnatural. Most unnatural from Orou’s point of view is, of course, the European institution of marriage. Nature herself is in continual ﬂux. How then, he asks, can an oath of immutability be taken between two beings in the face of a heaven which is not a moment the same or beneath a rock that is turning to powder?47 Constancy is neither expected of Tahitian women nor is it seen to be desirable. In fact Orou intimates that he looks to the sexual commerce of women as a vehicle for deliberately initiating social change in a way that he thinks will be beneﬁcial to his people.48 In a sense it might be said that he envisages the women on his island as playing a parallel role to that of Bougainville, who is held up for admiration by the two French speakers at the beginning of the Supplément. Just as the great French explorer travels to unknown lands and brings back tales of exotic peoples for the enlightenment of his compatriots so, from Orou’s vantage point, the Tahitian women will improve their own community by embracing the foreigner in their midst. In these ways Orou’s discourse clearly resonates with the cosmopolitan ethos of the Histoire. Always seen in dialogue, serving as linguistic intermediary between the French and his own people, he furthermore undertakes himself to travel with Bougainville on his return trip to France.49 Through his Tahitian savage Diderot would thus seem to endorse emphatically the value of cultural interaction for men and for women, giving the commerce of women, understood in an unambiguously sexual way, a key role to play within the dynamics of civilising exchange. In a more fundamental sense, however, the philosophe’s ambivalence regarding the ‘commerce of women’ that I have sought to identify in Sur les femmes and the Histoire has not in fact been resolved. His anxieties regarding such intercourse ﬁnd expression in a cynical farewell address to the Europeans pronounced by an old Tahitian chieftain. From the latter’s viewpoint – which might be seen as that of age and experience contrasting with Orou’s youthful idealism – the encounter between the French and the Tahitians has not proﬁted his people; to the contrary, he fears now for their very survival. More particularly, with respect to the sexual interaction between Tahitian women and Frenchmen, where Orou sees a promising eugenic experiment, the Chieftain perceives disaster for his people, especially the womenfolk. Their sexual associations with the Europeans have not strengthened their stock but have brought contamination. The Tahitian women’s blood, he says, has become tainted with the Europeans’ disease and he warns that unless the infected women are killed, the disease will be transmitted on the

The Female Figure in French Enlightenment Anthropology 111

island in perpetuity. It is not, however, just this physical contamination which makes him fear for the future of his race: he exposes how interaction with Bougainville’s men has brought an equally detrimental form of moral corruption. What is most signiﬁcant here is that the Chieftain focuses his criticism on precisely those two features associated with the process of civilisation which in both the Histoire and Sur les femmes are said to have improved the status of women: property and love. In stark contrast to the picture of the oppression of women in primitive societies found in these two other texts, the Chieftain points out that before the arrival of Bougainville’s expedition, the women on the island were happy and free. It is the Europeans with their civilised ways who have brought division and bloodshed through their notions of ‘thine’ and ‘mine’ and their romantic passions: We are innocent; we are happy: and thou canst not but spoil our happiness. We follow the pure instinct of nature: thou hast sought to efface its character from our souls. Here all things belong to all men. Thou hast preached some strange distinction between ‘thine’ and ‘mine’. Our daughters and our wives were held in common by us all: thou hast shared this privilege with us, and thou hast come and inﬂamed them with frenzies unknown before. They have lost their reason in they arms. Thou hast become ferocious in theirs. They have come to hate each other. You have slaughtered each other for them: they have come back stained with your blood.50 Thus through the mouthpiece of the Tahitian Chieftain Diderot challenges the stadial history and its theory of gender relations which he had adopted from Millar. He brings into doubt whether civilisation has improved the condition of woman; indeed, he questions whether it has brought beneﬁts of any sort. Symbolically, the Chieftain’s address to the Europeans in which this attack on civilisation is launched takes the form of a monologue. Through this solitary mode of speech Diderot strongly implies that the survival of the Tahitian people and their way of life lies not in cultural interaction or the process of civilisation but in perpetuating the insularity that protects their simplicity. In the Supplément Diderot reiterates the cosmopolitan ethos he promotes in the Histoire and he gives women a special role not just in symbolising the humanitarianism of the Enlightenment but also in actually effecting the cross-cultural exchange on which the latter was seen to depend. However, while working on Raynal’s œuvre he was also compelled to face up to the very dark side of global commerce: tracing the atrocities committed by the European powers in the name of Enlightenment he saw only too painfully how commercial activities had come to threaten the very existence of the indigenous peoples of the New World. As he thought things through from the point of view of the tyrannised, his cosmopolitanism – founded on the claims of humanity in general – was supplemented by an ever more radical patriotism. Like Rousseau, he began to suspect that ‘l’esprit patriotique’ was the only way to defend successfully the liberty, security, happiness and dignity of the individual.51 While, unlike Rousseau, Diderot did not

112 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization

believe that patriotism was inherently incompatible with the concept of cosmopolitanism, I have tried to show how the two perspectives result nonetheless in tensions in his writing, not least in his representation of women. It is to women that Diderot looks for the protection of the structures of the family and, in turn, the security of the nation; but it is also in women that he sees the natural embodiment of love that transcends national frontiers and embraces all peoples of the globe. While this latter image draws its inspiration from the perceived natural role of the female sex as mother, on entering the world stage the cosmopolitan woman leaves the sacred isolation of the home and thus constitutes an inherent threat to the philosophe’s bourgeois morality: she exhibits behaviour that is precariously close to the excessive sensibility, held to be a feature of all women, that should be brought back within proper bounds by female pudeur. However, these tensions which assume a gendered form in Diderot’s writing are not exclusively a function of his attitude towards the female gender. The contradictory representations of ‘the commerce of women’ which I have traced from the worldly woman in Sur les femmes through to the cosmopolitan woman in the Histoire and the sexual trade of the Tahitian women in the Supplément, are, at least in part, inﬂuenced by a more deep-seated anxiety regarding Enlightenment values. Women become the locus of this anxiety in Diderot’s writing and, as a result, become a potentially privileged site for the critique of the Enlightenment. Like the savage – whose ironic, critical role in eighteenth-century French literature is so well attested – Woman could perform a similar function, and from time to time the philosophe appears to glimpse this possibility. However, he also demonstrates how easily the challenge posed by the female sex can be neutralised. At the end of the Supplément the two male French speakers who have been discussing Tahiti turn their attention to a matter closer to home: B – So we shall still be able, after dinner, to go out or to stay at home, as we wish? A – That will depend, I think, rather on the ladies than on ourselves. B – Always the ladies! We cannot take a step without their running into us. A – Suppose we read them the conversation of Orou and the chaplain? B – What do you think they would say? A – I have no idea. B – And what would they think? A – Very likely the opposite of what they said.52 The tensions inherent in civilisation, drawn out in the conversation between Orou and the chaplain, are thus deftly relocated onto the ﬁgure of Woman and her ‘natural’ duplicity. Woman is always other than what she appears and this extends to her civilised face. As Diderot explains in Sur les femmes, ‘More civilized than us externally, they [women] have stayed simple savages within, all more or less Macchiavellian.’53 In every sense then, Woman emerges in enlightened French anthropology as a contradictory ﬁgure: ostensibly drawn from

The Female Figure in French Enlightenment Anthropology 113

an empirical analysis of material nature, she is in fact a rhetorical ﬁction designed to hold together an Enlightenment narrative from which she herself, locked in innate savagery and lacking in rational thought, is paradoxically excluded.

Notes 1. For the publishing history of Sur les femmes see the introduction to the edition by Laurent Versini in Diderot:œuvres (Éditions Robert Laffont, Paris: 1994), pp. 947–48. References in this chapter will generally be to the English translation ‘On Women’ by Francis Birrell in the collection Dialogues by Denis Diderot (Routledge, London: 1927), pp. 185–96. When discussing the passages adopted from Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes, which are omitted from Birell’s translation, I will refer to the translation by J. O. Justamond, A philosophical and political history of the settlement and trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies (Baynes, London: 1813). 2. On this aspect of Diderot’s personal life see Elisabeth Badinter, Qu’est-ce qu’une femme? (POL, Paris: 1989), pp. 20–1. 3. The Supplément would be published towards the end of 1773; a reworked edition would come out at the beginning of 1774. 4. Blandine L. McLaughlin, ‘Diderot and Women’ in French Women and the Age of Enlightenment (Indiana University Press, Bloomington: 1984) p. 296. 5. This is evident, for example, in the article, ‘Anatomie’ in Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie which explains: ‘L’Anatomie humaine, qui est absolument & proprement appellée Anatomie, a pour objet, ou, si l’on aime mieux, pour sujet le corps humain. C’est l’art que plusieurs appellent Anthropologie’. 6. Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des Lumières (Albin Michel, Paris: 1995), pp. 9–21. 7. Michèle Duchet, Histoire de l’anthropologie, p. 15. 8. The many possible examples include the Huron of Voltaire’s L’Ingénu; Adario, the protagonist of Lahontan’s Dialogues de M. le baron de Lahontan et d’un Sauvage dans l’Amérique; and the ‘savage’ who inhabits Rousseau’s hypothetical state of primitive nature in Sur l’origine des inégalités. 9. ‘It is not enough, M Thomas, to talk and to talk well about women. Make me see them. Hang them up under my eyes like so many thermometers to register the smallest change in manners and customs’, ‘On Women’, p. 194. 10. The year before the publication of Thomas’s Essai, the Scot, John Millar, had published The Origin of the distinction of ranks in which he looks in part at the status of women in so-called primitive societies in comparison with supposedly more civilised European nations. The same tradition is perpetuated after Thomas on both sides of the Channel with William Alexander’s The History of women from the earliest antiquity to the present time, giving some account of almost every interesting particular concerning that sex, among all the nations, ancient and modern (1779) and Joseph-Alexandre Ségur’s Les femmes, leur condition et leur inﬂuence dans l’ordre social, chez les différens peuples anciens et modernes (1808). In different ways all these texts draw on a much earlier source, Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois, published 1748, in which he explores the inﬂuence of climate and government on the behaviour and regulation of women in different parts of the world. 11. First published in 1770, revised and augmented in 1774, 1780 and 1820. All references will be to the Justamont translation of 1813, detailed above. 12. Anthony Strugnell points out ‘the immobility of French women in comparison with their English counterparts who, though few in number relative to the great surge in women’s travel in the mid-nineteenth century, were more ready to take up the challenge of the open road and the high seas in the pursuit of the exotic and the new’. See

114 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization

13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

‘Women in Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes: from the anthropological to the emblematic’, in L’Invitation au voyage: Studies in honour of Peter France, ed. John Renwick (Voltaire Foundation, Oxford: 2000), p. 175. The Histoire (Book 10, chapter 8) relates, for example, how women of dubious reputation were sent out to consolidate the settlement of the previously lawless buccaneers on the Caribbean island of Saint Domingo, commenting that they ‘like most of those who have at different periods been sent into the New World, were noted for their vices and licentiousness’. See A philosophical and political history, iii.488. ‘Women in Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes’, p. 175. On this subject see Lieselotte Steinbrügge, The Moral Sex: Woman’s Nature in the Enlightenment, transl. Pamela E. Selwyn (Oxford University Press, New York/Oxford: 1995), pp. 21–40. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.: 1990); Poulain de la Barre, De l’égalité des deux sexes, 1673. ‘On Women’, p. 190. See Voltaire’s article ‘Femme’ in his Dictionnaire philosophique. ‘On Women’, p.192. On Rousseau’s characterisation of women in terms of their sexuality, see in particular ‘Sophie, or the Woman’ in Emile (Book 5). ‘Woman, how I pity thee! There is only one compensation for your ills. And had I been lawgiver, perhaps you would have received it. Were you freed from all the bonds of slavery, you would have been sacred wherever you had appeared’, ‘On Women’, p. 194. The passage in question comes from Book 6, chapter 22 of the Histoire. See A philosophical and political history, ii.562–28. This passage is taken from Book 7, chapter 17. See A philosophical and political history, iii.76–81. A philosophical and political history, iii.77. A philosophical and political history, iii.78. It can be noted that in both cases the value given to women has a material basis: the concept of love is said to stem from the development of the notion of beauty, that is to say, it is a response to the female body; property, Diderot argues, introduces an economic inequality between members of a society and thus in a strictly monetary sense some women become worth more than others. A philosophical and political history, iii.79. In the essay Diderot simply concludes his analysis of the rise of women with the observation that ‘At length the time comes, when men grow disgusted of labour from the increase of their fortunes. Their principle care is to prevent time from hanging heavy on their hands, to multiply their amusements, and to extend their enjoyments at this period the women are eagerly sought after, both on account of the amiable qualities they hold from nature, and of those they have received from education’, A philosophical and political history, iii.78. ‘The soul of women is not more upright than our own, but decency does not permit them to speak with our frankness. So they have invented a delicate warbling by means of which we may say straightforwardly all we want, when we have been whistled into their dovecot. Women either keep silent, or, frequently, give the impression of not daring to say what they do say. We can easily see that Jean-Jacques has wasted a great deal of time at the feet of women, and that Marmontel has passed a great deal of it in their arms. We might easily suspect Thomas and D’Alembert of having been too virtuous. Women accustom us to discuss with charm and clearness the dryest and thorniest subjects. We talk to them unceasingly: we wish them to listen: we are afraid of tiring or boring them. Hence we develop a particular method of explaining ourselves easily which passes from conversation into style’, ‘On Women’, p.196. From Book 19, chapter 14. See A philosophical and political history, vi.563.

The Female Figure in French Enlightenment Anthropology 115 30. ‘The intercourse between the two sexes, which is generally casual, would scarce ever be followed by any permanent consequences, if paternal and maternal tenderness did not attach the parents to their offspring. But before the ﬁrst child can provide for itself, others are born which calls for the same care. At length the instant arrives when this social reason exists no more: but then, the power of long habit, the comfort of seeing ourselves surrounded by a family more or less numerous, the hopes of being assisted in our later years by our posterity; all these circumstances expel the idea and the wish of a separation’, A philosophical and political history, iii.77. 31. A philosophical and political history, i.3. 32. A philosophical and political history, i.230. 33. A philosophical and political history, i.231; i.229. 34. A philosophical and political history, i.230. It is to be noted that to prevent the male citizen from travelling is seen as unnatural: ‘The Japanese, ﬁery as his climate, and restless as the ocean that surrounds him, required that the utmost scope should be given to his activity, which could only be done by encouraging a brisk trade. To prevent the necessity of restraining him by punishments, it was requisite to keep him in exercise by constant labour, and to allow his vivacity an uninterrupted career abroad, when it was in danger of kindling the ﬂame of sedition at home’, A philosophical and political history, i.229–30. 35. The frontispiece can be found in A philosophical and political history, volume iii. The captions appear in the later English edition of 1820. On this and other engravings in the Histoire see Lise Andries, ‘Les illustrations dans l’Histoire des deux Indes’ in ‘L’Histoire des deux Indes’: réécriture et polygraphie, ed. H.-J. Lüsebrink and A. Strugnell, SVEC 333 (Voltaire Foundation, Oxford:1995), pp. 11–41. 36. ‘Women in Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes, p. 180. 37. ‘Women in Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes, p. 182 38. A philosophical and political history, ii.59. 39. A philosophical and political history, v.21–2. 40. ‘Women in Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes, p. 180. The caption reads ‘A barbarous incident which happened at Barbados has furnished the subject of this plate. An Indian girl having rescued a young Englishman from the hands of the Caribs is sold as a slave by him, who was indebted to her for life and freedom.’ 41. In its original context, the passage incorporated into Sur les femmes from Book 19, chapter 14 on the importance of female chastity in civilised society continues with an even more explicit statement of how gallantry is detrimental to the state: ‘What is the result of this national gallantry? […] a race of men without information, without strength, and without courage; incapable of serving their country’, A philosophical and political history, vi.564. 42. ‘On Women’, p. 187. 43. ‘It is, above all, by their passionate love, their attacks of jealousy, their transports of maternal tenderness, the manner in which they share prevalent and popular frenzies that women astonish us: for they are beautiful as the seraphim of Klopstock, terrible as the devils of Milton. I have seen love, jealousy, superstition, and rage developed in women to a degree beyond the experience of man’, ‘On Women’, pp. 185–6. 44. ‘Bashfulness is under the protection of the timid sex. Who is it that shall blush, when a woman doth not?’, A philosophical and political history, vi.563. 45. ‘Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville’, translated by Francis Birrell in Dialogues by Denis Diderot, p. 144. 46. This is emphasised by the choice of ﬁnancial terms as in the following examples: ‘You thank us when we are levying on thee and thy compatriots the heaviest of all impositions’; ‘When thou goest away, thou wilt have left us children behind thee. In thy opinion is not this tribute on thy person and on thy substance better than any other?’, ‘Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville’, pp. 144–5. 47. ‘Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville’, p. 131.

116 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization 48. Montesquieu also believed that women were an important mechanism of social change and that their freedom was essential to maintain a moderate kind of progress by helping continuously to change manners, thus preventing decay or revolution. See Tjitske Akkerman, Women’s vices, public beneﬁts:women and commerce in the French Enlightenment (Het Spinhuis Publishers, Amsterdam: 1982), pp. 52–3. 49. Assuming, of course, that Diderot intends the reader to identify his ﬁctional Orou with the historical ﬁgure of Aotourou who is discussed by the French speakers in the opening section of the Supplément. 50. ‘Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville’, pp. 119–20. 51. On Diderot’s developing sense of patriotism see Anthony Strugnell, ‘Diderot et l’idée de la nation’ in Colloque international Diderot (1713–1784), ed. Anne-Marie Chouillet, (Aux Amateurs des Livres, Paris: 1985), pp. 195–203. 52. ‘Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville’, p. 158. 53. ‘On Women’, p. 195.

2.3 Civilization, Patriotism And Enlightened Histories of Woman Sylvana Tomaselli

The concept of civilization has been pressed into hard work in eighteenthcentury studies in recent years and as such warrants scrutiny. While it will be examined somewhat tangentially here, its conjunction with patriotism in the present chapter will provide a framework for, and possibly even the beginning of an answer to, a fair question prompted by an examination of the Enlightenment debate about woman, namely, why it was that, since the progress of civilization was said to be so favourable to woman, women did not themselves herald the good news. Why was it, in other words, that men, not women, wrote the conjectural history of woman in the eighteenth and nineteenth century? For it was indeed only men who outlined the various stages of society, noting how each transformation from the state of nature to the modern age marked an advancement in the condition of women.

Women writers and conjectural history The answer that men wrote everything was intuitively unappealing even at the onset of the great movement in eighteenth-century women’s studies, and our exponentially increasing knowledge of women’s writing makes it ever less acceptable. Nor can it be said that women were uninterested or uninvolved in debates in which the question of civilization arose; nor did they fail to enter those discussions in which the conjectural history of society was likely to make a useful rhetorical or analytical contribution. One tempting way of dealing with this issue is to return to the question itself, query the veracity of the claim underlying it, and seek to show that women theorists were in fact neither unaware of the discussions surrounding the issue of the progress of society, nor entirely disengaged from assessments of their role in it.1 Several were either indirectly involved in theoretical histories of mankind or actively participated in historical projects about women. It was, after all, Madame Dupin who employed her secretary, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to write, collate and research in the mid-1730s, an Essai sur les événemens importants dont les femmes ont été la cause secrette (c. 1735). [An essay on important events of which women were the secret cause] Later in the century, a work which is only partly theoretical, Antoine117

118 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization

Leonard Thomas’s (1735–85) Essai sur le caractère, les moeurs et l’esprit des femmes dans les différens siècles (1772) [Essay on the character, mores and spirit of women throughout the ages] while not prompted, as far as is known, by Madame Necker, was written by a man who by his own account was in and out of her salon, ﬁnding in her house a refuge indistinguishable from his own home.2 In Britain, Catherine Macaulay did not write a history of woman, but she clearly knew of its conceptual structure starting from the ‘barbarous ages of mankind’ in which men abused their natural physical superiority to ‘such a degree, as to destroy all the natural rights of the female species, and reduce them to a state of abject slavery’.3 William Alexander’s The History of Women from the Earliest Antiquity, to the Present Time; giving some Account of almost every interesting Particular concerning that Sex, among all Nations, ancient and modern (1779) was, the advertisement claimed, written speciﬁcally for the fair sex. Mary Wollstonecraft expressed mixed feelings about the progress of civilization from the point of view of both the sexes in her Vindications: ‘[t]he civilization which has taken place in Europe has been very partial, and, like every custom that an arbitrary point of honour has established, reﬁnes the manners at the expense of morals, by making sentiments and opinions current in conversation that have no root in the heart, or weight in the cooler resolves of the mind’.4 This might explain why she did not engage in this genre of history writing herself. Yet she was not averse to deploying some of its terms or to using it as an implicit backdrop to parts of her An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794). Furthermore, by the time she came to compose her Letters written during her travels through Northern Europe, she was more reconciled both to civilization and to its history. Indeed, she thought its study vital: The more I see of the world, the more I am convinced that civilization is a blessing not sufﬁciently estimated by those who have not traced its progress; for it not only reﬁnes our enjoyments, but produces a variety which enables us to retain the primitive delicacy of our sensations.5 Looking on to the following century, Madame de Stae¨l’s writings, not least De L’Allemagne [On Germany], which she sent for publication in 1810, are replete with remarks belonging to the history of woman genre, and the treatment of women throughout the ages in Germany (as well as elsewhere in Europe) is a subject whose appropriateness she clearly takes as a given. Throughout the eighteenth century, moreover, women travellers, such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Wollstonecraft, provided accounts which read very much like cross-sections of the history of woman, in that the various countries they visited were embodiments of some of the stages of the progress of society. Thus, Wollstonecraft noted: If travelling, as the completion of a liberal education, were to be adopted on rational grounds, the northern states ought to be visited before the more polished parts of Europe, to serve as the elements even of the knowledge

Civilization, Patriotism and Enlightened Histories of Woman 119

of manners, only to be acquired by tracing the various shades in different Countries.6 On this view, one that was by no means peculiar to Montagu and Wollstonecraft, travelling spatially was travelling temporally and experiencing phases of the civilizing process. Women authored much of the best and most inﬂuential travel writing, they can be argued therefore to have produced histories, which not only used conjectural history, but substantiated it.

Civilization and virtue And yet, it cannot be said that conjectural history was a very feminine enterprise. The examples just considered do make a collection of sorts, it is true; but even a comprehensive and highly inclusive bibliography would reveal the paucity of histories of women written by women. Women did write histories. Indeed, some of the best-known historians were women. Macaulay, for one, was known within French intellectual circles as ‘the famous historian’.7 Many wrote on education, as Macaulay also did. They wrote treatises on the philosophy of the mind and epistemology, as did Elizabeth Hamilton and Lady Mary Shepherd. The Marquise du Châtelet wrote on mathematics as well as philosophical subjects. Most signiﬁcantly, and as Harriet Guest has admirably well explained, women took to the pen for religion.8 When compared to religion, philosophy, pedagogy, political economy and other subjects women chose to write on, popularise or translate, the history of woman emerges as an unattractive subject for them in the eighteenth century and beyond. Considering how well equipped so many were and how important, one might assume, the subject might have been for them, it is noteworthy that the history of woman attracted no real female contributor, whether as original thinker or as popularizer. Nor are detractors and critics of the genre particularly noticeable. Despite the ambivalent remarks Wollstonecraft made on the subject of the progress of civilization, she did not reject the project even when she was in her most critical intellectual phase. She criticized overly positive or negative views of progress in her Vindications, but not the endeavour to assess whether mankind, or one of the sexes, could be said to have beneﬁted through the advancement of civilization.9 It must be stressed, of course, that conjectural historians were generally far from being thick on the ground. Conjectural history was still a relatively novel enterprise in the eighteenth century and part and parcel of the growth of modern history writing. More importantly, while it attracted some well-known thinkers, such as Rousseau on the Continent or Lord Kames in Scotland, it was not an unproblematic genre. Besides the epistemological questions it elicited in relation to the evidence it drew on, it was also morally contentious. Much of it might easily have been deemed unbecoming. To be sure, writing itself was unbecoming.10 To seek fame, to draw attention to oneself, was a morally very precarious affair, which even in men, had to be justiﬁed and explained away in some manner or other. Great talent, genius, might possibly excuse it,

120 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization

and did, when the works were in the service of others or for the greater glory of the nation or God.11 When Madame Necker wrote about M. Thomas she spoke of his great gifts (not least of which was a phenomenal memory) in the same breath as she did his quest for fame, and of his virtues when she touched on his ambition.12 Very little of this reserve remains in our culture today and we might ﬁnd it imaginatively difﬁcult to recover that kind of sensibility. Be this as it may, it is well to remember that the Enlightenment was the age in which ambition and self-interest in all human beings were only just beginning to be discussed as being, not only not sinful, but part and parcel of a Providentially designed human nature, most notably by the Abbé Malebranche, Montesquieu, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. Hitherto the mighty and great were expected to seek glory and much of political writing from Cicero onwards consisted in arguments over the nature of true glory. With modernity, the discussion widened to assess the moral implications of the earthly pursuits of ever-larger segments of the population. To put it in another way, the question of whether the age was condoning and legitimating greed and all the other deadly sins remained a genuine one throughout the eighteenth century, and indeed has only just very recently stepped back into the penumbra of political debate. This is also true of the question of whether the unintended outcome of laissez-faire economics was part of a Providential and divinely just order.13 The history of mankind was intended to serve to resolve the issue raised by human nature: did God will us to be selﬁsh or at least self-interested for the greater good of mankind or did He mean legislators to restrain individuals in their seemingly insatiable quest for material well-being. Whatever moral reservations they might have had about the world they lived in, those who undertook the history of society were led to demonstrate that human foibles were in fact the cause of the advancement of the species. There were few exceptions to this generalisations: the most famous one, of course, being Rousseau. Against such a background it is possible to see how inappropriate an activity the writing of conjectural history might be for women. Their venturing into print, educating or drawing attention to themselves qua individuals could be justiﬁed, not to say forgiven, if it were part of a quest for virtue or its promulgation. To take but one example from the ﬁgures already mentioned, this is how Thomas spoke of Madame Necker: Mes opinions, mes idées, mes sentimens, ou s’accordent parfaitement avec les siens, ou s’y épurent et s’y perfectionnent. Elle m’anime à tout ce que j’aime, et m’inspire encore plus de mépris pour tout ce que je dédaigne ou ne puis souffrir. Elle n’a qu’un object; ou plutôt elle en a deux, qui pour elle ne sont qu’un, les lumières et la vertu; elle n’éclaire son esprit que pour rendre son âme meilleure, et chacune de ses idées se transforme en un sentiment moral; elle a suivi cette route toute la vie, et c’est ainsi qu’elle est parvenue à une pureté et à une élévation de caractère qui a peu d’exemples.14 [My opinions, ideas and feelings either are in perfect agreement with hers, or are puriﬁed and perfected by hers. She strengthens me in what I love and

Civilization, Patriotism and Enlightened Histories of Woman 121

leads me to despise all the more what I disdain or cannot bear. She has only one aim, or rather she has two, which for her are the same, enlightenment and virtue. She improves her mind only to improve her soul, and each of her ideas is transformed into a moral sentiment. She has followed this path all her life and that is how she has achieved a purity and superiority of character that has few equals.] The preoccupation with the acquisition of virtue, its nature, and its relationship to the pursuit of enlightenment was central to both the sexes at the practical and the philosophical level. However open the question of the nature of virtue remained (theocentric or civic), the idea that its promulgation was everyone’s duty seemed to be taken for granted. Writing a theoretical account of historical processes at work in the enhancement of the status of woman was, to say the least, not the most self-evident way to do so, if only because of the variables it put into play: the development of self-awareness as an individual, the growth of private property and the accumulation of private wealth, the increasing importance of appearances, the rise of manners, ﬁnesse in deportment and speech, the movement away from God as well as nature, the rise of artiﬁce, luxury, and so forth. Consider the very idea of civility. One need not turn to the great critiques of civilization, to Rousseau’s Discours sur les arts et les sciences [Discourse on the arts and sciences] or Sur les origines de l’inégalité [On the origins of inequality], to encounter the deeply problematic nature of the concept and the moral objections it was robed in. The deﬁnition to be found in the Encyclopédie, which might have been expected to be among the works most favourable to the notion of civilization, gives the following entry for civility: civilité, politesse, affabilité, synonymes, ( Gramm. & Morale.) manières honnêtes d’agir & de converser avec les autres hommes dans la société; mais l’affabilité qui consiste dans cette insinuation de bienveillance avec laquelle un superieur rec[,]oit son inferieur, se dit rarement d’égal à égal […] Elle n’est souvent dans les grands qu’une vertu artiﬁcieuse qui sert à leurs projects d’ambition […] La civilité et la politesse sont une certaine bienséance dans les manières & les paroles, tendantes à plaire & à remarquer les égards qu’on a les uns pour les autres. Sans émaner nécessairement du coeur, elles en donnent les apparences, & font paraître l’homme en dehors comme il devrait être interieurement. C’est, dit la Bruyère, une certaine attention à faire, que par nos paroles & nos manières les autres soient contens de nous.15 [civility, politeness, affability, synonyms, (Grammar and Morality.] honorable ways of acting & engaging in conversation with other people in society; but the kind of affability which consists in the intimation of good will with which a superior meets an inferior, is rarely said of the relation between equals […] It

122 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization

is often only an artiﬁcial virtue amongst the great which serves the course of their ambition […] Civility and politeness are a kind of propriety in manners and speech, which tend to please & to exhibit the consideration one has for others. Without necessarily emanating from the heart, they give the appearance of doing so, & make one appear outwardly as one ought to be inwardly. It is, according to La Bruyère, acting and speaking in such a way that others are pleased with us.] The whole import of the article was to align civility with appearance as opposed to virtue or honour. It was what Montesquieu referred to as false honour in L’Esprit des Lois [The Spirit of Laws].16 The dictionary entry only became positive in tone when civility was taken to mean a quality that not only drew public approbation on an individual, but also marked him as genuine by deserving of it: La civilité, prise dans le sens qu’on doit lui donner, a un prix réel; regardée comme un empressement de porter du respect & des égards aux autres, par un sentiment interieur conforme à la raison, c’est une pratique du droit naturel, d’autant plus louable qu’elle est libre & bien fondée.17 [Civility, taken in the sense it should be given, is truly worthy; when considered as an eagerness to show respect & consideration to others, by an inner sentiment conforming to reason, it is an application of natural right, all the more laudable as it is free & and well founded.] It is fair to say that the end of the entry left the reader to ponder for him or herself the precise relation between civility, politeness and affability, and untangle their connection with notions of propriety and true moral worthiness. At best, a dichotomy seemed to be drawn between true civility and some form of pretence. Nor did this seem to be reversed or qualiﬁed elsewhere in the Encyclopédie. Although considered initially as synonymous, politesse was said to require its own entry in the course of ‘civilité’. Rather surprisingly, that article ﬁrmly distinguishes politeness, on the one hand, from civility and ﬂattery, on the other, and presents politeness as requiring a natural disposition unlike civility and ﬂattery. Yet, while it speaks of politeness only positively, grounding it ultimately in virtue, the piece as a whole is no less philosophically bafﬂing than the entry ‘civilité’; and similarly exposes the tensions in eighteenth-century ethical debates about the connection between morality, mores and manners. It is written with the presumption that readers will not be favourably disposed towards the idea of politeness and seeks to induce them to think well of it. Indeed, politeness is described in one instance at least in terms normally reserved for people: Il est encore bien glorieux à la politesse d’être employée dans les écrits & dans les discours de morale, ceux mêmes de la morale chrétienne, comme un véhicule

Civilization, Patriotism and Enlightened Histories of Woman 123

qui diminue en quelque sorte la pesanteur & l’austérité des préceptes & des corrections les plus séve`res. J’avoue que cette même politesse étant profanée & corrompue, devient souvent un des plus dangereux instrumens de l’amourpropre mal réglé; mais en convenant qu’elle est corrompue par quelque chose d’étranger, on prouve, ce me semble, que de sa nature elle est pure et innocente. Il ne m’appartient pas de décider, mais je ne puis m’empécher de croire que la politesse tire son origine de la vertu; qu’en se renfermant dans l’usage qui lui est propre, elle demeure vertueuse; & que lorsqu’elle sert au vice, elle éprouve le sort des meilleures choses dont les hommes vicieux corrompent l’usage.18 [It is a source of glory for politeness to be employed in works and discourses on morality, even those of Christian morality, as a means of lessening the weight & austerity of the harshest precepts and punishments. I own that when this same politeness is violated & corrupted, it often becomes the most dangerous instrument of unruly pride; but in admitting that it is corrupted by something external to it, one demonstrates, it seems to me, that it is pure and innocent by nature. It is not for me to pronounce on this, but I cannot help but believe that politeness has its origin in virtue; that in keeping within its own conﬁnes, it remains virtuous; & that when it serves vice, it shares the fate of the best things distorted by the vicious. ] For an article to seek to ingratiate the term it is deﬁning is rather unexpected even of the unashamedly partisan Encyclopédie. Another anomaly is worth noting moreover. Despite the fact that the piece begins by grounding politeness in a natural human disposition discernable at all times and in all places, it ends by stating that it was a quality little known of the savage, adding, Elle n’a guère lieu au fond des forêts, entre des hommes & des femmes nuds, & tout entiers à la poursuite de leurs besoins; & chez les peuples policés, elle n’est souvent que la démonstration exterieure d’une bienfaisance qui n’est pas dans le coeur.19 [It hardly occurs in the depth of the forests, between naked men & women, absorbed as they are in meeting their basic needs; & amongst civilized peoples, it often only the external manifestation of a good will absent in the heart.] These two explanations illustrate rather well several points that can be made about the Enlightenment debate over politeness and civilization. Firstly, that it was thought that the relationship between people had changed with time, owing principally to the ease with which basic needs were being met; secondly, that this process was seen both negatively when it involved only outward behaviour and positively when it seemed to be indicative of a motive to please which had no ulterior motive, that is, no other motive than benevolence narrowly construed; thirdly, that the modern age was one in which the relationship between individuals was generally speaking governed by artiﬁce and

124 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization

appearance; and ﬁnally, that it was both difﬁcult to refrain from casting a moral judgement on the process and to do so in an analytically coherent manner. Perhaps the only person who truly succeeded in rendering a coherent moral judgement on the civilizing process was Rousseau. He succeeded by both specifying that he was engaging in an entirely secular enterprise and by giving an unqualiﬁedly negative pronouncement on civilization. This was a position open or intellectually acceptable to very few people. That the history of civilization ran counter or rested very uneasily with discourses about virtue, Christian or ancient, is seen in a number of different, but overlapping, ways. The fact that much was made in these histories about mankind’s gradual emancipation from the time-consuming labour of satisfying basic needs may have been a little problematic in an age in which the Lockean critique of idleness, one directed to all ranks and both the sexes, found many powerful expositors. Diderot, in his mixed review of Thomas’ Essai, made much of the causal relation between ennui and the progress of the relationship between man and woman from the age of brutality to that of modernity.20 That it was desire, insatiable desire, for artiﬁcial needs that was the prime mover in conjectural histories of man as well as woman could only have presented difﬁculties in an age in which the case for the moral neutrality of luxury was being made against great resistance. Moreover, while woman was far from passive in the conjectural histories produced primarily in France and Scotland, and while she was especially linked to the development of the arts, the reﬁnement of language, and the growth of ﬁnesse and of the luxury trade, the nature of the agency involved was a very far cry from that product of the exercise of free will in the morally responsible agents of moral philosophy or moral theology. To the degree that woman was active in these accounts it was through her passions and desires as well as through those of men. In sharp contrast, reason and faith, not the appetites, were at the core of the moral doctrines that eighteenth-century women intellectuals adhered to and argued through. The history of civilization was in no small part an account of how man’s lust for the sex in general had over the ages been reﬁned into a craving for the desire of a particular woman. The distinction between what was frequently referred to as ‘physical’ from ‘moral’ love was conceptually very important to many intellectual endeavours in the period, including the nascent anthropology, Buffon’s work and the realm of aesthetics.21 In theories of the development of society, this distinction was historised. The shift from one type of love to the other manifested man’s rise from a brutish condition. As Burke, who did not write a history of woman per se, explained in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757): The passion which belongs to generation, merely as such, is lust only; this is evident in brutes, whose passions are more unmixed, and which pursue their purposes more directly than ours. […] But man, who is a creature adapted to a greater variety and intricacy of relation, connects with the general passion, the idea of some social qualities, which direct and heighten the appetite which he has in common with all other animals; and as he is not designed like them

Civilization, Patriotism and Enlightened Histories of Woman 125

to live at large, it is ﬁt that he should have something to create a preference, and ﬁx his choice; and this in general should be some sensible quality; as no other can so quickly, so powerfully, or so surely produce its effect. The object therefore of this mixed passion which we call love, is the beauty of the sex. Men are carried to the sex in general, as it is the sex, and by the common law of nature; but they are attached to particulars by personal beauty. I call beauty a social quality; for where women and men, and not only they, but when other animals give us a sense of joy and pleasure in beholding them, (and there are many that do so) they inspire us with sentiments of tenderness and affection towards their persons; we like to have them near us, and we enter willingly into a kind of relation with them, unless we should have strong reasons to the contrary.22 The full-ﬂedged conjectural theories of the Scots, like John Millar or Adam Ferguson, and the more fragmentary ones of Frenchmen, like Diderot, provided narrative accounts of the softening of men’s behaviour in order to be in a position to ‘enter willingly into a kind of relation with’ women, and perhaps more to the point that women ‘enter willingly into a kind of relation with’ them.23 As has been suggested already this involved concepts and processes which were at best morally controversial. Even if that had not been so or if we seek to eliminate the morally dubious concepts of politeness and its cognates from theoretical histories of mankind, there remains another reason or cluster of reasons why the genre might not have been attractive to women theorists. Women who were in the business of making the case for women as potentially no less worthy than men (to put it in such a way as not to restrict the point to those who had speciﬁc social and political claims in mind) were unlikely to gravitate towards a discourse which, even when it did speak of some of the virtues, focused on effeminate ones. For after all, the history of civilization could be read, and indeed was read by some, most notably Rousseau, as the history of effeminacy, a history of the fall of all the qualities associated with vir. Whatever ingenious complexion Ferguson sought to put on it when he claimed that ‘[t]hat weakness and effeminacy of which polished nations are sometimes accused, has its place probably in the mind alone’,24 the fact remained that women seemed more inclined to ﬁght their battle on what had been traditionally deemed the highest moral ground. They did not tend to contribute to the argument that modernity engendered or required new virtues, and that history had ﬁnally brought in the age of woman (as the nineteenth century was to see it, e.g. through the eyes of the Goncourt brothers), and her time was nigh. This might have been short sighted or retrograde of them, but women writers continued to seek to make their case on the well-trodden ground, far above the baser aspects of human nature, of heroism.

Patriotism Much more traditional than conjectural history were the lists of famous women about which Ruth Perry has written, and which went back to ancient times; or,

126 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization

in predominantly Catholic countries, to the time of the ﬁrst saints and martyrs.25 Somewhat more recent were discussions about the equality between the sexes, which emerged out of the Battle of the Sexes especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.26 Those who used these genres did so in the language of virtue or virtues. Neither of the two genres disappeared from sight in the eighteenth century, despite the ascendancy of theoretical history throughout Europe. And this brings us to that virtue which in the secular world encompassed so many manly virtues, patriotism. If we deduce what Madame Dupin sought from a history of women from the relevant fragments we have of Rousseau’s writing on the subject, we see that the question she wanted settled was the issue of the comparative merit of women in relation to men: Quand on cite, il faut compter; autrement c’est de l’érudition perdue. Supposons que je voulusse prouver qu’en général les femmes ont autant ou plus de mérite que les hommes. Si je citais Sémiramis on me citerait Alexandre, à Judith on m’opposerait Scevola, à Lucrèce Caton d’Utique, Anacréon à Sapho, et ainsi d’exemple en exemple la liste des grands hommes aurait bientot épuisé celle des femmes. Mais si l’on établissait une proportion entre le nombre des personnes qui de part et d’autre ont gouverné des Etats, commandé des Armées, et cultivé les Lettres, et le nombre de celles qui ont brillé dans ces differens Genres, alors il est évident que le coté ou ` la quantité relative l’emporterait mériterait réellement l’avantage.27 [When one cites, one must count; otherwise the erudition is wasted. Let us suppose that I wanted to prove that generally speaking women have as much or more merit than men. If I were to cite Semiramis, Alexander would be cited, Judith would be compared to Scaevola, Lucretia to Cato of Utica, Sappho to Anacreon, and so forth from example to example the list of great men would soon exhaust that of women. But if one were to establish a ratio between the number of individuals who one way or another have governed states, led armies, and cultivated knowledge, and the number of individuals who have excelled in these different genres, than it would become evident which side truly has the advantage.] The same argument can be found in the fragment we have of Rousseau’s ‘Sur les femmes’ [On women] of the same period. What is noticeable is that no mention was made in it of the qualities that might be deemed feminine. The virtues in question were those of political and military leadership, and all the civil and moral virtues. Even more striking is that the passage explicitly stated that the human mind is such that no achievement however great meets anything other than scorn when performed by submissive or dependent beings: Considérons d’abord les femmes privées de leur liberté par la tirannie des hommes, et ceux-ci maîtres de toutes choses, car les couronnes, les charges, les emplois, le commandement des armées, tout est entre leurs mains, ils s’en

Civilization, Patriotism and Enlightened Histories of Woman 127

sont emparez dès les premiers tems par je ne sais quel droit naturel que je n’ai jamais bien pu comprendre et qui pourroit bien n’avoir d’autre fondement que la force majeure. Considérons aussi le caractère de l’esprit humain, qui ne veut que du brilliant, qui n’admire la vertu qu’au milieu des grandeurs et de la majesté, qui méprise tout ce que peuvent faire de plus grand et de plus admirable dans leur état des personnes soumises et dependantes. 28 [Let us ﬁrst consider women deprived of their freedom by the tyranny of men, and men masters of all thing, as all crowns, ofﬁces, employments, military leadership – everything is in their hands; they took over all such things from the beginning of time through I know not what natural right, which I have never fully been able to understand and which might well have no other grounding than superior physical strength. Let us also consider human nature, which wants only what scintillates, which only admires virtue when it is exhibited in the midst of grandeur and majesty, and which despises the greatest and most admirable actions when performed by those who are subject to and dependent on others.] I dare say this point, namely, that what would be regarded as great deeds when performed by the great, were naturally despicable when done by subjugated and dependent beings, was not lost on women. There was however more than one way to take the point on board. One was to focus on unquestionably great women, hence the compilations of heroines. Thomas’s Essai was partly such an endeavour and found a match in the same author’s Essai sur les éloges (1773) which was about the art of eulogy to great men, although it also included a discussion of Christina of Sweden. It was not however a genre that appealed to everyone; any more than the history of woman did.

The case of Mary Wollstonecraft Take Mary Wollstonecraft. Neither eulogies of women nor the theoretical history of woman provided the medium that Wollstonecraft chose to make her case about the merit, or more accurately the potential merit, of woman. There is a brief list of great women in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), but it is of little consequence to the case that she wished to make; indeed she was explicit in her aim to write not about outstanding women, but ordinary ones.29 To be sure, the genre she adopted was largely, if not entirely, dictated by the intellectual and material circumstances in which she found herself. Had it not been for Burke, Price, or her publisher, Joseph Johnson, her Vindications would almost certainly not have seen the light of day, and the fact that she was egged on by the latter to write a letter by way of reply to Burke’s Reﬂections did shape the form as well as the content of her defence of Price and the actions of the National Assembly in France. It is also true that when circumstances called for it, she sought the origins of the French Revolution in a history that bore a strong family resemblance to theoretical history. But the case she made about woman could

128 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization

never have been made through the history of woman. This would have been so even if she had not thought that the progress of civilization had been very partial.30 She could not have made her point about woman through such a conjectural history, because she was mindful of the Providential Order of things, especially in the early 1790s, and could never have conceived it to be working through the appetitive drives of both the sexes and leading to a world of the pursuit of fashion and material possessions. For Wollstonecraft proudly outdid Rousseau and his followers. She rejected the world as it was even more fundamentally than them in that she rejected the kind of marriages on which it was grounded. She even outdid the very man she overtly sought to defend against Burke’s allegedly unfair attack. In his address to the Glorious Revolution Society, Richard Price had expressed a longing for a world in which the great public ﬁgures of his day were also virtuous in their private life (or, failing that, at least sufﬁciently judicious to hide their vices from the public gaze).31 Wollstonecraft’s Vindications are a sophisticated account of what it would take for men to be virtuous in their private as well as public lives. Nothing short of a complete moral revolution was required. Civil and political rights would not even begin to effect the necessary changes. Even if such rights were extended to the whole of the adult population the reign of true virtue would not be nearer. What was required was a total redeﬁnition of the purpose of life on earth. It required the education of women ﬁrst and foremost as moral beings. They had to learn to forsake that love of self which made them unworthy of the rights which were their due, as such a love obscured their duties to others or incapacitated them from fulﬁlling them even if they recognized their obligations to society. The moral volte-face Wollstonecraft had in mind would make for a world in which women would devote themselves to others, as mothers to their children, as wives to their husbands and as neighbours to their neighbours. It would also be a world in which men would likewise be devoted husbands and fathers. It would be a world in which women as well as men would be citizens and patriots. For whether the sacriﬁce of one’s self was made on the battleﬁeld or in the nursery, whether in combat or in giving birth, the sacriﬁce was the same. Wollstonecraft did not choose to write about legendary women to make her case for the merit of women and their entitlement to respect and the rights that necessarily accompany it. She wanted to make a case for the potential merit of all ordinary women and all men. The morally metamorphosed society she thought could have been realized by the French Revolution in its early stages would have had wide ranging implications for commerce, luxury and all that was connected to appearances and pretence. It would have been a world in which the distinction between true and feigned civility was entirely meaningless. It would have been a world in which, in the words of the author of ‘civilité’, civility would indeed have been ‘regarded as an eagerness to pay respect and show consideration to other, because of an inner sentiment conforming to reason […]’. It would have been an age in which Wollstonecraft herself would no longer have needed to battle against manners, artiﬁce, and appearance.

Civilization, Patriotism and Enlightened Histories of Woman 129

Given these revolutionary moral aims, Wollstonecraft had to shun conjectural history just as she shunned the eulogies of great women. What is more, what her chosen style of polemic afforded her, focused as it was on the notion of citizenship and love of country, was something that conjectural history could not. It provided her own ground for courageous, independent, wise and rational action. This is so not least because it depicted a course of action for her and her readers to undertake. It advocated the rejection of one kind of self and the adoption of another. Conjectural history, on the other hand, was a narrative, a determinist’s narrative; its protagonists were phenomenal entities governed by inclinations and appetitive needs. It was about seduction and seducing of the kind Wollstonecraft only freely indulged in when writing her Letters from Scandinavia to Gilbert Imlay and, prior to that, in the ﬂesh.32 Wollstonecraft’s Vindications were not vindications of the ﬂesh. They were morally prescriptive works on how to overcome the temptations of a misguided world, not least because the life of vanity was the certain path to unhappiness. Her Vindications vindicated moral virtue.33

The case of Frederick Engels This does not mean that conjectural history was unusable by the revolutionary critics of civilization. Consider Frederick Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.34 The mention of Engels’ work in this volume might at ﬁrst appear rather odd, but it is in fact not entirely out of place as it was, after all, a direct response to a claim identiﬁed with the eighteenth-century intellectual movement, indeed a riposte to it. Although written nearly one hundred years later, The Origin is, in more ways than one, an Enlightenment text. The very quest for origins to understand what is and what is to be done is typical of the Enlightenment, despite the fact that Engels did not avow predecessors. The title of the work alone evokes Rousseau’s Discours sur l’Origine et les Fondements de l’Inégalité. While Rousseau had made proud to disregard the facts and all known authorities, the purport of Engels’ work was a commentary on the American evolutionary anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan’s Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization (1877). It was undertaken, Engels stressed, at Marx’s behest as the latter had intended to give such a commentary himself. Morgan had argued that the family, private property and the state did not exist in prehistoric society. The question that Morgan, and Engels following him, set themselves was one of origins, namely, that of the origins of the family understood as a patriarchal unit. How had it evolved out of the clan? How had it supplanted maternal groupings? The answer lay in the advent of private property, which took place during the pastoral stage and with the acquisition of herds. As wealth had increased, the position of man had strengthened. He had begun to own the cattle and the slaves. Woman had continued to own the household chattels, but the latter were to depreciate relative to the new and growing wealth of man.

130 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization

Whereas within female lineage his children had not inherited, man came to favour his children as he came to accumulate wealth and acquired the notion of inheritance. Engels thus argued that: The overthrow of the mother right was the world-historic defeat of the female sex. The man seized the reins in the house also; the woman was degraded, enthralled, the slave of the man’s lust, a mere instrument for breeding children. The patriarchal family comes into being.35 Engels traced the worsening of the female condition in some detail and took a surprising level of interest in the lessening of sexual freedom through the gradual encroachment of incest taboos. Thus readers, having been given an initial glimpse of a Platonic Eden of communism and group sex, were taken down through the various circles of hell of which marriage, was the most intense inferno. It was the fourth stage in the history of the family, that of the monogamian family, which constituted the worse state for women. It arose in the middle to upper stage of barbarism and was the signal of the dawn of civilization. Woman lost all rights. Adultery on her part became more severely punished than in previous stages, and while marriage was overtly deemed exclusive of other sexual relationships, monogamy was in fact only ever expected of her: Thus, monogamy does not by any means make its appearance in history as the reconciliation of man and woman, still less as the highest form of such reconciliation. On the contrary, it appears as the subjection of one sex by the other, as the proclamation of the conﬂict between the sexes entirely unknown hitherto in prehistoric times, In an old unpublished manuscript, the work of Marx and myself in 1846 [The German Ideology], I ﬁnd the following: ‘The ﬁrst division of labour is that between man and woman for child breeding,’ And today I can add: ‘The ﬁrst class antagonism which appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monagamian marriage, and the ﬁrst oppression with that of the female sex by the male. Monogamy was a great historical advance, but at the same time it inaugurated, along with slavery and private wealth, that epoch, lasting until today, in which every advance is likewise a relative regression, in which the well being and development of the one group are attained by the misery and repression of the other.36 What is striking about The Origin for those familiar with eighteenth-century conjectural histories is the extent to which Engels is at pains to emphasize that in the beginning women were more than the equal of men. Power, to the degree that there was any, was theirs. It was a matriarchal society. What is more, it was one of sexual promiscuity. Like Rousseau’s conjectural history of man in the Discours sur l’Inégalité, The Origin is the story of a Fall. In Engels’ case, the Fall is that of woman, not man. It is the Fall from a state of female lineage, communal property, and sexual freedom. Eighteenth-century conjectural histories of

Civilization, Patriotism and Enlightened Histories of Woman 131

woman, by contrast, had told of the gradual improvement of the condition of woman in history; the growth of her liberation from a state in which men abused of their physical strength and knew only a desire for the sex in general, as opposed to individual females.37 Both histories were about a struggle for power, but the eighteenth-century version claimed woman used civilization to gain the ascendancy by, in most if not all accounts, effeminizing man. As Engels had made no prior reference to such a body of literature, his sudden outburst about one third of the way into his argument comes somewhat as a surprise: That woman was the slave of man at the commencement of society is one of the most absurd notions that have come down to us from the period of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Woman occupied not only a free but also a highly respected position among savages and all barbarians of the lower and middle stages and partly even of the upper stages. […] I may add, furthermore, that the reports of travellers and missionaries about women among savages and barbarians being burdened with excessive toil in no way conﬂict with what has been said above. The division of labour between the two sexes is determined by causes entirely different from those that determine the status of women in society. Peoples whose women have to work much harder than we would consider proper often have far more real respect for women than our European have for theirs. The social status of the lady of civilization, surrounded by sham homage and estranged from all real work, is socially inﬁnitely lower than that of the hardworking woman of barbarism, who was regarded among her people as a real lady (lady, frowa, Frau = mistress {Herrin}) and was such by the nature of her position.38 Conjectural histories did indeed use travellers and missionaries’ reports claiming that savage women laboured intensively, whilst men remained idle. That they deemed this indicative of woman’s slave-like status was no less true. For Engels, on the other hand, labour on the part of women was redemptive: The emancipation of women becomes possible only when women are enabled to take part in production on a large, social scale, and when domestic duties require their attention only to a minor degree. And this has become possible only as a result of modern large-scale industry, which not only permits of the participation of women in production in large numbers, but also actually calls for it and, moreover, strives to convert private domestic work also into a public industry.39 Labour brought women back within the public domain. Apart from the account of the condition of woman in the state of nature, it is over the inherent moral status of labour that conjectural historians and Engels differ most. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, for men writing for ladies, work, physical work, especially unequally distributed work, was the watermark of enslavement. How

132 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization

writers from Mary Astell to the Utopian socialists, the nineteenth-century Liberals to twentieth-century feminists stand in relation to physical work is an important aspect of the present topic which needs to be explored elsewhere. For the present, it is another feature of Engels’ text which is of particular relevance. Before discussing the potential for liberation brought about by industrialization, however, Engels had followed his remarks on Native Americans and other aboriginal peoples by a study of the Old World. To Morgan’s work, he had added material on the Greeks and Romans. More importantly, he had written of the Germanic invasions of the Roman Empire and assessed the contribution of these peoples to civilization. Indeed, the last part of The Origins, devoted to the analysis of the state, saw the modern state as originating in the governmental practices of the early Germans. They had, however, made a striking appearance in the unfolding of the argument already. Women, he contended, were highly respected amongst the ancient German peoples. They held positions of authority comparable to those held by them amongst the Spartans. Pairing marriages, that is, marriages between individuals, but without the noxious aspects of monogamian unions, continued to exist amongst them. What Germans brought mankind was however altogether new; they brought love, the ‘moral love’ designated by Buffon, Burke and others, in contrast to physical love; or what Engels, rather unattractively called (and rendered in English as) ‘individual sex love’: Thus, in this connection also, an entirely new element acquired world supremacy with the emergence of the Germans. The new monogamy which now developed out of the mingling of races on the ruins of the Roman world clothed the domination of the men in milder forms and permitted women to occupy, at least with regard to externals, a far freer and more respected position than classical antiquity had ever known. This, for the ﬁrst time, created the possibility for the greatest moral advance which we derive from and owe to monogamy – a development taking place within it, parallel with it, or in opposition to it, as the case might be, namely, modern individual sex love, previously unknown to the whole world.40 What capitalism made possible was the penultimate condition for love between men and women; communism would make romantic marriage a reality for all men and women; it would spread the German invention to all mankind or at least for as long as any one couple was held together by reciprocal affection. Unions that ceased to be so would be immoral and dissolved. ‘[Love] is recognized in theory, on paper, like all the rest. And more than this cannot be expected for the present’, wrote Engels.41 The future would recognize love in practice. Clearly Engels’ concerns, like J. S. Mill’s in The Subjection of Women, reﬂect the nineteenth-century preoccupation with adultery, prostitution, and divorce. Much has been written on all those topics. What is salient here is that these were not the predominant concerns of eighteenth-century feminists. Companionship within marriage was, generally speaking, the aim of education and reform. For

Civilization, Patriotism and Enlightened Histories of Woman 133

feminist republicans, like Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges, it was friendship between equals, sharing intellectual interests and commitments, but, above all, equal in self-denying and self-sacriﬁce whether ﬁghting enemy forces or cradling and breast-feeding babies. These women were making a case for an entirely new relation between the sexes, although of ancient origins between men, namely, they were calling for the Aristotelian notion of friendship amongst equals, the building block of true political community. They were not arguing or waiting for a world of love. Indeed, while from Mary Astell onwards during the long eighteenth century, they were proliﬁc in writing on the nature of divine love, the love we ought to have for God, they scarcely ever went into the subject of its profane counterpart.42 Like Engels, Wollstonecraft was critical of late marriages; he thought it was the ‘school for conjugal inﬁdelity’; she feared it as the seedbed of lasciviousness. Unlike Engels, however, Wollstonecraft did not look forward to the day when the individual family ceased to be the economic unit of society; on the contrary, that was precisely what she was fearing would take place through the intensiﬁcation of the division of labour and what she was eager to reverse. She did not want private housekeeping to be transformed into a social industry, much less the care and education of children to be taken out of the parental sphere. It was bringing children back to their mothers, mothers back to them, which was her aspiration, not as an end in itself but a necessary building block for a world in which the regard for others ruled men and women above all else. The reason, then, why women did not write conjectural histories of woman is that such histories inevitably led their authors into the very murky waters out of which they desired to drag both the sexes. Theirs was in a profound sense a moral rejection of what has become characteristic of modernity. Radical or conservative, what they wanted was to ground or re-ground society on self-control and self-denial, not self-indulgence in any shape or form. Outside the ﬁctional mode, and often also within it, they wanted not romantic love, not sensuality, not what they would have thought of as sexual license, but genuine companionship. They wanted power relationships between the sexes to be neutralised in marriage rather than shown to be the root cause of the historical march of humanity. Most of all, perhaps, they did not want history to take them to a world of equality, whether thanks to the mechanisms inherent in commercial society or as the fruit of transcended capitalism. They wanted to forge such a world for themselves as the responsible moral beings they argued in their various ways they fully were.

Notes 1.

2.

A case for eighteenth-century women writers’ participation in the production of a history of woman is made in my ‘Reﬂections on the History of the Science of Woman’, in A Question of Identity: Women, Science & Literature, Marina Benjamin (ed.), Rutgers (N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993), pp. 25–39. Œuvres Complètes de Thomas, de l’Académie Française (Paris: Desessarts, 1802, 4 Vols.), Vol. I, p. xix. On Madame Necker’s salon, see, Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A

134 Gender, Race and the Progress of Civilization

3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (London: Cornell University Press, 1994), esp. pp. 53–89. Catherine Macaulay, Letters on Education, Letter XXII, ‘No characteristic Difference in Sex’ (London, 1790), p. 206. Vindication of the Rights of Men, in A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Sylvana Tomaselli (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 8–9. A Short Residence in Sweden, Richard Holmes (ed.) (London: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 72. Ibid., p. 173. For an account of Macaulay as a historian and the reception of her history, see, Bridget Hill, The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 82. See Women, Writing and the Public Sphere: 1700–1830, Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Clíona Ó Gallchoir and Penny Warburton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), esp. pp. 1–23 See Harriet Guest, Small Change (n. 8). Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. I, pp. xxi–xxvii. See, E. J. Hundert The Enlightenment’s Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Oeuvres, Vol. I. pp. xix–xx. By the Chevalier de Jaucourt, Paris, 28 vols, 1751–1772, 17 vols. of text, 1751–1765 and 11 vols. of plates, 1762–72; 1753, Vol. III, p. 497. The Spirit of the Laws, trans. and ed. by Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), book 3, ch. 7, p. 27. See, note 16. Ibid., probably also by the Chevalier de Jaucourt, Paris 1762, Vol. XII, p. 916. For a seminal work on politeness in the eighteenth century, see, L. G. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness (Cambridge, 1994). Ibid., p. 917. Diderot’s views on women and the progress of mankind found expression in a number of texts, including in his contribution to the third edition (1780) of the Abbé Raynal’s Histoire Philosophique et Politique des établissements et du commerce des européens dans les deux Indes [Philosophical and political history of European institutions and commerce in the two Indies], 10 vols. Geneva 1781, vol. 4, p. 69. See, Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘Woman in Enlightenment Conjectural Histories’, in Conceptualising Woman in Enlightenment Thought, Hans Erich Bödeker and Lieselotte Steinbrügge (eds) (Berlin: Arno Spitz GmbH, 2001). A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, J. T. Boulton ed. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul (1967), pp. 42–3. See, Mary Catherine Moran’s chapter in this volume. An Essay on the History of Civil Society, 6th edn (London: 1793), p. 381; quoted in my, ‘The Enlightenment Debate on Women’, History Workshop, 20, 1985, pp. 101–24. See for instance her ‘George Ballard’s biographies of learned ladies’, in J. D. Browning, ed. Biography in the Eighteenth Century, vol. 8, London/New York: Garland, pp. 85–111. See, Caroline C. Lougee, ‘Le Paradis des Femmes’: Women, Salons, and Social Stratiﬁcation in Seventeenth-Century France (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1976). Jean-Jacques Rousseau ‘Idée de la Méthode dans la Composition d’un Livre’, in Oeuvres complètes, Bernard Gagnebin et Marcel Raymond (eds.) (Paris:) Gallimard, 1964, 4 Vols, Vol. II, p. 1246. ‘Sur les femmes’, ibid., p. 1255.

Civilization, Patriotism and Enlightened Histories of Woman 135 29. ‘Sappho, Eloisa, Mrs. Macaulay, the Empress of Russia, Madame d’Eon, &. These, and many more, may be reckoned exceptions; and, are not all heroes, as well as heroines, exceptions to the general rules? I wish to see women neither heroines nor brutes; but reasonable creatures.’ A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in A Vindication of the Rights of Men, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Hints, pp. 155–37. 30. Ibid., p. 74. 31. The argument which follows is made in greater detail in ‘The most public sphere of all: the family’, in Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830 (see n. 10). 32. See, Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (London: Weidenfeld and& Nicolson, 2000); Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘The Death and Rebirth of Character in the Eighteenth Century’, in Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, Roy Porter (ed.), Routledge, 1996. 33. For an insightful reading of the Vindications as vindications of political virtue, see, Virginia Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992). 34. 1884; Revised 4th edn, 1891. The edition used here is that edited by Evelyn Reed (New York: Pathﬁnder Press, 1972). 35. Ibid., p. 68 36. Ibid., pp. 74–5. 37. See, n. 22. 38. p. 61 (n. 34). 39. Ibid., p. 152. 40. Ibid., pp. 77–8. 41. Ibid., p. 84. 42. This point only refers to non-ﬁctional works, of course.

SECTION 3

SEX AND SENSIBILITY

Introduction Dror Wahrman

All three chapters in this section examine changing attitudes to gendered subjectivity in the age of Enlightenment, and all take as their starting point a fundamental contradiction. Vivien Jones explores the contradictory inheritance in Mary Wollstonecraft’s writings between a rationalist-Enlightenment feminism and a more essentialist view of femininity. Robin Howells writes of the tension between Rousseau’s theoretical stance and the urges driving his personal life: Rousseau himself described the resulting conﬂict as being ‘perpetually in contradiction with [him]self’. Philip Carter’s opening contradiction is already indicated in his title, ‘Tears and the Man’: can an Enlightenment man be both tearful and manly? All three authors then go on to show how these apparent opposites are reconcilable within a more complex framework moving beyond simple gender binaries. Robin Howells’s essay follows Rousseau’s own account of his life in placing the origins of his erotic personality in his childhood. More speciﬁcally, the opposing tendencies that Rousseau experienced – his heart ‘both ﬁerce and tender’, his character ‘effeminate and yet unconquerable’ – emerged partly from the mixed genres of his childhood reading, as he exposed himself to the contradictory pulls of classical republican writings and philosophy, on the one hand, and of romantic love stories and novels on the other. The resulting tension, as Howells says, is not only gendered but also genred: a fascinating instance of the interplay between subjective impulses and the literary imagination. Philip Carter places Rousseau in a broader context. What Howells – in line with Rousseau himself – presents as individual idiosyncrasies, Carter shows to have been well-established traits of that famous eighteenth-century ﬁgure, the Man of Feeling. Rousseau’s passivity, his seemingly contradictory mixture of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ traits, his draw to the ‘principle of water and ﬂow’ – all were in tune with the gender-complicated portrait of men of sensibility. The delicate balance between stereotypically feminine characteristics and classically masculine attributes required of such men became a key sign of their civilised status. Explicating these discourses of manly sensibility, Carter turns to a wide range of genres and cultural forms.1 In this he joins Howells’s generic concern, as well as Vivien Jones, who explicitly raises the question of genre and cultural location: 136

Introduction 137

together with other contributors to this volume, their interest is in the ‘Enlightenment project’ broadly construed, rather than the high philosophical Enlightenment of earlier studies. Like most eighteenth-century cultural historians, it is the broad, sophisticated world of enlightened opinion – including a wide range of non-canonical sources, such as educational and didactic literature, sermons, political polemics, and novels – that they seek to illuminate. There are potential disadvantages to this approach – just how wide can ‘Enlightenment’ become before it is simply a descriptor of a historical period? – but its advantages are here very evident, in the insights into hitherto-unexplored connections that this wider vision permits. The point can be illustrated by a theme common to all the chapters in this section, one of great concern to educated minds in the period of Enlightenment, and that is the issue of authenticity and the related problem of the unreliability of signs. Rousseau, Howells tells us, was profoundly dissatisﬁed with reality and expressed sustained preference for ‘another world’. ‘The impossibility of attaining real beings’, Rousseau wrote in his Confessions, ‘ﬂung me into the land of dreams’. To what extent was this Rousseau’s unique condition, as opposed to that of modern man? ‘The man of the world is entirely covered with a mask’, Rousseau wrote in Emile, ‘he is so accustomed to disguise, that if, at any time he is obliged for a moment to assume his natural character his uneasiness and constraint are palpably obvious … . Reality is no part of his concern, he aims at nothing more than appearance’.2 The dissonance of the real and the apparent, the substance and the refraction, is the condition of modernity. A similar preoccupation with transparency and truth was evident in Mary Wollstonecraft’s writings. ‘Truth is the only basis of virtue;’ Jones quotes her, ‘and we cannot, without depraving our minds, endeavour to please a lover or husband, but in proportion as he pleases us’. A later quotation from the Vindication of the Rights of Woman put it even more evocatively, referring to the ‘smoke [that] heats the imagination by vainly endeavouring to obscure certain objects’. Wollstonecraft’s position on openness in sexual education, Jones explains, ‘is presented as a test case in the choice between enlightened transparency and the willed ignorance of “false delicacy”’. As the conservative Richard Polwhele understood very well, when he denounced Wollstonecraft’s position as dangerously radical, the mistaken obfuscation that she opposed (to quote Jones again) was ‘disastrous not only for women, but for human perfectibility itself’. The ramiﬁcations of the question of transparency versus obfuscation reached throughout society, affecting not just male/female relations but all human interactions. The same was true of the eighteenth-century appeal of the culture of sensibility, as summarized here by Philip Carter. ‘Sensibility’s appeal’, he writes, ‘owed much to its identiﬁcation as an alternative to the established standards of ‘polite’ social performers who were regarded as wilfully distorting the desired congruence between inner motive and other expressions of reﬁnement’. Tears became a form of communication that supposedly bypassed the artiﬁce

138 Sex and Sensibility

of language and guaranteed its own transparent sincerity. But were tears a reliable sign? Could they be feigned? Once again, gender is key to the story, although it does not encompass its full cultural meaning. Nor, for that matter, does Enlightenment narrowly understood. The recurring cultural concern underlying these three case studies is with the articulation and recognition of the true and the sincere in a world rife with artiﬁce; an artiﬁce enhanced by the accelerated commercialisation of everyday life. Some might say, in response, that a preoccupation with artiﬁce and authenticity is a perennial Western concern: note the distinguished history of the theme of the ‘theatrum mundi’ in the Western tradition. Up to a point, this is true, but eighteenth-century society’s urgent need to confront issues of disguise and artiﬁce involved much that was peculiar to this period. Not for nothing did this century witness the heyday of the masquerade as a social institution and a cultural trope, much more than any period before or after. The masquerade was the epitome of collective experimentation with artiﬁce, disguise and the transformation of identities. ‘I found Nature turned topside-turvy’, one masquerade-watcher reported, continuing in breathless succession: ‘Women changed into Men, and Men into Women, Children in Leading-strings seven Foot high, Courtiers transformed into Clowns, Ladies of the Night into Saints, People of the ﬁrst Quality into Beasts or Birds, Gods or Goddesses: I fancied I had all Ovid’s Metamorphoses before me’. And not for nothing, moreover, were contemporaries so insistent that the masquerade – not simply the ‘theatrum mundi’ – was the best and most precise metaphor for their age. The present is ‘such masquerading times’, Edward Young declared in 1728, that ‘’Tis not a world, but Chaos of mankind.’ Or as an actress reciting a theatrical epilogue told her audience: ‘The world’s a masquerade! the masquers, you, you, you’. Nobody evoked the timeliness of this image more powerfully than Elizabeth Montagu, in a letter she sent Hannah More in the early 1780s: ‘it is the ton of the times to confound all distinctions of age, sex, and rank; no one ever thinks of sustaining a certain character, unless it is one they have assumed at a masquerade’.3 It behoves us to pay careful attention to what the frequency with which we ﬁnd this refrain echoed from every eighteenth-century rooftop tells us about the deﬁning preoccupations of the age. Terry Castle, in her wonderful cultural history of the eighteenth-century masquerade, chooses to focus on the gender aspects of the identity play this institution represented as an explanation for its peculiar cultural purchase at this historical juncture. But as the Ovidian masquerade description just quoted indicates, we should take gender in this case to be but one aspect of the broader meaning signalled by the eighteenth-century masquerade with regard to contemporary notions of identity and its limits. It was the peculiarities of eighteenthcentury understandings of how identities could shift and mutate that made artiﬁce, or disguise, or masquerade, such potent possibilities or threats that required so much cultural attention. In part, these new and perhaps ominous possibilities seemed directly linked to those aspects of eighteenth-century life that seemed new and ‘modern’. In the modern anonymous commercial society,

Introduction 139

‘where looks are merchandise’ (thus Samuel Johnson in his poem ‘London’), how could one distinguish true from false, copy from original, signiﬁer from signiﬁed? ‘This is not an age in which we may trust to appearances’, the ingenue Evelina was warned before entering London society in Frances Burney’ novel.4 These were concerns that preoccupied Rousseau and Wollstonecraft, as they struggled with issues of sexuality and gender identity; as well as Edmund Burke, Philip Francis and many others as they debated standards of male conduct. For Wollstonecraft, one of the key manifestations of women’s oppression was their recruitment to a false, manipulative style of femininity. Rousseau and Burke were set against each other – by their contemporaries, and still by present-day scholars – in the authenticity stakes, the one depicted as a creature of artiﬁce and performance, the other as an avatar of personal sincerity. The culture of sensibility – which held them both in its thrall – was fundamentally about the question of false versus sincere sentiments, the Macaroni versus the Man of Feeling. Other chapters in this volume, notably those by Daniel White and Sarah Knott, explore further this important eighteenth-century story, as enlightened men and women grappled with changing ideals of sociality and selfhood.

Notes 1. P. Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 1660–1800, Harlow, 2001. 2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile. Quoted in Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800, Cambridge, 1982, p. 24. 3. Guardian 154, 7 Sept. 1713; in Guardian, ed. J. C. Stephens, Lexington, 1982, p. 502. [Edward Young,] Love of Fame, the Universal Passion. Satire VI. On Women, London, 1728, p. 145. Charlotte Lennox, The Sister: A Comedy, London, 1769, epilogue written by Dr Goldsmith. Mrs Montagu to Miss H. More, Bath, 1782; in William Roberts, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, 3rd edn, London, 1835, i, p. 269. 4. T. Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction, Stanford, 1986. Samuel Johnson, London: A Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal (1738), in A Collection of Poems, London, 1763, p. 195. Frances Burney, Evelina: Or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, 1768; eds E. A. Bloom and L. D. Bloom, Oxford, 1982, p. 309.

3.1 Advice and Enlightenment: Mary Wollstonecraft and Sex Education Vivien Jones

Truth is the only basis of virtue; and we cannot, without depraving our minds, endeavour to please a lover or husband, but in proportion as he pleases us. Mary Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria … for from the mutual desire [both sexes] have to each other, which nature has implanted in them to that end, that delight which they take in the act of copulation, does the whole race of mankind proceed … . Aristotle’s Complete Master-piece1 This essay is about Mary Wollstonecraft and sex education. An unpromising topic, perhaps, given the scarcity – and, on occasion, the notorious prudishness – of Wollstonecraft’s explicit comments on the subject. Writing from within the tradition of moral education which is committed to control over the passions, Wollstonecraft is often thought of as troubled, even disgusted, by the body and the burden of sexual difference – hence her ready appropriation of the Enlightenment discourse of masculinist reason. I want to rethink this assumption by examining Wollstonecraft’s occasional remarks on how knowledge of sex might be communicated, and by bringing her into relation with a rather different tradition of instructional writing: that of popular medical and sexual advice. Thinking about Wollstonecraft in this less familiar context can contribute to our still developing understanding of the complexities and contradictions of her feminism. It also raises wider questions about popular manifestations of Enlightenment thinking, and speciﬁcally about how we might deﬁne the role and status of popular advice literatures in relation to ‘Enlightenment’ discourses.2

I Of writers in English who might be described as ‘feminist’, it was Mary Wollstonecraft who ﬁrst put the question of female sexuality, indeed of female pleasure, at the heart of her feminist project.3 The ways in which she formulates the question vary considerably across her work as a whole, however, and some of 140

Mary Wollstonecraft and Sex Education 141

those formulations have proved problematic for modern feminists. My ﬁrst epigraph, from Wollstonecraft’s unﬁnished, posthumously-published novel, The Wrongs of Woman (1797), represents what we might think of as her most radical (or do we simply mean her most congenial?) position. The quotation comes from a passage in which Wollstonecraft’s protagonist, Maria, is writing to her daughter, justifying her decision to leave a brutal husband. She makes this personal decision part of a wider critique of a deployment of sexuality based in an inequality of desire: ‘Those who support a system of what I term false reﬁnement … will not allow a great part of love in the female, as well as male breast, to spring in some respects involuntarily. … To such observers I have nothing to say, any more than to the moralists, who insist that women ought to, and can love their husbands, because it is their duty’ (p. 144). Later, Maria writes to a rather different audience: to the civil court where her husband has brought an action of ‘criminal conversation’ (whereby the husband sued his wife’s lover for seduction and claimed damages for the loss of her ‘domestic services’).4 Refusing the passive role imposed by the seduction charge, Maria again asserts her right to sexual autonomy: ‘in the heart of misery, I met the man charged with seducing me. We became attached – I deemed, and shall ever deem, myself free’ (p. 180). The court, predictably enough, think differently, reasserting the ‘good old rules of conduct’ against ‘the fallacy of letting women plead their feelings’ (p. 181). Maria/Wollstonecraft’s justiﬁcation for women’s right to reciprocal pleasure, her uncompromising rejection of duty as sufﬁcient motivation within sexual relationships, is ﬁrmly based in a set of familiar Enlightenment vocabularies, assumptions, and arguments: desire as a human, rather than simply a male, characteristic (springing ‘involuntarily’ in ‘the female as well as the male breast’); the natural right of an individual to free themselves from brutality and enter into a new relationship of equality; the rejection of the ‘good old rules’ of institutionalized morality; the language of rational idealism (‘truth … virtue’; ‘endeavour’; ‘in proportion’). But Wollstonecraft’s formulations bring together traditions which, as far as deﬁnitions of gender and possibilities for feminism are concerned, are potentially at odds. Her stress on the ‘involuntary’ nature of desire invokes an empiricist biological materialism, some of the implications of which (identifying women as primarily reproductive creatures, for example) might sit uneasily with that other, more comfortably feminist, Enlightenment discourse of rational equality and control. It is this contradictory inheritance I shall be exploring in this essay. Here, I want simply to note that in this ﬁctional text, at least, Wollstonecraft gives voice to the claim that the ‘truth’ of mutual pleasure governs the relationship between sex and virtue; that a morally acceptable sexual practice depends precisely on the rejection of any gendered deﬁnition of virtue which subordinates (women’s) individual pleasure to a social morality based on duty. In Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), however, pleasure carries notoriously less weight, and duty – particularly the duty of motherhood – considerably more. In this polemical educational treatise, pleasure is deferred: ‘[v]irtue and pleasure are not, in fact, so nearly allied in this life as some eloquent writers have laboured to prove’.5 Unlike Wollstonecraft’s ﬁctional protagonist in Wrongs of

142 Sex and Sensibility

Woman, the single mother described in VRW ‘represses the ﬁrst faint dawning of a natural inclination, before it ripens into love, and in the bloom of life forgets her sex – forgets the pleasure of an awakening passion. … She no longer thinks of pleasing … and her brightest hopes are beyond the grave’ (p. 119). It is sublimatory statements like these which have worried modern feminists: in Cora Kaplan’s claim from the mid-1980s that Wollstonecraft ‘sets up heartbreaking conditions for women’s liberation – a little death, the death of desire, the death of female pleasure’, for example; and in Susan Gubar’s suggestion that what she calls ‘the paradoxical feminist misogyny that pervades her work’ stems in part from Wollstonecraft’s self-disgust at her own ‘slavish passions’, ‘over-valuation of love’, and ‘ﬁckle irrationality’.6 Kaplan’s astute diagnosis of socialist feminism’s puritanical inheritance is part of a wider anxiety about the relationship between modernist feminism and forms of Enlightenment humanism: a humanism which occludes not only female sexuality but also, of course, other categories of difference both within and beyond the ‘woman’ evoked in the title of Wollstonecraft’s text.7 Kaplan’s response also raises a characteristically postmodern question about what the relationship should be between feminism(s) and pleasure(s). Eager to use the humanist rationalist ideal as a means of escape from the sexually-differentiated regime of desire, as well as from the tyranny of unthinking domesticity and reproduction, Enlightenment feminisms typically reject, or ignore, the pleasures of the body so dear to late twentieth-century sensibilities. Within this egalitarian Enlightenment tradition, education provides a conceptual, if not always an actual, alternative to the inequalities of sexual dependency, and chastity or modesty are offered as rational choices. But in urging women to become more than simply ‘creatures of sensation’, to break out of the ‘gilt cage’ of mere physical beauty and sexual attraction, and to ‘discharge the important duties of life by the light of their own reason’ (VRW, pp. 130, 113, 131), such feminisms, through this downplaying of female sexual desire, can also appear to collude with the asexual ‘proper lady’ of ideal feminine respectability. This collusion can itself be seen in part in generic terms. VRW is part of the tradition of writings on female education within which proto-feminist claims for rational equality and intellectual independence are in constant tension with the pragmatic demands of a sexual division of labour and/or a belief that girls’ education must appropriately reﬂect inherent sexual differences. Not surprisingly, these educational writings are, in other words, a site on which the tension within Enlightenment discourses between rationalist arguments for gender equality and functionalist arguments for ‘natural’ difference is played out particularly clearly.8 And within this educational tradition, the downplaying of female sexuality takes various forms. Common to many of these texts is a mistrust of the kind of frivolous, fashionable education offered at commercially-motivated boarding-schools for young ladies, establishments run by ‘[a]dventurers of all kinds’, according to Clara Reeve writing in 1792, where ‘the attention is chieﬂy paid to external accomplishments’ and the students emerge ‘without that sweet modesty and delicacy of mind and manners, which are the surest guards of female virtue’.9 This repeated opposition between the luxury-driven ‘external accomplishments’

Mary Wollstonecraft and Sex Education 143

which equip young women for the marriage market, and the need to safeguard the ‘modesty’, ‘delicacy’, and ‘female virtue’ which will make them responsible wives and mothers skews many of the texts which advocate a properly serious alternative curriculum. Thus Hester Chapone lays out a rigorous programme of study in her inﬂuential Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773), but she baulks at the idea of ‘exchanging the graces of imagination for the severity and preciseness of a scholar’ which she fears studying classical languages might induce. And, she adds, ‘such objections are perhaps still stronger with regard to the abstruse sciences’.10 Whether it appears in the form of those ‘external accomplishments’ which are assumed to encourage desire, or of the ‘abstruse sciences’ which might give access to inappropriate knowledges, educational texts like these actively discourage interest in, or identiﬁcation with, the body. In their stress on difference, Reeve and Chapone, like Hannah More later, represent particularly clearly the continuities which exist between educational writing and domestic conduct literature.11 At the other end of the spectrum between difference and equality are the more unproblematically proto-feminist interventions of female educationalists like Mary Astell at the beginning of the century, or Catharine Macaulay, whose Letters on Education (1790) had such a profound inﬂuence on Wollstonecraft.12 But schemes for rational self-improvement mean that, here again, the sexualized body is subordinated, this time to an ideal of chastity. Astell’s Serious Proposal is for an all-female religious and educational community which will help women ‘expel that cloud of Ignorance, which Custom has involv’d us in’ and allow them to indulge that ‘desire to advance and perfect its Being’ which is ‘planted by GOD in all Rational Natures’. As a means to this advancement, it will also provide a refuge where ‘Heiresses and Persons of Fortune may be kept secure, from the rude attempts of designing Men’, since ‘[s]he who has opportunities of making an interest in Heaven, of obtaining the love and admiration of GOD and Angels, is too prodigal of her Time, and injurious to her Charms, to throw them away on vain insigniﬁcant men’.13 The immediate allegiances of and inﬂuences on Astell and Macaulay are obviously very different. Astell works within the tradition of Cartesian rationalism; she is a Stuart sympathizer writing in the face of the 1688 Revolution Settlement; she writes (probably) as a lesbian. Catharine Macaulay inherits principles derived from Locke and Fénelon which, by 1790, have been mediated through Rousseau and are pervasive in liberal educational theory; she is a republican historian; a French revolutionary sympathizer; and a woman whose personal sexual choices, notably her second marriage to a much younger man, had subjected her to cruel public attack.14 But in spite of these differences (including that simply of time), they recognizably participate in similar arguments and strategies when it comes to gender inequality: notably in their shared celebration of chaste independence and indifference to desire as the conditions and consequences of a rational education for women: I shall inform [my pupils] of the great utility of chastity and continence; that the one preserves the body in health and vigor, and the other, in purity and

144 Sex and Sensibility

independence of the mind, without which it is impossible to possess virtue or happiness. … I am sanguine enough to expect to turn out of my hands a careless, modest beauty, grave, manly, noble, full of strength and majesty; and carrying about her an aegis sufﬁciently powerful to defend her against the sharpest arrow that ever was shot from Cupid’s bow.15 Though the image of heroic, ‘manly’ femininity to which it attaches is rather different, Macaulay’s advocation of ‘chastity and continence’ echoes Wetenhall Wilkes’s classic conduct-book deﬁnition of chastity in terms of ‘abstinence and continence’. And Wilkes’s deﬁnition is in turn closely based on Richard Allestree’s much-reprinted The Ladies Calling, ﬁrst published in 1673, in which the heroism of female modesty is celebrated in terms surprisingly similar to Macaulay’s: ‘her very looks should guard her, and discourage the most impudent assailant’.16 Even in its secularized, republican form in Catharine Macaulay, the disciplinary language of Christian moral heroism (which is also the language of romance narrative) pervades the literature of female education, as it does the more restrictive forms of conduct literature from which educational writings are often barely distinguishable. There is a challenge here for a feminist literary and historical analysis which has long been concerned to reject the legacy of the proper lady of advice literature – whether that involves exposing or denying the existence or inﬂuence of that ideal. 17 To what extent does this literature of self-management describe and invoke forms of independent subjectivity and critique which might be thought of as (potentially positive?) manifestations of the Enlightenment project – whether or not we would want also to describe them as ‘feminist’? The Marchioness de Lambert, for example, in her Advice of a Mother to her Daughter, is explicit about the need to establish an independent critical space: ‘Secure yourself a retreat and place of refuge in your own breast; you can always return thither, and be sure to ﬁnd yourself again. When the world is less necessary to you, it will have less power over you’.18 Vindication of the Rights of Woman is part of this instructional tradition, with all its ambivalences and overlaps. Hence Wollstonecraft’s concern to establish clear distinctions between various inﬂuential writers on the education of women: from Rousseau, to James Fordyce and John Gregory, to Catharine Macaulay and Mme de Genlis. Hence, also, her concern to distinguish not between repressive modesty and active desire, as modern feminism might hope, but between ‘mistaken modesty’ and its rational equivalent.19 I want to suggest that, in doing so, Wollstonecraft brings the tradition of moral advice writing into conjunction with the rather different knowledges and forms of selfmanagement advocated in popular medical advice books and, even, in books of sexual instruction. It’s in this strategy that we ﬁnd evidence to support my opening claim for Wollstonecraft’s originality in making female pleasure and desire central to feminism.

Mary Wollstonecraft and Sex Education 145

II I take my cue here from Richard Polwhele’s anti-revolutionary, and certainly anti-Enlightenment poem The Unsex’d Females (1798), the most well-known example of a conservative rhetoric which identiﬁed women sympathetic to the French revolution with sexual promiscuity, and, crucially, with access to forbidden knowledges. The particularity of Polwhele’s attack on Wollstonecraft draws attention to precisely that innovative quality in her views on sexuality which I want to explore. In one of several virulent footnotes, Polwhele pillories Wollstonecraft for encouraging open discussion of sexuality. In a book ‘designed for the use of young ladies’, he claims: Miss Wollstonecraft does not blush to say, … that, ‘in order to lay the axe at the root of corruption, it would be proper to familiarize the sexes to an unreserved discussion of those topics, which are generally avoided in conversation from a principle of false delicacy; and that it would be right to speak of the organs of generation as freely as we mention our eyes or our hands.’ To such language our botanizing girls are doubtless familiarized: and, they are in a fair way of becoming worthy disciples of Miss W. If they do not take heed to their ways, they will soon exchange the blush of modesty for the bronze of independence.20 I’ll come back to the ‘botanizing girls’. Polwhele’s footnote appears to refer to Wollstonecraft’s Elements of Morality, for the Use of Children, ﬁrst published in 1790 during her time working for Joseph Johnson as a translator and reviewer. A collection of moral tales typical of Wollstonecraft’s early educational writings for children, the Elements of Morality is a loose translation of Moralisches Elementarbuch (1782) by Christian Gotthilf Salzmann (who himself later translated VRW, as well as Godwin’s Memoirs of Wollstonecraft, into German).21 The passage that so offends Polwhele, and which he misquotes, comes from the book’s ‘Introductory Address to Parents’, a statement of educational principles added by Wollstonecraft herself: I would willingly have said something of chastity and impurity; for impurity is now spread so far, that even children are infected; and by it the seeds of every virtue, as well as the germe of their posterity, which the Creator has implanted in them for wise purposes, are weakened or destroyed. I am thoroughly persuaded that the most efﬁcacious method to root out this dreadful evil, which poisons the source of human happiness, would be to speak to children of the organs of generation as freely as we speak of the other parts of the body, and explain to them the noble use which they were designed for, and how they may be injured.22 It may be, however, given his suggestion that the book he cites is aimed particularly at young ladies, that Polwhele actually intends to refer us to VRW, and a

146 Sex and Sensibility

passage in which Wollstonecraft, writing now unequivocally in her own voice, returns to the subject of sexual knowledge: The ridiculous falsities which are told to children, from mistaken notions of modesty, tend very early to inﬂame their imaginations and set their little minds to work, respecting subjects, which nature never intended they should think of till the body arrived at some degree of maturity; then the passions naturally begin to take place of the senses, as instruments to unfold the understanding, and form the moral character. And she continues in a footnote: Children very early see cats with their kittens, birds with their young ones, etc. Why then are they not to be told that their mothers carry and nourish them in the same way? As there would then be no appearance of mystery they would never think of the subject more. Truth may always be told to children, if it be told gravely; but it is the immodesty of affected modesty, that does all the mischief; and this smoke heats the imagination by vainly endeavouring to obscure certain objects. (VRW, pp. 196–7) Polwhele’s violent response to what might seem comparatively insigniﬁcant moments in Wollstonecraft prompts us to ask questions about the precise role of sex education within the agenda of Enlightenment feminism, and alerts us to a signiﬁcant, but largely overlooked, aspect of Wollstonecraft’s complex and contradictory take on sexual knowledge, desire, and pleasure. For Polwhele, clearly, Wollstonecraft’s appeals for openness and ‘truth’ are representative of a dangerous radicalism, the precise nature of which is easily misunderstood by modern readers because of the anti-masturbation argument which surrounds them.23 But our retrospective knowledge of the horrendous disciplinary practices visited on women in the nineteenth century to prevent masturbation should not be allowed to obscure the signiﬁcance of Wollstonecraft’s suggestion that children should be told ‘the truth’. Her belief in the efﬁcacy of a language of sexual instruction based on rational ideals of openness and transparency operates here in opposition to what she calls ‘bodily wit’ (p. 198), a much more dangerously ambiguous mode of communication which distorts the relationship between body and mind. The principle of open response to children’s questions is laid down by Locke, who argued that: ‘Curiosity should be as carefully cherished in Children, as other Appetites suppressed’; and that, in response to the child’s question ‘What is it for? … The use of the thing should be told, and the way explained, how it serves such a Purpose, as far as their Capacities can comprehend it.’24 Wollstonecraft in these comments extends Locke’s cherishing of curiosity and his commonsense functionalism to questions about sex. It is a move which has no precedent in Locke himself, nor, as far as I am aware, in later Lockean educational treatises, and

Mary Wollstonecraft and Sex Education 147

certainly not in any texts on women’s education, all of which are silent or negative on the subject.25 The views of James Nelson, in his Essay on the Government of Children (1753) are more typical – and, were it not for her important footnote, closer to Wollstonecraft’s position on ‘personal reserve’ (VRW, pp. 197–9): … besides the nicest Care with regard to Words, Parents … should be greatly circumspect in their Actions. … a Mother should by no means appear too much undressed in the Presence of her Son; or a Father in that of his Daughter; for these and many other Things, though in themselves innocent, are not allowable … … nor should [boys and girls] ever be exposed naked to one another, or the least wanton Curiosity be permitted: the Eyes and Ears convey Corruption to the Mind; and we cannot begin too soon to shut up every Avenue to Vice.26 The advice in Lockean and Rousseauvian educational theory to free babies’ and children’s bodies from restrictive clothing and imprisonment indoors comes into conﬂict here with new standards of privacy which advocate a much more restrictive attitude to bodily functions. Wollstonecraft’s support for openness and information about reproduction brings the Lockean educational tradition, the straightforward response to the question ‘What is it for?’, into conjunction with the literature of medical and sexual advice. Print culture soon began to supplement oral transmission, and it was from texts like Aristotle’s Complete Master-piece that most of the reading public throughout the eighteenth, and well into the nineteenth, century would have obtained their sexual information, including detailed descriptions of female and male genitalia and reproductive organs. In their invaluable survey of sex education literature from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century, Roy Porter and Lesley Hall suggest that ‘[i]t was decent, for example, to give young folks a copy of Aristotle’s Master-piece as an engagement present’.27 They don’t, however, speculate in any more detail about the precise readerships for such texts; about how women, particularly, might have read them; or about how we might understand their status in relation to the moral advice literature more usually cited as instrumental in the formation of feminine subjectivity. The ofﬁcial answer to ‘What is it for?’ in Aristotle’s Master-piece is, of course, ‘for reproduction’; and various versions of the text include advice on how best to ensure conception, how to go about conceiving male or female children, and so on. But, as Tim Hitchcock has suggested, such texts could also be read negatively, as contraceptive advice – or, rather differently, as pornography.28 The 1797 edition of Aristotle’s Master-piece is certainly aware of this last possibility, as it introduces the section describing female genitalia: ‘If it were not for public beneﬁt, especially of the practitioners and professors of the art of midwifery, I would forbear to treat of the secrets of nature, because they may be turned by some lacivious [sic] and lewd persons into ridicule; but they being absolutely necessary to be known, in order to public good, I will not omit them’.29 There’s some disingenuousness here perhaps, but the terms of the self-justiﬁcation are

148 Sex and Sensibility

nevertheless worth noting: a commitment to ‘public good’ claims precedence over the threat of ridicule. Considering the way in which, like most other popular medical advice texts in the period, Aristotle’s Master-piece combines snippets of fairly up-to-date anatomical and physiological knowledge with folkbelief, and offers some advice that could be counter-productive, if not downright dangerous, we might feel that the ‘public good’ to be derived from such a heterogeneous mixture is distinctly limited. But what’s important here is the claim itself: for knowledge as a ‘public good’; for ‘enlightenment’ as popular practice.30 Wollstonecraft shares that essential commitment, including, at times, the utilitarian terms in which the dissemination of knowledge is often justiﬁed. Typically, for example, she argues in VRW that: In public schools women, to guard against the errors of ignorance, should be taught the elements of anatomy and medicine, not only to enable them to take proper care of their own health, but to make them rational nurses of their infants, parents, and husbands; for the bills of mortality are swelled by the blunders of self-willed old women, who give nostrums of their own without knowing anything of the human frame. (VRW, p. 249) But, as that last comment about ‘self-willed old women’ makes clear, she is also concerned with the forms in which knowledge is conveyed; with, as Tim Hitchcock puts it, ‘the relationship, and indeed the non-relationship, between these two literatures [of popular instruction and elite medical knowledge]’.31 This is, after all, also at the heart of the relationship between knowledge and gender as it obtained at the time Wollstonecraft wrote, and she is implicitly just as much concerned with the constructions of femininity in medical advice literature as she is with those in books of moral advice. Her tentative suggestion that the two might be brought together as part of the same project of intellectual and moral improvement, her stress on transparency, on the need for rational, functional explanations, can be seen as a kind of practical response to that concern. As I have argued elsewhere, we can safely assume that Wollstonecraft’s reading in medical literature was quite extensive.32 Her careful choice of Mrs Blenkensop, midwife at the Westminster New Lying-in Hospital, to attend what turned out to be the fatal birth of the future Mary Shelley, for example, can certainly be read as a political decision based on her reading of obstetric and midwifery texts. Mrs Blenkensop represents an informed and experienced middle way between, on the one hand, the increasingly popular male practitioners for whom women were too often simply the objects on which they displayed their skill, and, on the other, the pathologizing and sentimentalizing of nature’s ‘darling object, woman’ in some popular midwifery texts.33 Medical and sexual advice manuals (including some versions of Aristotle’s Master-piece) typically contain extensive coverage of ‘the several Maladies incident to the Womb’.34 Again, styles and levels of knowledge vary hugely and, as in moral conduct literature, plagiarism

Mary Wollstonecraft and Sex Education 149

and recycling of material are endemic. A text like John Grigg’s Advice to the Female Sex in General, published in 1789, is comparatively well-informed and straightforward in its explanation of physical conditions and complaints, but texts addressed explicitly to women very often represent the female body as both excessively delicate and physiologically aberrant. The Ladies Dispensatory: or, Every Woman her own Physician, ﬁrst published in 1740 but republished many times, and in many forms, throughout the century, is typical: The delicate Texture of a Woman’s Constitution, as on the one Hand it renders her the most amiable Object in the Universe, so on the other it subjects her to an inﬁnite Number of Maladies, to which Man is an utter Stranger. … That lax and pliant Habit, capable of being dilated and contracted on every Occasion, must necessarily want that Degree of Heat and Firmness which is the Characteristick of Man. … this periodical Secretion, as it is unlike any Thing known in other Animals; so it occasions various Symptoms and Cases that deserve the utmost and nicest Regard of Physicians, as they resemble no other Diseases that fall under their Inspection.35 This is the language of pathologized sensibility, which makes femininity and female sexuality sites of anxious self-obsession in precisely the way Wollstonecraft so effectively exposes in VRW: ‘By ﬁts and starts [women] are warm in many pursuits; yet this warmth, never concentrated into perseverance, soon exhausts itself; exhaled by its own heat, or meeting with some other ﬂeeting passion, to which reason has never given any speciﬁc gravity, neutrality ensues’ (p. 130). ‘Fits and starts’; ‘never concentrated’; ‘soon exhausts itself’: Wollstonecraft’s scathing analysis makes clear the ways in which the ‘pliant’ mechanisms offered as physiological truths in The Ladies Dispensatory transfer to women’s psychic economy. 36 It is this internalized pathology which for Wollstonecraft is responsible for the false modesty, the ‘false reﬁnement’, which is unable to discuss sex and the body in any straightforward way. Women’s ‘overstretched sensibility naturally relaxes the other powers of the mind’ (p. 130, my italics): the capacity for feeling is reduced to physicality, instead of being controlled and improved by reason. Compared with texts like The Ladies Dispensatory, Wollstonecraft’s advocation of brisk openness about sexual matters, and her ungendered view that ‘Women as well as men ought to have the common appetites and passions of their nature, they are only brutal when unchecked by reason’ (VRW, p. 200), look much closer to the commonsense functionalism of Aristotle’s Master-piece, with its celebration of ‘the mutual desire [the sexes] have to each other, which nature has implanted in them to that end’, and of the consequent ‘delight which they take in the act of copulation’. 37 (This stress on ‘delight’ reminds us again that Aristotle’s Master-piece can also be seen as part of a pornographic tradition. Unlike pornography, however, and like Wollstonecraft, Aristotle’s Master-piece retains a consistent concern with reproductive rather than recreational, experimental, or self-consciously subversive sex. But the connection is an important

150 Sex and Sensibility

reminder of those more deﬁantly materialist, libertine discourses of enlightenment sexuality, of which Wollstonecraft was well aware. These are discourses which Wollstonecraft ofﬁcially rejects, but which constantly trouble and shape her discussions of sexuality in VRW. The relationship of this other tradition to ‘feminism’ (both now and during the enlightenment period) is an important and deeply-contested issue, which I don’t have space to develop in this essay, but which a full contextualization of Wollstonecraft’s views on sexuality would have to address.38) Apart from this rather mixed bag of self-help medical manuals, sex education (Polwhele would no doubt have said pornography) for many women was mainly available, in printed form at least, through the study of botany. This is certainly the connection that Polwhele makes in the footnote to The Unsex’d Females with which I began this section. His footnote is appended to the following passage in his poem, in which female corruption is epitomized by ‘girls’, who: With bliss botanic as their bosoms heave, Still pluck forbidden fruit, with mother Eve, For puberty in sighing ﬂorets pant, Or point the prostitution of a plant; Dissect its organ of unhallow’d lust, And fondly gaze the titillating dust …39 The panting details of Polwhele’s pruriently sexualized representation of children say more about him than they do about botany. But this is only one of the most extreme of the conservative interventions in the late eighteenth-century controversy, well documented by Alan Bewell and particularly by Ann Shteir, in which the language and models of Linnaean botany were attacked as dangerously radical, both politically and sexually.40 The most offensive texts were Erasmus Darwin’s poems Loves of the Plants (1789) and The Botanic Garden (1791), which explained the sexual system of plant categorization in anthropomorphized and eroticized terms, and for which Fuseli designed the frontispiece. As Alan Bewell puts it, ‘Built into the sophisticated formalism and internationalism of the poem is the extraordinarily radical argument that there are as many kinds of sexual arrangements and modes of courtship as there are species.’41 Fears about ‘botanizing girls’ concentrated more narrowly on the knowledge of human sexuality offered analogously through the study of stamens and pistils, and persuaded Priscilla Wakeﬁeld, for example, in her Introduction to Botany (1796), to use the appropriately-named William Withering’s desexualized language, in which stamens and pistils are called ‘chives’ and ‘pointals’.42 In VRW, published the year after The Botanic Garden, Wollstonecraft roundly attacks the idea that such study is inappropriate: What a gross idea of modesty had the writer of the following remark! ‘The lady who asked the question whether women may be instructed in the modern system of botany consistently with female delicacy? was accused of

Mary Wollstonecraft and Sex Education 151

ridiculous prudery; nevertheless, if she had proposed the question to me, I should certainly have answered – they cannot.’ Thus is the fair book of knowledge to be shut with an everlasting seal! (VRW, pp. 192–3)43 Wollstonecraft’s position in relation to the botany controversy is the one we would expect. Knowledge is always preferable to ignorance or obfuscation, and she is perfectly prepared to let women call a stamen a stamen. The very existence of the controversy makes clear how much more radical was her suggestion that human reproductive organs and processes be known and named in the same way: a knowledge prompted rather than veiled by observation of the plant and animal worlds (‘cats with their kittens, birds with their young ones, etc.’). In his essay on the radical meanings of botany, Alan Bewell points out the way in which the language of botany is incorporated into VRW’s argument for education as the ‘true soil in which womanhood should be nurtured’; without education, Wollstonecraft argues, women are reduced to ‘barren blooming’.44 But he perhaps underestimates the physicality which also clings to that language. Given the pervasiveness of horticultural metaphors throughout the literature of conduct and female improvement, Wollstonecraft’s use of botanizing vocabulary to describe education is perhaps less immediately striking than the metaphorical connection between forms of physical and spiritual self-perpetuation made in the following claim: ‘The stamen of immortality, if I may be allowed the phrase, is the perfectibility of human reason’ (VRW, p. 122). It is absolutely symptomatic of Wollstonecraft’s take on sexuality that the sexualized botanical image should present itself (‘if I may be allowed the phrase’) at this moment, reminding rational perfectibility of its rootedness in the material even at the point of sublimation. It also, interestingly, recalls the offending passage in the ‘Introductory Address’ to Elements of Morality, which urges sex education as a way of reminding children of ‘the germe of their posterity, which the Creator has implanted in them for wise purposes’ (p. 9). Wollstonecraft never denies the naturalness of sexuality and desire. She derides John Gregory for advising his daughters to conceal any wish to get married: ‘as if it were indelicate to have the common appetites of nature’; these common appetites ‘are only brutal when unchecked by reason’ (VRW, pp. 100, 200). This is the principle on which her (albeit tentatively) suggested programme of sex education is based: far from being inimical to a programme of rational improvement, sexuality is made crucial to its proper fulﬁlment. In extending the moral rationalist programme of female education to include the materialist, empiricist knowledges associated with sex and medical manuals, Wollstonecraft bridges a gendered generic gap. She also makes evident the continuities between these popular literatures of self-improvement and the larger Enlightenment project of rational progress. At those moments where she is most explicit about how sexual knowledge should be communicated, it is presented as a test case in the choice between enlightened transparency and the willed ignorance of ‘false delicacy’ which is so disastrous not only for women, but for human perfectibility itself.

152 Sex and Sensibility

In Wrongs of Woman, Wollstonecraft’s feminist programme of education about sex continues. Often thought of as the sequel, in ﬁctional form, to VRW, Wrongs of Woman demonstrates the consequences of a gendered sexuality in which ignorance and false delicacy attract a concomitant brutality. ‘Personal intimacy without affection, seemed, to me the most degrading, as well as the most painful state in which a woman of any taste … could be placed’: Wollstonecraft’s daringly explicit account of the disgust and abuse experienced by Maria in her marriage to Venables becomes an argument not for dutiful chastity, but for the right to enjoy the desires ‘implanted … for wise purposes’.45 And in Wrongs of Woman she even gets round to the ‘delight’ which is so unproblematically celebrated in Aristotle’s Master-piece. Within the novel form and, it must be said, in the light of her relationship with Godwin, Wollstonecraft makes active female desire into a rational feminist virtue: ‘Yes; eagerly as I wish you to possess true rectitude of mind, and purity of affection, I must insist that a heartless conduct is the contrary of virtuous. Truth is the only basis of virtue; and we cannot, without depraving our minds, endeavour to please a lover or husband, but in proportion as he pleases us’ (p. 145). Her position here, in her last work, is continuous with the programme of enlightened self-management developed in her earlier educational writing.

III Across her writings, Wollstonecraft repeatedly confronts the difference made by sexual difference to Enlightenment analyses of the relationship between reason, will, and desire. Within the gender system of ‘false reﬁnement’ the imperative of desire is simply denied: it ‘will not allow a great part of love … to spring in some respects involuntarily’ (WW, p. 144). Though she is more usually associated with the reappropriation of reason for women, Wollstonecraft’s humanist project also recuperates desire, and struggles to bring the two back into (re)productive, and pleasurable, relation (‘we … endeavour to please a lover or husband, but in proportion as he pleases us’). For modern feminists, the explicit concern with pleasure here has meant that these moments in Wrongs of Woman are the most congenial of Wollstonecraft’s pronouncements on female sexuality – though what has been read as the repressive voice of reason elsewhere in Wollstonecraft still lurks in the calculated precision suggested by that phrase ‘in proportion’. But in the ten or more years since feminist critics deﬁned their different, postmodern, agenda by focusing on Wollstonecraft’s, and Enlightenment feminism’s, resistance to the possibilities of pleasure, the context within which feminists address the pleasures and dangers of sexual identity has signiﬁcantly shifted. The consequences of the postmodern corrective, of the moment of ‘bodies and pleasures’, have been mixed, to say the least.46 At a moment when, encouraged by the prurient liberalism of a deregulated media, young women use ‘post-feminist’ formulations about owning their own sexuality in order to conﬁdently claim that they are not being exploited when they make fast money as lap dancers, or sex workers, Wollstonecraft’s Enlightenment formulations, by contrast, take on new

Mary Wollstonecraft and Sex Education 153

resonance: ‘Women as well as men ought to have the common appetites of their nature, they are only brutal when unchecked by reason: but the obligation to check them is the duty of mankind, not a sexual duty’ (VRW, p. 200).

Notes 1. Mary Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria (1797), The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler with Emma Rees-Mogg, 7 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1989), 1: 145 (hereafter WW); Aristotle’s Complete Master-piece, in two parts; Displaying the Secrets of Nature in the Generation of Man (London: printed for the booksellers, 1797), ‘Introduction’, fol. A2r (hereafter, MasterPiece). 2. See Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 2000), particularly chaps. 4, ‘Print Culture’, and 15, ‘Education: A Panacea’; and cf. Mary Catherine Moran’s discussion of John Gregory in Section I of this volume. 3. I’m using ‘feminist’ here as a label for those writers explicitly committed to a critique of and improvement in the position of women – as opposed, for example, to those texts where what we might think of as ‘feminist’ characteristics or potential might be identiﬁed, but where that remains unacknowledged by the polemical position or generic identity of the texts themselves eg. ‘scandalous memoirs’ or some libertine writings. 4. See Elaine Jordan, ‘Criminal Conversation: on Mary Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman’, Women’s Writing 4:2 (1997), 221–34; ‘deployment of sexuality’ is of course Foucault’s term. 5. Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, 5: 142, my emphasis (hereafter VRW). 6. Cora Kaplan, ‘Wild Nights: Pleasure/Sexuality/Feminism’ in Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1986), p. 39; Susan Gubar, ‘Feminist Misogyny: Mary Wollstonecraft and the paradox of “it takes one to know one”’, Feminist Studies 20:3 (1994), 453–73 (pp. 459–60). See also Cora Kaplan, ‘Pandora’s Box: Subjectivity, Class and Sexuality in Socialist Feminist Criticism’, Sea Changes, pp. 147–76; Mary Poovey, ‘Man’s Discourse, Woman’s Heart: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Two Vindications’ in The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Cf. Barbara Taylor, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and the Wild Wish of Early Feminism’, History Workshop Journal 33 (1992), 197–219 for the view that ‘it is in fact within the domain of sexual love itself that the wish [to confound, confuse the distinction between the sexes] is formulated’ (p. 198). 7. For an attack on Enlightenment blindness to the claims of cultural difference within Wollstonecraft’s feminism, see particularly Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). 8. Cf. Siep Stuurman, ‘The Deconstruction of Gender: Seventeenth-Century Feminism and Modern Equality’, in Section VI of this volume. 9. Clara Reeve, Plans of Education: with Remarks on the Systems of Other Writers (London: Hookham and Carpenter, 1792), p. 135 in Vivien Jones (ed.), Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 116–17. 10. Hester Chapone, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (London: H. Hughs for J. Walter, 1773), 2 vols, II, 121–2, Jones, Women, pp. 105–6. Cf., for example, ‘there is a modesty with regard to science, which belongs to their sex’, François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon, Treatise on the Education of Daughters (1688; ﬁrst English trans. 1707), trans. T. F. Dibdin (Cheltenham and London, 1805), p. 126.

154 Sex and Sensibility 11. Cf. Kathryn Sutherland, ‘Writings on Conduct and Education: Arguments for Female Improvement’ in Vivien Jones (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain, 1700–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 25–45. On the similarities and differences between Wollstonecraft and More, see Harriet Guest, ‘The Dream of a Common Language: The Strictures on Femininity of Hannah More and Mary Wollstonecraft’, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 271–89. 12. See VRW, pp. 174–5, and Wollstonecraft’s review of Letters on Education for the Analytical, Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, 7: 309–22. 13. Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies Parts I & II, ed. Patricia Springborg (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1997), pp. 20, 8, 39, 12. 14. On Astell, see, for example, Ruth Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell: An Early English Feminist (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), Hilda Smith, Reason’s Disciples (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1982); on Macaulay, see Bridget Hill, The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 15. Catharine Macaulay, Letters on Education: With Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects (London: C. Dilly, 1790), pp. 220–1. 16. Wetenhall Wilkes, A Letter of Genteel and Moral Advice to a Young Lady (1740; 8th edn. 1766) in Jones, Women, p. 30; Richard Allestree, The Ladies Calling (1673) in The Works of the Learned and Pious Author of the Whole Duty of Man (Oxford and London: Roger Norton for Edward Pawlett, 1695), p. 8. 17. The classic texts on the proper lady ideal are Poovey, Proper Lady and Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). For challenges to the hegemony of the proper lady, see Vivien Jones, ‘The Seductions of Conduct: Pleasure and Conduct Literature’ in Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Roberts (eds), Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 108–32; Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History’, The Historical Journal 36:2 (1993), 383–414. 18. Marchioness [Anne-Thérèse] de Lambert, Advice of a Mother to her Daughter (1790; ﬁrst English trans. 1727) in Vivien Jones (ed.), The Young Lady’s Pocket Library, or Parental Monitor (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995), p. 162. 19. For a full discussion of Wollstonecraft’s relationship with instructional writing see Vivien Jones, ‘Wollstonecraft and the Literature of Advice and Instruction’ in Claudia L. Johnson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 119–40. See also Lisa Plummer Crafton, ‘“Insipid decency”: Modesty and Female Sexuality in Wollstonecraft’, European Romantic Review 11:3 (2000), 277–99. 20. Richard Polwhele, The Unsex’d Females: a Poem (London: Cadell and Davies, 1798), p. 9n., and in Jones, Women, pp. 189–90. 21. The revised 1791 edition had illustrations by Blake. See Mary Wollstonecraft, Elements of Morality, for the Use of Children; with an introductory address to parents (hereafter, Elements), Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, 2: 2; see also Virginia Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 22. 22. Elements, p. 9. 23. The repressive hysteria about masturbation which would reach its climax in the nineteenth century was already well established in the eighteenth. See: ‘Masturbation in the Enlightenment: Knowledge and Anxiety’, chap. 4 of Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650–1950 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 91–105; Tim Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 1700–1800 (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 54–7.

Mary Wollstonecraft and Sex Education 155 24. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), ed. John W. and Jean S. Yolton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 167, 185. 25. To this extent, Porter and Hall’s claim that ‘The desirability of open sexual discussion was often stressed’ is unconvincing, especially since they quote Polwhele’s misquotation of Wollstonecraft by way of illustration. (Porter and Hall, p. 21.) 26. James Nelson, apothecary, An Essay on the Government of Children, under three general heads: viz. health, manners and education (London: Dodsley, 1753), pp. 199–200. Cf. Wollstonecraft’s anxieties about the ‘nasty and immodest habits’ which girls develop in boarding schools (VRW, p. 234). 27. Porter and Hall, pp. 5–6. For a detailed discussion of Aristotle’s Master-piece, see ch. 2, pp. 33–64; see also Hitchcock, pp. 49–51. 28. Hitchcock, pp. 49–52. 29. Master-piece, p. 34. 30. There are interesting parallels here with current debates about the effects of internet access to medical knowledge. 31. Hitchcock, p. 54. 32. See Vivien Jones, ‘The Death of Mary Wollstonecraft’, British Journal for EighteenthCentury Studies 20:2 (1997), 187–205. 33. ‘darling object’: Martha Mears, The Pupil of Nature; or Candid Advice to the Fair Sex (London: printed for the authoress, 1797), p. 5. Inﬂuenced by Rousseaurian ideas, Mears’s book was an interestingly ‘modernized’ version of earlier descriptions of women in terms of delicate sensibility. 34. See, for example, the ‘Contents’ of the 1782 edition, Porter and Hall, p. 60. 35. The Ladies Dispensatory: or, Every Woman her own Physician (1740) in Jones, Women, p. 83. 36. On the relationship between physiological theory and theories of sensibility, see for example, John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge University Press, 1993). 37. Master-piece, ‘Introduction’, fol. A2r. 38. On pornography and Enlightenment, see Lynn Hunt (ed.), The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800 (New York: Zone Books, 1993), particularly Margaret C. Jacob, ‘The Materialist World of Pornography’, and Kathryn Norberg, ‘The Libertine Whore: Prostitution in French Pornography from Margot to Juliette’. For an interesting study of the self-conscious radicalism of Wollstonecraft’s own sexual and domestic arrangements, see Gary Kelly ‘(Female) Philosophy in the Bedroom: Mary Wollstonecraft and Female Sexuality’, Women’s Writing 4:2 (1997), 143–54. 39. Polwhele (1798), pp. 8–9. 40. See Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Alan Bewell, ‘“Jacobin Plants”: Botany as Social Theory in the 1790s’, The Wordsworth Circle 20:3 (1989), 132–9. 41. Bewell, p. 135. 42. On Withering’s desexualized translations of Linnaeus, and Wakeﬁeld’s adoption of his terms, see Shteir, pp. 21–4, 85. Wakeﬁeld is another problematic example of a female educationalist committed to principles of what Wollstonecraft would call ‘false modesty’. 43. The reference is to John Berkenhout, A Volume of Letters to his Son at the University (1790). 44. Bewell, p. 138; VRW, p. 73. 45. WW, pp. 139–40; Elements p. 9. 46. ‘bodies and pleasures’, Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 157.

3.2 Tears and the Man Philip Carter

First, a few famous tears. In February 1790 Edmund Burke was busy drafting what became his celebrated critique of the French revolution. Before publication he showed his friend Sir Philip Francis a passage in which he described the revolutionaries’ ejection of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette from Versailles in October of the previous year. The passage, as is well known, was a provocative play on the suffering of the queen: that ‘delightful vision, glittering like the morning star’ who had ﬂed ‘almost naked’ from an act of barbarity which threatened the ageold concept of male chivalry, central to Burke’s deﬁnition of civilized gender and social relations.1 On publication a number of Burke’s political critics, notably Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, expressed their hostility at his account. But so, in these early stages, did Francis who advised Burke to scrap a section which he feared would work against its author. While broadly sympathetic to Burke’s interpretation, Francis remained sceptical as to the sincerity of his portrait of Marie Antoinette. The queen, he reminded Burke, had not exactly been a paragon of ancien régime virtue. Yet here was a defence referring not to her misunderstood morality but her all too apparent gallantry and beauty. For Francis, this was not enough; all Burke said of the queen’s plight was, he claimed, ‘pure foppery’.2 On receiving the review Burke fell into a confused and upset state. Later that evening he replied to Francis, thanking him for his candour before turning to the main issue, his friend’s attack on what Burke called the ‘moral Sentiments of his piece.’ Burke’s response was to assert the sincerity of his description of the queen. After speaking of ‘my own feeling’ for Marie Antoinette and of the ‘natural sympathies of my own Breast’, he concluded by dismissing the accusation of foppery. Francis was wrong to think that his sympathy was artiﬁcial or unmanly, and to support the argument Burke recalled his speciﬁc physical response to her suffering. ‘The abominable Scene of 1789’ had, he claimed, ‘drawn Tears from me and wetted my paper. These tears, moreover, came again ‘as often as I looked at the description’ and would, he believed, continue to be shed, by himself and (after his and Francis’s death) for ‘as long as Men with their Natural feelings exist.’3 Burke’s account of his uncontrollable tears ﬁts readily with a popular perception of late eighteenth-century social performance. Half a century ago, T. H. White 156

Tears and the Man 157

included a chapter on weeping as one in a series of bizarre occurrences in this supposed Age of Scandal. Since then a number of cultural histories have subjected tears to more rigorous (if less entertaining) investigation, by which it has become a prominent element in the rich historiography detailing a mid to late-century ‘culture of sensibility’.4 From White onwards, it has been a feature of this investigation to emphasize that tears born of sentimental culture were as much a male as a female practice. Indeed, who could deny this when that archetypal sentimental male, Harley – hero of Henry Mackenzie’s novel, The Man of Feeling (1771) – weeps on 47 occasions in just 135 pages? As Claudia L. Johnson suggests, Burke’s was an age when self-styled ‘sensitive men’ frequently ‘shed tears (gushes, wellings, droplets) over “interesting objects” ranging from blasted trees to crippled dogs to virgins in distress.’5 But what do late twentieth-century commentators make of those who gushed, welled and dropped? The answer, it would seem, is not much. Contemporary evaluations of sentimental manhood repeatedly characterize the weeping man as in some way inferior to his forebears or successors, whether he be feminized, effeminized or otherwise rendered non-male. In Janet Todd’s opinion it was through tears that the archetypal man of feeling substituted ‘masculine signs of honour’ for the ‘feminine posture of grief’, and so ‘avoided manly power and assumed womanly qualities of tenderness and susceptibility.’ For Kevin Sharpe and Stephen Zwicker the ‘sentimental hero’ existed as man in nothing but physique, an ‘almost hermaphrodite composite of masculine form and feminine sensibility’, while Mary Chapman and Glen Hendler’s demonstration of ‘the importance of masculine sentimentality in American cultural history’, still identiﬁes his English predecessor as ‘a male body feminized by affect, a sort of emotional cross-dresser … motivated by a logic of affective androgyny.’6 Others, it should be acknowledged, are more accommodating. Yet, even where the ﬂexibility of gender is more readily, and rightly, appreciated, the man of feeling’s masculine status remains questionable. According to Harriet Guest, for example, the period witnessed the development of ‘an imaginary space’ as domestic and public sites of ‘philanthropy, benevolence and sympathy’ grew together, with the result that ‘men and women of feeling became barely distinguishable, united in their ambivalent relation to the commercial culture that produced them.’7 The aim of this essay is to look again at the late eighteenth-century relationship of masculinity and sensibility, via the shedding of tears, in order to demonstrate its validity and utility as identiﬁed by contemporary social reformers. In doing so, the focus is less on that popular sentimental touchstone, Mackenzie’s Harley, than a series of Enlightenment opinion formers – intellectual and popular – who identiﬁed a welcome synthesis between the masculine and sentimental in social documentary and advice literature, and who estimated its effect in correspondence and reportage. However, to speak of co-existence is not to deny an often tense relationship between being manly and possessed of feeling. These tensions often came less from outright detractors, shocked at the unnaturalness or unmanliness of men in tears, than from sympathetic advocates, like Philip Francis, and indeed Mary Wollstonecraft, who saw themselves rescuing genuine

158 Sex and Sensibility

sensibility from an effeminacy prompted by false or unregulated expression. To these writers the manliness of feeling could be simultaneously assured and vulnerable and damaging. Thus the femininity or effeminacy which some modern commentators associate with male sensibility was, for many eighteenth-century writers, principally a question not of gender failure but degree and nuance – of social, intellectual and political contexts, and of relations between men, as well as between men and women. Sensibility’s appeal owed much to its identiﬁcation as an alternative to the established standards of ‘polite’ social performers who were regarded as wilfully distorting the desired congruence between inner motive and outer expressions of reﬁnement. Sensibility offered the chance to restore this synthesis, central to the moral validation of Hanoverian theories of reﬁnement, via a heightened focus on instinctive displays of natural emotion indicative of improved forms of reﬁned, and virtuous, manliness. Less concerned with the measured conversations of the ‘genteel’, sentimental culture promoted the physical body as the best resource to communicate reﬁnement via a wordless language of actions including sighing, trembling and facial expression. In line with these developments it was observation, as much as speaking or listening, which served as the means to appreciate the extent of another’s feeling. Advice on such behaviour was prominent in mid to late-century discussions of desirable male conduct. The Aberdonian moralist and doyen of the London preaching circuit, James Fordyce, reminded male readers in the mid-1770s of the importance of the ‘tender look of fellow feeling’ combining ‘sympathetic sighs, tender tears, and pray’rs, and looks of love … the feeling heart that prove.’8 Of such gestures, tears received particular attention and came to serve as a signature of many would-be men (and women) of feeling. This is not to suggest that positive statements on male weeping were previously unknown; and certainly the culture of sensibility did not see the ﬁrst deployment of men’s tears in conduct literature. None the less until this point weeping was principally deﬁned as private, purgatory and, especially, feminine – attributes which advocates of sentimental manhood dramatically reappraised though never fully broke with. Writing towards the end of the seventeenth century, for example, George Savile, marquess of Halifax, had depicted weeping as the means by which ostensibly powerless wives inﬂuenced their husbands. Thirty years on, Richard Steele’s Tatler paper similarly identiﬁed tears as a female activity, though one motivated by a genuine and otherwise inexpressible emotion. The implication of both accounts was the unsuitability of men’s engagement; as Steele made clear, while a woman responds with tears, a man ‘thinks how he ought to act’. This early eighteenth-century suspicion of male weeping also extended to boys. John Locke’s highly inﬂuential Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) made much of the male child’s need to be kept free of the constraints of adult proprieties. Even so, Locke also called for the ‘fault’ of childish tears to be curbed so as to inculcate the ‘Brawniness and Insensibility of Mind’ necessary for later life.9 Not all early eighteenth-century commentators were consistent in their prohibition. For Richard Steele the gendering of tears as female did not rule out all

Tears and the Man 159

possibility of adult male weeping. Rather, men were to appreciate the inappropriateness of tears when, as in moments of crisis, practical assistance was useful and becoming.10 Male tears in the Tatler or Spectator were invariably shed in private and then as a consequence of acute personal experiences such as the death of a child or spouse. The value of tears at moments of great anguish corresponds with their then dominant purpose, that of release. By cleansing or irrigating the body, weeping restored a natural humoural equilibrium and therefore became a necessary consideration in physiological studies of the period. Indeed for the physician James Parsons, tears had the potential to save lives ‘for they lessen the bulk of humours, and gain time for the more happy Return to the Mass of its Natural Circulation.’ Thus, in vehement grief [as well as laughter] … shedding of Tears in Plenty is known to ease the Anxiety usually attending it.’11 It was with the development of sentimental culture that weeping gained a second, more demonstrably social function. As a source of communication between individuals, mid to late-century tears came to express not just personal (or legitimate self-) sorrow, but served as a means of expressing an interactive sympathy for another’s plight. Where earlier writers had thought only women receptive to these signs (a man, wrote Steele, appreciates ‘those whom he observes to suffer in silence’), a later generation identiﬁed social weeping to be a male as well as female quality.12 This new social purpose supplemented the established value of tears as regulation or release. In his autobiographical Sketch from the Dead (1782) Robert Carter Thelwall welcomed tears – ‘the only alleviation of our misfortunes and miseries during mortal life’ – as a way of enduring the pain of his wife’s death in March 1780: ‘Happily they overﬂow through my eyes, which yields a temporary relief, till some new occasion of recollection makes them ﬂow afresh.13 In February 1761 mourners at the funeral of the Bath impresario Richard ‘Beau’ Nash had likewise shed ‘unfeigned tears’ as, of course, others continued to do at similar undocumented ceremonies.14 According to his contemporary biographer, Oliver Goldsmith, Nash had himself been prone to weep. His displays provide a good example of the emergence of the newly communicative sentimental tear, prompted by external stimuli and falling after the breakdown of alternative means of social connection. Previously active in the fashionable practice of celebrity philanthropy, in later years Nash was increasingly unable to afford material assistance. Instead, with his money gone, ‘he gave, as the poet has it, all he had, a tear; when incapable of relieving the agonies of the wretched, he attempted to relieve his own by a ﬂood of sorrow.’15 Nash’s tears fell at a time when male weeping was becoming an increasingly integral part of commentaries on the modern, sentimental gentleman. Writing in the mid-1750s, the court physician Peter Shaw encouraged a softening of men’s hearts to be experienced via weeping, tears being ‘witnesses of the noble disposition’ of that heart ‘participating in the most amiable manner.’16 By ‘tender tears’, wrote Fordyce, we detect ‘the feeling heart.’ According to Hugh Blair, only with crying could one be sure that an emotional exchange was at its most advanced and moral, the ‘degree of sensibility which prompts us to weep with them that weep’ being greater ‘than that which prompts us to rejoice with them that rejoice’.17

160 Sex and Sensibility

The link between male sensibility and tears was further developed by Vicesimus Knox, headmaster at Tonbridge School in Kent, and a popular writer on conduct and reform politics during the 1780s and ‘90s. In his essay ‘On the unmanliness of shedding tears’ Knox set out to challenge this very equation between weeping and effeminacy. His argument combined physiology with morality: God had given men tear ducts (‘organs’) for a purpose which, as in earlier commentaries, was in part purgatory – the personal relief provided by tears being often greater than alternative palliatives such as philosophical reasoning or religious faith. But tears, for Knox, were principally a means to communicate sympathy. And with so much in the modern world with which to sympathize it was, he believed, suspect that men were not more regularly moved to tears. Several explanations were offered as to why the legitimate relationship between observation and male weeping might break down. One, again, was physiological: ‘He who does not feel it and express his feelings as nature intended … must be deﬁcient in some of those organs which are necessary to constitute natural excellence’. A second focused on the distortion of men’s natural urges by social pressures. Knox saw this external restraining inﬂuence as distinctly modern; free of such constraints ancient and classical societies had been composed less of dry-eyed stoics than sensitive weepers. It was the Hanoverian fashion for ‘hardness of heart’ (closely wedded to a consumer culture and oligarchic political state) which had brought about an unwelcome situation Knox now sought to undo with his rousing call that male readers offer ‘no blush at being seen to give vent to grief by the ﬂoodgates of the eyes.’18 In thinking about how its sponsors underwrote the manliness of sensibility, it is worth emphasizing that the majority identiﬁed it as an equation requiring careful negotiation, not least because of the popular identiﬁcation of feeling, like politeness or gentility, as an essentially female quality. These were views shared, to a degree, by sentimental reformers. Writing in the Lounger periodical (1785), Henry Mackenzie contrasted the ‘gentleness, complacence [and] sensibility’ of women with the ‘steadiness, deliberation and fortitude’ of men.19 ‘The worthiest parts of your sex’, Fordyce informed female readers, are ‘modesty, sympathy, generosity and the promptness to cherish tender sentiments’; what was ‘beauty’ in women was most certainly ‘a blemish in men’.20 Yet while both appreciated the proximity of sensibility and femininity, neither Mackenzie nor Fordyce were hesitant about men grasping sentimental culture. But nor did either envisage a simple appropriation of feminine virtues. Rather, the intended outcome was a new style of sentimental manhood that drew on and embellished existing male qualities without blurring enduring gender demarcations. The aim was a correspondence between, not synthesis of, the sexes. What brought them closer was a quality – sensibility – which if thought more advanced in women was also sufﬁciently malleable and valuable to enhance existing standards of manhood. The result did not bring masculinity into question. As Mackenzie argued, steady males and gentle females would combine to create neither effeminates nor gender transgressives, but men and women ‘not less amiable than useful, not less engaging than enlightened.’21

Tears and the Man 161

Two processes – one of tradition, the second of redeﬁnition – may be identiﬁed as the principal means by which commentators sought to establish the equation between manhood and sensibility. In considering the manliness of feeling we should ﬁrst heed what John Dwyer identiﬁes as the ‘complex relationship between newer emotion and traditional self-control within the sentimental genre’ and the error of ‘positing a gulf between the language of reason and emotion’ in accounts of the genre.22 Here Dwyer is mindful of the dynamics of sympathy as characterized within Scottish Enlightenment philosophy and, in particular, in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). For Smith, all worthwhile exchanges were dependent on a capacity for responsible or reasonable sympathy, both on the part of the sufferer and his potential alleviator. In each case reason served to control the natural tendency of self-interest and to produce a mutually beneﬁcial outcome. Smith’s central claim was the impossibility for spectators, however well meaning, to appreciate fully another’s experience, and to enter into a sympathetic exchange with that person unless the observed moderated his or her feelings, reducing them to ‘a certain mediocrity’ that ‘the spectator can go along with.’ Without the persistence of self-command, the integrating webs of sympathetic exchange were liable to break down as they became both incomprehensible and unseemly.23 Eager to avoid this outcome, Smith relied heavily on men’s expression of a socially responsible Epictetan stoicism, the ‘spirit and manhood’ which he applauded as ‘a wonderful contrast with the despondent, plaintive and whining tone of some modern systems.’ Ruling out ‘whining’ meant a curb on displays of ‘clamorous grief … sighs, tears and lamentations’, especially among those experiencing rather than observing, or seeking to alleviate, suffering.24 Indeed, by banishing tears at the moment when self-indulgence might be considered most legitimate, men both established a masculine reputation and enhanced the quality of sympathy and grief conveyed back to them by impressed on-lookers. Mistimed tears, by contrast, undermined this status or communication. ‘We are’, wrote Smith, ‘more apt to weep and shed tears for such … as seem to feel nothing for themselves’; thus Socrates’ friends ‘all wept when he drank the last potion’, while the once respected military leader, the duc de Biron (1562–1602), had disgraced himself by weeping before his execution.25 For James Boswell, a student of Smith and a close and troubled observer of equanimity on the scaffold, male self-indulgence at this and other moments generated not sympathy but ‘pity’ among one’s company, relegating the sufferer to an inferior position ‘not consistent with dignity of character’.26 In addition to making feelings comprehensible and palatable, Smith considered masculine self-command essential if one was to react correctly to the sight of others’ distress. Like many advocates of manly sensibility, he emphasized practical assistance as men’s best response to well-regulated displays of passion. But action in the face of distress demanded a degree of self-command sufﬁcient to replace natural self-interest with altruism. It was Smith’s belief that such generosity could not be acquired by, to use modern parlance, ‘feeling your pain’. Instead the sympathetic man was required to see the situation through the eyes of an independent arbiter – Smith’s ‘impartial spectator’ – for whom questions

162 Sex and Sensibility

of individual sacriﬁce were invariably outweighed by the beneﬁts of generous, if personally destructive, acts of assistance. Smith identiﬁed these intellectually motivated acts of ‘generosity’ as masculine, juxtaposing them against an equivalent feminine quality of ‘humanity’. What might now be thought of as associated virtues were, for Smith, distinguishable along gender lines. Hence, female ‘humanity’ was the ‘mere exquisite fellow feeling which the spectator entertains’; demanding ‘no self-denial [and] no self command’ it was, he believed, ‘the virtue of a woman.’ By default, certain qualities stand out in Smith’s understanding of ‘generous’ male manifestations of sympathy as the subordination of personal emotions required inherently masculine powers of ‘selection, speculation and self command’. Moreover, distinctly ‘generous’ acts served as the wellspring for traditionally manly actions. The soldier risked death not because he believed a cause worth dying for, but as a result of his ability to sympathize with an impartial spectator (here manifest as the patriot nation at large), prompting him to make such a sacriﬁce. In another classical example, Smith revealed how Brutus, founder of the Roman Republic, had drawn on his ‘exalted propriety’ to quell paternal affections and sanction the execution of his traitorous sons for the greater political good.27 Smith’s method of illustrating the manly elements of sympathetic exchange presents a model of male behaviour far removed from many late-century images of sentimental manliness. Certainly, his intolerance of ‘plaintive whining’ or his respect for Brutus were not widely condoned by a later generation who favoured a more moist-eyed and domesticated image of man- and fatherhood. This said, Smith’s emphasis on the proximity of male sensibility and stoicism did endure, and locates him as one in a series of intellectual and more popular commentators eager to demonstrate the symbiosis of ‘modern’ feeling with ‘classical’ self-discipline. A similar emphasis on self-control is therefore present in Vicesimus Knox’s description of true male sensibility as ‘reserved’ rather than ‘forward, noisy and ostentatious’, or in David Hume’s promotion of ‘soundest judgement’ in men possessed of a ‘delicacy of passion’.28 Indeed, Hume believed that judgement not only curbed excess but also ‘improves our sensibility’, replacing ‘rougher and more boisterous emotions’ with ‘tender and agreeable passions’. Elsewhere, he matched Smith’s call for men’s display of sensibility to be evaluated by its practical outcome. As a result, Hume’s ‘man of virtue’ combined ‘softest benevolence’ with ‘the most undaunted resolution’. The result was a man who, while ‘bathed in tears’ – Hume proved less censorious on this issue – possessed sufﬁcient selfmotivation to ‘brighten up the face of others’ sorrow.’29 Later papers from the Lounger indicate the persistence of this ideal, with praise being given to men who combined ‘contemplation’ with ‘habits of action’. For Mackenzie, both strands came together not in the supine Harley but in the Roman stoic Marcus Aurelius Antonius – ‘one of the most illustrious men that ever lived’ – who had also been highly regarded by Smith.30 But if connections between these writers are evident, then so too are variations in tone and deﬁnition. In contrast to Smith’s equation of humanity with

Tears and the Man 163

uncontrolled emotion and passivity, others had less difﬁculty in recommending male readers to act in a speciﬁcally ‘humane’ manner. David Hume, for example, thought that real men were compelled to act precisely because of their ‘sentiments of humanity’. Where Smith’s drier-eyed ideal behaved as a consequence of an impartial observer, Hume proposed a more demonstrably compassionate, emotional – but no less manly – personality motivated less by reason than ‘softest benevolence’ and ‘tenderest sentiments.’31 Later reformers took further this more explicit emotional strategy by redeﬁning the meaning of manhood in line with sensibility. Keen to moderate the Smithean ideals of reason and sacriﬁce, Vicesimus Knox encouraged men to engage in more overt emotional displays and, in part, to derive manly identity directly from this capacity for sympathy and compassion. Knox’s description of inadequate men as those who placed ‘sense, courage and fortitude’ above sensibility suggests a distinction between traditional and newer, sentimental models of manliness. In place of these established qualities he praised ‘tenderness’, ‘sensitivity’ and ‘susceptibility’ as superior values through which the young reader was encouraged ‘to feel as a man.’32 To argue in this way required Knox to confront those who, notwithstanding a generational interest in sensibility, remained convinced of the connection between emotional expression and male weakness. By contrast he demonstrated not just the naturalness of male tears but their equation with a superior, more enlightened, manliness in part by identifying the limitations of those who refused to weep. Thus it was that men’s ‘hardness of heart’ was now attributed to their corrupt modern lifestyles which privileged cynicism above sympathy. For Knox a traditional civic humanist language of complaint was to be addressed with recourse to sentimental not classical republican means. Modern living consequently produced a level of corruption that was manifest not as effeminacy, as mid-century jeremiads had claimed, but a deformed model of manhood which initially gave the semblance of admirable composure and self-possession. However, as Knox pointed out, what was on display here was less Smithean command than the ‘perfect coolness of the St James’s gamester’ whose insensitivity masqueraded under ‘the appellation of manly fortitude.’ Real manliness, by contrast, rejected inscrutability for more openly emotional conduct, expressed principally through weeping. Far from being a sign of ‘weak understanding’, tears were evidence of the ‘tenderness’ by which modern manhood was now best deﬁned. By implication, their absence put manliness in doubt: ‘it may be questioned’, wrote Peter Shaw, ‘whether those are properly men, who never weep upon any occasion’.33 This, crucially, did not mean the abandonment of public duties for private scrutiny. As Michèle Cohen shows in this volume, Knox’s educational system was one in which order, method and the classics were viewed as essential preparations for an adulthood characterized by patriotism and civic participation. At ﬁrst, perhaps, this is to suggest something of a Knox paradox – the tough headmaster simultaneously advocating softer male tears either through confused thinking, or shrewd self-promotion towards divergent civic and sentimental

164 Sex and Sensibility

readerships. Certainly there is some truth in the latter, though it would be wrong to imply that receptiveness to the market undermined the integrity, or modernity, of his thought. Rather, for Knox ‘soft’ sensibility and ‘hard’ classicism proved compatible since sentimental self-analysis was always to result in civically responsible actions. There was, quite simply, no purpose in having ‘genuine SENTIMENTS, or feelings’ if the consequence was ‘not friendly to man, [and] improving to his nature’.34 For the reform-minded Knox, improvement was clearly identiﬁed as a promotion of new political liberties combined with the defeat of ‘despotism’ manifest in corrupt European states. In contrast to Burke, whose tears he believed equivalent to the false object of his sorrow, Knox saw only the tyranny inherent in ancien régime France – that ‘pageantry of the unfeeling great’ – which he accused of provoking a revolution now giving full expression to the ‘manly sentiment’ of radicals like Charles James Fox.35 Compared with the vision of some contemporaries, among them the Philadelphian physician Benjamin Rush, Knox’s study of sensibility and civic responsibility remained limited in scope and efﬁcacy as a practical work of political science. For Rush, as Sarah Knott shows us elsewhere in this volume, the purpose of equating sentimental and civic was the establishment of an innovative form of republican sensibility and sentimental republicanism, inclusive of shared class and gender, as well as speciﬁc racial divisions.36 For Knox, by contrast, self-scrutiny was intended to prompt a return to an earlier (non-despotic) political reality, though he offered no comment on the possible social tensions arising from a transition which he thought equally dependent on middle-class humanity and aristocratic responsibility born of privilege. And yet, despite their differences, Knox and Rush shared an ambitious common purpose: a public stage for the sentimental self who was not, as is often supposed, personally difﬁdent and politically conservative, but rather proactive, reformist and, in Rush’s model, republican. The gallery of role models chosen to illustrate and promote sentimental manhood further illustrates the desired synthesis of traditional and more modern qualities manifest in enlightened and responsible social practice. In view of the centrality of compassion to the sentimental ideal, it is not surprising that a benevolent and weeping Christ featured prominently in this assembly as Arminian concepts of Christ ‘as man on earth’ developed to accommodate the ultimate man of feeling, embodying gentility, tenderness and charity. Hugh Blair was typical in praising Christ for his ‘compassion’, his rejection of ‘hard indifference’, and his ‘tender and exquisite’ sensibility by which he conﬁrmed both his divinity and masculinity for having ‘felt as a man’.37 Particular attention was given to the tearful Christ. Vicesimus Knox and Robert Carter Thelwall were two who noted his response at the death of Lazarus (John 11:35) as evidence of the acceptability of similar actions among modern men: ‘Jesus himself wept, and thus for ever hallowed the briny fountain. Tears are appropriated to man, as one of the most honourable distinctions which separate him from brute creation.’38 For James Fordyce the lachrymose Christ likewise provided men with the best possible indication that ‘nothing is more becoming than the tear of generous sorrow.’39

Tears and the Man 165

If Christ remained the supreme man of feeling he was nevertheless found in some interesting company. Knox, for example, noted the weeping of such familiarly hardy heroes as Ulysses, Achilles and the Trojan, Hector. That eighteenth(or, indeed, twenty-ﬁrst) century readers found these examples surprising was, Knox suggested, testament to a misguided understanding of manhood. In fact, as a rival conduct writer made clear, sentimental practices had always been ‘among the most conspicuous Virtues of the greatest Ancient heroes – men of sensibility being generally Persons of the strictest Honour and most exalted Courage’.40 Here an alternative justiﬁcation of the manliness of feeling was provided in which the inherent physical vigour, not delicacy, of sensibility was held up for example. To move from tears to practical help required brawn as well as brain, nerve as well as nerves. As Hugh Blair argued in 1790, ‘Manliness and sensibility are so far from being incompatible, that the truly brave are generous and humane; while the soft and effeminate are hardly capable of any vigorous exertion of affection.’41 In making these claims, writers like Blair and Knox were not simply highlighting a link between sensibility and courage, but seeking to redeﬁne military heroism as determined, at least in part, by soldiers’ capacity for feeling. In doing so, they built on earlier works, notably Richard Steele’s The Christian Hero (1701) – a remarkably forward-looking essay which highlighted the importance of forgiveness and fellow-feeling for deﬁnitions of courage within civil society. Later guides regularly employed the image of the polite and graceful military ofﬁcer as a commentary on the scope of modern civil society. There was, of course, debate over the best time and place for warriors to display this capacity for feeling. Adam Smith, while appreciating the value of male sympathy, remained cautious and warned men of ‘too exquisite sensibility … not to wantonly embrace the profession of a soldier.’42 Smith’s objection to open grief, his admiration of Brutus, and his growing emphasis on stoicism in later editions of the Theory suggests he would have rejected those more overtly sentimental acts encouraged by second-generation men of feeling.43 In contrast to Smith’s Brutus, Knox’s Hector was cast in a domestic role playing with his son. The aim was to convince men who still considered such actions ‘weak and effeminate’ that it was now possible to combine domesticity with public responsibility either through work or warfare. The tender father was ‘by no means unmanly’, a point made by Knox’s neat synthesis of classical and sentimental manhood: Hector removing his warrior’s helmet so ‘that he may not frighten his little boy with its nodding plumes.’44 The idea that classical authors had always appreciated the valour of sensibility, together with depictions of heroes like Hector weaving bravery with compassion, demonstrated and validated the manliness of feeling as a historical commonplace. Yet enlightened reformers were equally keen to identify an appreciation of sensibility not just as the return to a former age, but as evidence of a superior reﬁnement in a uniquely civilized society. In making such claims proponents of this stadial theory of societal evolution were able, through social observation, to update classical ideals. High Enlightenment thinkers like Smith and Hume saw the transition as a consequence of gradual but profound shifts in social structure

166 Sex and Sensibility

and relations by which the barbarity of classical heroes was rejected in favour of more reﬁned standards epitomized by the personal conduct of the contemporary gentleman. In Adam Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), therefore, Hector appeared not as a sentimental father but as the victim of Greek ‘animosity and hostile passions’. In contrast to earlier incivilities, Ferguson believed that violent passions had now given way to an equation (like that by Knox) of the war hero with ‘gentleness’ and ‘sentiments of tenderness and pity.’45 Two decades on Knox himself further promoted the superiority of modern soldierhood – braver and more compassionate – over that of earlier societies. In doing so he did not deny the reﬁnement of classical warriors, like Hector, but found in contemporary Britain a far wider range of activities by which the modern soldier was civilized. While his forebears had been forced to choose between war or politics, eighteenth-century ofﬁcers found diversion in literature, commerce, leisure and, of course, family life. Such discussions led easily to accounts of real-life military heroes readily available in an age of near constant warfare. Men such as James Wolfe, commander and casualty at the British assault on Quebec in September 1759, became an exemplar to youth both at the time of his death and to later readers through the conduct works of Fordyce and popular collections of national worthies. Part action hero, part patriot, Wolfe was also a man of sensibility, mixing ‘the sweets of particular Attachments’ with an ‘extensive Spirit of Benevolence’ to produce a man ‘truly brave, truly noble, friendly, gentle, compassionate, great and glorious!’ To others, he embodied Smith’s careful separation of private sensibility from professional life: though fatally wounded he continued to give orders ‘without emotion’ while having previously shown ‘charity and benﬁcience’ and having been ‘gentle, kind and conciliatory in his manners’.46 Wolfe’s passing was appropriately commemorated. There were, if contemporary periodical obituaries are believed, few dry eyes in the ranks which marked his death: ‘O then, the Eye is seen to mourn … nay the whole Body … would willingly clothe itself with a Garb of expressive Sorrow.’47 War in America offered further opportunity for sentimental actions and commemorations, this time among revolutionary British Americans whose appropriation and interpretation of sensibility became elemental to an emergent national identity, further developed in the early republic by writers like Benjamin Rush and, indeed, via Vicesimus Knox whose works were published in the United States and for which, in the late 1780s, he received an honorary doctorate from Rush’s institution, the College of Philadelphia. Civilian role models were also available either for emulation or as subjects deserving sympathy. With the British publication of La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and the Confessions (1782), Jean-Jacques Rousseau provided late-century readers with an often lachrymose moral hero who, to the delight of many reviewers, ‘recounts his feelings and his arguments … with an unexampled meticulousness’ and thus prompted male (and female) admirers to offer compliments ranging from Hugh Blair’s restrained but enthusiastic commendation to the eccentric experimentation of Thomas Day.48 Closer to home was the Revd William Dodd, who was hanged in June 1777 for defrauding his former employer, the ﬁfth earl

Tears and the Man 167

of Chesterﬁeld. Dodd had long enjoyed a reputation for emotional display via his sermons in which he preached benevolence to congregants described by Horace Walpole as ‘sobbing and crying from their souls.’ Dodd’s subsequent fall had been dramatic, but in his ﬁnal weeks he regained some of his former reputation as an exemplary man of feeling. During prison visits from his wife, he was reportedly ‘so much affected as to stop short and burst into a ﬂood of tears.’ ‘I feel exceedingly for poor Dr Dodd’, wrote Walpole during the trial, ‘this scene of protracted horrors cannot but excite commiseration in every feeling breast’.49 Not surprisingly, one of the ﬁrst commemorative pamphlets after Dodd’s execution simply offered A Tear of Gratitude for his life. It is to this mixed assembly that supporters would have introduced that other noted weeper, Edmund Burke. Horace Walpole was again among those who applauded Burke’s sincerity after reading his Reﬂections with its unedited eulogy of Marie Antoinette. Here was a man whose ‘every sentiment’ shows ‘how sincerely he is in earnest’; Burke’s enthusiasm proving a welcome relief from those politicians whose claims ‘never seem to ﬂow from the heart’.50 Today, however, it is Burke the emotionally unstable controversialist who is better known, principally for his provocative commentary on the French queen which prompted criticism from friends and adversaries alike. Notwithstanding their distinctive politics, what all considered unacceptable was Burke’s excessive sensibility: an excess which Philip Francis found embarrassing, Thomas Paine theatrical, and Mary Wollstonecraft identiﬁed as Burke’s very undoing as a man. Accused of manipulating sentiment for political effect and of indulging in a froth of emotion, Burke epitomized Wollstonecraft’s twin antitheses of desirable manhood: the ultra-rational schemer and ‘dupe’ of excess feeling. To Wollstonecraft this self-styled proponent of ‘manly sentiment’ was rather the ‘feminine’ Burke vainly penning ‘unmanly sarcasms and puerile conceits’.51 For critics, Burke’s emotional response to the French monarchy was all the more striking when set against his unfeeling, even malicious, reaction to George III’s ill health during the regency crisis of 1788–9. Once more tears were central both in Burke’s attempted atonement for his domestic views (by way of his sympathy for Louis XVI in the Reﬂections), and in satirists’ condemnation of his excessive or bogus attempts to weep away his former unsympathetic reputation.52 Burke faced further criticism in May 1791 when his opposition to revolution led to a deﬁnitive break with his political ally Charles James Fox. The split, initiated by Burke, occurred during a parliamentary debate in which Fox pointed to another apparent inconsistency in Burke’s politics; this time contrasting his colleague’s present stand against revolutionary France with his earlier support for the protagonists of the American War of Independence. In response, Burke had accused Fox of undermining his position and then, in a harsh audible whisper, publicly broke off relations. Shocked at his mentor’s statement, Fox was immediately reduced to tears and what Walpole described as ‘lamentations on the loss of Burke’s friendship’. According to Walpole, ‘Burke wept too – in short it was the most affecting scene possible’, though other accounts do not refer to Burke’s weeping.53 Whatever his actual response to Fox’s tears, to his critics Burke’s

168 Sex and Sensibility

alleged misinterpretation of political events, coupled with his performance in this and in previous debates, was symptomatic of a man who was variously irrational, insane or, once again, feminized. This exceptional status was compounded in reports which quickly passed over Fox’s own remarkable behaviour and certainly did not label his weeping as unbecoming or effeminate. By contrast, Burke’s display was evidence of a ‘whining ostentation’ which showed his conduct in May 1791 to be ‘less simple, less masculine than his [Fox’s]’. Burke had ‘complained with the minute and jealous tenderness of a women’ to such a degree that, as one critic argued, former friends including Dr Johnson would have ‘had too much manliness of character to approve the conduct into which a fatal alternation of feebleness and violence has betrayed you.’54 It is to such contests, as well as to the French revolution in general, that historians typically look when marking the collapse of a culture of sensibility ultimately found wanting both by radical and conservative commentators at a point of international crisis. In truth, of course, sentimental reformers had faced challenges throughout the period. To take one example, Jeremy Bentham believed that men, though generally disposed to sympathy, were as a result of greater rationality better able to regulate their emotions and to ‘command the external appearances of sensibility with a very little real feeling’. For Bentham what was distinctive about manly sentiment was its inherent vulnerability to distortion, whether through suppression or, at a time when such displays were evidence of reﬁnement, via a wilful profusion of signs. His readers were consequently warned against too easy an equation between inner motive and ‘the quality of the tears … [or] the number of moments spent crying’. Indeed, Bentham believed that any episode of male weeping, regardless of extent, could provide cover for more traditional values with ‘tears of rage’ being likely explained in public as a more respectable sign of contrition.55 Such concern over tears ‘on demand’ ﬁtted closely with weeping’s late-century association with social communication as considered by behavioural writers rather than by physicians, like James Parsons, who remained sceptical of this capacity and its chances of success. Thus in a sentimental age of social crying relatively little attention appears to have been paid to Parsons’ earlier demonstration of the practical difﬁculty of faking convincing tears: that the ‘eyes cannot be inﬂuenced by any meaning but real Grief’ and otherwise continue to reﬂect the ‘laughing Way’ clearly indicative of affected feeling.56 Malleable for the purposes of beneﬁcial self-presentation, sympathetic tears were also vulnerable to manipulation for wider social ends. Writing in the year that Lord Chesterﬁeld’s Letters exposed for many the tenuous relationship between inner feeling and outer expression, the Irish writer Thomas MacMahon attacked as naive any promotion of sensibility as a corrective to modern manners. Instead, MacMahon pointed to the considerable practical divergence between sentimental signs such as tears and their incentive, between being ‘tender eyed’ and ‘tender-hearted’. Rousseau and Lawrence Sterne were the principal targets of MacMahon’s study which dismissed the ‘facility of shedding tears’ – ‘though so highly rated at present’ – as an ‘equivocal sign of goodness’ celebrated

Tears and the Man 169

‘by none but themselves.’ So debased had the currency of tears become that they were now regularly deployed by ‘wicked and sanguinary men … [as] preludes and preparations to new sources of villainy and oppression’.57 Bentham, quoting Hume, offered Oliver Cromwell as the perfect example of a man who ‘more than ordinarily callous’ was also ‘remarkably profuse in tears’.58 This sense of sensibility’s innate capacity for self-corruption proved particularly alarming, especially when ‘wicked’ weepers were so closely identiﬁed as key players in sentimental dissemination. Prominent preachers such as Fordyce and Dodd, as well as being praised, were exposed by their critics as emotional charlatans working a congregation for professional or sexual advancement. Less impressionable observers retained a healthy scepticism about the veracity of the sentimental tear. Horace Walpole was clearly sympathetic towards Burkean sentiments which ‘ﬂow from the heart’.59 Even so, his guarded comments on the mutual weeping of Fox and Burke suggest an awareness that such displays, whether in the form of tears or passionate writing, were highly prone to manipulation. What Walpole actually thought remarkable was not that the encounter took place but that it was ‘undoubtedly an unique one, for both the commanders were in earnest and sincere’; the implication being that sentimental exchanges were seldom free from attempted duplicity on the part of at least one participant.60 Sensibility, it seems, was a social ideal ever battling against a perceived deﬁcit of trust. Walpole’s suspicions mirrored those of the physician Peter Shaw who in his earlier advocacy of male tears had spoken both of virtuous ‘moral weeping’ and mere ‘physical crying’ which, designed to impress, lacked corresponding emotional integrity. That Burke the accused might himself turn accuser further demonstrates the intensity of the contest to claim genuine sensibility and reveal corruption. For Burke, of course, it was Rousseau, not he, who fashioned the symbols of social virtue for personal effect. Outwardly benevolent, Rousseau’s declarations of sensibility, eloquently expressed in his Confessions, disguised ‘a selﬁsh, ﬂattering, seductive, ostentatious vice’ in which ‘all social sentiment’ became indistinguishable from ‘inordinate vanity’. If dangerous when practised solely by this ‘insane Socrates’, the result was disastrous, indeed revolutionary, when championed by a nation where the Rousseauian dichotomy of ‘benevolence to the whole species’ and ‘want of feeling for every individual’ had become political orthodoxy.61 For supporters the embodiment of manly feeling, to their detractors these men were guilty of manipulating sensibility for personal or political effect. However, it is important to remember that criticism originated less with sensibility itself than the ways one was adjudged to display that quality. It was therefore in its expression not existence that sensibility became gendered, and was gendered not just male or female but also between men, manly or effeminate. In fact, for all their disagreements, commentators like Burke and Knox (or, indeed, Rousseau or Benjamin Rush) were in their promotion of sensibility seeking common ends, albeit for signiﬁcantly divergent political purposes. When Burke criticized Rousseau therefore he appealed to sensibility as a means to resist the atomization of a formerly secure community into a collection of narcissists, eccentrics or, at

170 Sex and Sensibility

worst, regicides. Likewise when Knox proposed ‘self-examination’ to detect ‘a heart in need of reform’ he did not envisage the reformed man turning inward but rather applying himself against the corruptions of the unfeeling Burkean state which had led to revolution. What both feared was the dominance, and distortion, of the self through a false display and interpretation of sensibility. Central to such fears was a suspicion that the pull of self-preservation and promotion ensured sensibility’s natural trajectory was towards the self at the expense of the social. To some, like Bentham, the relationship between masculinity and sensibility, though possible, served by its very existence to discredit and undermine the latter element. For others, from Smith to MacMahon to Burke, collapse resulted either from an uncontrollably emotional self forced on reluctant and uncomprehending observers, or from a hyper-rational self at odds with signs, like tears, used to communicate to a would-be receptive and deceivable audience. The result, in effect, was steady implosion variously manifest in differing political and cultural contexts as Dodd’s histrionics, Marie Antoinette’s cruelties, or the insanities of Rousseau and his acolytes. In his February 1790 letter to Philip Francis, Burke predicted that men of ‘true feeling’ would continue to be moved to tears long after his death (1796) and that of Francis (1818). The popular perception of criticism to such displays during the nineteenth century, while itself a still fruitful area of research, suggests that Burke’s ‘natural feelings’ became rather more marginalized as an indice of manhood than he had predicted.62 In part, this increasing resistance to male sensibility developed from an opposition to the culture’s ultimately dominant solipsism by which feeling became equated with selﬁsh, unproductive and, therefore, unmanly conduct. Such unease was better deﬁned and codiﬁed with the subsequent re-appearance of alternative standards privileging public service dependent on ‘traditional’ male values. These standards became more ﬁrmly rooted in response to events. The rigours of the nineteenth-century public school, of imperial and civil service and, most signiﬁcantly, the mass horrors to which western civilization has subsequently been exposed have engrained (at least publicly) the value and necessity of an absence of conspicuous male feeling. This, moreover, is an inﬂuence which continues to colour how we view our cultural history. But opinions change and, presently, the public male tear appears to be back in fashion. Likewise by historicizing once static psychologies of male emotion and performance, recent studies are bringing to men’s experience the complexities and nuances which feminist scholarship has offered to formerly obscured histories of women. 63 Placing Burke in the context of a multivocal advice and documentary literature is to ﬁnd an on-going attempt to restyle standards of acceptable male conduct as beﬁtted a broader enlightenment project. There was no single strategy for implementing this reform and much debate about precisely what was required, for which men, and how to effect these changes. What is less in doubt is its importance to a generation of eighteenth-century social theorists and their readers, and the attention they gave to conﬁrming and best demonstrating the manliness of feeling.

Tears and the Man 171

Notes 1.

2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

Edmund Burke, Reﬂections on the Revolution in France (1790), in L. G. Mitchell ed., The French Revolution, 1790–1794, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 9 vols (Oxford, 1981–97), VIII (1989), pp. 120, 126. Francis to Burke, 19 Feb. 1790, in Thomas W. Copeland ed., The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, 10 vols (1958–1978), VI (July 1789–Dec. 1791), p. 86. Burke to Francis, 20 Feb. 1790, in ibid., VI, pp. 89, 91. T. H. White, The Age of Scandal. An Excursion through a Minor Period (1950, Oxford, 1986), ch. 13. See also Anne Vincent-Buffault, The History of Tears: Sensibility and Sentimentality in France (Basingstoke, 1991); Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago IL and London, 1999); George E. Heggarty, ‘“O lachrymarum fons: tears, poetry and desire in Gray’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 30 (1996/7), 83–112, and Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1999), ch. 4; G. J. Barker-Benﬁeld, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in EighteenthCentury Britain (Chicago IL and London, 1992); also Tom Lutz, Crying: The Natural and Cultural History of Tears (1999). Claudia L. Johnson, Equivocal Beings. Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s (Chicago IL and London, 1995), p. 5. A full listing, or ‘index’, of Harley’s tears appears in Henry Morley’s 1886 edition and is reprinted in The Man of Feeling, intro. Stephen Bending and Stephen Bygrave (Oxford, 2001), pp. 110–11. Other notable ‘weepies’ include Henry Brook’s The Fool of Quality (1764–70) and Sarah Scott’s The History of Sir George Ellison (1766). Janet Todd, Sensibility. An Introduction (1986), pp. 89, 99; Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker, ‘Introduction’ to idem eds, Reﬁguring Revolutions. Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the French Revolution (Berkeley CA, 1998), p. 13; Mary Chapman and Glen Hendler, ‘Introduction’ to idem eds. Sentimental Men. Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture (Berkeley CA and London, 1999); pp. 3, 8. Bending and Bygrave likewise describe Harley’s masculinity as a ‘feminized variety’ but proceed to identify Mackenzie’s novel as part of a debate over manhood within sentimental culture (xiv). Harriet Guest, ‘“These neuter somethings”: gender difference and commercial culture in mid-eighteenth-century England’, in Sharpe and Zwicker eds, Reﬁguring Revolutions, p. 194. James Fordyce, Addresses to Young Men, 2 vols (1777), II, p. 92; ‘Epistle on various subjects’, in Poems (1786), p. 259. George Savile, Lord Halifax, The Lady’s New-Year’s Gift (1688) in The Complete Works of George Savile, ed., Walter Raleigh (Oxford, 1912), p. 8; No. 68 (15 Sept. 1709) in The Tatler ed., Donald F. Bond, 3 vols (1985), I, p. 472; John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) in The Educational Writings of John Locke, ed., James L. Axtell (Cambridge, 1968), p. 217. Tatler, No. 68, I, p. 472. James Parsons, Human Physiognomy Explain’d in the Crounian Lectures on Muscular Motion (1747), p. 81. On the modern explanation of tears’ value as a release of stress hormones see Dylan Evans, Emotion. The Science of Sentiment (Oxford, 2001), pp. 43–4. Tatler, No. 68, I, p. 472. Robert Carter Thelwall, A Sketch from the Dead; or a Monody to the Memory of Mrs Carter Thelwall (1782), pp. 21, 26. I am grateful to Kate Retford for this reference. Oliver Goldsmith, The Life of Richard Nash (1762), in Arthur Friedman ed., The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, 5 vols (1965), III, p. 366. Ibid., III, p. 340; the poem referred to is Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751). Modern critics of the hormonal explanation of tears likewise identify its principal function as a rewarding collective emotion generated by this ‘honest sign of distress’, Evans, Emotion, pp. 43–4; Randolph Cornelius, The Science of Emotion. Research and Tradition in the Psychology of Emotion (1995).

172 Sex and Sensibility 16. Man, A paper for ennobling the species, No. 43 (22 Oct. 1755), p. 5. 17. Hugh Blair, ‘On sensibility’, in Sermons (1777–1801), III, p. 25. 18. Vicesimus Knox, ‘On the unmanliness of shedding tears’, in Winter Evenings, 2 vols (1788, 2nd edn 1793), II, pp. 182–3. 19. No. 77, The Lounger (1785–87), 3 vols (2nd edn, 1787), III, pp. 85, 87. 20. Fordyce, Sermons to Young Women, 2 vols (1765), II, 233, 226. 21. Lounger No. 77, II, p. 87. 22. John Dwyer, ‘Enlightened spectators and classical moralists: sympathetic relations in eighteenth-century Scotland’, in Dwyer and Richard B. Sher ed., Sociability and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh, 1993), p. 103. 23. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), ed., D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macﬁe (Oxford, 1976), pp. 23, 27. 24. Ibid., pp. 283, 44. 25. Ibid., pp. 48–9. 26. James Boswell, ‘On pity’, The Hypochondriack No. 29 (Feb. 1780) in Boswell’s Column, 1777–83, ed., Margery Bailey (1951), p. 165. 27. Smith, Theory, pp. 190–2. 28. Knox, ‘On the inconstancy of affected sensibility’ (1788), in Winter Evenings, II. p. 161; David Hume, ‘On the delicacy of taste and passion’, in Essays, Moral, Political and Literary (1742/52), ed., Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN, 1985), p. 6. 29. ‘The stoic’ in ibid., p. 151. 30. The Mirror, 3 vols (1779–80), No. 77, III, pp. 85, 87. 31. Hume, ‘The stoic’, in Essays, p. 151. 32. Knox, ‘On the inconstancy of affected sensibility’, in Winter Evenings, II, p. 158. 33. Knox, ‘On the unmanliness of shedding tears’, in ibid., II, p. 179; Man, No. 43, p. 4. 34. Knox, Christian Philosophies, 2 vols (1795), I, p. 254. 35. Knox, The Spirit of Despotism (1795, 2nd edn, 1821), pp. 55, 12. 36. On the fusing of sensibility, federalism and patriotism see also David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes. The Making of American Nationality, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill NC, 1997), esp. chs 2–3 and Sarah Knott’s essay in this volume. 37. Blair, ‘On the compassion of Christ’ and ‘On the moral character of Christ’, in Sermons, II (1780), p. 122; V (1801), p. 68. 38. Knox, Christian Philosophies, II, p. 363; Carter Thelwall, Sketch, p. 21. Knox identiﬁed St Paul and St John as two further exemplars of the religious man of feeling, I, p. 259. On humans’ apparently unique ability to weep see Lutz, Crying, pp. 17–18. 39. On earlier interpretations of Christ’s weeping see Marjory E. Lange, Telling Tears in the English Renaissance (New York, 1996) which discusses, among others, John Donne’s celebrated sermon (1622) on John 11:35, ‘Jesus wept’: ‘He wept as a man doth weepe, and he wept as man may weepe’. 40. Stephen Fovargue, A New Catalogue of Vulgar Errors (1767), pp. 127–8. 41. Blair, ‘On sensibility’, in Sermons, III, p. 37. 42. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 245. 43. On Smith’s changing tone in his 6th edn (1790) see John Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse. Sensibility and Community in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh, 1987), ch. 6. 44. Knox, ‘On the happiness of domestic life’, in The Works of Vicesimus Knox, 7 vols (1824), I, p. 214. 45. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), ed., Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge, 1995), p. 190. 46. Moral Biography; or the Worthies of England (1798), p. 172. 47. John Pringle, The Life of General James Wolfe (1760), pp. 3, 5, 17. 48. Critical Review (May 1783), quoted in Claire Brock, ‘Rousseaurian remains’, History Workshop Journal 55 (forthcoming, 2003), 143 also Robert Darnton, ‘Readers respond to Rousseau: the fabrication of romantic sensibility’, in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984).

Tears and the Man 173 49. Walpole to Lady Ossory, 29 June 1777, in The Correspondence of Horace Walpole., ed. W. S. Lewis, 48 vols (1937–1983), XXXII, p. 360; Morning Chronicle (15 March 1777), quoted in Gerald Howson, The Macaroni Parson. A Life of the Unfortunate Dr Dodd (1973), p. 168. On Day see George W. Giguilliat, The Author of ‘Sandford and Merton’. A Life of Thomas Day (New York, 1932). 50. Ibid., XXXIV, p. 98; W. L. Bowles, A Poetical Address to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (1791), pp. 2–3. 51. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), in Political Writings, ed., Janet Todd (Oxford, 1994), p. 25. Comparison of Burke’s descriptions of the French royal family between the Reﬂections and his correspondence has also prompted some modern commentators to question the integrity of his sentiments for the queen. See Tom Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology. Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 160–1. On the feminine Burke see also Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 65–7. 52. Criticism of Burke’s attitude to George III followed a speech to the Commons in February 1789 discussed in John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death. Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793–1796 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 90–6. 53. Walpole to Mary Berry (12 May 1791), in Correspondence, XI, p. 263. 54. Parallel between the Conduct of Mr Burke and that of Mr Fox, in their late Parliamentary Contest (1791), pp. 8, 34–5. 55. Jeremy Bentham, ‘Of circumstances inﬂuencing sensibility’, in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1781), ed. Wilfrid Harrison (Oxford, 1948), p. 177. Bentham placed slightly more faith in the ‘pulse’ as an indicator of feeling since ‘a man has not the motions of his heart at command as he has those of the muscles of his face’ (ibid.) 56. Parsons, Human Physiognomy, p. 79. 57. Thomas MacMahon, An Essay on the Depravity and Corruption of Human Nature (1774), pp. 172, 176. 58. Bentham, Introduction, p. 177 Highly critical of Cromwell’s duplicity, Hume believed the Protector ‘much given to weeping, and could at any time shed abundance of tears’, The History of England (1762), ch. 61, fn 4. Among radical nonconformists, by contrast, these tears were evidence of an admirable passion; see Peter J. Kitson, ‘“Not a reforming patriot but an ambitious tyrant”: representations of Cromwell and the English Republic in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’, in Timothy Morton and Nigel Smith eds, Radicalism in British Literary Culture, 1650–1830 (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 188–9. 59. Walpole, Correspondence, XXXXIV, p. 98. 60. Ibid., XI, p. 263. 61. Burke, Letter to a Member of the French Assembly (1791), in Mitchell ed., The French Revolution, pp. 313–14. 62. Vincent-Buffault, History of Tears; Lutz, Crying; John Tosh, ‘Gentlemanly politeness and manly simplicity in Victorian England’, TRHS, 6th ser. 12 (2002), 455–72. 63. For example, Chapman and Hendler eds, Sentimental Men; Milette Shamir and Jennifer Travis eds, Boys Don’t Cry? Rethinking Narratives of Masculinity and Emotion in the United States (Columbia, NY, 2002); Martin Francis, ‘Tears, tantrums, and bared teeth: the emotional economy of three Conservative prime ministers, 1951–1963’, Journal of British Studies, 41/3 (2002), 354–87.

3.3 Reading Rousseau’s Sexuality Robin Howells

On Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s personal sexual dispositions there is no shortage of evidence to orient the enquiry, because he tells us about them. Here (as in so much else) he inaugurates modernity. He is historically the ﬁrst to examine closely his own sexuality, and to perceive it as an essential element of the ‘self’. He is also the ﬁrst to trace his proclivities back to his childhood. More exactly, he is the ﬁrst to write all this down, in a literary subgenre which he also inaugurates, for the public (eventually) to read – the Confessions. The notable section in Book I was composed when he was in his early ﬁfties, around 1765. He had however already projected models of sexuality and sexual relations in his epistolary novel, Julie, or The New Heloise (published at the start of 1761). The freedom of ﬁction allows him to explore and debate the relation of sexuality to desire, virtue, social and metaphysical order. Sexuality is formally theorised, especially in relation to nature, socialisation and imagination, in the latter part of Emile, or On Education (published in 1762). In Book 5 of Emile, notoriously, he argues that woman is intended to be subordinate to man. Between his theoretical stance and his personal imperatives however there is a considerable tension. This tension is itself clearly gendered and – so to speak – genred. We have only to look at the titles. Emile, or On Education places itself under a male sign, and its subtitle is denotative and abstract. This is philosophy, a masculine domain. Julie, or The New Heloise however declares for the female, and the subtitle is connotative and mythical. Novels go with women. Rousseau himself marks this opposition in his account of how as a child he came to self-consciousness. At the age of six or seven he began reading the French romances, such as Cassandra, that had belonged to his mother. His other main reading was history, and especially Plutarch’s Lives of Illustrious Men, which had belonged to her father. (Genre is doubly linked to gender). Strongly identifying with what he reads, he derived from Plutarch what he calls ‘Roman pride’, from the romances a stimulation to ‘tender and expansive sentiments’. Ancient republicanism and love stories were opposed inﬂuences. Thus his heart becomes ‘both ﬁerce and tender’. His character is ‘effeminate and yet unconquerable’. ‘Between softness and virtue’ he will be, as he puts it, ‘perpetually in contradiction with myself’.1 174

Reading Rousseau’s Sexuality 175

The French romances and Plutarch are however alike in depicting the heroism of antiquity.2 Both belong to what Rousseau will call ‘another world’. In the Dialogues this becomes ‘an ideal world’, and we are told that this world is inhabited by ‘the author of Emile and of Heloise’.3 Both the masculine and feminine models offer an ideal, which Rousseau will oppose to reality. But there is evidently an hierarchy too. Between ‘virtue’ and ‘softness’ the valorisation is clear. The former carries approbation, the latter prompts ambivalence. This psychological mechanism is evident in the account of his childhood reading in the Confessions. To his grandfather’s legacy he attaches moral, social and even metaphysical approval: ‘Happily these were worthy books, and it could not have been otherwise, for this library had been formed by a minister of religion’. On the contrary, he reports that his father was ‘thoroughly ashamed’ to be ‘like a child’ in his attachment to romances. Rousseau will internalise this shame at regressive desire. Emile he will call his greatest and best work. As with his political publications, he attaches to it not only his name but his proud title ‘Citizen of Geneva’. It meets the norms – masculine, republican and disciplined – of his superego. His novel, born of more intimate imperatives, caused him acute embarrassment.4 He explicitly refuses to attach his civic title to it, because it would profane the name of his ‘patrie’ (Julie, Second Preface). But he still puts his own name to it, and defends it passionately. The gendering of genre is reﬂected stylistically, it seems to me, in Rousseau’s writing as a whole. In the philosophical and political works his style is very ‘male’. It is formal and binary, trenchant and end-stopped. However, even that discourse draws on the primal and the corporeal. ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains’ presents an abstract idea through a metaphor of origin and an image of bodily mistreatment. This famous opening sentence of The Social Contract is echoed in the opening of Emile. There the same absolute opposition is afﬁrmed through a single, more conventional but essentially similar ﬁgurative expression: ‘All is good leaving the hands of the Author of things; all degenerates in the hands of man’. In his novel however, and in much of the personal works (Confessions and Reveries), Rousseau’s style becomes ﬂowing and musical. He develops a characteristic vocabulary which is organic. His language seems not sexual but intensely sensual (favouring verbs such as to taste, to suffer, to caress, to take pleasure, to wander, to disﬁgure).5 It implies a diffusely eroticised body. It reﬂects the preference that he himself increasingly afﬁrms for prolonged states of semi-awareness, a return to primary sensibility, receptiveness, dreaming and ecstasy. His writing still sublimates his erotic imperatives but increasingly liberates them. It offers a kind of compensation for his repressive sexual theory, particularly with regard to the feminine. It takes us a long way from the phallic focus.

Passivity Central to Rousseau’s sexual temperament is his passivity, shading into masochism. In the Confessions he identiﬁes his taste for undergoing something

176 Sex and Sensibility

like sexual punishment, which he famously links to a childhood experience. Being spanked on the bottom by his surrogate mother gave him erotic pleasure. ‘I found in the pain, even in the shame, an element of sensuality.’ The fact of a female hand suggests to the writer that ‘there was no doubt present here some precocious sexual instinct’. Mlle Lambercier perceived his reaction on the second occasion and stopped this form of punishment. This episode, says Rousseau, ‘decided my tastes, my desires, my passions, myself, for the rest of my life’.6 He recognises the difﬁculty of believing that its effect could be so profound – and we would say of course that it revealed and codeﬁed rather than determined his disposition. But his formulation also implies, still more remarkably, that the self is sexual. Rousseau is keen to let us know that he did not actively seek this punishment – not because he did not enjoy it, but because he found it distressing to upset Mlle Lambercier or to lose anyone’s goodwill and affection. Here we see the child’s anxiety, the writer’s need for disculpation (following confession, if not punishment!) and a suggestion of bad faith which Rousseau himself identiﬁes in order to refute it. He completes his account of the episode by noting that it caused a second privation – which we might see as emblematically still more signiﬁcant. Mlle Lambercier had up till then allowed him and his cousin Abraham to sleep in her room, and on chilly nights even to share her bed. That practice she also promptly ended. From then he was treated by her ‘like a big boy’. This, says Rousseau wryly, was an honour which ‘I would have readily foregone’.7 ‘Within the terms of psychoanalytic theory,’ writes Jean Starobinski, ‘it is reasonable to see the whole structure of Rousseau’s sexual life, as well as its attendant guilt, in terms of an “infantile ﬁxation” – or even a “pregenital”, that is, oral and anal ﬁxation.’ One of its principal manifestations is his narcissism.8 His masochism is another, according to Pierre-Paul Clément, who offers a systematic (and professional) psychoanalytic reading of Rousseau through the writings. Rousseau refuses the Oedipal conﬂict with the father, protecting his desire to remain one with the mother. He is thus unable to develop object-relations (which would ‘normally’ fragment and sublimate his desires through negotiations in the real world). Introversion turns his aggression into masochism, his need for wholeness into narcissism.9 His libido eventually ﬁnds satisfaction, argues Clément, through the ‘glory’ of writing. It is of course that writing itself which enables us to understand so much about Rousseau. His profound awareness of himself is exhibited in the autobiographical works. It is also manifested in the works of imagination, sometimes with startling simplicity. The ﬁrst work that he wrote was Narcisse, or The Lover of Himself. Almost the last, a highly innovative musical drama, was Pygmalion, the artist in love with his own creation. In the Confessions Rousseau goes on to observe that his infantile desire leads him to seek ‘an imperious mistress’.10 This preference he also links to ‘my timid disposition and my spirit of romance’.11 The French romances, his earliest reading, showed him heroes submissive to their ladies. The Courtly Love tradition remains very important to Rousseau in offering a cultural form for his desires. Petrarch furnishes the epigraph for The New Heloise, which contains a

Reading Rousseau’s Sexuality 177

score of quotations from Italian poetry. (Italian is Rousseau’s favourite language, for its musicality and expressivity.)12 Tasso was Rousseau’s favourite poet, his epic romance Jerusalem Delivered his favourite work. Courtly love is idealising and neoplatonic within a Christian framework, sublimating sexual desire and eroticising spiritual aspiration. It also links love with death, both as perfect consummation and as sexual peril. It will be given new imaginative realisation in the discourse of Rousseau’s novel, which has been described as the last and distinctly bourgeois manifestation of the tradition.13 As a youth he was kept virginal, he says, by timidity and idealism, but also through disgust at the idea of sexual congress.14 He resorted to masturbation, which became a habit. He explains it as the chief resort of those of a shy disposition and a lively imagination, enabling them to have their will of the fair without needing to ask.15 This auto-satisfaction we can recognise as an expression of what he will increasingly identify as his key disposition: a profound dissatisfaction with reality and preference for his ‘other world’. At one level this constitutes regression to the pleasure principle. At another however it satisﬁes the superego by demonstrating the excellence of his heart. His preference for ‘dreams’ (‘chimères’) proves his soul’s moral aspiration or platonic knowledge of the good; and it conﬁrms the inferiority of the real world. In terms of his thought, the ‘chimera’ is in a sense the vision that he always claims to have been the origin of his political writings – the ‘illumination of Vincennes’.16 Its ﬁctional form in its fullest realisation is the world of his novel.17 Its existential form is what he will call ‘reverie’. This dreaming state – passive, regressive and expansive – he will declare to be his essential bent.18 He will explore it in his last work, entitled The Reveries of the Solitary Walker. There are other factors which seem likely to have affected his sexual disposition. The most obvious is the general repressive and culpabilising inﬂuence of Genevan Calvinism. The most complicated is his family situation. Its salient element is the death of his mother at the time of his birth, and what followed. There is the behaviour of his father, which Rousseau reports with ﬁlial piety in the Confessions. His father would tearfully and convulsively embrace him, moaning ‘Bring her back to me, console me for her loss!’.19 To us it seems fairly evident that such treatment would tend to eroticise, feminise and culpabilise the self-imagination of the child. Secondly there is the relation with his elder brother. François had been born seven years previously, and raised by his mother (the father having been long absent between the two events). In the Confessions Rousseau recognises that his own advent on the scene was to the detriment of his brother. His brother’s increasing misconduct prompted physical chastisement by his father, and Rousseau claims to have once ﬂung himself upon his brother protectively and taken the blows himself.20 What we have just suggested about the effect of the father’s embraces – feminising and culpabilising him – would seem to apply also to his ‘good’ role vis-à-vis the ‘bad’ brother. We perceive too the rivalry for parental affection (and perhaps, given Rousseau’s subsequent avowal, for parental punishment). Finally there is the relationship of each of the couples who serve as his surrogate parents. Jean-Jacques was raised ﬁrst by his

178 Sex and Sensibility

father and his father’s sister. Then – his father having found it necessary to quit Geneva (again) – he was sent to live with the minister Lambercier and his sister Mlle Lambercier. Thus the child’s paradigm is that of father and mother who are also brother and sister.21 Polymorphous affective relations will characterise Rousseau’s novel. The Confessions adduces several episodes which gave the young Jean-Jacques something of the experience of sexual submission that he desired. It was provided physically by playing school with little Mlle Goton as the teacher, during which she seems to have assaulted him sexually but forbiddden reciprocation. Its most sublimated version is that of the ‘day of the cherries’, during which he enacts chivalric and pastoral relations with two young noblewomen.22 The most dramatic is the episode of self-exposure in Turin. The adolescent, abroad and lonely, exhibits his bottom to women. The gesture is explained by Rousseau as a request for female punishment. But beneath that we should surely perceive what would today be called ‘a cry for help’, and speciﬁcally a plea to be mothered. He is unexpectedly caught and threatened by ‘a big man, with a big moustache, […] and a big sabre’ and older women with broom-handles.23 The man with the large weapon evidently represents the father who avenges and castrates; the detail of the women equipped with broom-handles suggests the fantasy of being penetrated as well. Telling us about his improper sexuality is itself exhibitionist. It too is selfinculpation, a request for punishment and a plea for understanding. And all this is implicit in his choice of title – Confessions. Culturally, all his writings can be perceived as passive exhibitionism. From the start, even the most philosophical works draw attention to the persona of the writer; and even the most dangerous display on the title-page his name. They exhibit his vision, his truth, his selfwitness. Provocatively they demand recognition. His insistent challenging of society’s norms – French high civilisation, monarchy and church; the Enlightenment and the ‘philosophes’; even and especially Geneva itself – demands and tests love, and eventually succeeds in prompting persecution from all these quarters. *** The relationship at once ﬁlial and sensual that Rousseau seeks is provided by Mme de Warens. Aged sixteen, having run away from Geneva, he is directed to a lady of Catholic charity. She turns out to be a pretty and buxom blonde only twelve years his senior. She takes him into her house, and soon becomes ‘Maman’ to his ‘Petit’. Eventually however she also decides to take him into her bed. Rousseau himself tells us that he did not want this, feeling – understandably – that it was a kind of incest.24 He also realises that he is sharing her with her steward Claude Anet. The grave steward is himself a father-ﬁgure for the young man.25 Indeed Rousseau sees Anet as also playing that role for Mme de Warens, and for the two of them: ‘he regarded us almost as two children deserving indulgence’. On the same page he assigns to her the central role, that of

Reading Rousseau’s Sexuality 179

an expansive tenderness. He continues: ‘thus was established between the three of us a society perhaps unique on earth’.26 This ideal constitutes not only a ménage à trois but a blend of authority and tenderness, and a pattern of erotic relations (justiﬁed by the structure of moral affection) intertwined with those perceived as familial. Loving triangles will recur in his ﬁction and (with Sophie d’Houdetot and Saint-Lambert) his life. Rousseau however falls ill, rather mysteriously. It is tempting to see this protracted illness as a means of evading the sexual demands of ‘Maman’. Better, it requires her to nurse him. He becomes thereby, in his own formulation, ‘entirely her creation, entirely her child and more so than if she had been my real mother’.27 Passivity enables him to avoid what he does not want. Its regressive form provides him with what he does want. He ﬁnds his state of illness quite pleasurable (as he recognises in his account in Book 5 of the Confessions). Giving him calm, suggesting death, it is a kind of spiritualisation. But it also legitimises his attention to his body, intensifying his sensual experience of himself. In fact Rousseau claimed to have suffered from another malady since birth. He presents it as a malformation or blockage of the urethra, which caused him difﬁculty in urinating. Its symptoms ﬂuctuated, and at various times he had recourse to probes, which he would sometimes administer himself. One hardly needs to be a Freudian, in the contexts that we have noted, to see psycho-sexual signiﬁcance in the location, nature and treatment of this malady.28

Homo-eroticism Rousseau’s passivity, and indeed his masochism, seem to be reﬂected also in a homo-erotic tendency.29 In the Confessions he himself readily recognises the fascination exerted upon him by a series of men (Bâcle in Turin, Venture de Villeneuve in Annecy, Altuna in Paris). More interestingly suggestive however are two childhood episodes that he mentions – to admire himself – in the Reveries. In each, Jean-Jacques by accident suffers a bodily wound from another boy, but will not accuse him, and wins love. The ﬁrst lad embraces him and tearfully begs Jean-Jacques not to tell.30 The other event, in Rousseau’s account, is still more intense. Again he receives corporeal hurt; again his blood ﬂows freely. In this second case the boy ﬂings himself upon me, embraces me, holds me tightly while bursting into tears and uttering piercing cries. I too embraced him with all my strength, weeping like him with a confused emotion which was not without a little sweetness. Following this union, the injured Jean-Jacques is taken by the boy to his mother who bathes his wound. ‘Her tears and those of her son so penetrated my heart that for some time I thought of her as my mother and of her son as my brother.’31 Rousseau himself identiﬁes the meaning of the latter part of the second episode, with startling and quite moving simplicity. He is looking for a

180 Sex and Sensibility

family and ultimately a mother. We can see how, as with Mme de Warens, bodily suffering is the means of getting a woman to nurse him. Here however the transaction – as in the ﬁrst case – is essentially male. We have not ‘softness’ but acts of violent wounding (Jean-Jacques is still the passive party), courage, and ethical self-sacriﬁce, to establish a passionate same-sex relationship.32 Combined here, and moralised, are the desire for physical violation and for male bonding. Rousseau’s masochistic male scenario undoubtedly had its cultural models. One is Plutarch’s Illustrious Men. In fact Rousseau early in the Confessions recounts how as a child he was so moved by Plutarch’s stories of stoic heroism that he offered in imitation of Scaevola to place his hand on a hot stove (bodily extremities, hard surfaces, pain and martyrdom, again). Plutarch means most notably the idealisation of Sparta, not only as the example of collective republican virtue (repeatedly celebrated as such in Rousseau’s political works) but of exemplary individual acts of endurance. Sparta proverbially is the boy so brave that he would not cry out when a fox was gnawing at his vitals. No less proverbially it is youths wrestling nude, a practice that not only assists their strength and purity physically but demonstrates it morally. Rousseau is presumably alluding to this Spartan practice when he afﬁrms in his earliest political work that ‘the man of worth gladly enters the struggle naked’.33 His image of male virtue here seems to me an expression, scarcely sublimated, of homo-erotic hysteria. This leads us to the second cultural model. Epic and romance, in their more reﬁned versions, offered an erotics of death in combat. In Virgil’s Aeneid the account can be quite orgasmic. Handsome young warriors, their bodies mortally penetrated by the enemy blade, spurt, droop and die. Perhaps the most remarkable example: ‘The sword, forced strongly home, pressed through the ribs of Euryalus and burst his white breast; he rolled writhing in death, the blood spread over his lovely limbs, and his neck, relaxing, sank on his shoulder. He was like a bright ﬂower shorn by the plough, languishing and dying’.34 Gender ambiguity becomes explicit in the case of Camilla the warrior woman. Her death in battle, having herself killed many men, is the more erotic in its contrast: ‘The shaft found its mark under her bared breast, and there stayed ﬁxed, forced deeply home to drink of a maiden’s blood’ (Book 11). Fénelon’s didactic prose epic The Adventures of Telemachus (1699), which takes much from Virgil, was one of Rousseau’s favourite books. The image of the dying warrior as wilting ﬂower – well suited to Fénelon’s sensually platonising style – recurs there.35 Rousseau’s favourite among all ﬁctional works, indebted likewise to Virgil, is Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (c.1575).36 In Tasso the struggle to conquer is Christianised and romanced, so that the crusader brotherhood besieging Jerusalem are in peril less from pagan knights than from pagan ladies. One of the latter is duly a warrior woman. Tancred discovers that the opposing champion whom he has mortally wounded is Clorinda whom he loves. Death is eroticised in this way, then culpabilised and spiritualised as he curses himself after baptising her while she breathes her last (Book 12). Earlier Clorinda in full armour had saved from a ﬁery fate the beautiful Christian virgin Sophronia and her devoted lover Olindo, who had volunteered to be lashed to the stake and burned with her (Book 2).

Reading Rousseau’s Sexuality 181

Rousseau himself wrote a translation of opening segments of the Gerusalemme, including much of the episode which he calls ‘Olinde et Sophronie’. The youth he evidently sees as a version of himself (‘he desires much, hopes little, asks nothing’). Olinde is glad to savour the sweet pain (‘“How delicious the torments will be!”’), as he is bound body-to-body with his beloved on the pyre.37 Rousseau’s translation ends (in mid-Book) at this moment: armoured womanhood rescuing from exquisite death a virgin and her twin who is Jean-Jacques with a name (‘Olinde’) which is curiously feminine. Our reading is in effect conﬁrmed by the fact that Rousseau quotes from this section of Tasso’s poem in his account of his own boyhood martyrdoms in the Reveries (cited above). An episode very similar to that of Olinde and Sophronie occurs at the end of Rousseau’s Levite of Ephraïm. The Levite, reworking a story in the Old Testament, deals in displaced homosexual gang rape and mass slaughter. Students of Rousseau’s imaginaire have understandably given it considerable attention in recent years.38 But here we must leave it aside, turning instead to his ﬁctional masterpiece.

Julie, or The New Heloise Rousseau himself will recount to us, in Book 9 of the Confessions, the fantasmic origins of his novel. Feeling a great need to love, he says, I did just what my reader will have learned by now to expect. The impossibility of attaining real beings ﬂung me into the land of dreams, and seeing nothing in existence which was worthy of my delirium, I nourished it with an ideal world that my creative imagination soon populated with creatures after my own heart.39 A second stage brings him (as he puts it) a little closer to earth: I imagined love and friendship, the two idols of my heart, in the most ravishing forms. […]. I imagined two friends who were women rather than men […]. I bestowed on one a lover of whom the other was the tender friend and even something more, but I admitted no rivalry, quarreling or jealousy, because all painful feelings distress me to imagine, and I did not wish to darken this smiling picture with anything which degraded nature. Smitten by my two charming models, I identiﬁed myself with the lover and friend as much as possible. Seeking an appropriate location for them, he continues, he needed a lake. He chooses the great water of his own origins, Lake Geneva, and on its edge the little town of Vevey, the place of origin of ‘Maman’.40 As primal locations, liquid and mother are themselves of course profoundly linked. I shall come back to this. But let us begin with the affective pattern that Rousseau has just outlined. It is clear that his ideal dream brings together sexual love, heterosexual friendship (with ‘even something more’), and same-sex friendship – and binds them

182 Sex and Sensibility

still closer by excluding interpersonal conﬂict. The young women, Julie and Claire, will also be cousins, adding another and familial strand to the bonds. The young man, the ‘lover and friend’ completing the triangle, is a version of himself. This may be why we are never told his name; but he is given a chivalric pseudonym, Saint-Preux. Slightly older than the cousins, and Julie’s tutor, he is their superior; but he is a plebeian guest in her noble household, which makes her his lady in that sense too. Thus these relations too are complementary and to some extent reversible. The novel will be epistolary (in the fashion of the time, and perhaps in imitation of the letters of Eloisa and Abelard, the medievalising metatext of spiritualised passion announced in the title), but it is interesting that Rousseau in his account of its creation never gives a reason for this choice. It means that Rousseau is writing letters of love and friendship, in the personae of both sexes (yet in a style that scarcely differentiates them), to himself. His avowed self-projection within the ﬁction, Saint-Preux, can also mirror himself by writing. Saint-Preux makes the ﬁrst utterance, by letter (though he sees its addressee every day). It announces to Julie the forbidden declaration of love, offering to die should she so command, and asking only to be read.41 Passively he exhibits his love and self, for punishment and recognition. Julie, eventually overwhelmed by his writing, avows by letter her own love. He asks her to make all the decisions for them both (Part I, Letter 12). But his tranquillity is disturbed – according to his own account – when she takes the ﬁrst sexual initiative (I, 14). She then banishes him from her presence, which leaves him free to fantasise about her. His imagination dwells upon her breasts, which he celebrates by quoting lines from Tasso (about the half-seen breast of a pagan enchantress), and evoking a classical cup (I, 23). Julie’s body, like everything else about her, is elegant. Rousseau is an aesthete. His desire requires reﬁnement, as he himself recognises. ‘I needed young ladies’ offers within the Confessions a suggestive parallel to ‘I needed a lake’. What appeals to him in a woman, he says, is reﬁnement – and he lists items of female apparel with an attention both feminine and voyeuristic.42 Rousseau dreams of men as naked athletes; women he wants elegantly dressed or en déshabillé, partially revealed so as to provoke the imagination. But Julie’s breast is also compared to a cup. Rousseau has her propose to Saint-Preux a rural rendez-vous at a chalet known only to ‘fresh and discreet milkmaids’, free from mankind and ‘under the tender care of Mother Nature’.43 Its rectiﬁed equivalent in the second half of the novel is the ‘Gynécée’ or nursery at Clarens, where one consumes ‘dishes to the taste of women and children’. Men are excluded, even Julie’s husband; but Saint-Preux through his insistent demands is admitted. The milkproducts, he says, were delicious, and still more so in a dairy where Julie presides!44 Regressive desire – the exclusion of male sexuality, and the infantile-oral wish for the mother’s breast – could scarcely be afﬁrmed more clearly. Saint-Preux, in a word, wants to remain Julie’s child. In the ﬁrst half of the novel he is received for love by Julie d’Etange (and her mother) into her ﬁrst family; but he is expelled by the arrival on the scene of her father. In the second half of the novel he is received for social order by Julie de Wolmar (now a

Reading Rousseau’s Sexuality 183

mother) into her second family, under the tutelage of her husband who is to help him to achieve maturity. But he is deeply ambivalent about becoming one of the adults. As he writes (on behalf surely of his creator), ‘I feel greater pleasure still in seeing myself as the child of the household’.45 He never really wanted Julie sexually. It was she who wanted him in that way. He wanted a mother. His ﬁrst letter to Julie begins ‘I must ﬂee from you, Mademoiselle’. His last includes a formula in which the truth is made astonishingly explicit: ‘When that fearsome Julie pursues me, I take refuge with Madame de Wolmar and I am at peace’.46 The love that he wants most is maternal. Saint-Preux also wants a love that is fraternal. His surrogate brother is milord Edouard – Rousseau’s fantasy English companion: aristocratic, stern but passionate. Edouard will rescue him from Julie’s sexual demands by carrying off the fainting tutor in his strong phallic arm and a carriage. ‘In an instant,’ writes Claire (enviously?), ‘he bore him with a powerful arm into the chaise, and they departed closely embracing’.47 In the second half of the novel Saint-Preux will return the favour by prising Edouard free from the clutches of two scarlet women – the doubles surely of Julie and Claire who pursue Saint-Preux. As Julie is to be his loving mother, Claire is to be his loving sister. But none of these roles is exclusive: Edouard is his twin and also his elder brother; Claire is to be his mother too, and Julie his sister. He addresses Julie as ‘my charming mistress, my spouse, my sister, my sweet friend’ (I, 55); Claire tells her ‘your lover is my friend, that is, my brother’ (II, 5). Implicit is a wish to return to the state that Freud calls polymorphous perversity. Forbidding the regressive desire to merge however is the father. The rectiﬁed father (for Julie as well as Saint-Preux) will be Wolmar, in the second half of the novel. The real father is the terrible Baron d’Etange. Julie’s father is the Father: the master of the house and the horde, the patriarch and philanderer, towards whom they all feel awe and guilt.48 The Baron pronounces the ‘Non du père’: he expels the claimant to his daughter, causes the death of his wife (‘her husband alone is to blame’: III, 7), kills the tutor’s child in the womb of the daughter (I, 63), and marries her to his own choice. Œdipus rises in the eighteenth century.49 Or rather he censors his desire to rise. Indeed, to declare Julie the new Heloise makes Saint-Preux another Abelard. Rousseau, through his surrogate, castrates himself rather than confront the Father. Or rather, his guilty Eros is sublimated into the glorious Eros of writing.

Flow Rousseau is drawn to the feminine principle of water and ﬂow. In his more mythic account of the origins of man, water is the primal and generative element. The ﬁrst meeting-places of humanity were rivers, springs and wells.50 Water in ﬂow and repose is perhaps the fundamental symbolic principle of his novel. A true loveletter, he says in the Second Preface, is ‘like a living spring which ﬂows without cease and never runs dry’. Persuasive speech is ﬂow. Life forever with Julie would be ﬂow.51 Julie is from still water (Julie d’Etange – ‘étang’

184 Sex and Sensibility

means pond), and returns to her element when her immersion in the lake brings about her death.52 All these of course are statements about Rousseau’s own writing (the letters, the persuasive utterance, the novel called Julie) in which we are to immerse ourselves as it ﬂows. The act of writing itself is for Rousseau a whole erotics. Saint-Preux within the ﬁction copies out Julie’s letters, substitute for herself, making of them a precious book (II, 13). So does Rousseau the maker of the ﬁction, copying out his own composition ‘with an inexpressible pleasure, using the ﬁnest gilt paper’.53 To copy is to reproduce the same – erotics as auto-erotics. Saint-Preux indeed saves for the evenings ‘this charming occupation’ and ‘advances slowly so as to prolong it’.54 The ﬂow of ink is controlled by his hand; the ﬂow of words is drawn from Rousseau’s creation Julie and Julie’s creator Rousseau. The manu-script, unlike the woman, remains theirs. Julie the woman must die so that Julie the book can be written. Rousseau’s last work, the Reveries, will be composed explicitly for himself. By then he must rely more on memory than imagination for his ‘charming contemplations’; but the principle is the same. ‘Writing ﬁxes those which may still come to me; each time I reread them will offer me jouissance.’55 However self-abuse can lead to death (as Saint-Preux needs to be warned by Julie: Heloise, II, 15). Emile adolescent must be watched day and night. ‘If he ever discovers this dangerous supplement, he is doomed. Henceforth his body and soul will be forever enfeebled.’56 Sophie is told that she could kill Emile by allowing him too much sexual intercourse or too little. It’s women who really want it, and they wear men out.57 This fear must be an element in Rousseau’s dream of autarchy. All the outlets and inlets have to be blocked, in order to prevent wear and waste. ‘None of these exchanges occurs without loss, and such repeated losses reduce to almost nothing quite considerable resources’.58 The ideal (e)state is self-complete: Emile’s state, the Wolmar estate at Clarens, the city-state of Du contrat social. Perhaps this is also the state represented by each clean-limbed male, the state of Rousseau’s philosophic desire. His more intimate desire is represented in his novel, in which Clarens though admirable fails to satisfy. Julie dying gladly looks forward to the inﬁnite, and back to her ﬁrst love.59 Saint-Preux will not grow up. Rousseau’s more intimate desire is in its character feminine, receptive and expansive – to return to nature, water and the mother.

Notes 1. Confessions, CW5.7–11; Dialogues, CW1.123. References are to The Collected Writings of Rousseau, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover and London: New England University Press, 1990– ), by volume and page-number(s). I also give references to the authoritative French edition of Rousseau’s Œuvres complètes, in the Pléiade (5 vols; Paris: Gallimard, 1959–95), especially when supplying the French text (modernised) in notes. The translations here, attempting to convey the quality as well as the sense of Rousseau’s writing, are usually my own. 2. Plutarch presents the austere republican heroes of Sparta and Rome; the romances of La Calprenède or Mme de Scudéry (ﬁction mostly set in ancient times) feature Alexander and Cyrus, Cleopatra and Clelia. On the continuing cultural signiﬁcance of the seventeenth-century French romances even in mid-eighteenth-century England,

Reading Rousseau’s Sexuality 185

3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

see Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote, ed. Margaret Dalziel (Oxford UP, 1970), ‘Introduction’ (and text!). ‘Un autre monde’; ‘un monde idéal’: CW1.9 and 13; Pléiade i, pp. 668, 673. ‘My great embarrassment was the shame of giving myself the lie so evidently and publicly. After the severe principles that I had just declared […] against effeminate books which breathed love and softness […] which I had so harshly censored’ (Confessions Book 9: CW5.365; Pléiade i, p. 434). ‘Goûter’, ‘souffrir’, ‘caresser’, ‘jouir’, ‘errer’, ‘déﬁgurer’. Rousseau’s language itself is composed to be tasted and undergone, lingered over and savoured. ‘J’avais trouvé dans la douleur, dans la honte même, un mélange de sensualité’; ‘il se mêlait sans doute à cela quelque instinct précoce du sexe’; ‘ce châtiment d’enfant […] a décidé de mes goûts, de mes désirs, de mes passions, de moi, pour le reste de ma vie’: CW5.13; Pléiade i, p. 15. ‘J’eus désormais l’honneur, dont je me serais bien passé, d’être traité par elle en grand garçon’: loc.cit. Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: transparency and obstruction, tr. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago and London: Chicago UP, 1988) p. 394. Pierre-Paul Clément, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. De l’Eros coupable à l’éros glorieux (Neuchâtel: La Baconnière, 1976). For perhaps the clearest summary, see pp. 100–101. The broad outlines of this view of Rousseau’s sexuality – infantile, narcissistic and masochistic – underly a number of recent books. These include Paule Adamy, Les Corps de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Paris: Champion, 1997); the psychoanalytic reading of Rousseau’s religion by Michel Coz, La Cène et l’Autre Scène: Désir et profession de foi chez Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Paris: Champion, 1998); and the account of Rousseau’s novel by Elena Pulcini, Amour-passion et amour conjugal. Rousseau et l’origine d’un conﬂit moderne (Paris: Champion, 1998). He is seen as both submissive to the father and challenging the ‘fathers’ of society in Claire Elmquist, Rousseau père et ﬁls (Odense UP, 1996); and in the more tragic reading by Thomas M. Kavanagh, Writing the Truth: Authority and Desire in Rousseau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). More clearly against the regressive psychoanalytical account are several recent studies which argue for Rousseau’s philosophical importance in recognising the role of sexuality in politics. These include Penny A. Weiss, Gendered Communities: Rousseau, Sex, and Politics (New York UP, 1993); Margaret Ogrodnick, Instinct and Intimacy: Political Philosophy and Autobiography in Rousseau (University of Toronto Press, 1999); and – most remarkably, to my mind – Elizabeth Rose Wingrove, Rousseau’s Republican Romance (Princeton UP, 2000). The struggle over Rousseau within North American feminist scholarship is evidenced by another dozen recent American books and articles listed in Wingrove’s bibliography. Noting the provenance and language of these contrasting approaches – French and American – it seems that we are dealing with two rather different academies. ‘N’osant jamais déclarer mon goût, je l’amusais [I occupied it] du moins par des rapports qui m’en conservaient l’idée. Etre aux genoux d’une maîtresse impérieuse, obéir à ses ordres, avoir des pardons à lui demander, étaient pour moi de très douces jouissances, et plus ma vive imagination m’enﬂammait le sang, plus j’avais l’air d’un amant transi [a swooning suitor].’ CW5.15; Pléiade i, p. 17. ‘Mon humeur timide et mon esprit romanesque’: loc.cit.. It has been nicely observed that as Julie deals in Italian quotation, so Emile deals in quotations from Latin, ‘the virile language’ – except in the story of Emile and Sophie where the Italian poets duly take over. See Françoise Bocquentin, ‘Comment lire J.-J. Rousseau selon J.-J. Rousseau?’, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la lecture, ed. Tanguy L’Aminot (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1999), 329–49 (p. 335). See Denis de Rougemont’s great historical study of Courtly Love, translated as Love in the Western World (or Passion and Society) (tr. Monty Belgion; New York: Pantheon, 1956). See too the Introduction to Pulcini, Amour-passion.

186 Sex and Sensibility 14. He was sickened by the sight of bitches [sic: ‘des chiennes’] coupling, and by seeing holes in the earth where he was told that whores and debauchees did the same [‘des cavités dans la terre où l’on me dit que ces gens-là faisaient leurs accouplements’]: CW5.14; Pléiade i, p. 16. Horror of the female ‘hole’ is surely implicit. 15. ‘Ce vice, que la honte et la timidité trouvent si commode, a de plus un grand attrait pour les imaginations vives: c’est de disposer pour ainsi dire à leur gré de tout le sexe […] sans avoir besoin d’obtenir son aveu’: CW5.91; Pléiade i, p. 109. 16. Rousseau’s accounts of the ‘illumination’ that he experienced in 1749 on the road to Vincennes can be found in CW5.294–5, 575, and CW8.20; Pléiade i, pp. 351, 1015, 1135–6. 17. For Rousseau ‘utopias were genuine portraits of the human heart’, as Judith Shklar nicely puts it, embracing the aspirational, philosophical and ﬁctional dimensions of his writing: Men and Citizens: a Study of Rousseau’s Social Theory (Cambridge UP, 1969), p. 8. 18. CW1.123, 153–4, and CW5.577–9; Pléiade i, pp. 817, 857–8, 1138–42. 19. ‘Jamais il ne m’embrassa que je ne sentisse à ses soupirs, à ses convulsives étreintes, qu’un regret amer se mêlait à ses caresses’; ‘“Ah”, disait-il en gémissant, “Rends-la-moi, console-moi d’elle”’: CW5.7; Pléiade, i, p. 7. 20. ‘Une fois que mon père le châtoyait rudement et avec colère, je me jettai impétueusement entre deux l’embrassant étroitement. Je le couvris ainsi de mon corps recevant les coups qui lui étaient portés’: CW5.9; Pléiade i, pp. 9–10. 21. It seems that the minister and his sister had actually been accused of improper intimacies: see Clément, De l’Eros coupable, p. 60, note 36; Coz, La Cène, p. 36. But JeanJacques is unlikely to have known that. Our concern anyway is less with the putative ‘facts’ than with the sexual imaginaire – as in our reading of the text of the Confessions itself. 22. On games with Mlle Goton, and on the idyllic ‘journée des cerises’, see respectively CW5.23, 113–16; Pléiade i, pp. 27, 134–9. 23. ‘Je fus atteint et saisi par un grand homme portant une grande moustache, […], un grand sabre’: CW5.74–5; Pléiade i, p. 89. 24. ‘J’étais comme si j’avais commis un inceste’: CW5.165; Pléiade i, p. 197. 25. ‘As he was serious, even grave, and I was younger than him, he became for me a kind of tutor [‘gouverneur’], saving me from many follies; for he overawed me and I dared not forget myself before him [‘car il m’en imposait, et je n’osais m’oublier devant lui’]’: CW5.149; Pléiade i, p. 177. 26. ‘Il nous regardait presque comme deux enfants dignes d’indulgence’ ; ‘Combien de fois elle attendrit nos cœurs et nous ﬁt embrasser avec larmes’; ‘Ainsi il s’établit entre nous trois une société sans autre exemple peut-être sur la terre’: CW5.169; Pléiade i, p. 201. 27. ‘Je devenais tout à fait son œuvre, tout à fait son enfant et plus que si elle eût été ma vraie mère’: CW5.186; Pléiade i, p. 222. The interpretation of his illness is proposed in the Pléiade edition, p. 218, note 6. 28. See Starobinski, Transparency, ‘On Rousseau’s illness’ (an essay ﬁrst published in 1962); Clément, De l’Eros coupable, ch. 19, ‘L’Etrange maladie’; Adamy, Les Corps, ch. 13, ‘Le corps persécuté’. 29. Other critics who perceive a sexual bivalence in Rousseau argue for an essential homosexuality (Adamy, Les Corps), or – more persuasively – point to a dream of hermaphroditism which is also of autarchy (Clèment, De l’Eros coupable, ch. 20; Joel Schwartz, The Sexual Politics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Chicago UP, 1984), ch. 4; Robert J. Ellrich, ‘Rousseau’s androgynous dream: the minor works of 1752–62’, French Forum 13 (1988), 319–38). I am using the term ‘homo-eroticism’ to signify the male subject’s susceptibility to sexual arousal by masculine qualities (or secondarily by perceiving an attraction of the same between females). 30. The boy had accidently crushed Jean-Jacques’s ﬁnger-ends between two metal rollers, Jean-Jacques having felt ‘tempted to place my ﬁngers there and running them pleasur-

Reading Rousseau’s Sexuality 187

31.

32.

33. 34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

41. 42. 43.

44.

45.

ably over the smooth surface of the cylinder’ [‘je fus tenté d’y poser mes doigts et je les promenais avec plaisir sur le lissé du cylindre’] (CW8.38; Pléiade i, p. 1036). Hands, tempting surfaces, touching, metal, pleasure, pain. … There seems to be a link (the right word) between Rousseau’s infantile eroticism and the opening sentences of the Social Contract and Emile, quoted above. Does the desire to return to the sensual mother underly both? ‘[…] je l’embrassais aussi de toute ma force en pleurant comme lui dans une émotion confuse qui n’était pas sans quelque douceur.’ ‘[…] longtemps je la regardai comme ma mère et son ﬁls comme mon frère’ CW8.38–9; Pléiade i, p. 1037. The two events recounted here are in effect episodic versions of the relationship that Rousseau represents as having existed throughout his boyhood between himself and Abraham Bernard, his companion, occasional bedfellow and (real) cousin, whom he loved ‘more than my brother’: Confessions, CW5.11ff.; Pléiade i, pp. 13ff. We noted earlier the story of blows and affection shared with (or claimed from) his real brother. ‘l’homme de bien est un athlète qui se plaît à combattre nu’: CW2.6; Pléiade iii, p. 8. In this instance the context too is of some interest in relation to Rousseau. Euryalus is devoted to the beautiful Nisus, with whom he goes on a daring night raid. When Nisus sees his boon companion captured by the enemy and about to be dispatched, he tries to save him by crying out ‘“All the fault is mine”’ (Aeneid, Book 9; tr. W. F. Jackson Knight; Penguin, 1956). For example, in Books 13 and 15, pp. 363, 370, 429, 431, of Les Aventures de Télémaque, ed. Jeanne-Lydie Goré (Paris: Garnier Flammarion, 1968). Fénelon’s ﬁction (itself derived from the opening of the Odyssey), is explicitly the metatext for the story of Emile and Sophie in the last Book of Emile. On Rousseau and Tasso, see the avowal of his passion in the Confessions, CW5.247; Pléiade i, p. 294 and note 9; Pléaide v, pp. cccii–v; and Jean Starobinski, ‘L’Imitation du Tasse’, Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau 40 (1992), 265–88. ‘Il désire beaucoup, espère peu, ne demande rien’; ‘“Que les tourments me seront délicieux”’: Pléiade v, pp. 1289–92. (Rousseau’s translation of Tasso is not available in English.) See notably the more psychological account offered in Kavanagh, Writing the Truth, ch. 5, and the ‘engaged’ reading in Wingrove, Rousseau’s Republican Romance (ch. 6), which I ﬁnd less persuasive . To my mind, Rousseau contrives to allow both his surrogates in the narrative – the Levite and Elmacin – to eschew politics as well as sexual relations with their (female) betrothed, in favour of suffering. See my article, ‘Rousseau’s ﬁctions of sacriﬁce’, SVEC 2003.07, 271–91. ‘L’impossibilité d’atteindre aux êtres réels me jeta dans le pays des chimères, et ne voyant rien d’existant qui fût digne de mon délire, je le nourris dans un monde idéal que mon imagination créatrice eut bientôt peuplé d’êtres selon mon cœur’: CW5.359; Pléiade i, p. 427. ‘Epris de mes deux charmants modèles, je m’identiﬁais avec l’amant et l’ami le plus qu’il m’était possible’. ‘Pour placer mes personnages dans un séjour qui leur convînt, […]. Il me fallait cependant un lac’. CW5.361–2; Pléiade i, pp. 430–1. ‘[…] périr par votre ordre […]’. ‘Si vous avez lu cette lettre, vous avez fait tout ce que j’oserais vous demander’: Part I, Letter 1. ‘Il me fallait des demoiselles’; ‘une robe plus ﬁne et mieux faite, une chaussure plus mignonne, des rubans, de la dentelle’: CW5.113; Pléiade i, p. 134. ‘Les fraîches et discrètes laitières’; ‘l’art ni la main des hommes n’y montrent nulle part leurs soins inquiétants; on n’y voit partout que les tendres soins de la Mère commune’: I, 36. ‘J’obtins à force d’importunités de l’y accompagner’; ‘Est-il quelques mets au monde comparables aux laitages de ce pays? Pensez ce que doivent être ceux d’une laiterie où Julie préside’: IV, 10. ‘Je sens plus de plaisir encore à me regarder comme l’enfant de la maison’: V, 2.

188 Sex and Sensibility 46. ‘Il faut vous fuir, mademoiselle’ (I, 1); ‘Quand cette redoutable Julie me poursuit, je me réfugie auprès de madame de Wolmar, et je suis tranquille’: VI, 7. 47. ‘A l’instant il l’a porté d’un bras vigoureux dans la chaise, et ils sont partis en se tenant étroitement embrassés’: I, 65. 48. For this reading, see Tony Tanner, Adultery in the novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979), ch.2, ‘La Nouvelle Héloïse’. 49. The clearest manifestation of the Œdipus complex is the sentiment of guilt towards the father: see Paul Pelckmans, Le Sacre du père: Fictions des Lumières et historicité d’Oedipe (1699–1775) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1983). The argument that Freud’s model of family relations is less a universal than a product of the rise of the bourgeois sentimental family has been proposed by a number of cultural historians: for a recent presentation, see Charlotte Daniels, Subverting the Family Romance (Lewisburg and London: Bucknell University Press, 2000). 50. Essay on the Origin of Languages: CW7.310–15; Pléiade v, pp. 400–5. On Rousseau and water, see the archetypal study by Monique Anne Gyalokay, Rousseau, Northrop Frye et la Bible (Paris: Champion, 1999), ch. 3. 51. ‘Une lettre d’un amant vraiment passioné sera […] comme une source vive qui coule sans cesse et ne s’épuise jamais’; ‘cette douce persuasion qui coule de sa bouche’; ‘O ma Julie! […] que ne puis-je couler mes jours avec toi’: The New Heloise, Second Preface; V, 5; I, 23. 52. Her married name is ‘Wolmar’, which might suggest ‘veut la mer’ (‘wants water’) – or ‘veut la mère’ for Saint-Preux. Water indeed represents the negation of her married and social condition. Claire reminds her (for our beneﬁt) that she loves boating but denies herself because her husband dislikes water, and her children might be exposed to danger: IV, 13. 53. ‘Je [le] ﬁs et mis au net durant cet hiver avec un plaisir inexprimable, employant pour cela le plus beau papier doré, de la poudre d’or et d’azur pour sécher l’écriture, […].’ (Confessions 9: CW5.367; Pléiade i, p. 436.) 54. ‘Je destine les soirées à cette occupation charmante, et j’avancerais lentement pour la prolonger’ (II, 15). 55. ‘Je ﬁxerais par l’écriture celles qui pourront me venir encore; chaque fois que je les relirai m’en rendra la jouissance’: CW8.7; Pléiade, i, p. 999. ‘Jouissance’ like ‘jouir’ had (and still has) a speciﬁcally erotic meaning in French. There is no adequate English equivalent. See Victor Reinking, ‘Rousseau’s bliss: jouissances’, SVEC 332 (1995), 335–48. 56. ‘Ne le laissez seul ni jour ni nuit […]. S’il connaît une fois ce dangereux supplément, il est perdu. Dès lors il aura toujours le corps et le cœur énervés […].’ Emile: trans. and ed. Allan Bloom (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1991), pp. 333–4; Pléiade iv, p. 663. 57. See Emile Book 5: ed. Bloom, pp. 359, 369, 428, 477–9; Pléiade iv, pp. 695, 709, 795, 863–6. 58. ‘Aucun de ces échanges ne se fait sans perte, et ces pertes multipliées réduisent presque à rien d’assez grands moyens’: Héloïse, V, 2. 59. ‘The ﬁrst sentiment that gave me life’ [‘le premier sentiment qui m’a fait vivre’]: Héloïse, VI, 12.

SECTION 4 GENDER AND THE REASONING MIND Introduction Mónica Bolufer Peruga

Women’s education, their access to learning, and what uses they should make of their reason, were intensely controversial subjects in eighteenth-century Europe. In fact it can be argued that education, broadly deﬁned to include intellectual, moral, emotional and physical formation, was at the centre of early modern debates on gender. It was the focal point of discussions of women’s intellectual and moral character and potential, and their appropriate social responsibilities and locations; education was regarded as crucial in determining whether gender-ascribed traits were natural or a product of acquired patterns of behaviour, thinking and feeling. The debate over female education during the Enlightenment reiterated issues that had long been controversial: how much education should women receive (that is, what type and degree of learning, besides basic moral, religious and domestic training, should be included in their curriculum); by which methods should they be educated (‘formal’ or ‘informal’); where and by whom should they be educated (at home, in the convent or boarding school, by mothers or governors/governesses). These questions were all underpinned by a more fundamental one: why and for what purpose should women be educated? At a time when new intellectual constituencies were appearing on the cultural scene, the issue of female entitlements could not be evaded. What types of knowledge should women be allowed to display, and in which contexts? How tightly should the boundaries be drawn around women’s participation in the realm of ideas, as students, as rational mothers, as readers and writers? The ﬁgure of the female intellectual -the ‘woman of letters’, to use the characteristically ambiguous early modern phrase – will be examined later in this volume, but it is important to note here how the meaning of this phrase changed with transformations of the social rules governing female intellectualism. The chapters in this section deal with these issues as they appeared in French and British educational literature, and in contemporary controversies about correct forms of written French. Jean Bloch and Michèle Cohen look at debates on women’s education by focussing, in Bloch’s case, on women’s own writings about education in eighteenth-century France, and, in Cohen’s chapter, on the British controversy over ‘public’ and ‘private’ education and its implications for 189

190 Gender and the Reasoning Mind

women’s relationship to intellectual practices. Dena Goodman takes the unusual and illuminating starting point of debates over French orthography to open up issues of female cultural authority. Goodman shows how seventeenth-century initiatives to simplify and systematize French orthography by bringing it closer to the spoken language instituted an alliance between ‘modern’ men of letters and cultivated women (who were deemed experts in the arts of conversation) against the erudite, etymological tradition; however, in the eighteenth century male writers turned to the written word as the norm for orthography while at the same time deprecating female speech and writing. Together, these chapters show very clearly how debates over female education in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were inﬂected by changes in women’s cultural roles. Focussing on two national examples, Britain and France, they raise some interesting comparative points that can be extended to other European countries such as Spain, Italy, or Germany. The historiography of eighteenth-century women’s education shows that although pedagogical habits and institutions differed considerably from country to country, the points under dispute were basically the same.1 This is hardly surprising, given the international diffusion of pedagogical literature, particularly French writings on education: in 1797 a (probably ﬁctitious) writer to a Spanish periodical depicted cooking maids as avid readers of translated editions of Mme Le Prince de Beaumont and Mme de Genlis, while cultivated ladies were reading them in French: a piece of satirical hyperbole that nonetheless points to the widespread popularity of such texts, with their address to common European concerns.2 Nearly all writers agreed on the value of women’s education as an instrument of social reform. In the case of plebian women, educating them to be devout Christians, obedient subjects and efﬁcient workers was almost universally advocated. The education of elite women was more contentious. The genteel acquisition of ‘accomplishments’ (music, dance, foreign languages, manners) was rejected as merely frivolous, and there were the usual calls for ‘moral’ and ‘useful’ education about Christianity and domestic affairs. Disagreements arose, however, over the importance of ‘politeness’, especially the cultivation of conversational abilities, and real erudition in women was generally deprecated. Some knowledge of history, geography, and modern languages (French, Italian) was regarded as appropriate, but classical languages, philosophy and the sciences were highly contentious, as was the choice between ‘private’ (home-based) or ‘public’ education (in convents or schools). Authors also disagreed about women’s intellectual potential and the uses to which female education should be put. In the eighteenth century, as traditional misogyny gave way to notions of complementary gender-speciﬁc attributes, it was increasingly argued that women’s education ought to be adapted to their different (rather than inferior) intellectual capacities; women were depicted as more inclined to wit, taste, and practical reasoning than to abstract speculation. It was taken for granted that, far from genderless, minds did have a sex, and ‘masculine reason’ in women was not to be encouraged. Across Europe, in the expanding print culture of the eighteenth century, the pedagogical obsessions of Enlightenment intellectuals resulted in reams of

Introduction 191

writings on education. For women writers, this presented a golden opportunity for respectable authorship. In the late eighteenth century, as ideals of sentimental domesticity took hold across European society, education became a very safe subject for women writers, one where maternal pedagogic authority could be successfully exploited in the increasingly competitive terrain of professional authorship.3 Bloch’s essay provides an illuminating survey of women’s writing on education in France from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the post-revolutionary period. Her verdict on the contributions of these women is ultimately critical: their prescriptions, she judges, were too narrow and subservient to male opinion. Yet her essay implicitly shows how rather than just writing in the shadow of male educationalists, women actively participated in the elaboration of Enlightenment pedagogical thought and practices, engaging critically with emergent educational theories. This was true of Mme de Lambert’s relationship to Fénélon, of Mme Le Prince de Beaumont’s morally conservative yet ﬁercely rationalist approach to girls’ education, and of Mme d’Épinay’s and Mme de Genlis’ critical appraisals of Rousseau. Something similar can be said of other European women writers, like the Spaniard Josefa Amar y Borbón who, well aware of contemporary international debate, diverged from many of the usual assumptions in her Discourse of women’s physical and moral education (1790), making signiﬁcant use of her French predecessors. In fact, across national and linguistic boundaries, in remarkably dissimilar cultural contexts, shared attitudes to educational issues gave rise to common approaches among women writers, although with varying emphases. All expressed a strong conﬁdence in women’s (especially their own) rational potential and judgement; they energetically denounced the general neglect of women’s education, whether resulting from social indifference or a desire to keep women dependent on men. All called on women to take responsibility for themselves, both as moral individuals and as members of the social community, while at the same time managing to avoid the censorious tone common among male moralists and reformers. Also, in contrast to men who tended to stress the utilitarian side of women’s education (educating women to be responsible wives and mothers, or polite participants in elite society) women writers tended to value learning as a route to emotional and intellectual autonomy, a path to self-esteem and the pleasures of solitary reﬂection as well as those of literary glory. ‘It is good to depend as little as possible on others, as in the noble exercise of study’, Josefa Amar declared, before citing Mme de Lambert on the same subject, in a strikingly revealing paragraph.4 But then she hurried to add that ‘fame and immortal glory go in hands with merit, wherever it is found’: Amar clearly thought of herself, and behaved, as one deserving of a high literary reputation. This view of female learning as a source of pleasure and a site of public recognition was shared by many of her European contemporaries, in sharp contrast with the ideal propounded in Rousseau’s Émile (and implicitly assumed by most male – and some female – pedagogical writers) that ‘all women’s education must be related to men’, that is, directed to meeting the material and sentimental needs of children and husbands.

192 Gender and the Reasoning Mind

This issue of for whom women should be educated (themselves or their families) underlay many pedagogical debates, including that of ‘public’ versus ‘private’ education. As Michèle Cohen shows, arguments over whether boys should be sent to school were common in British pedagogical literature, whereas the outcry against boarding schools for girls, the call for their domestic education, seems to have been unanimous. In France, enlightened critics blamed convents for producing frivolous, ignorant females who were either immoral themselves or the innocent victims of male seduction (as Cécile de Volanges in Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses); however, both in France and in Italy, some writers acknowledged the beneﬁts of public education and urged its reform. In Spain, where female public (convent) schooling was very limited, proposals for colleges that would offer elite girls a more secular, modern instruction were widespread in enlightened circles (although they rarely materialized), while at the same time education by mothers was held up as the real ideal. Far from a merely practical alternative, such home-based education was seen as a symbol of maternal dedication, an emblem of the new sentimental family, and a moral and social panacea. This viewpoint was highly inﬂuential in eighteenth-century Europe (and most powerfully expressed in Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse); it was, however, less popular in Britain, where mistrust of women’s moral and intellectual capacity to educate the young, and concern about the effeminisation of boys under maternal inﬂuence, dominated pedagogical debate. In her essay, Cohen throws light on the dichotomies of ‘public’ versus ‘private’ and ‘formal’ versus ‘informal’ which have dominated assessments of women’s education. She shows how these categories, far from merely descriptive of pedagogical practices, were in fact highly prescriptive and led to a radical devaluation of women’s intellectual achievements in their own eyes, as well as in contemporary social opinion and in the historiography. Not only was girls’ education deﬁned as ‘informal’ in comparison to boys’ education (which in fact was far from uniform and systematic), but also, and more crucially, ‘informal’ modes of learning had very different gender implications. By the end of the eighteenth century, informal learning for men was praised as encouraging individual autonomy, in contrast to hidebound pedagogical methods, whereas in women’s case it was discouraged as conducive to anarchic, superﬁcial learning and, implicitly, as encouraging a degree of personal initiative and intellectual ambition improper for their sex. As in the case of orthographical norms, it can be argued that certain types of female education, like self-learning (rather than institutional education) and learning to write according to the model of oral speech (instead of the printed word) were devalued because they were branded ‘informal’, that is, unsystematic and lacking in proper method. As Cohen shows, these pedagogical categories not only shaped social deﬁnitions of ‘solid’ versus ‘superﬁcial’, ‘masculine’ versus ‘feminine’, but also, in many cases, undermined women’s self-conﬁdence and self-presentation and, to some extent, even their own sense of intellectual entitlement. Pedagogical debate was not mere intellectual speculation. It took place in a precise social and cultural context broadly similar throughout Europe: women

Introduction 193

were playing an active role in the intellectual public space, and an inﬂuential model of domestic femininity was emerging and consolidating. Women’s intellectual presence and performance in the social arena was intensely controversial, as revealed in stereotypes of the learned woman to be found all over seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe: the French femme savante, the Spanish bachillera, the Italian dottoressa or letteratta, the English ‘female pedant’, which represented women intellectuals as dilettante, impolite, and immodest.5 Yet despite the apparent uniformity of these caricatures, the image of the woman intellectual, Dena Goodman argues, was not constant. The rules governing women’s public use of knowledge shifted over time, with changes in reading, writing, and publishing practices and in the meanings of concepts like ‘culture’ and ‘public’. Aristocratic culture had traditionally allowed some public role for women intellectuals, who were regarded as ‘exceptions’ to their gender. Renaissance and Baroque celebrations of ‘illustrious women’ must be seen in this light, as well as the public examinations of young female ‘prodigies’, who were praised as national treasures ; both practices were characteristic of the social customs of the privileged classes.6 If the ousting of the Old Regime in revolutionary France and the construction of a new political culture there implied a more drastic exclusion of women from the acquisition and public display of knowledge, as Geneviève Fraisse argues, this came after an earlier and more gradual change – the expansion of the public literary sphere from the late seventeenth century to the 1780s – which had invested women’s education and intellectual roles with new signiﬁcance.7 In her essay on the reform of French orthography, Goodman argues that this earlier process had had ambiguous consequences for woman, who actively participated in the construction of the public literary sphere (as readers, writers, and arbiters for literary taste), but who were ultimately relegated to the more passive role of consumers of culture. Thus, French elite women, who had exerted – and were recognized as exerting – intellectual authority over the ‘essentially oral culture of the salon’, experienced a degradation of their cultural status. As the world of conversation, so central to seventeenth and early eighteenth-century notions of polite culture, gave way to literature as the key ﬁeld of professional intellectual activity, women’s cultural role was redeﬁned and reduced.8 Rather than their prominent (albeit ambiguous) role as salonnières, French elite women found themselves occupying the more passive position of readers; they became the target audience of eighteenth-century male and women writers, with the latter both numerous and often successful, but marginalized. This is an appealing yet controversial thesis, which will be discussed in other sections of this volume. What is evident from these essays is that, by the late eighteenth century, discursive and institutional practices with regard to women’s education did not entirely succeed in containing women in the narrowly deﬁned roles of cultivated wives and hostesses, educating mothers or sympathetic readers. In many instances women took these roles into their own hands, investing them with new meanings and public authority while at the same time secretly or openly claiming knowledge as a source of pleasure and happiness, ‘a room of one’s own’.

194 Gender and the Reasoning Mind

Notes 1. Martine Sonnet, L’éducation des ﬁlles au temps des Lumières. Paris, Cerf, 1987, and ‘La educación de una joven’, in Arlette Farge and Natalie Z. Davis, eds, Historia de las mujeres. Del Renacimiento a la Edad Moderna, vol. 3 of George Duby and Michelle Perrot’s Historia de las mujeres en Occidente. Madrid, Taurus, 1992, pp. 129–65. Mónica Bolufer, Mujeres e Ilustración. La construcción de la feminidad en la España del siglo XVIII. Valencia, Institució Alfons el Magnànim, 1998, ch. 3. Luciano Guerci, La sposa obbediente. Donna e matrimonio nella discussione dell’Italia del Settecento. Torino, Tirrenia stampatori, 1988, ch. 6. Peter Petersauer, The education of women in eighteenth-century Germany. New York, Edwin Mellen Press, 1991. 2. M. Bolufer, ‘Pedagogía y moral en el Siglo de las Luces: las escritoras francesas y su recepción en España’, Revista de historia moderna, 20 (2002), pp. 251–92. 3. Yvonne Knibiehler and Catherine Fouquet, Histoire des mères. Du Moyen Âge à nos jours. Paris, Montalba, 1977; Claudia Opitz, ‘The “Myth of Motherhood” revisited. Reﬂexions on Motherhood and Female (In-)Equality during the Enlightenment’, in Hans E. Bödeker and Lieselotte Steinbrügge, eds, Conceptualising Women in Enlightenment Thought, Berlin, Berlin Verlag, 2001, pp. 75–88. 4. Josefa Amar, Discurso sobre la educación física y moral de las mujeres, Madrid, Cátedra, 1994, p. 67. 5. M. Bolufer, Mujeres e Ilustración …, pp. 145–151; L. Guerci, La spose …; Ann B. Shteir, ‘“With matchless Newton now one soars on high”: Representing Women’s Scientiﬁc Learnedness in England’, in H. Bödeker and L. Steinbrügge, Conceptualising Women …, pp. 115–128. 6. M. Bolufer, ‘Galerías de “mujeres ilustres”, o el sinuoso camino de la excepción a la norma cotidiana (ss. XV–XVIII’, Hispania, 204 (2000), pp. 181–224. 7. Geneviève Fraisse, Muse de la raison. La démocratie exclusive et la différence des sexes, Paris, Alinéa, 1989; Anne Vila, ‘Ambiguous Beings’: The Debate on Women Intellectuals in French Medicine and Literature, 1775–1845, this volume, pp. 53–69. 8. Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, and Dena Goodman, ‘Introduction’ to Going Public. Women and Publishing in Early Modern France. Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1991, pp. 1–9. Dena Goodman, ‘Women and Enlightenment’, in R. Bridenthal, S. Stuard, M. Wiesner, eds, Becoming Visible. Women in European History. Boston, Houghton and Mifﬂin, 1998, pp. 233–61.

4.1 L’ortografe des dames: Gender and Language in the Old Regime Dena Goodman*

What greater pleasure for a researcher than to have in her hands and before her eyes the very manuscripts written by a woman of the past she seeks to understand? What greater frustration than struggling to decipher not just the handwriting, but the spelling! More than two hundred years after the death of the noted salonnière Marie-Thérèse Geoffrin, her manuscripts are my only contact with the corporeal woman. But due to her poor spelling, reading her letters makes the same sensory impact on me that I imagine smelling her unwashed body might. Moreover, it is painfully obvious that the men of letters with whom Geoffrin consorted and to whose success she contributed so materially had no such hidden shame: their manuscript letters may reveal the occasional slip, but they are basically sound in the mechanics of spelling and grammar. The letter as body is gendered, and the shameful body is female. Editors and historians since the nineteenth century have called attention to the poor spelling of elite eighteenth-century women, and especially those who participated in the republic of letters, as if to remind their readers that the gender gap central to the republic was intellectual as well as social. The editor of Madame Geoffrin’s correspondence with the Polish king Stanislaus advises us in his preface that ‘it was not possible to preserve the constantly vicious spelling of madame Geoffrin, it would have been an abusive exactitude and a fatiguing scrupulousness for the public. This multitude of errors would have given a tiresome aspect to the style and would not even have allowed for a good appreciation of the meaning.’1 In his magisterial history of the French language, Ferdinand Brunot, too, provided ‘specimens’ of women’s poor spelling and called attention especially to that of such well-known writers and friends of the philosophes as Madame de Tencin, Madame Geoffrin, and Rousseau’s muse, Madame de Warens.2 Moreover, Brunot noted, when spelling is considered, ‘the distance is weak between a marquise de Verdelin, for example, and mother Levasseur, who served as J. J. Rousseau’s secretary.’ 3 Poor spelling was the mark of intellectual inferiority, the counterweight to the material wealth and social and political superiority of the salonnière. Pointing it out redressed the balance between her and the men of letters who frequented her salon. 195

196 Gender and the Reasoning Mind

Félicité Dupont, who served under Madame de Genlis as undergoverness for the daughters of the duc de Chartres in the 1780s, was self-conscious about her poor spelling, and not without reason: her correspondent and husband, JacquesPierre Brissot, criticized her for her spelling errors, driving her at times to write to him in English so as to avoid his criticism.4 The chevalier de Bonnard, who was the tutor for the sons of the duc de Chartres, took great pleasure in reading almost daily letters from his wife when they were apart, but in his own he also reminded her to work on her spelling.5 In 1773, Madame de Choiseul wrote to Madame du Deffand of her embarrassment that an academician with whom she wanted to raise a point of grammar should see her own writing: ‘I don’t want him to ﬁnd the spelling mistakes in a letter by a woman who has taken it into her head to reason about language,’ she explained.6 And yet an orthographic norm only began to be established in France in the eighteenth century, and it was only fully in place in the nineteenth. Why, then, were eighteenth-century women made to feel ashamed if they failed to meet it? And why did women feel this shame particularly? My purpose in this essay is to historicize this shame.

L’ortografe des dames How did women spell in the eighteenth century? According to Marie-Claire Grassi’s study of eleven hundred manuscript letters written by noblewomen and men between 1700 and 1860, gender was a key factor in determining how these letter writers spelled. According to Grassi, ‘The sex of the writer is, with geographic origin [rural or urban], the most determinant criterion of epistolary discourse.’ In the period from 1700 to 1770, Grassi found that more than 90 per cent of the male letter writers she studied adhered to the orthographic norms of their day, while only 25 per cent of the women did. By contrast, 37 per cent of the women continued to write according to ‘archaic’ practice. The remaining 38 per cent of women’s letters fell somewhere between these two poles. By 1820, however, 59 per cent of women’s letters adhered to the orthographic norms of the day, and by 1860, fully 86 per cent did.7 Statistically, then, women and men of the same social status did spell differently in the eighteenth century, but, Grassi shows, this distinction was in the process of disappearing at precisely that time, as the spread of education and literacy to (elite) women brought them into line with the orthographic norm. The main problem with this interpretation is that it inscribes the difference between the way that men and women of the elite typically spelled into a progressive narrative in which women’s practice was archaic and irrational, and men’s was both modern and normative. Grassi not only embraces the Encyclopédie’s claim that orthography, properly speaking, does not include ‘the writing practice of uneducated people who … have no stable principle and leave everything to chance,’8 but sees it as descriptive of the practice of the overwhelming majority of elite women. Here is an example Grassi gives of such an unprincipled female speller from 1732: ‘Linthéré qu ie prand monsieur en ce qui

Gender and Language in the Old Regime 197

nous regarde ma fait pansé a un establissement qui celon moy nous scera tré convenable.’9 To the degree that the orthographic practice represented here is phonetic, however, it is hardly without principles. Nor is it simply archaic. Indeed, from the sixteenth century on, proponents of orthographic reform argued precisely that French orthography should be established on phonetic principles. And starting in the seventeenth century, they made their claims for phonetic reform in terms of a gendered understanding of language that idealized the phonetic principle as the ‘ortografe des dames.’ By the latter half of the eighteenth century, however, when the phonetic reformers had been deﬁnitively dismissed as dangerous radicals, this same term came to have a new meaning in the spellers being marketed to a female public. The new Orthographe des dames or ‘Speller for ladies’ taught elite women and girls how to spell correctly and thus avoid the shame and embarrassment of presenting themselves badly (to men) in the letters they wrote. My aim in this essay is to trace this shift in meaning and thus to explain how the orthographic practice of elite women came to be a source of shame.

Spelling and the education of girls Grassi’s study shows that most elite women did spell differently from most elite men in the eighteenth century, and she points to the differential education given to elite girls and boys for an explanation. Educational practice, moreover, rested on the assumption of a fundamental inequality between the sexes and the belief that the role of education was to maintain the social order that rested upon it.10 As Bernard Magné notes, because girls were seen as less capable than boys, they were taught fewer subjects; the difference in their education was quantitative, not qualitative.11 But why, then, was spelling not included in the studies appropriate to girls? Increasingly in the eighteenth century, girls did receive formal education, but it was notoriously brief and only minimally academic. If, as Martine Sonnet points out, educators of poor girls ‘were always in a hurry to remove the pen from their hands and replace it with needle and thread,’ the convents in which young ladies were formed tended to teach writing as they did music and dancing – as an accomplishment necessary to demonstrate polish in le monde.12 In her memoirs, Madame de Cavaignac, born in 1780, noted with regret that since the Revolution, pensionnaires were being transformed into lycéennes. Her mother, by contrast, was ‘born in an age when women were not taught, when they were scarcely allowed to take up spelling.’13 Girls were, of course, taught to write, but pretty much as they were taught everything else – by example and through constant repetition and correction. As a young lady learned to converse in her mother’s salon, she would learn to write by engaging in a correspondence with her, as modeled, for example, in abbé Reyre’s Ecole des jeunes demoiselles, ou lettres d’une mère vertueuse à sa ﬁlle.14 To the degree that she did learn to spell in this way, she was merely imitating because she was not taught the principles upon which French spelling rested. These principles, which were fundamentally

198 Gender and the Reasoning Mind

etymological, could not be understood without a knowledge of Latin – which girls were not taught because they were not thought capable of learning it or willing to put in the effort required to do so. Without Latin, there was no real point in teaching spelling. With little guidance and no formal instruction, most women thus fell back on the phonetic spelling the uneducated had been using for generations, modiﬁed more or less by their familiarity with printed models. In the eighteenth century, the most important of these models was the epistolary oeuvre of Madame de Sévigné.15 By 1725, when her letters were ﬁrst published, writing had become a part of elite women’s lives. With the advent of the royal postal service and increased mobility, as royal conquests and colonialism expanded their world, letter writing had become one of the central activities of the French elite. Along with conversation, it was now one of the polite practices that deﬁned nobility, as France’s aristocracy moved of the battleﬁeld and into the bureaucracy, the court, and the salon.16 Like conversation and dancing, letter writing was a means of performing or expressing the reﬁnement that was central to a new merit-based notion of nobility. Any girl or woman aspiring to a place in le monde would have to learn these skills. The growing number of women and girls who were expected to be able to write a pretty letter were guided by a steady stream of print editions of Sévigné’s letters.17 These became the basis of a mixed-gender epistolary model, in which Sévigné’s stylistic voice was materialized through the orthography of the men of letters who edited her correspondence and the printers who published it. The orthographic norm imposed on Sévigné’s letters, as well as on those of other women that were included in letter-writing manuals and compendia, gave a new, material meaning to the idea of a ‘mistake’ in writing and the ideal of ‘writing well’ that girls were expected to achieve.18 ‘If to speak well is the mark of a good education, to write well is the mark of a woman of wit,’ advised Madeleine de Puisieux in her Conseils à une amie; ‘it is the manner of writing that distinguishes the ordinary woman from the woman of wit. Speak well, write even better.’19 On an even more basic level, one ﬁctional pensionnaire wrote to her mother that the nuns ‘wish absolutely that I possess the principles of my language, telling me that it is only through this means that a young lady announces her education.’20 In her memoirs, Madame de Genlis illustrates the signiﬁcance of proper orthography for young women with an anecdote about the daughter of a ‘poor gentleman’ in the provinces who wrote to a farmer-general in Paris on a matter of family business. ‘M. de la Popelinière, knowing that this was a young person of eighteen who wrote to him, read the letter with interest even though it was extremely simple; but he admired the beautiful handwriting and the perfect spelling.’ After a six-month correspondence, the gentleman declared his love, proposed, and was accepted. When the young lady arrived in Paris, however, she turned out to be less beautiful and more awkward than her letters had suggested. ‘After a few days,’ Genlis writes, ‘M. de la Popelinière was so dissatisﬁed with her mind that suspicions arose concerning the charming letters he had so admired.’ The young lady quickly admitted ‘that she did not even know how to spell, and

Gender and Language in the Old Regime 199

that she had simply had the letters written by the local priest copied.’ The wedding was called off and de la Popelinière, being a gentleman, placed a hefty dowry on the young lady and arranged another, more suitable marriage for her. Genlis concluded the story with the following lesson: ‘Madame Zimmerman, when I knew her, had been married for ﬁve years: her face was no longer blotchy; a dancing master had made her graceful, she had learned how to spell, she was pleasant, pretty, modest, wise; it seemed to me that M. de la Popelinière must have had regrets about her.’21 The lesson for us, however, lies in the paradox that by the middle of the eighteenth century, good spelling had come to be seen as the material sign of a lady, but instruction in spelling was still not a part of her education.

Literacy, latinacy, and gender The limitations put on female education help to explain why women spelled differently from men, but the distinction between literacy and Latinacy that educational policy both created and reﬂected cut even deeper. As literacy spread in the wake of the Renaissance and Reformation, the collèges established to educate boys spread Latinacy with a curriculum based on classical language, literature, and culture. The gender gap between elite men and women was thereby strengthened, even as increases in literacy might have weakened it.22 Instead, the collège education that served as a means of social mobility for bright boys such as Diderot and Marmontel also created a new line of gender distinction that shaped the elite world they now entered. In contrast to men like themselves, the illiterati were the non-Latinate, and les dames were a convenient and conventional ﬁgure for them.23 It is thus striking that in laying out a plan for female education, the great seventeenth-century feminist Poullain de la Barre omitted Latin from the curriculum. However, as Bernard Magné points out, Poullain de la Barre’s premise was that an education proper for girls was also the best education for boys.He sought to equalize education by eliminating Latin altogether in favor of a modern, French-based curriculum.24 The argument against Latin education would gain momentum in the eighteenth century and culminate, as Louis Trenard argues, in the shutting down of the Jesuit collèges in 1761.25 Nevertheless, throughout the eighteenth century growing numbers of boys received a Latin-based education in their collèges, while their sisters received, if anything, a French one at home or in convent schools. Thus, right up until the French Revolution, a linguistic divide shaped both le monde and the republic of letters that found a home in it. The campaign for a French curriculum grew out of a movement on behalf of the French language that began to take shape in the sixteenth century.26 By the seventeenth century, the gender gap between the Latinate and the unlettered, overlaid onto the traditional distinction between masculine writing and female speech, would prove extremely useful to the champions of ‘la langue maternelle’ and become embedded in the debate.27 The speech of women of the court became associated with the mother tongue in its purity because it was

200 Gender and the Reasoning Mind

unadulterated by Latin, while at the same time removed from the baseness and variety of patois.28 As a Latin education became the norm for elite men, French was passed down through the female line. To learn it, young men were urged to frequent the salons and listen to the ladies who presided there. 29 Whereas Latin was learned through the rules that governed it, French had to be observed in action. Twelve years after the Académie Française was established to ‘give certain rules to our language and to render it pure, eloquent, and capable of treating the arts and sciences,’30 Claude Favre de Vaugelas declared that to ‘ﬁx’ the French language through rules of grammar or spelling would be to kill it. ‘Usage’ alone could determine what was correct or incorrect, and usage would necessarily change over time. His goal, he wrote in the Remarques sur la langue françoise, utiles à ceux qui veulent bien parler et bien escrire (1647), was simply to record the current state of the language.31 Vaugelas deﬁned good usage as ‘the way of speaking of the healthiest part of the Court in conformity with the way of writing of the healthiest part of the authors of the time.’ He made a point of signaling the presence of women at court, ‘since women, ignorant of the usage of Latin, will give you a more naive and thus more authentic judgment.’32 The best writers may ‘afﬁx “the seal,”’ as L.-F. Flûtre puts it, ‘but the primary source is the conversation of honnêtes gens.’ Vaugelas considered the French language to be on the whole tilted toward the feminine pole of speech rather than the masculine pole of writing.33 ‘The language of elegant conversation carried as much weight as that of ﬁne writers,’ concludes Marc Fumaroli.34 Throughout the seventeenth century men of letters developed this theme. In 1672, Père Bouhours identiﬁed female speech as naive and natural – just like the French language itself – in contrast to masculine literary art. The speech of ladies, he explained, was more pure, since it was closer to the ‘sources’ of the language. If the association of French with the king gave it its majesty and authority, its association with women made it the language ‘par excellence of affect and sensibility.’ French, he declared, was the ‘language of the heart.’35 Vaugelas was a sociologist of language. For him, as Fumaroli explains, language was a set of social facts that it was his job to establish. For the Jansenist authors of the Port-Royal Grammaire, by contrast, French, like Latin, was primarily a means of representing ideas. They were epistemologists of language who saw it as a tool for thinking.36 By the eighteenth century, most men of letters, inside and outside the academy, had come to think about French this way. Its claims to universality were associated with its ability to represent ideas, and to do its work, it had to be ﬁxed, stable, rational. One of the implications of this shift was to establish French in the image of Latin: ﬁxed, grammatical, and based on the writing of men of letters rather than the speech of ladies.37 At the turn of the eighteenth century, the Académie Française proclaimed both its autonomy from the court and its authority in the public sphere by asserting the priority of writing over speech. It asserted its legal privilege to judge in matters linguistic at the expense of ladies, who had been held up by Vaugelas and his followers as arbiters of taste because of their intimate and

Gender and Language in the Old Regime 201

natural knowledge of the French language in its purity.38 The academy now identiﬁed the French language with writing and devalued the spoken language as derivative and erratic, ungoverned and out of control. In the face of this natural force, the academicians fell back on their privileged access to history through their command of Latin.

The movement for spelling reform In the sixteenth century, writing was the concern only of a small, male, privileged elite who saw the written word as their territory and their responsibility.39 Traditionally, nobles considered the physical act of writing a form of derogation,40 while for the vast majority of commoners, writing was simply outside the limits of their world. Complaints about the Latin accretions that littered written French were thus made on aesthetic and rational grounds, not populist ones. As those who called for spelling reform saw it, writing was a mirror of speech, and the French mirror needed to be cleaned.41 Whereas later reformers would see the unpronounced letters that cluttered the page as traps for the non-Latinate reader and mysteries to the non-Latinate writer, the early reformers assumed all writers and readers to be Latinate, as they were. They did not, however, assume them to be native French speakers. Printing was now multiplying French reading matter and spreading it beyond France, and reformers wanted to make it an international language of scholarship and literature equal to Latin. Latin was written as it was spoken, they argued, and French ought to be as well.42 As the most radical reformer, Honorat Rambaud, put it: ‘Every year well-ordered states [les républiques bien policées] name people to oversee weights & measures, & several other things, as necessity requires & reason commands: & notwithstanding [the fact] that literature [les lettres] is of much greater importance, there is neither order nor police.’43 Nevertheless, spelling reform failed utterly in the sixteenth century. Yves Citton and André Wyss argue that it failed partly because a perfectly phonetic system was impossible, and partly because no one had the authority to institute one, but mostly because there was not much social pressure to do so. 44 Their social explanation, however, does not account for the success of spelling reform in the eighteenth century, because, like most historians, they see the politics of language through the lens of class struggle, and class would only become a signiﬁcant force in the nineteenth century with the advent of universal public schooling. 45 In the Old Regime, the language of gender, rather than that of class, was used to identify the emerging body of non-Latinate French readers and writers for whom spelling was a signiﬁcant social problem. The triumph of the new orthography in the eighteenth century, however, was in large part a defeat of the progressive forces that championed the phonetic spelling that became known as l’ortografe des dames. This more complicated history of spelling reform needs to be situated within a larger gender struggle over the control of the French language that took shape in the seventeenth century.

202 Gender and the Reasoning Mind

The call for spelling reform resurfaced in the writings associated with the précieuses. In Le grand dictionnaire des pretieuses (1661), Antoine Baudeau de Somaize claimed that it was one of the précieuses, Claristène, who announced one day ‘that a new Orthography must be devised, so that women may write as conﬁdently and as correctly as men do.’ Their male friend, Didamie, assures the three women present that this would be easy to do and offers to help them. Roxalie then establishes the principle on which they will operate: ‘Roxalie says that it must be done such that one could write the same as one speaks, & in order to execute this plan, Didamie takes a book, Claristène takes a pen, & Roxalie & Silenie get ready to decide what must be added or subtracted from words, in order to make usage easier and spelling more convenient.’ In short order the four friends work out the problem. Their solution is found in a list of words Somaize appends to the article, with both old and new spellings.46 As both Brunot and Wendy Ayres-Bennett point out, the scene may be apocryphal and the characters ﬁctional, but they nevertheless locate spelling reform efforts in the salon world.47 Like Vaugelas, Somaize was haunting the salons in search of proper usage, but he did so to establish the basis of a new orthography. And whether or not they invented the spelling Somaize associated with them, or merely adopted it happily as a systematic reﬁnement of their conventional practice, the ladies did use this new, phonetic orthography in the letters they wrote. ‘Mme de Sévigné, traditionally lampooned for her spelling and charged (quite wrongly) with ignorance and frivolity because of her spelling, deserves to be rehabilitated,’ writes Nina Catach. ‘A student of Ménage, she presents quite simply the traits of pronunciation and orthography of her day and her milieu, with a usage that is modernized and quite superior to the average manuscripts of the age.’ In short, her spelling was that advocated by the reformers of her day.48 In 1668, seven years after Somaize published his dictionary, Louis de L’Esclache published Les véritables régles de l’ortografe francéze, ou l’art d’aprandre an peu de tams à écrire côrectemant. The following year, Antoine Lartigaut published his own phonetic speller, Les progrès de la véritable ortografe ou l’ortografe franceze fondée sur ses principes conﬁrmée par démonstracions. 49 Whereas Lartigaut acknowledged the association of language reform with the précieuses while, however, distancing himself from them to assert his own seriousness, 50 L’Esclache was not afraid to identify himself with the ladies. After all, he was already well known for giving public courses designed to prepare Parisian women for salon life by teaching them subjects such as science and literature that they did not learn in school. Like Somaize, but unlike the sixteenth-century reformers, L’Esclache identiﬁed reform with the needs of elite women and himself as their champion. In his work, the battle lines were clearly drawn between the non-Latinate – identiﬁed with ladies of le monde and esprit – and the Latinate academic establishment: Those who do not know the Latin language and who have some wit, say that we ought to write as we speak: but certain scholars maintain that this method,

Gender and Language in the Old Regime 203

as it causes us to lose the origins of words, prevents us from knowing their proper signiﬁcation … . It seems that the ﬁrst, who do not have enough power to establish their opinion ﬁrmly, do not have enough authority to obligate us to follow it. As the others cannot tolerate any damage to the Latin language or to the Greek, they hang on to their feelings with tremendous stubbornness.51 It was clearly the ladies whose writing practice derived directly from their speech (rather than translated from Latin) and whom L’Esclache was opposing to the scholars concerned only with etymology. He would be the champion of the powerless ladies against the powerful academicians, whose authority was matched only by their stubbornness. By 1713, Père Vaudelin had taken the new argument for spelling reform to its logical Christian and patriotic conclusion. First, since the speech of ladies was natural rather than learned, a rational system of spelling would be a representation of this natural and naturally beautiful speech.52 Although Vaudelin claimed to be recommending to the French ‘a new manner of Writing as they speak,’ what he proposed in fact was a method of writing as ladies of the court spoke, those whose ‘pronunciation of honorable and familiar conversations is certainly the most natural, the most agreeable, the most used at the Court, and the only pronunciation of the beaux sexe.’53 Purged of unnecessary letters, ‘as gold is puriﬁed in the crucible,’ this French would become ‘the common Language of all of Europe, and the Language of Commerce throughout the World.’ Thereafter, proclaimed Vaudelin, ‘we will all speak, we will all write, we will all read and pronounce the same language in the same way.’54 French would be a universal written language, the transparent manifestation of the parole of French ladies, as the universe was the manifestation of the parole of God. By grounding phonetic spelling in the latest linguistic theories circulating in the salons – those that identiﬁed pure French with elite women’s speech – the reformers were able to address one of the major problems identiﬁed by their opponents: by locating speech sociologically, they could eliminate the variation that made it inadequate to ‘ﬁx’ spelling. But they also found themselves asserting the usage of women against the authority of the academy. If the sixteenthcentury reformers had run up against a lack of recognized authority, their heirs found themselves trying to convince the body established to provide it not only to recognize the legitimacy of women’s needs, but to bow to their natural authority. Since the sixteenth century, orthographic reformers had been attacked in language invented for religious reformers, not only because there were Calvinists such as Peter Ramus among the reforming orthographers, but because the danger of ‘overturning our orthography’ was considered by some to be as great as that of overturning the established order of religion, state, and society.55 But when an anonymous pamphleteer called L’Esclache a ‘blasphemer’ and his phonetic system ‘blasphemy,’ he was taking up the hysterical tone of anti-précieuses like Molière in their fear for the collapse of the gender system and the social and

204 Gender and the Reasoning Mind

intellectual order it supported. Driving his point home, he wrote: ‘It is you alone who have seriously corrupted this lovely order, since, like Samson with his Delilah, you slink around [ﬁlés] the ruelles of the précieuses, teaching them your French philosophy, which is, in the eyes of the most reasonable people, the ruin and complete destruction of the Latin language.’56 The author dedicated his pamphlet to the ‘Gentlemen of the Académie Française,’ pleading with them directly ‘to pronounce against his [L’Esclache’s] vanity like Sovereign Judges.’57 Such pleas had been mounting over the decades since the academy was founded, but now, with the entire social order threatened, they had to be answered. The academy ﬁnally addressed the question of regularizing French spelling in 1673, but it was only to dig in their heels. The ﬁrst draft of the Observations … touchant l’orthographe (1673) stated categorically that in their dictionary, the Forty Immortals would employ ‘the old Spelling (writing practice), which distinguishes men of letters (and those who have studied the language) from the ignorant (and ordinary women).’ 58 In 1680, with the academy’s dictionary still stalled, the lexicographer Pierre-César Richelet produced his own, in which he employed an orthography that was neither the etymological orthographe des sçavans nor the phonetic ortografe des dames. His main modiﬁcations were the suppression of many (but far from all) silent letters and doubled consonants and the systematic use of accents. He also replaced the y with the i and simpliﬁed Greek and Latin letters.59 Between rational but radical reform and historical but arrogant conservatism, he laid out the path of reasonable and realistic modiﬁcation.60 In 1705, eleven years after the academy ﬁnally published its own dictionary, it sent forth its perpetual secretary to defend the old spelling against the reformers – although by this time the moderates were clearly the real threat. The advantage of suggesting otherwise was to paint any opposition as radical and, worse, feminine. The disadvantage was that it made the academy look pretty foolish. François Séraphin Regnier Des Marais’s Traité de la grammaire françoise was cast as a frontal assault on the reforms advocated by L’Esclache (although he did not deign to name his adversary). Regnier ﬁrst defended the historical origins of proper orthography by attacking the reformers’ weakest and most basic argument. L’Esclache had stated it with thoroughly Lockean logic: ‘As our conceptions are the portrait of the things that we can know; and as the word [parole] is [the portrait] of the thought, it is also very certain that writing is the portrait of the word [parole].’61 Regnier rejoined predictably that since speech was inherently unstable and constantly changing, spelling could not represent it.62 Regnier then turned to the arguments from reason and usage, which maintained that a rational system of spelling would acknowledge current usage in speech, while correcting errors in written French based on traces of archaic (Latin) usage.63 Regnier countered that the authority of both reason and current usage in writing must be upheld rather than the false authority of usage in speech. Dismissing the association of usage with speech as it had been established by Vaugelas, Regnier declared writing the only basis of the ‘usage’ standard because speech (like the women associated with it) was simply too unstable.64 In thus

Gender and Language in the Old Regime 205

championing the old spelling, Regnier and the academy were not simply trying to conserve an old order in the face of inevitable and necessary change; they were severing a traditional alliance between women and men, speech and writing, which had been consecrated in the founding of their academy: they were declaring the independence of the republic of letters from both la cour and le monde. By devaluing speech and denying its ability to set a standard of usage, Regnier implicitly challenged the legitimacy of women’s contribution to shaping the French language. He also explicitly refused to consider relevant the reformers’ desire to change academic spelling to make French more accessible to ‘foreigners, women, and children.’65 Paris was now a major stop on the grand tour, L’Esclache had pointed out. With all the improvements and monuments that had made Paris a great city and a cosmopolitan center (including the glories of the royal academies), the French now had an obligation to make visitors linguistically welcome: ‘The decoration that one adds everyday to Paris, the cleanliness of its streets, and the safety of walking there at night cause large numbers of foreigners to come there. As they will wish to learn our Language, we are in some sense obliged to facilitate the learning of it, and the best approach that we can take to arrive at this goal is to reduce our manner of writing to our manner of pronunciation.’66 Regnier’s response to this ‘argument from convenience,’ as he called it, was unequivocal: as foreigners must obey the laws of any country they visit, so must they accept the rules of any language they wish to learn.67 As for children, they should learn to read as their fathers and grandfathers had learned. And women? ‘Where would we be in each Language … if because some women get confused in reading, we immediately had to remedy that by a universal change in Spelling?’ he asked. ‘For those women who wish to instruct themselves by reading & to cultivate their minds, it is up to them to make use of the means that are available to everyone for the correct pronunciation of each letter.’68 Needless to say, Regnier did not address the question of female education. Nicolas Du Pont, a man who identiﬁed himself on the title page of his response to Regnier’s treatise as an avocat au parlement, expressed the frustration of the public that had been waiting for the academy to reform spelling. Having read the Traité, Du Pont now realized that ‘these Gentlemen were a long ways away from entering into the spirit of that reform, since they had received with applause a Work that strives to make known its disadvantages and uselessness.’69 He then set out to refute Regnier’s argument against reform, concluding that ‘’if it were possible … to produce an Orthography as accessible to children and women as to Scholars: it would … have to be advantageously received, and included among those things that facilitate entry into the Arts and the Sciences.’70 In the voice of the obscure lawyer, the public called for greater access to the arts and sciences, while the academicians were busy erecting barricades to keep them out. Rather than guardians of a public trust, the Forty Immortals were acting like a privileged corps with exclusive jurisdiction over the French language.71

206 Gender and the Reasoning Mind

‘No one has ever written in order to preserve the origin and the meaning of words,’ Du Pont protested. ‘Spelling was invented simply to write a Language correctly and to read the same way one speaks. It is only the business of Scholars to bother themselves with the origin and meaning of words.’72 Whereas Regnier had stated with obvious disdain that one did not change the law to accommodate children, women, and foreigners, the point of Du Pont’s proposed phonetic system of spelling was precisely to make it possible for ‘those persons without science, women, children, and foreigners who can form and recognize letters, [to] be able to read and write French in a week or two at most, without making a single spelling mistake.’73 Reforming citizens like Du Pont wanted to spread written French as broadly as the spoken language, and so to break down the orthographic barrier between writing and speech that the academy had erected out of the rubble of the old Latinate respublica litteraria. When it came time for the academy to publish a second edition of its dictionary (it would appear in 1740), the pressure for change was overwhelming. Another one of the Immortals, Abbé d’Olivet, was selected to determine what changes to authorize. ‘Preceded by usage, supported by opinion,’ writes Nina Catach, ‘d’Olivet thus realized a series of thoughtful reforms that mark a historical turning point and break strikingly with manuscript usage: one word in four was thus transformed.’74 D’Olivet and the academy were forced to concede because the printers and the men of letters whom they published had taken reform into their own inkstained hands. In 1709, Père Buffer claimed that more than two-thirds of the books published in the previous ten years used the ‘new orthography’ – and the works he named included those of more than half the current Immortals. In 1724, the abbé de Saint-Pierre referred to the new spelling that ‘was getting established day by day.’75 Men of letters had reached consensus, and the authority of the academy would now simply back it to establish orthographic order after two centuries of anarchy, schism, and strife. The new orthographic order also established the incontestable authority of the written over the spoken word. And because the men of letters of the Enlightenment claimed authority in all matters through their mastery of the written word, they only reinforced this position. They did so by abandoning the argument for phonetic orthography based on the need for writing to represent feminine speech. Instead, they contributed to a theory of orthography based on the written usage of contemporary men of letters rather than the spoken usage of women of le monde and la cour. Their promotion of the ‘new spelling’ reﬂected both their need to assert their authority through that of the written word and their assumed position as guardians of the French language. It was also embedded in the relationship they sought to establish between themselves and the reading public ﬁgured as an elite woman.

Spelling and the pedagogical Enlightenment The philosophes resembled in many ways the spelling reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their campaigns against privilege and despotism and

Gender and Language in the Old Regime 207

in favor of nature and reason as the proper bases of social, political, and linguistic order can be seen as continuous with the campaign for phonetic reform. Traditional practices such as Latin, and the privileges that protected access to them, were a favorite target of Enlightenment criticism, and a central of goal of the Encyclopédie was to expose them as irrational and thus in need of reform. Consistent also with the earlier movements was the identiﬁcation of Latin with barbarism and pedantry, and of French with civilization and women.76 The opposition between a feminine world of civilized conversation and a masculine one of scholarly Latin underlay the philosophes’ campaign to bring the ‘world of learning’ into the ‘conversible world’ – to use Hume’s memorable terms.77 But although the philosophes took their learning into le monde and championed women’s natural common sense (uncorrupted, that is, by a Latin education) against the pedantry of the Latinate academy, they were no more willing than their academic predecessors to subordinate writing to speech. They tended to idealize women not as speakers, but as governors of male conversation and as readers of male-authored texts. Indeed, commonsensical elite women were their preferred ﬁgure for the reading public, which alone could validate and legitimize their authority as men of letters.78 Unlike the ladies of the seventeenth century, however, who had been authorized to exercise aesthetic judgment (taste) because they were thought to come by it naturally and to express it (naturally) in speech,79 the new critical reader was less likely to pass judgment on the writer than to ask intelligent questions and be persuaded by the reason underlying the answers she was given. The notebooks of the Enlightenment salonnière Suzanne Necker, in which she ponders lessons learned from the men in her salon concerning proper word usage based on their analyses of published texts, suggest the reversal of roles that had been effected by the 1770s.80 In the discourse of the seventeenth-century reformers, elite women had been cast as aesthetic judges because they were seen as the uncorrupted other. The power associated with this role both gave rise to the spate of criticism that coalesced around the ﬁgure of the précieuse, and was deployed by the reformers to fuel their arguments for phonetic orthography. 81 The philosophes, however, saw and presented themselves as uncorrupted through their Lockean epistemology, direct appeal to the public, and embracing of the French language. They staked their claims on the written word and its authority by appropriating the naïve and natural female voice in their texts,82 even as they set out to conquer the academy, chair by chair.83 No longer presenting female speech as a governing ideal outside of writing that the written word should follow, they absorbed the naturalness of female speech into their own writing and their own moderate practice of orthography. In Enlightenment texts, the purity born of ignorance that characterized women often coalesced around the naïve, who combined moral purity with intellectual foolishness. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who ventriloquized the female voice most successfully in his epistolary novel, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1760), appropriated it most thoroughly in his Essai sur l’origine des langues (1755–61). In the essay, speech and writing play the roles assigned to women and men in the gender schemes of his

208 Gender and the Reasoning Mind

other works, most notably Julie and Emile (1762): speech is natural and expresses feelings, whereas writing is cold and rational and takes men away from nature. Rousseau gave primacy of origin to feminine speech over masculine writing, and argued that writing, not speech, removed language from its original purity. And yet, Rousseau asserted, ‘the art of writing does not at all depend upon that of speaking.’84 Speech might be natural, pure, expressive, and historically prior to writing, but writing, no matter how inferior, was nonetheless independent of speech. It would neither be subject to speech nor model itself on it. The written language was both the territory and the responsibility of men of letters. ‘The body of a nation alone has rights over the spoken language, and the writers have rights over the written language,’ declared Charles Pinot Duclos in his phonetically spelled remarks on the Port-Royal grammar. Writers, he went on, had an obligation to maintain their property, ‘to correct what they have corrupted.’85 They were thus doubly obliged to improve spelling: ﬁrst, in their capacity as guardians of the written language; and second, as servants of the public with a responsibility to make knowledge as accessible as possible through writing. Duclos placed the history of writing in the center of the Enlightenment project: ‘This art serves equally to confound the lie and reveal the truth: if it has sometimes been dangerous, it is at least the repository of arms against error, that of religion and law.’86 For Duclos, writing could only tear away the veils of secrecy and superstition that masked truth if it was freed of the orthographic prejudice that kept it out of the hands of the public.87 When philosophes such as Duclos asserted the liberation of writing from speech, it was to use their authority based on the written word to advocate further changes in the system of orthography that would make writing fully accessible to the public. Voltaire, too, was able to endorse the rationality of phonetic spelling without, however, basing it on the naturalness of (female) conversation.88 In his view, writers were the ‘true masters of the language,’ because they were the ones who created it. Men of letters had to guard French against corruption, and the greatest threat to linguistic purity, it seemed, was now the (female) speech that, in the previous century, had been its redoubt. With Voltaire and his followers embracing French and rejecting Latin, writing was no longer in need of speech as a guarantee against barbarism and corruption. They would be its guardians; they would police the language that was their domain. The Encyclopédie was the elaboration of this dual aim of asserting the autonomy and authority of the written word and the men of letters whose ‘property’ it was, on the one hand; and the need to make the written word freely accessible so that it could function as an instrument of Enlightenment, on the other. The article ‘Orthographe,’ however, echoes the conservative fears of Regnier Des Marais more than the new conﬁdence of Voltaire and Duclos. Its author, Nicolas Beauzée, endorsed Regnier’s gendered argument against any reform based on speech and reasserted the importance of maintaining history through etymological spelling.89 In the article ‘Néographisme,’ Beauzée continued his assault on phonetic reform while asserting the authority of men of letters.90 Eventually, however, he renounced his retrograde stance. When he took up the subject again

Gender and Language in the Old Regime 209

in the Encyclopédie méthodique (1789), he declared that it was now possible ’to adopt, according to the characters legitimately authorized by usage, a simpler, tighter [mieux lié], more consistent orthographic system.’91 The last defender of the old spelling had been won over. Noël-François de Wailly’s L’orthographe des dames, ou l’orthographe fondée sur la bonne prononciation, démontrée la seule raisonnable, par une société des dames (1782),92 in which the call for spelling reform is put into the mouths of ladies, would seem to be as retrograde as Beauzée’s articles in the Encyclopédie. In Wailly’s hands, however, the descendants of Somaize’s précieuses spoke not from the position of natural linguistic authority, but as humble representatives of the nation. They called on men of letters, whose authority they recognized, to make spelling available to all Frenchwomen and men by making it fully phonetic. ‘We beg of you, Sirs, to give us a reasoned, simple, uniform plan of orthography,’ they wrote. ‘Dedicated speciﬁcally to the study, to the perfection of our language and of our orthography, this learned company will render an important service to the nation, if by means of its reﬂections on language and orthography, it clariﬁes usage, directs it, perfects it. This labor seems to us truly worthy of the philosophers and grammarians who comprise this illustrious society.’93 Wailly’s ladies acknowledged that the men to whom they appealed might be afraid to look foolish in submitting writing to speech (spelling to pronunciation), but challenged them to recast the question in terms of a new democratic politics: Why, they asked, was it reasonable to fault women for mispronouncing words whose spelling did not correspond to spoken usage, but not for misspelling those same words for the same reason? Why? It’s that the laws of usage for pronunciation are within our reach. In fact, we have, like the scholars, organs for hearing and for making sounds. It’s not the same with current orthography: based on a knowledge of several languages that no one has taught us, these laws are beyond our reach; and, as you have made sure, it is morally impossible for us to observe them. … A usage that is not within reach of the majority of those who must observe it is contrary to reason. It is an error, an abuse, that must be corrected with alacrity.94 When Wailly placed the call for reform in the mouths of ladies, it was not to challenge the authority of men of letters, but to petition them humbly for reform. ‘We have already said that the authors are the true legislators in this matter,’ the ‘ladies’’ wrote. ‘Use your rights, Sirs; work to enlighten the nation more and more, to facilitate its acquisition of knowledge. Far from making you ridiculous in putting within reach of everyone a knowledge as useful as orthography, you will render by this reform a signal service to the nation.’95 In defending himself in the Année littéraire against the charge that he, like so many reformers before him, was trying to ‘overturn the language’ by imposing a new system on his own authority, Wailly, who signed his letter as an ‘honorary member of the Academy of Amiens,’ reminded the Parisian academicians that

210 Gender and the Reasoning Mind

his scheme was laid out by ‘Ladies’ who were ever respectful of the men whose help they ardently sought. Quote upon quote emphasized the women’s respect for the authority of men of letters (‘You are our masters and our Judges’) and its basis: ‘It is to the Tribunal of reason, we mean to say to yours, Sirs, that we bring our complaints about current spelling.’96 These were not précieuses wishing to create disorder in the republic of letters, but citoyennes avant la lettre who asked only that the language of the nation be made accessible to them and those they represented. Wailly’s Orthographe des dames was a throwback, however, in that eighteenthcentury Orthographes and Grammaires des dames were more likely to be pedagogical works whose authors were less concerned with the principles of orthography than with selling their services. In the prefaces to their books and the advertisements for their courses, they spoke in a masculine voice that merged intellectual authority with moral judgment. To make their names and their fortunes in a Paris that was as eager for new products and services as it was for enlightenment, the new pedagogues cultivated the stigma now attached to the female author of a poorly written letter. In so doing, they both reﬂected and propelled the shift in thinking that transformed l’ortografe des dames from an orthographic ideal into incorrect spelling.

Spelling for sale: teaching women to spell correctly ‘It is a vain ostentation of erudition that has ruined spelling,’ Duclos had declared. ‘It is the savans and not the philosophes who have altered it. … The spelling of women, which the savans ﬁnd so ridiculous, is, in many respects, less unreasonable than theirs. Some of them wish to learn the orthography of the savans; it would be better if the savans adopted a part of that of women, while correcting the defects of a half education, that is, of the savan.’97 In suggesting that one could compare the orthography of les savans with the l’ortografe des dames, Duclos meant to discredit the pedants more than promote the ladies. From the perspective of the new spelling, their orthography was no better than that of women – and possibly worse. It was from this conﬁdent perspective, and from their new position of authority, that Enlightenment men of letters and writing masters would develop new ways to teach women and girls how to spell correctly. In 1662, Charles Cotin had declared unequivocally that female letter writers wrote ‘better and more naturally in these encounters than all our modern orators.’98 If women sometimes made ‘mistakes,’ these were, in effect, errors of transcription. Since they wrote naturally, rather than with art or as the result of understanding rules of grammar, spelling, or style, women were helpless to correct these errors. Or, as La Bruyère concluded in Les caractères (1684): ‘If women were always correct, I would dare say that some of their letters would perhaps be some of the best writing in our language.’99 After 1740, when the new spelling was authorized by the academy, the ‘mistakes’ women made took on new meaning and resonance. L’ortografe des dames

Gender and Language in the Old Regime 211

no longer represented an orthographic ideal – the transparent transcription of a pure French unadulterated with barbaric Latinisms – but an anarchic reality outside the law: how women spelled was simply incorrect. Thus, Wailly’s ladies begged the academy to reform spelling so that they could become good, lawabiding citizens. Most men of letters and writing masters, however, saw the problem less politically: they simply told their female readers how embarrassing it was to write poorly and how badly it reﬂected on them to do so. By identifying poor spelling as a source of social embarrassment they encouraged women, and especially girls and their mothers, to be self-conscious about how they wrote and to experience a new sense of shame in it.100 Men of letters and writing masters offered spelling lessons both in print and in person to solve the social problem they had identiﬁed, if not created. In March 1770, the Avantcoureur, a fashionable Parisian weekly, printed the following advertisement that told women and girls that they should be embarrassed by their poor spelling, before offering to correct the problem: It is not rare to see young people graced with agreeable talents, & who cannot write their own language correctly. One listens to them sing with pleasure, & one reads their writing with great difﬁculty & and with disgust. One fears to teach them a science that is ordinarily acquired only through long and painful diligence. A method that would shorten the study of this science & facilitate it cannot but be welcomed. M. MARTIN, former Navy writer, ﬂatters himself that with his experience he can teach Ladies and Young Ladies French Orthography in the space of about four months, according to the aptitude of his subjects, with a daily lesson of one hour. … This Professor distributes at his address the Prospectus of a new theory of French Orthography, & proposes to publish soon all his observations and research on this interesting subject.101 Whether or not M. Martin ever published his book, others appeared in the same vein. One was the chevalier de Prunay’s 1777 Grammaire des dames, où l’on trouvera des principes sûrs & faciles, pour apprendre à Orthographier correctement la Langue française, avec les moyens de connaître les expressions provinciales, de les éviter, & de prévenir, chez les jeunes Demoiselles, l’habitude d’une prononciacion vicieuse, dedicated to the Princesse de Lamballe.102 In his preface, the chevalier both acknowledged the beauty of women’s natural eloquence and stated his support of a reformed spelling based on it: ‘I hope that after having made clear the uselessness and the danger of conserving etymological letters in words in which they corrupt pronunciation, we will write, afterward, as we speak, that is, as the Ladies speak in the court and in the Capital.’103 But the chevalier also expressed his dismay at the poor command of grammar and spelling that deformed women’s writing. His goal, after all, was not to praise women’s speech, but to correct their writing. A Lady … gives a conversation all its pleasures by means of her wit, by the grace which she spreads over all that she says, by the ﬁne and delicate

212 Gender and the Reasoning Mind

expressions she uses; whereas when the same Lady expresses herself in writing, it seems that she is not the same person. Often she observes neither construction nor connection in the sentences, and the vivacity of her thoughts can no longer be seen except through an inﬁnite number of mistakes in the most basic rules of spelling; such that what would have been so pleasant to listen to can only be read with difﬁculty.104 Making a larger social claim, Prunay went on to declare that if only women would learn to write properly, the French language would be ‘enriched beneath their pens,’ as the letters of Madame de Sévigné ‘and several other ladies’ already attested.105 Of course, this Sévigné was the printed version and not the practitioner of l’ortografe des dames promoted by the reformers of her day. By the time Prunay was writing, Sévigné had been classiﬁed as a woman and therefore ‘ignorant’ of spelling (in the Encyclopédie’s terms). As Suzanne Necker noted in an unﬁnished éloge of Sévigné: ‘This woman, whose style was so pure, did not know how to spell.’106 In Prunay’s view, teaching ladies to spell would contribute to the patriotic and Enlightenment project of improving, rationalizing, and spreading the French language, but would it not also threaten French femininity? Generations of scholars had been telling women that learning to spell required both commitment and hard work that were contrary to their feminine nature, and a knowledge of Latin that, if it was not beyond their capacity, would turn them into monsters of erudition. With the new spelling, however, Latin was no longer a requirement, and therefore, women were told, they could be taught to spell without endangering their femininity. Indeed, men like Prunay and Martin were now reassuring women that learning to spell was easy and cajoling them into just trying. If, like Wailly (and the précieuses), they tried to suggest that the problem was spelling, not women, they were accused of being radicals who wanted to take the law into their own hands and overturn the social order. In 1785, Abbé Louis Barthelemy took on the task of teaching young ladies to spell correctly in his Grammaire des dames, ou Nouveau traité d’orthographe françoise, which he dedicated to Madame de Genlis. He made clear in his preface the importance of correct spelling, while reassuring the concerned mothers who were his readers that he was not advocating serious scholarship for their daughters: ‘It is still not advisable to demand of a well-born person that she be a scholar,’ he intoned; ‘any display of erudition might even be called a crime: but the knowledge for which there is no mercy given at all, is that of one’s own language. In fact, the ignorance of its rules is excusable only among the people.’107 With orthography no longer a sign of Latinacy or erudition, it was on its way to becoming a marker of class; no woman who claimed good birth and a good education could therefore afford to remain ignorant of it. Now it was not only possible but necessary that young ladies spell correctly. Fortunately, the abbé had made it easy for them by simplifying all the rules. Barthelemy’s second speller, La cantatrice grammairienne, ou l’art d’apprendre l’Orthographe française seul, sans le secours d’un Maître, par le moyen des Chansons

Gender and Language in the Old Regime 213

érotiques, pastorales, villageoises, anacréontiques, & c. …, used examples from erotic songs to make spelling simple and fun for the mature woman, who was advised to give her daughter the more age-appropriate Grammaire des dames. This libertine speller had a different dedicatee – the comtesse de Beauharnais – and a different tone and form, but the message was essentially the same. ‘It is a constant truth that women possess more eminently than we the art of seizing contrasts, … of replacing reasoning with an epigram and above all the talent of embellishing even their mistakes,’ the abbé began, thus reducing women’s natural linguistic talent from speaking pure French to embellishing their mistakes in writing it. ‘But however seductive the brush, which in their hands can often be regarded as a magic wand, if correct spelling does not accompany this enchanting pen, the effort it takes us to read them [i.e., women] will destroy forever the pleasure in it. … Spell, spell, we tell women constantly, if you want us to read you with all the interest that the freshness and luster of your brilliance inspire in us.’ 108 Barthelemy did not really blame women for spelling badly. Rather, he concurred with Pierre-Joseph Boudier de Villemert’s assessment in his Ami des femmes that l’ortografe des dames had its roots in the old prejudice that ‘condemned women as well as the nobility to a crass ignorance.’ Revising history, Boudier and Barthelemy now claimed that women intentionally spelled badly to avoid the ridicule attached to pedantry. ‘The ridicule cast upon pedantic learning had so discredited all knowledge, that many women made it a point of honor to mangle the words of their language.’109 We can understand why the ladies avoided like the plague giving the impression of being learned, but they still look pretty foolish for doing so. Note how the emphasis here is on the impression poor spelling makes on the men who must decipher it. Granted, the abbé was using erotic songs as his hook for a certain kind of female reader, but the assumption that a woman’s writing is a form of presentation of the self, and that the function of that self is to please others (especially men), was consistent with the more conventional spellers being produced by contemporaries such as Prunay and lies squarely within the paradigm of male Enlightenment discourse about women. Rousseau made the connection between women’s use of language and their obligation to please most bluntly in Emile: ‘The man says what he knows, the woman says what pleases; one needs knowledge in order to speak, and the other taste; one must have as his principal object useful things, the other agreeable ones. Their discourse can have nothing in common except the form of truth.’110 For Barthelemy, Prunay, and others who admonished women, ‘orthographiez, orthographiez,’ spelling was the form of truth. Or, as Elie-Catherine Fréron commented on Prunay’s Grammaire in the Année littéraire, ‘I at ﬁrst thought that by this art of writing well, the author meant that of composing a good text; but I quickly realized that he did not raise his speculations so high, & that he modestly limited his subject to prescribing the rules of correct orthography.’111 If Barthelemy tried to seduce female readers with erotic songs, others cast their dry subject in the pedagogical literary forms made popular by Enlightenment writers. In J. B. Roche’s Entretiens sur l’orthographe françoise, for example, three

214 Gender and the Reasoning Mind

gentlemen discuss the central issues of the debate on spelling reform. The English Milord represents the progressive foreigner who advocates the new spelling; the Comte is the conservative who defends both the ‘masculine’ old spelling and the study of ancient languages; and the Abbé is the teacher who will demonstrate that anyone can learn to spell French, if only they use his method.112 When the ladies enter, the men volunteer to change the subject, but Sophie, the young lady, admits that orthography ‘is a science that I would very much like to know, and of which I understand nothing at all. I am so ignorant that, in order to express the most ordinary things, I write practically by chance. I can barely ﬁgure out myself what I meant to say. Often, for want of being able to spell the words that come into my mind, I am forced to use others that deform all my thoughts.’113 Happily, the Abbé has devised a method of teaching spelling to those whose knowledge of languages is limited to French. ‘Myself, for example?’ asks the Marquise.When the Abbé agrees to reveal his method, Sophie asks if she might listen in, since ‘you have announced your method in such a way as to give me some hope: perhaps it will not be entirely above my head.’ The Abbé then reveals his true purpose: ‘I have fulﬁlled my goal, Mademoiselle, in inspiring in you the desire to acquire a science so ﬁt to make the graces and the lightness of your spirit shine. I would have informed you of this already, but I feared boring you with the perspective of a study a bit too serious for your age. Be assured, Mademoiselle, that in all our conversations, I will make it a law not to say a word that will not be easy for you to understand with a bit of concentration.’ So reassuring is the Abbé that even the Marquise wants to try, but, she cries, ‘I am so lazy! How could I subject myself to a study that is so exacting of inﬁnite details?’ Don’t worry, the Abbé tells her, she will have few rules to learn.114 A ﬁnal concern is laid to rest when the Abbé casually mentions that once the ladies have learned the basics of French word construction, ‘we will seek in Latin and Greek the enlightenment that our language will have refused us.’ ‘Oh, heavens,’ cries Sophie, ‘to me Latin! Greek!’ ‘But, Sir,’ interjects the Marquise, ‘Don’t even think it.’ But the Abbé does. ‘Listen, Ladies. It is not a question of making a special study of these two beautiful languages: we will draw from them only a small number of words that serve as roots to an inﬁnity of French words. As long as you are brave, I hope that before our return to the city, you will know all the parts of my method perfectly.’ Sophie then declares herself ready for the challenge: ‘I assure you, Sir, that you will have no cause at all to complain of my zeal and my application: I am too ashamed of the mistakes that I commit everyday.’115 The mistakes made by Sophie and La Marquise were key to Roche’s pedagogical method, as Fréron noted approvingly in his review of the Entretiens. Each dialogue begins with examples from the two ladies’ homework based on the previous lesson where, of course, ‘there never fail to be some mistakes. The Abbé … uses these as the occasion for a review of the previous conversation.’116 Roche appealed to a manufactured sense of shame rooted in a desire ascribed now to women simply because it was expected of them – to write as beautifully as they

Gender and Language in the Old Regime 215

spoke. His dialogue told girls and women that they could overcome the shame of poor spelling, but it also told them that to do so they would have to overcome their natural timidity and laziness. Whereas seventeenth-century commentators had praised ladies for the naturalness of their epistolary prose as an extension of their conversation, eighteenth-century successors such as Roche used the wedge driven between speech and writing to turn praise into admonition. The perceived differences between men and women no longer opened up possibilities of reform, ways of imagining a different way of doing things, as they had in the seventeenth century. More and more, they simply marked weaknesses or inadequacies of women relative to men. When Antoine Tournon wrote the Promenades de Clarisse et du Marquis de Valzé, ou Nouvelle méthode pour apprendre les principes de la langue et de l’Ortographe françaises à l’usage des Dames (1784), the situation of the young lady who must learn to spell but is afraid to do so because she thinks, foolishly, that spelling is beyond her capacity, was such a commonplace that it could become the premise of a quasi-novel. In his review of the Promenades, Fréron quoted the opening paragraph that introduced the young and lovely Clarisse and the father who doted on her, and then commented sarcastically: Would you believe it, Sir, if the title had not informed you? Would you believe it? That this is the beginning of a French Grammar? You have to admit, we live in a charming century. In the olden days there was nothing that curious ladies could use to learn the language but cold and austere grammars; the title alone of Grammar repulsed them; and so there were few ladies who dared even to approach it; but now everything has changed. First of all, this word, Grammar, that scarecrow of the sex, has been suppressed; & by a happy surprise, the pretty word Promenade has been substituted for it. … The promenade holds more attractions than grammar; & then, look at the art with which this promenade is offered. It’s not a solitary promenade, but rather the promenades of Clarisse & of the Marquis de Valzé, & the title is suggestive. We suspect two lovers under the name of master and female student, & I bet we won’t be wrong; it’s the title of a novel at the head of a grammar.117 And, indeed, Fréron was right. Upon their arrival in Paris, Clarisse and her father meet the handsome Marquis, who offers to teach the young English miss how to speak French properly. While Clarisse wants to accept this honorable offer, ‘she had always heard that the principles of our language were difﬁcult, & so much so, that very few Frenchwomen had the double advantage of speaking well and writing purely.’ So, Tournon explains, although ‘Miss wanted very much to know our language, … she was afraid to study it.’ Valzé reassured her in the hopes of pleasing her. ‘He thus committed himself to present only principles that were clear, precise, & above all never boring.’ 118 The entire grammar, in fact, is embedded in a Rousseauian text that manages to combine the situation of Julie and Saint-Preux with the pedagogy of Sophie. ‘Between us, Sir,’ Fréron conﬁded to his reader, ‘I don’t know if the grammar

216 Gender and the Reasoning Mind

can continue through the twenty-fourth installment, because our Tutor strays off track a lot; I very much fear that the grammarian will give way to the lover, and that nothing will remain but the novel. … Don’t you ﬁnd, Sir, that this manner of indoctrination is reminiscent of that of the late Abailard?’ 119 Like the pedagogy of Saint-Preux and Abelard, Tournon’s ‘new method’ for teaching grammar and spelling is really just the time tested pretext for the teacher to seduce his student. Its novelty is based on the idea that the way to win a young lady’s heart is to offer to help her to overcome the shame of spelling badly. Writing is a physical act as well as an intellectual one. The feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young has written insightfully on the way that modern Western women engage in purposeful physical activity. Her claims refer to gross movement that entails physical strength, such as throwing or running, but I think they apply equally well to the small motor skill of writing. Women often approach a physical engagement with things with timidity, uncertainty, and hesitancy. Typically, we lack an entire trust in our bodies to carry us to our aims. … We often lack conﬁdence that we have the capacity to do what must be done. … Our attention is often divided between the aim to be realized in motion and the body that must accomplish it, while at the same time saving itself from harm. We often experience our bodies as a fragile encumbrance, rather than the media for the enactment of our aims. We feel as though we must have our attention directed upon our bodies to make sure that they are doing what we wish them to do, rather than paying attention to what we want to do through our bodies.120 Where does this self-consciousness come from? What is the origin of women’s lack of conﬁdence in their ability to do the things that men do? If eighteenthcentury elite women approached writing with ‘timidity, uncertainty, and hesitancy,’ it was because such an approach to the world (both the physical world and the world of letters) was considered appropriately feminine, despite the naturalizing language in which it was described – writing as a woman was equivalent to throwing like a girl. This timidity was new and reﬂected the rejection of the phonetic principle associated with l’ortografe des dames in favor of a pragmatic consensus among those with an interest in asserting the priority of masculine writing over feminine speech and the authority to do so. Elite women’s writing could now be measured against a standard set by men of letters, and it failed to measure up because it derived from femininity itself. Women’s poor spelling reinforced the growing understanding of them as naturally naive, fearful, and lazy, especially in the face of tasks deemed intellectually and physically challenging.121 Even as they encouraged their readers to overcome their female weakness, spellers designed to teach girls and women to spell properly afﬁrmed social norms of feminine comportment, both bodily and intellectual, as a ‘natural’ hindrance to doing so.

Gender and Language in the Old Regime 217

I began this article with my own sense of embarrassment in encountering the spelling of eighteenth-century women. I have tried to show that my sense of embarrassment is but a reﬂection of the shame that they were encouraged to feel. Moreover, because writing was considered to be a means of presentation of the self, poor spelling reﬂected back on the speller. The shame of the poor speller was the shame of woman. The real shame, however, the historical one, is that elite women had lost both their claims on the French language and the linguistic conﬁdence their grandmothers and great-grandmothers had enjoyed. They would learn to spell, but they would no longer be able take pride in l’ortografe des dames.

Notes *

Dena Goodman is professor of history and women’s studies at the University of Michigan. This chapter is part of a larger project on the material culture of letter writing in eighteenth-century France. It is based on talks given at the Tenth International Congress on the Enlightenment (Dublin, 1999) and the Feminism and Enlightenment Colloquium: ‘Learned Ladies and Femmes Philosophe’ (London, 2000). The author is grateful to the participants at both conferences and the other readers along the way who offered helpful comments, especially Carolyn Lougee Chappell, Yves Citton, Kate Jensen, Sarah Knott, Sarah Maza, Barbara Taylor, Elizabeth Wingrove, Aurora Wolfgang, Joby Margadant and Ted Margadant.

1. Charles deMouÿ, Correspondance inédite du roi Stanislas-Auguste Poniatowski et de Madame Geoffrin (1764–1777) (Paris, 1875), ii–iii. 2. Ferdinand Brunot, ed., Histoire de la langue française des origines à 1900, rev. ed. (Paris, 1966), 7:176–78. 3. Ibid., 6:2:925. 4. See Leonore Loft, ‘“Un de ces esprits aériens decendus sur la terre”: Félicité Dupont and the Paradox of Sensibility,’ in Femmes savantes et femmes d’esprit: Women Intellectuals of the French Eighteenth Century, ed. Roland Bonnel and Catherine Rubinger (New York, 1994), 299. 5. Undated letter from Bernard de Bonnard to Sophie de Bonnard, probably written between 29 June and 3 July 1783. Papiers Bonnard: Mme de Bonnard née Silvestre, papiers personnels: Lettres du chevalier de Bonnard, son mari, Archives nationales, 352 AP 39. 6. Madame de Choiseul to Madame du Deffand, 22 Nov. 1773; quoted in Brunot, Histoire, 6:2:928 n. 7. Marie-Claire Grassi, L’art de la lettre au temps de ‘La nouvelle Héloïse’ et du romantisme (Geneva, 1994), 123–31. 8. Quoted in ibid., 123. I follow Liselotte Biedermann-Pasques in interpreting ‘manière d’écrire’ as ‘writing practice’ or ‘system of writing.’ Les grands courants orthographiques au XVIIe siècle et la formation de l’orthographe moderne: Impacts matériels, interférences phoniques, théories et pratiques (1606–1736) (Tübingen, 1992), 43. 9. Grassi, Art de la lettre, 123. 10. Ibid., 131. 11. Bernard Magné, ‘’Education des femmes et féminisme chez Poullain de la Barre (1647–1723),’’ in Le XVIIe siècle et l’éducation: Colloque de Marseille (Marseille, 1971), 116. 12. Martine Sonnet, L’éducation des ﬁlles au temps des Lumières (Paris, 1987), 251; Paule Constant, Un monde à l’usage des demoiselles (Paris, 1987), 237. Constant notes that traditionally girls learned to write with their needles – taught by their mothers or as apprentices to seamstresses, embroidering the alphabet as linen marks. ‘For young

218 Gender and the Reasoning Mind

13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

26.

ladies, who have left the needle to their servants,’ she explains, ‘the art of writing is “a choreography of the pen”’ (276–77). That is, it is no longer functional as women’s work and becomes the accomplishment of a lady. [Marie Julie Olivier de Corancez de Cavaignac], Les mémoires d’une inconnue, publiés sur le manuscrit original, 1780–1816, 2d ed. (Paris, 1894), 10–12. Cavaignac’s parents were not noble, but were, in her words, ‘in a state of fortune closer to wealth than to simple comfort.’ She credits their increasing prosperity to ‘the excellent administration of the mother of the family’ (2–3). Abbé Joseph Reyre, L’école des jeunes demoiselles, ou lettres d’une mère vertueuse à sa ﬁlle, 2d ed. (Paris, 1786); see also Constant, Un monde à l’usage des demoiselles, 295–7. On the importance of Sévigné as a model, see Constant, Un monde à l’usage des demoiselles, 295–6; and Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, ‘Authority, Authenticity, and the Publication of Letters by Women,’ in Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature, ed. Goldsmith (Boston, 1989), 51–52. See Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York, 1983); Carolyn C. Lougee, ‘Le paradis des femmes’: Women, Salons, and Social Stratiﬁcation in Seventeenth-Century France (Princeton, N.J., 1976); Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, Exclusive Conversations: The Art of Interaction in Seventeenth-Century France (Philadelphia, 1988); Jonathan Dewald, Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France, 1570–1715 (Berkeley, Calif., 1993); Daniel Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton, N.J., 1994); Jay Smith, The Culture of Merit: Nobility, Royal Service, and the Making of Absolute Monarchy in France, 1600–1789 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996). See Fritz Nies, Gattungspoetik und Publikumsstrucktur: Sur Geschichte des Sévignébriefe (Munich, 1972). On women’s letters in epistolary manuals, see Janet Gurkin Altman, ‘Women’s Letters in the Public Sphere,’ in Going Public: Women and Publishing in Early Modern France, ed. Elizabeth C. Goldsmith and Dena Goodman (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995), 99–115. Madeleine de Puisieux, Conseils à une amie (n.p., 1749), 34. Chevalier de Prunay, Grammaire des dames, où l’on trouvera des principes sûrs & faciles, pour apprendre à Orthographier correctement la Langue française, avec les moyens de connaître les expressions provinciales, de les éviter, & de prévenir, chez les jeunes Demoiselles, l’habitude d’une prononciacion vicieuse (Paris, 1777), 42–3. See also Reyre, Ecole des jeunes demoiselles, 1:25. [Stéphanie Félicité Ducrest de Saint-Aubin], la comtesse de Genlis, Mémoires inédites … sur le dix-huitième siècle et la Révolution française depuis 1756 jusqu’à nos jours (Paris, 1825), 1:98–100. See François Lebrun, Marc Venard, and Jean Quéniart, De Gutenberg aux Lumières, vol. 2 of Histoire générale de l’enseignement et de l’éducation en France, ed. Louis-Henri Parias (Paris, 1981), 373–74. Gabriele Beck-Busse, ‘Les “femmes” et les “illitterati”; ou: la question du latin et de la langue vulgaire,’ in La grammaire des dames (special issue), ed.Wendy Ayres-Bennett, Histoire, épistémologie, langage 16 (1994): 77–94. Magné, ‘Education des femmes,’ 120. Louis Trenard, ‘L’enseignement de la langue nationale: Une réforme pédagogique, 1750–1790,’ in The Making of Frenchmen: Current Directions in the History of Education in France, 1679–1979, ed. Donald N. Baker and Patrick J. Harrigan (Waterloo, Ont., 1980), 95–114. See, for example, D’Alembert’s critique of Latin education in his article, ‘Collège,’ in the Encyclopédie. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert, eds, Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers (Paris, 1751–65), 3:635. Yves Citton and André Wyss, Les doctrines orthographiques du XVIe siècle en France (Geneva, 1989), 20–25; Marc Fumaroli, ‘L’apologétique de la langue française classique,’ Rhetorica 2 (1984): 141–42.

Gender and Language in the Old Regime 219 27. Fumaroli, ‘Apologétique,’ 142–61. 28. Janet Gurkin Altman sees in Sévigné’s letters a deliberate cultivation of the ‘“mother tongue” as an idiolect’ (Altman, ‘The Letter Book As a Literary Institution 1539–1789: Toward a Cultural History of Published Correspondences in France,’ in Men/Women of Letters [special issue], ed. Charles A. Porter, Yale French Studies 71 [1986]: 30). 29. Goldsmith, Exclusive Conversations, 20. 30. ‘Statuts et règlements de l’Académie Françoise,’ in Histoire de l’Académie française, by [Paul] Pellison[-Fontanier] and abbé [Pierre-Joseph] d’Olivet, ed. Charles-Louis Livet (Geneva and Paris, 1989), 1:493. 31. Fumaroli, ‘Apologétique,’ 142–43. 32. Quoted in Alexis François, La grammaire du purisme et l’Académie française au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1905), 127. 33. L.-F. Flûtre, ‘Du rôle des femmes dans l’élaboration des Remarques de Vaugelas,’ Neophilologus 38 (1954): 241–48. Flûtre argues that Vaugelas was not the ‘Legislator of Parnassus’ he is painted to be by Molière in Les femmes savantes, but the ‘secretary’ of the salons, especially that of Mme de Rambouillet, where for thirty-ﬁve years he had registered the least variations of language usage. 34. Fumaroli, ‘Apologétique,’ 144. 35. See Ibid., 155–59; see also Katharine Ann Jensen, Writing Love: Letters, Women, and the Novel in France, 1605–1776 (Carbondale, Ill.,1995), 18–19. 36. Fumaroli, ‘Apologétique,’ 145. 37. Ibid., 161. 38. Wendy Ayres-Bennett, ‘Le rôle des femmes dans l’élaboration des idées linguistiques au XVIIe siècle en France,’ in Ayres-Bennett, La grammaire des dames, 47. 39. Citton and Wyss, Doctrines orthographiques, 24. 40. Lesley Smith notes that before the ﬁfteenth century, ‘far from being of high standing, writers – those who physically wrote – were servants to those who wanted books. Christine [de Pisan], in her widowhood, was reduced to writing for a living.’ She continues: ‘To “write” a book or document was unlikely to mean actually penning it oneself. … Writing was often dictation. … Peter the Venerable notes that writing is a work of the hand, but composing is the work of the heart.’ Smith, ‘Scriba Femina: Medieval Depictions of Women Writing,’ in Women and the Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence, ed. Lesley Smith and Jane H. M. Taylor (London, 1997), 27, 29. By the late seventeenth century, however, only the king maintained such a noble distinction. Saint-Simon explains the job of Rose, Louis XIV’s secretary, as follows: ‘To have the pen, this is to be a public counterfeiter, and to be charged to do that which would cost anyone else his life. This exercise consists in imitating so exactly the writing of the King that it cannot be distinguished from that counterfeited by the pen, and to write in this way all the letters that the King must or wishes to write with his own hand, and sometimes does not wish to take the trouble. Kings and other foreigners of high birth have lots of them; as do subjects, such as generals of armies or other important people, for the secrecy of their affairs or as a mark of goodness or of distinction.’ [Louis de Rouvroy, duc de] Saint-Simon, Mémoires (1691–1701), ed. Yves Coirault (Paris, 1983), 1:803–4. 41. Citton and Wyss, Doctrines orthographiques, 44–48, 100–102. 42. Ibid., 61, 102–8. 43. La declaration des abus que l’on commet en escriuant, & le moyen de les euiter, & representer nayuement les paroles: ce que iamais homme n’a faict (1572), quoted in Citton and Wyss, Doctrines orthographiques, 96. 44. Citton and Wyss, Doctrines orthographiques, 143–46. 45. Ibid., 105. See also Brunot, Histoire; Ambroise Firmin Didot, Observations sur l’orthographe ou ortograﬁe française suivies d’une Histoire de la réforme orthographique depuis le XVe siècle à nos jours (Paris, 1868), 13; Nina Catach, L’orthographe, 3d ed. (Paris, 1988), 35–37; Biedermann-Pasques, Grands courants, 25. I should note that

220 Gender and the Reasoning Mind

46. 47.

48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71.

Citton and Wyss provide a thoroughly convincing challenge to the blatant Whiggism of the standard narrative, which all the others share. Antoine Baudeau de Somaize, Le grand dictionnaire des pretieuses (1661; rpt.,Geneva, 1972), s. v. ‘Ortographe.’ Brunot, Histoire, 4:1:97–98; Ayres-Bennett, ‘Rôle des femmes,’ 45. As Brunot notes, attacks on the précieuses and préciosité are the best evidence that women were involved. Catach, L’orthographe, 33 n. 1. See Lougee, Paradis des femmes, 11–12, 28; Brunot, Histoire, 4:1:98; and AyresBennett, ‘Rôle des femmes,’ 39–41. [Antoine] Lartigaut, Les principes infallibles et les regles asurées de la juste prononciacion de nôtre langue (Paris, 1670), n. p. This is the same text he published the previous year, but now under a different title. Loüis de L’Esclache, Les véritables régles de l’ortografe francéze, ou l’art d’aprandre an peu de tams à écrire côrectemant (Paris, 1668), 4. [P. Gilles] Vaudelin, Nouvelle manière d’écrire comme on parle en France (Paris, 1713), 1. Ibid., 1, 28–30. Ibid., 22, 24, 26. Biedermann-Pasques, Grands courants, 50–51. La veritable orthographe françoise opposée à l’orthographe imaginaire du sieur de Lesclache (1669), quoted in Biedermann-Pasques, Grands courants, 52. Biedermann-Pasques seems to take this attack seriously, but I have my doubts. ‘On leur dira que sens avec un e signiﬁe ce que vous n’avés point et sans avec un a est une préposition de la grammaire,’ she quotes him as writing. To my mind, it reads much more like Molière and the other satirical attacks on the précieuses. Not that these are not serious, but the extremism of the form needs to be taken into account. Quoted in Biedermann-Pasques, Grands courants, 52. Quoted in ibid., 47. See also, Brunot, Histoire, 4:1:109–10. Biedermann-Pasques, Grands courants, 268. Ibid., 269. L’Esclache, Véritables régles, 5; [François Séraphin] Regnier Des Marais, Traité de la grammaire françoise (Paris, 1705), 75–76. Regnier Des Marais, Traité, 94–95. L’Esclache, Véritables régles, 20–22. Regnier Des Marais, Traité, 103–4. Ibid., 76. The linking of women and foreigners can be seen in the title of Abbé Girard’s L’Ortografe française sans équivoques & dans sés Principes naturels: ou L’Art d’écrire notre langue selon les loix de la Raison & de l’Usage; d’une manière aisée pour lés Dames, comode pour lés Etrangers, instructive pour lés Provinciaux, & nécessaire pour exprimer & distinguer toutes lés diférances de la Prononciacion (Paris, 1716). L’Esclache, Véritables régles, 9–10. Regnier Des Marais, Traité, 103. Ibid., 102. By reducing women’s claims on the written language to reading, Regnier was at the same time reverting to the focus on reading that shaped the debate in the sixteenth century, and gendering it in a way that reﬂected the practice of men of letters of his own day of ﬁguring women as the readers of their works. The most notable was his colleague Fontenelle, whose Dialogues sur la pluralité des mondes (1686) featured a marquise who would be the model of enlightened readers to come. See discussion later in this article. [Nicholas] Du Pont, Examen critique du ‘Traité d’orthographe’ de M. l’abbé Regnier Desmarais … avec les principes fondementaux de l’art d’écrire (Paris, 1713), 2–3. Ibid., 34. This is exactly how Brunot interprets Regnier. ‘Not even once, … is the least desire shown to bring into orthographic chaos a bit of clarity and logic. … Certain members

Gender and Language in the Old Regime 221

72. 73. 74.

75.

76.

77.

78.

79. 80. 81. 82.

83. 84.

85.

86.

were visibly not at all upset that spelling had become so difﬁcult,’ he writes. Rather than fulﬁlling their Cartesian mission to effect rational, democratic reform, this ‘aristocracy,’ as he calls the academicians, defended an archaic and irrational linguistic order solely in order to maintain their own power. (Histoire, 4:1:109–10). Du Pont, Examen critique, 36–37. Ibid., 99. Catach, L’orthographe, 35–37, and the table on 44. Firmin Didot estimates that nearly ﬁve thousand of the eighteen thousand words contained in the ﬁrst edition were modiﬁed in the second (Observations, 13). Biedermann-Pasques, Grands courants, 53. The texts she cites are: Claude Bufﬁer, Grammaire françoise sur un plan nouveau; and abbé de Saint-Pierre, Projet pour perfectioner l’ortografe des langues d’Europe. As Biedermann-Pasques points out, though, the accusation of ‘barbarism’ was used by both sides in the seventeenth century (Grand courants, 47). On the eighteenthcentury association of women with civilization, see Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘The Enlightenment Debate on Women,’ History Workshop Journal 20 (1985): 101–24. David Hume, ‘On Essay Writing,’ in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, Ind., 1985), 533–37. See Beck-Busse, ‘Les “femmes” et les “illitterati,”’ 89–90; and Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), 124–25, 193–96. After Fontenelle’s marquise in the Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686), the best known examples are Diderot’s Madame de Puisieux in La lettre sur les aveugles and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse in Le rêve de d’Alembert. The German mathematician Leonhard Euler wrote his mathematical treatises in Latin, but his works of popularization, most notably the Lettres à une Princesse d’Allemagne sur quelques sujets de Physique, et de Philosophie (1768, 1772), in French. On this practice and its signiﬁcance, see Timothy J. Reiss, The Meaning of Literature (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992), 218; Joan DeJean, ‘The Literary World at War; or, What Can Happen When Women Go Public,’ in Goldsmith and Goodman, Going Public, 116–28; and idem, Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle (Chicago, 1997). Harth, ‘The Salon Woman Goes Public … or Does She?’ in Goldsmith and Goodman, Going Public, 187–88. [Suzanne Curchod Necker], Nouveaux mélanges extraits des manuscrits de Madame Necker, ed. Jacques Necker (Paris, 1801), 1:123–24; 1:141–42; 1:326–28; 2:9–10. See Domna C. Stanton, ‘The Fiction of Préciosité and the Fear of Women,’ Yale French Studies 62 (1981): 107–34. Goldsmith, ‘Authority, Authenticity, and the Publication of Letters by Women,’ 55; Katherine Ann Jensen, ‘Male Models of Female Epistolarity; or, How to Write Like a Woman in Seventeenth-Century France,’ in Goldsmith, Writing the Female Voice, 41. See also Jensen, Writing Love; Susan Sniader Lanser, Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice (Ithaca, N.Y., 1992). François Albert-Buisson, Les Quarante au temps des Lumières (Paris, 1960). Rousseau, ‘Essai sur l’origine des langues,’ ed. Charles Porset (Bordeaux, 1970), 67, 61. For a gender analysis of Rousseau, see Lieselotte Steinbrügge, The Moral Sex: Woman’s Nature in the French Enlightenment, trans. Pamela E. Selwyn (New York, 1995), 54–82. Charles Pinot Duclos, Remarques sur la grammaire générale et raisonnée, in Oeuvres complètes, 10 vols., ed. Louis-Simon Auger (Paris, 1756), 9:38. Duclos’s Remarques ﬁrst appeared as notes to the 1754 edition of Antoine Arnauld’s Grammaire. It was reprinted often in the eighteenth century and then in a new edition with more commentary from 1803 on. Duclos had been elected to the Académie française in 1746; the year after he published his edition of the Grammaire he was elected the academy’s secretary general. See Albert-Buisson, Les Quarante, 26–29. Duclos, Remarques, 41.

222 Gender and the Reasoning Mind 87. Ibid., 43. 88. Quoted in François, Grammaire du purisme, 140–41. 89. ‘Orthographe,’ in Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, 11:669. Beauzée’s language echoes that of the discourse on women in the Encyclopédie more generally. See Lieselotte Steinbrügge, ‘Qui peut déﬁnir les femmes? L’idée de la ‘nature féminine’ au siècle des lumières,’ Dixhuitième siècle 26 (1994): 333–48; and Moral Sex, 21–34. On Beauzée, see Frank A. Kafker with Serena L. Kafker, ‘The Encyclopedists As Individuals: A Biographical Dictionary of the Authors of the “Encyclopédie,”’Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 257 (1988): 26–29. 90. ‘’Néographisme,’’ in Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie, 11:94. 91. Quoted in Didot, Observations, 297. 92. I depend here on the lengthy extract from L’orthographe des dames printed in Didot, Observations, 150–54. Didot has suggested that it was Wailly’s work that persuaded Beauzée to join the reformers (Observations, 296).Wailly was also the author of De l’orthographe (1771). 93. Quoted in Didot, Observations, 150–51. 94. Quoted in ibid., 151–52. 95. Quoted in ibid., 152–53. 96. ‘Lettre de M. de Wailly, au rédacteur de l’année littéraire,’ Année littéraire, 1783, 201, 209–11. 97. Duclos, Remarques, 38. 98. Quoted in Roger Duchêne, ‘Le mythe de l’épistolière: Mme de Sévigné,’ in L’épistolarité à travers les siècles: Gestes de communication et/ou d’écriture, ed. Mireille Bossis (Stuttgart, 1990), 13. See also Fritz Nies, ‘Un genre féminin?’ Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 78 (1978): 1001–2; and Altman, ‘Letter Book,’ 42–45. 99. Quoted in Jensen, Writing Love, 20. 100. On the responsibility mothers bore in protecting and preparing their daughters for marriage, see Nadine Bérenguier, ‘L’infortune des alliances: Contrat, mariage, et ﬁction au dixhuitième siècle,’ Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 329 (1995): 271–417. 101. L’avantcoureur, Feuille Hebdomadaire, où sont annoncés les objets particuliers des Sciences, de la Littérature, des Arts, des Métiers, de l’Industrie, des Spectacles, & les Nouveautés en tout genre, no. 12 (19 March 1770): 439. 102. Since the sixteenth century it had been traditional to dedicate spellers to highborn women, as Regnier Des Marais noted in his Traité (76–84). Regnier’s point was to suggest that they constituted unwelcome as well as futile interference from highborn women in matters that should be decided by appropriate authorities: ‘But as in Italy the reputation of Trissin, & the protection of Pope Clement, whose support he sought, helped little in getting his new spelling accepted, so too in France, the knowledge of Sylvius & others, & the support that he, Pelletier, & Ramus had procured, in dedicating their Works to two great Queens, & to a great Princess, could not prevent their pretended reform from being rejected by the Public, indignant that individuals should give the authority of resetting the alphabet, now to one faction, now to another’ (83–84). The association of these royal women with factionalism, and with the sectarianism of the religious wars in particular, comes through in Regnier’s criticism of those who were ‘all in agreement to combat the ordinary Orthography; but each one of whom wished to introduce one according to his own fantasy, & each of whom tried to appear to be the head of a Sect’ (84). 103. Prunay, Grammaire des dames, xv–xvi. The antiphilosophe Elie-Catherine Fréron tore Prunay apart for his attempt to bring spelling into line with speech. ‘The principle is true,’ he wrote, ‘but it proves, in general, that we will never have a good orthography; because it is clear that this reform would produce a universal upheaval, and would render useless, or very disagreeable to read all the printed books we have, either in French or in Latin.’ ‘Letter II,’ Année littéraire, 1776, 28.

Gender and Language in the Old Regime 223 104. Prunay, Grammaire des dames, xviii. 105. Ibid., xxxii–xxxiii. Prunay sought and received Voltaire’s endorsement, but the octogenarian philosophe’s letter was brief and formulaic. He admitted that ‘his extreme age and his continual illnesses have not yet allowed me to read your whole book; but what I have read, has seemed so true and so useful, that I cannot wait to give you the thanks I owe you.’ The Année littéraire printed the letter following its scathing review, which ended: ‘We have so many good books on French Grammar, although we have no perfect Grammaire Françoise, that it is astonishing that M. de Prunai has not made at least a more tolerable compilation. However, this work, mediocre as it is, has been received favorably by M. de Voltaire, who disdains none of the literary homages rendered him.’ Not surprisingly, Fréron accused Prunay of pandering to his female readers in order to enlist them as the main force in a campaign to ‘make a happy revolution in our orthography.’ ‘Letter II,’ Année littéraire, 1776, 29–30, 38. 106. [Suzanne Curchod Necker], Mélanges extraits des manuscrits de Mme Necker, ed. Jacques Necker (Paris, 1798), 3:409–10. 107. Abbé [Louis] Barthelemy, Grammaire des dames, ou Nouveau traité d’orthographe françoise, réduite aux regles les plus simples, & justiﬁée par des morceaux choisis de Poésie, d’Histoire, &c. Ouvrage dédié à Madame la Comtesse de Genlis (Geneva, 1785), v. 108. Idem, La Cantatrice grammairienne, ou l’art d’apprendre l’Orthographe française seul, sans le secours d’un Maître, par le moyen des Chansons érotiques, pastorales, villageoises, anacréontiques, &c … Ouvrage destiné aux Dames (Geneva and Paris, 1788), viii–ix. 109. Ibid., x, n. The reference is to [Pierre-Joseph Boudier de Villemert], L’ami des femmes (Hambourg, 1758), 33. The following year Boudier de Villemert would become one of the founding editors of the Feuille nécessaire, the Parisian weekly that would later become L’avantcoureur (see note 101). 110. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, ou de l’éducation (Paris, 1966), 490. 111. ‘Letter II,’ Année littéraire, 1776, 27. 112. J. B. Roche, Entretiens sur l’orthographe françoise, et autres objets analogues (Nantes, 1777), 2–4. 113. Ibid., 6–7. 114. Ibid., 9–10. 115. Ibid., 11. 116. ‘Letter VI,’ Année littéraire, 1778, 137. 117. ‘Letter VI,’ Année littéraire, 1785, 123–25. 118. [Antoine Tournon], Promenades de Clarisse et du Marquis de Valzé, ou Nouvelle méthode pour apprendre les principes de la langue et de l’Ortographe françaises à l’usage des Dames (Paris, 1784), 1:4–6. 119. ‘Letter VI,’ Année littéraire, 1785, 129–30. 120. Iris Marion Young, ‘Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality,’ in Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington, Ind., 1990), 146–47. 121. Louise d’Epinay contests this view in her response to Antoine-Léonard Thomas’s Essai sur le caractère, les mœurs et l’esprit des femmes: Letter to Galiani, 14 March 1772, reprinted in Qu’est-ce qu’une femme? Un débat, ed. Elisabeth Badinter (Paris, 1989), 192.

4.2 ‘To think, to compare, to combine, to methodise’: Girls’ Education in Enlightenment Britain Michèle Cohen

Describing Johnson’s early education, Boswell notes that after his return from the school at Stourbridge, Johnson spent two years at home ‘in what he thought was idleness’, spending his time reading a great deal ‘in a desultory manner, without any scheme of study, as chance threw books in his way and inclination directed him through them’. While his father scolded him for his ‘want of steady application’, Johnson himself estimated that during that time, he had been ‘acquiring various stores’, reading ‘in this irregular manner … a great many books which were not commonly known at the Universities, where they seldom read any books but what are put into their hands by their tutors’. Not only does Boswell argue that Johnson’s own ‘confession of idleness’ should be disregarded, but he suggests on the contrary that ‘ it may be doubted whether such a mind as his was not more enriched by roaming at large in the ﬁelds of literature than if it had been conﬁned to any single spot’.1 A similar comment can be found about the education of another great eighteenth-century ﬁgure, Gibbon, though this time by a modern historian: Gibbon, ‘A sickly child … took the opportunity of a fragmentary formal education to read voraciously’, implying that it was when he was not at school that Gibbon really laid the grounding for his magisterial work.2 Yet, when women’s self-directed, desultory reading is discussed, a different attitude is conveyed. Thus, it is because Arabella, heroine of Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, roams freely and unguided in her father’s library that she reads the romances which ﬁll her mind with ‘extravagant expectations’; and the husband who complains about his wife’s reading, in a letter published in the Edinburgh Evening Courant, does not just protest that it interferes with her care of his household, ‘if I set her down to mend my stockings, she is reading Locke upon the Human Understanding … and Johnson’s Lives have nearly starved my youngest daughter at breast’. What he ﬁnds most ‘extraordinary’ is that ‘she seems to read to no purpose, and with no method … she reads every kind of books, on any subject whatever; breakfasts on Tillotson, dines on the Thirty Nine articles, drinks tea with Roderick Random, and goes to bed with Humphry Clinker’.3 Why is the representation of men and women’s ‘informal’ education asymmetrical? Why is men’s ‘unsystematic’ or self-directed reading construed as the source of their creative genius, but women’s assumed to be just that – unsystematic and 224

Girls’ Education in Enlightenment Britain 225

unmethodical? What seems generally to be implied is that men’s informal reading is only apparently unsystematic whereas women’s really is, for on their own they cannot generate the rationality that disciplines the male reader. There are exceptions. Mary Wollstonecraft’s heroine, Mary, also read unsystematically, ‘every book that came in her way’, but that is precisely why, like men, ‘left to the operations of her own mind, she … learned to think’.4 Although there are important questions to be asked about the theme of the relation of men’s genius to informal, untutored education, it is women’s education that is the main focus of this chapter. Was females’ informal education in the eighteenth century as unsystematic and lacking in method as its representation suggests? One assumption of many historians is that the progress of women’s education is best measured by their access to schooling, implying that a domestic education was necessarily deﬁcient.5 Thus historian of girls’ education Deirdre Raftery remarked recently that ‘because of the peripatetic life style of her father, Mary Wollstonecraft was never in any one village long enough to have had a proper school education’. What would a ‘proper’ school education have meant for a girl in the eighteenth century? In the same vein, a modern critic writing about the education of young Hester Thrale commented ‘Mainly … her intellect was allowed to develop as it would, unfettered by the discipline of regular schooling, a fact which may account for the erratic mind of the later Mrs Thrale.’6 Another assumption is that women’s education was inferior to that of men’s. This assumption sits alongside a lack of historical understanding about male education, especially schooling. Indeed, the criticism of women’s education has obscured the fact that historians have treated men’s education unproblematically. Commentators have assumed that men’s education was superior, leaving it protected from critical gaze. Nor do we have an analysis of gender and education, even though boys’ and girls’ education in the eighteenth century can, to some extent, be compared.7 This chapter aims to challenge these assumptions and explore how central gender was to eighteenth-century educational reﬂection, prescription and practice for both sexes. It focuses on two especially important and interconnected debates: the public/private debate on education, and the place and study of the classics.

The public/private debate There are many prejudices entertained against the character of a learned lady; and perhaps if all ladies were profoundly learned, some inconveniences might arise from it; but I must own it does not appear to me, that a woman will be rendered less acceptable in the world, or worse qualiﬁed to perform any part of her duty in it, by having employed the time from six to sixteen, in the cultivation of her mind.8 This comment of educationist Vicesimus Knox also expressed the sentiments of many other men of his time. Since Locke had posited that the mind was a tabula rasa, it had become possible not only to envisage that women might be able to

226 Gender and the Reasoning Mind

obtain a proper education but to argue that the peculiar ‘weaknesses’ of women’s character were attributable not to their nature but to a faulty education, and could be corrected. Education could be ‘a remedy – indeed the chief remedy – for the afﬂictions of the minds of men and women’.9 However, the issue that preoccupied educationists and moralists in the eighteenth century was not just the kind of education young ladies and gentlemen should be getting but where their education would be obtained. Should they be educated privately, at home, or publicly at school?10 There is now a large body of work concerning the ‘public’ and the ‘private’, and their relation to gender and the notion of separate spheres.11 The growing realisation that in the eighteenth century, women were central to the main practices of the ‘public sphere’ – sociability and conversation – and therefore had a high ‘public proﬁle’, has led historians to question conventional mappings of gender onto public and private spaces and identities.12 However, the vocabulary of public and private has been deployed in the main in relation to women and women’s history, and less attention has generally been paid to men.13 By contrast, the public/ private debate on education initially concerned males alone. Tracing its development throughout the century not only provides insights into how masculinity was conceived but draws attention to the way moralists and educationists manipulated the meanings of public and private to reinforce or construct gender difference. When John Locke, in his educational treatise Some Thoughts Concerning Education, asked whether gentlemen’s sons should be educated privately i.e. at home, or publicly, in a grammar or ‘great’ school, he was not asking a new question, but it placed the issue at the heart of debates on education for the rest of the century.14 For Locke, this issue was intrinsically related to what he saw as the main aim of education, virtue: ‘’Tis Vertue, then, direct Vertue, which is the hard and valuable part to be aimed at in Education.’ Domestic education was, in his view, ‘much the best and safest way to this great and main End of Education’.15 What soon came to be called the ‘famous question’ exercised the minds and pens not only of educationists and moralists but of many and diverse men and women of letters, testifying to its importance in the cultural life of the century.16 On the one hand, supporters of private education claimed, as Locke had argued, that it promised virtue and that public schooling was a danger to boys’ morals because schools were full of violence and vice. On the other hand, supporters of public schooling claimed, as Locke had conceded, that it fostered emulation, manliness and a ‘knowledge of the world’ while home education did not prepare boys for society and made them ‘sheepish’.17 In the ﬁrst half of the century, both sides had their advocates and critics, though domestic instruction received a boost from the publication of Rousseau’s Emile (1762). In the early 1780s, at a time when the reputation of public schools, those ‘nurseries of all vice and immorality’had reached an all time low, a strong voice emerged in favour of public schooling, Vicesimus Knox, Master of Tunbridge School.18 Though Knox is generally known for his attempt to regenerate public schools and for his educational treatise, Liberal Education (1781), it is his

Girls’ Education in Enlightenment Britain 227

intervention in the public/private debate – his denunciation of private education and promotion of public schooling for boys – that I will consider here.19 Like Locke, Knox thought virtue ought to be the main aim of boys’ education, but his plan for its attainment was completely different. In the ﬁrst place, and in direct opposition to Locke, Knox argued that private education, rather than shielding youths from vice actually predisposed them to it. Discursively shifting the site of vice from the school to the home made it possible for Knox to shift the site of virtue from the home to the school, thereby subverting the very foundation of Locke’s claim for the superiority of domestic education. Secondly, Knox claimed that public schooling alone provided the discipline that fostered virtue and manliness while domestic instruction, indulgent and lacking in discipline, promoted idleness and vice, both signiﬁers of effeminacy.20 In other words, Knox constructed ‘masculinity’ as he enunciated the advantages of public schooling, and effeminacy, its other, as he denounced domestic education. At the same time, he transformed the meaning of the debate by placing gender at the heart of the discussion. Following Knox, manliness and effeminacy were mapped respectively onto public and private education. One commentator ‘perceived a certain hardihood and manliness of character in boys who have a public education, superior to what appears in those of the same age educated privately’, another argued that ‘lack of compulsion’ in domestic instruction meant that ‘everything’ was ‘languid and inefﬁcient’ and that the home-educated youth ‘would eventually be a coxcomb’.21 Not surprisingly, in a novel by educationist Maria Edgeworth, a ‘model father’ insists that his son be sent to school to be ‘roughed about among boys, or he will never learn to be a man’.22 Despite the expansion of various ‘seminaries’ and establishments for girls’ education throughout the century, there were few advocates of schooling for girls.23 Moralists and educationists were unanimous that there had to be a good reason for a girl to be educated at school rather than at home, for ‘whatever elegant or high-sounding schools may be sought out for a girl, a mother seems the only governess intended by nature’.24 Objections to schools varied. Early in the century, Mary Wray held the education of young ladies at boarding-school to be ‘useless, and indeed pernicious’. At the end of the century, Clara Reeve opposed girls’ boarding schools because ‘the attention is chieﬂy, if not entirely, directed to external accomplishments; while the moral duties and social virtues are neglected’. While arguing that ‘external accomplishments’ need not be altogether despised, Mary Wollstonecraft criticised boarding schools for teaching girls nothing to ‘engage their attention and render it an employment of the mind’. For Alexander Jardine, the many ‘defects’ imparted by these schools included ‘false and useless ideas, habits of idleness, indifference, or extravagance’. He considered that they did not warrant the amount of money paid ‘for the chance of a very few unimportant accomplishments’ which were likely to be better learned at home.25 Anxiety about boarding schools also focused on the dangers arising from the ‘promiscuous’ mixing of social classes. Clara Reeve worried that because the middling sort sent their daughters to be educated in the same places as the gentry,

228 Gender and the Reasoning Mind

girls were not receiving an education appropriate to their needs. ‘In every town you go through’, she complained ‘you may see written in letters of gold “a Boarding school for young Ladies” – but did you ever see one for those that are not to act the parts of young ladies? … All degrees are blended together in these schools, to the mutual disadvantage of all the parties concerned.’26 Another alleged consequence of social mixing was that girls acquired desires above their station and ended up despising their own social milieu. This is illustrated in Hannah More’s moral tale ‘The two wealthy farmers’. At their boarding school, the Miss Bragwells had just got enough knowledge ‘to laugh at their fond parents’ rustic manners and vulgar language’.27 This concern was dominant in the new genre of literature which emerged in the late 1760s, letters between mothers and their daughters at boarding school. In one such text, a mother warns her daughter to be aware of class difference and recommends that she choose as friend someone ‘nearly equal to yourself in rank and station’.28 Farmer Bragwell’s wife, of course, instructs her daughters to ‘keep company with the richest and most fashionable girls in the school, and to make no acquaintance with farmers’ daughters’.29 These texts also suggest that the good mother who sends her daughter to school does so reluctantly and not because she wants her out of the way. ‘Though you are removed from my sight’ writes Portia to her daughter Sophia ‘you are not, for all that, banished from my thoughts. On the contrary, you are more in them now than ever.’30 The good mother does not send her daughter away to school so she can be free to pursue her own frivolous and fashionable life, only the bad mother does. In this case, moralists and educationists agreed that the girl was better off at school, as some of these schools were ‘conducted by excellent and valuable women’.31 In the 1780s, the debate on girls’ education took a new turn. Opponents of boarding schools began to refer to girls’ schooling as public education.32 This discursive shift was signiﬁcant because it made it possible for educationists and moralists to claim that for the very reasons public schooling was suitable for boys, it was unsuitable for girls. One such moralist was Rev John Bennett. In Strictures on Female Education, he listed what were generally considered the three main advantages of public schooling for boys – conﬁdence, emulation, friendships – and then demonstrated how these advantages were precisely not to be recommended for girls. A key argument in favour of public schooling for boys had always been that schools encouraged them to be more conﬁdent. While conﬁdence was necessary for boys’ future public roles, in women it was ‘a horrid bore.’ Women’s greatest grace was ‘the crimsoning blush and the retiring timidity’. Emulation, deﬁned as a striving for excellence in an atmosphere of competition, was believed to be a powerful incentive channelling boys’ energies and motivating them to work, a preparation for their future life. Schools ‘excite a proper emulation by the collision of talents’ and are therefore appropriate for boys. Not only was emulation unnecessary for girls since they did not compete in the public world, but the very notion of competition was distasteful in women. Finally, public schools gave boys the chance to form lasting friendships

Girls’ Education in Enlightenment Britain 229

which ‘frequently lead the way to worldly honours and advancement.’ Friendships are not important to women since the ‘grand promotion, of which they are capable, is a digniﬁed marriage’. More than this, however, girls’ friendships at school, characterised by ‘private correspondencies, assignations, and intrigue’, could be dangerous. As Bennett imagined it, bringing girls together in a common reservoir, at a dangerous age, when nature bids an unusual fervour rise in their blood, when they … [are] actuated with similar feelings and similar desires, and when a restless leisure awakens all the powers of imagination and the senses, they insensibly convey an infection to each other by tales, sentiment, sympathy and friendship … . Hence, from so many offensive breaths, all pent up together, proceeds a total putrefaction of the moral air … a total forfeiture of that delicacy and softness, without which it is impossible for any woman to be lovely.33 Bennett concluded that ‘almost everything’ in schools could ‘corrupt the heart’. They were ‘hot beds’ forcing girls prematurely out of girlhood innocence and promoting their forwardness and independence. It is ‘a publick education which ﬁrst inspires the rage for pleasure and dissipation’, which ‘undomesticates’ a woman and therefore ‘unmakes her as to all the valuable purposes of her existence’. Home education alone guaranteed the delicacy and difﬁdence that were the essence of femininity, an essence encapsulated in the certainty that a homeeducated girl would be unlikely to ‘canvass for votes at an election’.34 Above all, and this is a key argument in view of the avowed aims of education, while public schooling promised virtue for males, it threatened the virtue of females. Female virtue was ‘a plant of too delicate a nature, to risk this scorching method of exposure’.35 Bennett was not alone in advocating public education for boys and opposing it for girls. Vicesimus Knox, who was a strong supporter of women’s education, explained: It has been asked, why I approve of public education for boys and not for girls, and whether the danger to boys in large seminaries is not as great as to girls? I must answer, in general, that the corruption of girls is more fatal in its consequences to society than that of boys; and that, as girls are destined to private and domestic life, and boys to public life, their education should be respectively correspondent to their destination. Vanity and vice will be introduced by some among a large number, and the contagion soon spreads with irresistible violence.36 Why did moralists and educationists – from the most conservative, like Hannah More to more enlightened supporters of female education such as Knox and Alexander Jardine – oppose boarding schools for girls so vigorously and consistently? One reason might be that it was difﬁcult to assess the personal and academic calibre of the governess (the woman who ran a school) and of the teachers

230 Gender and the Reasoning Mind

she employed. In the absence of an overall educational authority and of even the concept of teacher-training, anyone who so wished could open a school. While there must have been governesses like Elisabeth Ham’s aunt, who having attended a boarding school herself, ‘wished to turn the advantage to some account’ and opened a school, there were others who, like Emma’ s Mrs Goddard, were merely ‘plain, motherly’ kinds of women.37 Referring to a dominant anxiety of the times, ‘quacks’ in the medical profession, a character in the play ‘The Governess’ commented ‘there are quacks in our profession as well. If boarding schools were to be examined into, there would be found a great number, whose governesses are decayed tradesmen’s wives, and not possessed of more education than is necessary to provide for a family and manage a kitchen’.38 These arguments served to reinforce moralists’ warning that public schooling for girls violated ‘all the sacred obligations’ parents owed their daughters.39 Yet, Susan Skedd’s work on teachers in Oxfordshire and Carol Percy’s work on Ellin Devis and her fashionable school in Upper Wimpole Street provide evidence to counter these moral panics and support Christina de Bellaigue’s recent suggestion that governesses’ qualiﬁcations for their task has been much underestimated.40 In view of the near-unanimous agreement of eighteenth-century moralists and educationists that for middle-class girls, home education was superior to schooling, what merits were held for girls’ domestic education? One answer can be found in the Letters John Bennett published two years after Strictures, in 1789. Here, he constructed a moral and instructional programme addressed to his niece Lucy. This programme consisted of a sort of annotated bibliography of texts for the different subjects that could constitute a girl’s curriculum: religion, history, geography, natural history, poetry, Belles Lettres, grammar, Orthoepy (good pronunciation), letter writing, ﬁne arts. One novel is both allowed and recommended, Sir Charles Grandison, while all other novels and romances are to be shunned as they ‘corrupt all principle’, and seduce girls away from the path of virtue.41 Bennett cannot stress the point enough: ‘Plays, operas, masquerades, and all other fashionable pleasures have not half so much danger to young people, as the reading of these books’. Because reading is an occupation girls can do ‘in private, without any censure, and the poison operates more forcibly, because unperceived’, it must be carefully monitored and supervised. The success of Bennett’s programme is thus implicitly dependent on a home education, because it ensures that girls are ‘kept under their [parents’] own, immediate inspection’. Louisa, his model girl student, also had parents ‘adverse to boarding schools, as inspiring a young person with improper notions and undermining the taste for pure simplicity and domestic worth’. She was instructed in everything to do with books by her clergyman father and domestic responsibilities by her mother. But, Bennett is keen to point out, a home education does not imply randomness and irregularity. On the contrary. Louisa’ s ‘hours are as strictly arranged, as they could have been, at a school, into a regular plan of employment’. Every hour has its occupation, from domestic duties and needlework to ‘reading, correspondence, exercise and recreation’. Her whole life is systematic and ordered.42 And indeed, we ﬁnd the same emphasis on orderliness in women’s own accounts of their domestic education.

Girls’ Education in Enlightenment Britain 231

Women’s diaries and personal recollections strongly suggest that far from being haphazard, roaming wildly without any plan or method, their home education was highly regulated, following a strict and often self-imposed discipline.43 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu followed an exacting schedule when she studied Latin up to eight hours a day for two years in her father’s library, enjoying the fact that she was believed to be spending that time ‘reading nothing but novels and romances.’ Sixteen-year old Fanny Burney’s diary tells us that she made it a kind of rule never to indulge myself in my two most favourite pursuits, reading and writing, in the morning – so, like a very good girl I give that up wholly … to needle work, by which means my reading and writing in the afternoon is a pleasure I cannot be blamed for by my mother, as it does not take up the time I ought to spend otherwise. Elizabeth Carter too is said to have shown much self-discipline in her early studies, apparently to make up for her lack of early promise. After spending about a year and a half at Abbey school, Jane Austen, aged eleven, stayed home and received an education that was quintessentially ‘informal’. She learned Latin by ‘hear[ing] her father teaching her brothers and his pupils’; as for other ‘informally’ educated learned women, her father’s library was open to her and ‘her reading was very extensive in history and Belles Lettres; her memory was extremely tenacious’. Catharine Macaulay too beneﬁted from her father’s library for her early and self-directed reading in history.44 What these recollections make clear is a will to order and method in girls’ domestic education. Was this because boarding schools, with their ‘strictly arranged’ time, represented the standard of instruction which home education was supposed to emulate? In the light of the powerful opposition these schools elicited, I would argue rather that when educationists advocated ‘order’ in girls’ education, they were drawing on the conviction that order and male education were inextricably interwoven. This conviction is evident in Wollstonecraft’s remark that ‘To do everything in an orderly manner is a most important precept’ which women could not implement because their ‘disorderly kind of education’ prevented their forming the habits of order which men observe, who ‘from their infancy, are broken into method’.45 But why did method matter, and how does it bear on the entwined debates on boys’ and girls’ education?

Method and the classics ‘Method’ has a long and complex history in education. Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine argue that it ‘was the catchword of promoters of humanist education from the 1510s onward’. It was part of a shift from ‘the ideal end-product of a classical education (the perfect orator, perfectly equipped for political life), to the classroom aids (textbooks, manuals and teaching drills) which would compartmentalise the bonae litterae and reduce them to system’. ‘Methodical’, with its connotations of

232 Gender and the Reasoning Mind

order and system, was a key word in the description of the classics curriculum and more speciﬁcally Latin study, because the humanistic education programme was deﬁned by a ‘coherent, graded and comprehensive introduction to speaking and writing Latin’ which was at the same time ‘structured in terms of the practical problems of inculcating the requisite skills’.46 Method was also associated with moral character. This too was a product of the humanist system of education. Grafton and Jardine argue that it was ‘the development of a systematised programme of [liberal] arts training in northern Europe … in conjunction with a marketing drive which insisted that that training would produce good Christians, [which] led to a convenient confusion of the ‘methodical’ with the ‘morally sound’.47 Thus, when David Williams, Dissenting Minister, private tutor and author of A Treatise on Education (1774) and Lectures on Education (1789), contended that method was critical, it was because ‘the moral character evolves naturally together with the intellectual, subject to the nature and direction of the management received.’48 Another educationist asserted that in proportion as METHOD is attended to in the education of youth, they not only make progress in learning but also in virtuous habits. If the love of REGULARITY, ORDER or METHOD, and the love of VIRTUE, be not quite synonymous … it must at least be allowed that they are allied, and that the transition from the one to the other is easy.49 When Knox published his Plan of Education, Liberal Education, there was a proliferation of similar plans and treatises.50 While some of these publications might be marketing ploys written by schoolmasters advertising their offerings in the many private academies that ﬂourished at the time, others, like Knox’s own treatise, had the loftier aim of curing the ‘disorders’ of English education, save the youth of the nation and by extension, the nation itself.51 This Knox intended to do by following ‘that ancient system of education, which consists in a classical discipline, and which has produced in our nation many ornaments of human nature. … True patriotism and true valour originate from that enlargement of the mind, which the well-regulated study of philosophy, poetry and history, tends to produce’.52 In practice, this meant ﬁrst and foremost a ‘strict, a long and laborious study of the grammar at the puerile age’. The pupil, Knox advised, ‘should be obliged, during several of his ﬁrst years, to learn grammatical parts in the evening, and repeat them every morning, in the manner of the most approved schools. He should be obliged to parse the passage which he construes, and to exemplify the rules of the grammar in every lesson’. An essential part of the evening routine in great schools were the ‘exercises’ which Knox considered so well ‘adapted to the improvement of boys’ that he vaunted them as a speciﬁc advantage of public schooling over home education. They included the ‘composition of themes, verses and declamations, both in Latin and English’, which the pupil must ‘hand in every morning or once in two or three days: according to the length and the difﬁculty of the compositions’. Not surprisingly, ensuring that little boys

Girls’ Education in Enlightenment Britain 233

complied with this relentless regime made corporal punishment ‘indispensably necessary’.53 Not all educationists agreed with Knox’s method. In the 1750s, the dominance and teaching of the classics faced a number of challenges. One challenge came from parents. Latin had always been regarded as necessary to the gentleman, but there was now a ‘powerful current of anti classical protest’ by parents who wished their sons to be taught more useful subjects.54 This is why, as Paul Langford notes, Knox’s plan to revive a ‘strictly classical education’ as the suitable medium for training the commercial as well as the professional classes ‘ran counter to the practical wisdom of the day’.55 Another challenge came from progressive enlightenment thinkers such as Lord Kames and Adam Ferguson, and from the intellectual Dissenting tradition exempliﬁed by Joseph Priestley and David Williams.56 These thinkers did not oppose the study of the classics, but the continued reliance on the traditional method, with its focus on rote learning of Latin syntax and on versiﬁcation. In other words, method was the focal point of the debate. David Williams maintained that the ‘common method of conﬁning children to formal lessons’ was injurious to the development of their understanding, while Priestley, who had been Tutor of the languages at Warrington Academy, argued that ‘it can never be worth while to torment a hundred boys with making Latin verses’.57 Why was Knox, a progressive as regards girls’ education, defending traditional methods for boys’ education? ‘Because I think … that not only the taste, but the religion, the virtue, and I will add the liberties of our countrymen, greatly depend upon its continuance.’ He disapproved most strongly of ‘innovators’ who opposed ‘burthening the boy’s memory with Latin rules’. This ‘mode more superﬁcial, and more ﬂattering to idleness and vice’ was likely to be practised by private tutors like Williams, who rejected all rote learning.58 Method was at the heart of the debate, but for Knox in addition, it was indivisible from the public/private debate. Yet another challenge to the teaching of the classics was posed by girls and by women. Unlike the male innovators, women did not simply oppose traditional methods; their challenge was indirect and contradictory. Even though Latin formed no part of girls’ prescribed curriculum, nor were they encouraged to learn it, many did, in a variety of often unconventional ways: Lady Mary Wortley Montague by herself, Jane Austen, as we have seen, by ‘hearing’ her father teach it to her brothers, and Mary Russell Mitford, with the help of one schoolmistress while a pupil at Mr St Quentin’s school.59 At a time when the ediﬁce of traditional classical instruction with its focus on the laborious acquisition of syntax was under assault, Elizabeth Carter, the woman most famed for her knowledge of the classics, claimed not only that she had learned Latin and Greek without learning their grammar, but that grammar ought to be rather ‘a consequence of understanding a language than a handmaid to that knowledge’.60 If girls could learn Latin without the laborious study of grammatical rules, were these as necessary as Knox maintained? A subversive reading of Carter’s claim suggests that they were not. According to the traditional pedagogy Knox advocated, her knowledge of classical languages, like that of boys tutored by the innovative

234 Gender and the Reasoning Mind

private tutors he criticised, would be lacking in discipline and therefore ‘superﬁcial’ and ‘unmethodical’. Yet, this description does not sit easily with her mastery not only of Latin but of Greek, which inspired Johnson to declare that she understood it better than he did.61

Gender difference and the possibility of equal education The challenge posed by women went beyond the learning of Latin itself. Women’s claims to learning were not new, but what made this claim different in the Enlightenment, Barbara Taylor points out, was that Lockean empiricism ‘did not recognize gender distinctions: as all minds received sensory impressions, so all were capable of reasoned reﬂection of experiential data’. This made it possible for Enlightenment thinkers to develop a ‘sceptical approach’ to sexual differences, replacing the idea of ‘an innate, immutable human nature by one open to change and improvement’. Because education was at the heart of the project of improvement, it had crucial implications for women. ‘The intellectual terrain’ writes Taylor, ‘was one littered with feminist possibilities.’62 Littered, but not uncomplex. For it was possible to argue simultaneously for an absence of gender differences in mental capacity, which made women’s equal education possible, and for the presence of gender differences, which could potentially entrench existing inequalities. Thus a progressive like Alexander Jardine could maintain at the same time that the ‘mind is of no sex’, and that women were formed ‘of a ﬁner paste’ and possessed ‘greater degrees of sensibility, – quicker and nicer perceptions’ than men,63 while a conservative like Hannah More could assert that women had equal ‘parts’ (intellectual ability) to men, and also claim that they were inferior to men ‘in the wholeness of mind, in the integral understanding’.64 If most mental differences between the sexes were an effect of ‘art rather than nature’, it was possible to advocate an equal education for both sexes. Alexander Jardine reﬂected that ‘the talents and abilities of the sexes are probably nearly equal, when equally cultivated: or, if some mental constitutional differences exist, these are not greater than between individuals of the same sex, and not beyond the power of habit and education to assimilate and equalize’.65 Hannah More remained equivocal, conceding that as long as women received an education that cramped the ‘native growth of their minds’, it was impossible to ascertain ‘the degree of difference between the masculine and feminine understanding’.66 Mary Wollstonecraft had no such reservations. Women, she asserted, had ‘potentially methodical minds’,67 which the right education would enable them to develop. In promoting the equal education of women, Jardine’s aim was social progress, the ‘perfection’ of society and ‘social happiness’, which ‘may depend greatly on this approximating equality of the sexes’. This may explain why, at the same time as he recommended a liberal education for women so as to bring the sexes to ‘as near an equality as nature will permit’, he stipulated that this education should take place at home because no school could sufﬁciently resemble the family, ‘the foundation of society, and the materials of which it is formed; and in

Girls’ Education in Enlightenment Britain 235

them all the duties and habits of life should be acquired’.68 He meant this for girls alone. If most differences between the sexes were due to their education, the implication could not be avoided that were women and men to be educated in the same way, these differences could be eradicated. ‘Where is then the sexual difference, when the education has been the same’? asked Mary Wollstonecraft.69 This is why her plan to educate boys and girls together from age ﬁve to nine, a time held crucial to their mental formation, was so controversial and deemed so outrageous.70 As one of her critics, German philosopher Carl Meiners argued, ‘it is but empty sophistry or declamation to insist, because women have rational and immortal souls as well as men, upon a perfect equality in the education of the sexes’.71 For moralist Mrs West, another critic, the concern was that co-education would prevent the acquisition, for each sex, of their proper ‘bias’: ‘surely fribbles and viragos are equally contemptible and unnatural’. Not only should boys and girls not be educated similarly and together, but their education should contribute to producing and consolidating gender differences. Public schooling for boys, to foster ‘activity, energy, courage and enterprise’; private, domestic instruction for girls, to make them ‘docile, contented, prudent and domestic’ and prepare them ‘for the retired part that [they have] to perform’.72 Hannah More’s position on the issue was at once more subtle and more contradictory. On one hand, she recommended an education which will ‘give precision to [women’s] ideas; will make an exact mind … will lead [them] to think, to compare, to combine, to methodise’. As these were the faculties which she considered made men’s minds superior, it would appear that More was recommending for women something of the same education as men. On the other hand, however, she resisted the possibility of gender equality by deﬁning women’s education as the cultivation of their understandings ‘to qualify them for the practical purposes of life’, and as the acquisition of the kind of knowledge that was ‘rather ﬁtted for home consumption than foreign exportation’. The ‘greatest uses of study to a woman are to enable her to regulate her own mind, and to be instrumental to the good of others’.73 More’s critical exposition of the way women’s education cramped their understandings allows us a rare window into methods used for girls’ instruction. She particularly disapproved of the texts designed for their reading, which consisted mainly of ‘abridgements from larger works’ and ‘short writings of the essay kind’, such as those devised by Charles Rollin. In her view, these constituted ‘crippled mutilations’ which not only ‘[made] a smatterer and spoil[ed] a scholar’, but prevented the formation of critical powers and failed to ‘furnish the understanding’ or ‘accustom the mind to … reﬂection’. The brevity of the selections meant that the subjects, ‘superﬁcially treated, are distinct and disconnected ; they arise out of no concatenation of ideas, nor any dependent series of deduction’. The consequence of what she called this ‘pleasant but desultory reading’ was a mind which, because it ‘has not been trained to severe exercise, loves to repose itself in a sort of creditable indolence, instead of stretching its energies in the wholesome labour of consecutive investigation’.74

236 Gender and the Reasoning Mind

Method and ‘modern’ education If according to More these methods prevented ‘the formation of critical powers’, how did a grounding in Latin promote the ‘comparing, combining, analysing and separating ideas; that deep and patient thinking which goes to the bottom of a subject’ which More thought were the faculties of the superior (male) mind?75 Unfortunately, she did not provide an equivalent exposition of the way the structure of men’s education constructed their superior mental powers. That link was assumed. Fortunately however, some insight into the practical aspects of Latin study can be gained from educationist R. L. Edgeworth’s survey of a number of traditional schoolbooks for teaching Latin. Because he wanted to expose how ‘ill-written’ and ‘absurd’ these texts were, he described their content in some detail, providing much useful illustration. In one text, the sentences which had to be translated into Latin and back into English consisted of disconnected phrases such as ‘I have been a soldier – you have babbled – has the crow ever looked white – We were in a passion – ﬂowers have withered – peas were parched – The lions did roar a while ago.’ It’s not that Edgeworth disapproved of Latin exercises; he just objected to the arbitrariness and the disconnectedness of the sentences that formed the basis of these exercises. ‘Cannot we for pity’s sake’ he pleaded, ‘to assist the learner’s memory, and to improve his intellect, substitute some sentences a little more connected, and perhaps a little more useful?’, echoing More’s complaint about the ‘disconnected’ subjects in girls’ textbooks. In another text, whose preface claimed it would expose boys to ‘such precepts of morality and religion as ought most industriously be inculcated into the heads of all learners’, the exercises Edgeworth found were so entirely lacking in moral principle that he could hardly contain his indignation.76 It is perhaps worth noting that this was the very book Knox recommended because it ‘appears to be sufﬁciently well calculated for the purpose’ and ‘was the book generally used when I was at school’.77 Even though all Edgeworth aimed to do was to criticise current practices in the teaching of Latin in order to present his own more rational method, in effect, he exposed the gap between the claims made for a method, and the means by which objectives were to be attained. The ‘mismatch’ between the ‘ideals and practice’, Grafton and Jardine claim, is integral to the mystiﬁcation of humanist education.78 There will always be a more ‘rational’ method which purports to provide the means of attaining the ideal. At the same time, it is also because seven year old boys had to learn by rote what Edgeworth claimed were impossibly abstruse grammar rules, that the belief in the superiority of boys’ education was sustained.79 This was so entrenched and impregnable a conviction that Lady Pennington could write to her daughters that ‘a sensible woman will soon be convinced, that all the learning her utmost application can make her mistress of, will be from the difference in education, in many points, inferior to that of a school-boy’.80 As long as women had not studied the classics, they would be (and feel) at a disadvantage, and complain about, or sense, their exclusion from ‘knowledge’.

Girls’ Education in Enlightenment Britain 237

Taylor notes that Mary Hays, for example, ‘retained a sense of mental inferiority that no amount of literary success could overcome’ because of what she felt was an inadequate education: she was ‘unlearned, unacquainted with any language but her own’.81 It wasn’t just ‘any’ language that she felt she lacked, it was Latin – learned, in the eighteenth century, referred speciﬁcally to being educated in Latin. What complicates the issue is that it was not Latin itself – since girls could learn it and did – but Latin learned methodically which promised the mental training that women aspired to. Evidently, traditional methods were believed to train parts nothing else could reach. In this sense, women’s desire helped perpetuate the beliefs and practices of traditional classical methods while simultaneously challenging them by their own successful but ‘unmethodical’ study of the language. It is not because girls’ education lacked discipline, method or system that it was ‘unmethodical’, but in contrast with boys’ classical curriculum, ‘familiar territory with centuries of experience behind it’, girls’ ‘modern’ curriculum lacked the authority of time and experience.82 By virtue of being modern, it could not rely on the methods of the august masters ‘that have presided at Eton, Westminster, Winchester, the Charter House, Merchant Taylors and St Paul’s’ invoked by Knox to defend his own uncritical reliance upon that tradition.83 Its methods had to be invented and reinvented by each individual or individual school. Thus girls might be reading Histories of England, Plutarch’s Lives, the Spectator, Richardson and even learning Latin, but since only in exceptional cases did they have ‘the grounding in classics that all young gentlemen received as a matter of course’, their education was perceived and experienced to be inferior to that of males.84*

Conclusion Focussing on ‘method’ and ‘system’ has highlighted various neglected aspects of the story of girls’ education, and bringing boys’ education into the picture allowed us the possibility of thinking differently about both. ‘Method’ was (and has been) assumed to construct the superiority of male education. The impulse to inscribe ‘system’, ‘order’ and ‘method’ in girls’ modern (i.e. not classical) education was an attempt to give that education some legitimacy, and to counter contemporary charges that it must be lacking. At the same time, the need for method and system in females’ curriculum also drove the production of innovative texts and pedagogies which might then be shown to contrast favourably with the unchanging texts and methods of boys’ classical education, recently described as a ‘“system” which was impoverished [and] lauded uniformity’. 85 The contradictions between attitudes to domestic education and schooling in the contemporary literature and in the historiography of girls’ education warrant further investigation. Even if there was a realisation, in the late eighteenth century, that girls ‘deserved’, like boys, ‘a more formal and extensive schooling than could be provided in the home by parents or siblings’, we should assume neither that formal schooling was

238 Gender and the Reasoning Mind

superior to domestic education, nor that boys’ schooling is a straightforward model or standard for evaluating girls’ education. 86 Finally, females’ achievement in the classics posed a challenge to traditional methods, while their desire for these methods may, ironically, have contributed to their consolidation and perhaps even to the ‘remarkable recovery of authority of classics’ in the early decades of the nineteenth century. 87 Women’s contribution to this and other processes of educational change has been invisible. Their contribution should be recovered, and this can be done only with a radical re-thinking and re-viewing of women’s education in the Enlightenment. I am grateful to Richard Aldrich, Arianne Chernock, Andrew Jones, Diana Leonard, Carol Percy, and especially Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor for their helpful comments and suggestions on several versions of this chapter.

Notes 1. Life of Johnson (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 43–4. 2. J. Warren, The Past and Its Presenters (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1998), p. 95. 3. Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote: The Adventures of Arabella (London: Pandora, 1986), p. 7; B. M. Benedict, ‘ “Service to the public”: William Creech and sentiment for sale’ in J. Dwyer and R. B. Sher (eds), Sociability and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh: The Mercat Press, 1993), p. 137. 4. Mary (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 7. 5. For example, S. Harcstack Myers, The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Clarendon Press, 1990). S. Skedd, ‘Women teachers and the expansion of girls’ schooling in England, c1760–1820’, in H. Barker and E. Chalus (eds), Gender in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Longman, 1997). 6. D. Raftery, Women and Learning in English Writing, 1600–1900 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997), p. 67; J.L Clifford, Hester Lynch Piozzi (Mrs Thrale), 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 15. 7. See for example my discussion of French and English in Fashioning Masculinity, National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1996). 8. Vicesimus Knox, Liberal Education or, A Practical Treatise on the Methods of Acquiring Useful and Polite Learning (London, 1781), p. 231. Unless otherwise speciﬁed, all further references are from this edition. 9. D. Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 176. 10. With regards to education, the terms ‘private’ and ‘public’ were ambiguous even in the eighteenth century. For boys, ‘private’ always meant domestic education but could also refer to a variety of small seminaries, though these might be called ‘public’ to distinguish them from domestic education. ‘Public’ was always used with reference to grammar and great schools. Both ‘private’ and ‘public’ were more complex when applied to the education of girls. The public/private debate concerns only the education of middling and upper ranks of eighteenth-century society, as does this chapter. 11. See in particular A. Vickery, ‘Golden age to separate spheres? A review of the categories and chronology of English women’s history’ The Historical Journal 36 (1993); and R.B Shoemaker, Gender in English Society 1650–1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres? (London: Longman, 1998), ch. 8. 12. L. E. Klein, ‘Gender, conversation and the public sphere in early eighteenth-century England’, in J. Still and M. Worton (eds), Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 101.

Girls’ Education in Enlightenment Britain 239 13. A. Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (London: Yale University Press, 1998); See however M. Cohen, ‘Manliness, effeminacy and the French: gender and the construction of national character in eighteenth-century England’, in T. Hitchcock and M. Cohen (eds), English Masculinities 1660–1800 (London: Longman, 1999). 14. In the eighteenth century, the terms ‘great school’ and ‘public school’ were used interchangeably, and ‘the demarcation between public and grammar schools … was uncertain’, J. Lawson and H. Silver, A Social History of Education in England (London: Methuen, 1973), p. 254. The term ‘public school’ was given legal deﬁnition by the Public Schools Act of 1864. C. Shrosbree, Public Schools and Private Education (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). 15. Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education [1693] eds J. W. and J. S. Yolton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 128–32. 16. The Spectator 313; These include Samuel Richardson, Pamela (1739); Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones (1749); Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751); James Boswell, Life of Johnson (1791); William Cowper, ‘Tirocinium’ (1785); George Chapman, A Treatise of Education (1773); Sir John Fielding, The Universal Mentor (1763); Clara Reeve, Plans of Education (1792). For a more detailed discussion of the debate, see M. Cohen, ‘Gender and the private/public debate on education in the long eighteenth century’ in R. Aldrich (ed.), Public or Private Education? Lessons from History (London: Woburn Press, 2004). 17. Locke, Some Thoughts, p. 128. 18. Henry Fielding, The History of Joseph Andrews [1742] (London: Hutchinson and Co, 1904), Book III, ch. 5, p. 228. Tunbridge (rather than Tonbridge) is the spelling used by Knox. 19. Liberal Education went through ten editions in the ten years after publication. 20. Liberal Education, p. 254. 21. John Moore, A View of Society and Manners in France, Switzerland, and Germany 2 vols (London, 1779), I, p. 201. William Barrow, An Essay on Education 2 vols (London, 1802), vol. I, pp. 104–5. 22. Early Lessons, cited in Norman Vance, The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 11. 23. See M. Bryant, The London Experience of Secondary Education (London: Athlone Press, 1984); C. de Bellaigue, ‘The Development of Teaching as a Profession for Women before 1870’, The Historical Journal 44, 4 (2001) 963–88. Two texts present a positive image of boarding schools: an anonymous play, The Governess, or the Boarding School Dissected (London, 1785) and Erasmus Darwin, A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools (Derby, 1797) which he wrote for the school he set up for his two illegitimate daughters to run. 24. [Rev John Bennett], Strictures on Female Education; Chieﬂy in Relation to the Culture of the Heart (London, 1787), p. 138. 25. Mary Wray, The Ladies Library, cited in Raftery, Women and Learning, p. 54; Reeve, Plans, pp. 183–4; Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (London, 1787), p. 25; Alexander Jardine, Letters from Barbary, France, Portugal, etc., 2 vols (London, 1788), I, p. 329. 26. Reeve, Plans, p. 111. 27. Hannah More, ‘The two wealthy farmers; or, the history of Mr Bragwell’ in The Works of Hannah More, 2 vols (Philadelphia: J. J. Woodward, 1832), I, p. 131. 28. Portia, The Polite Lady or a course of female education in a series of letters from a mother to a daughter (London, 1769), pp. 60–1. In this text, the section on the daughter’s choice of friends at school takes up proportionately more letters than any other topic. 29. More, ‘The two wealthy farmers’, p. 131. 30. Portia, Polite Lady, pp. 1–2.

240 Gender and the Reasoning Mind 31. A. Jardine, Letters, I, p. 329. 32. I locate the ﬁrst occurrence of this shift in [Francis Foster], Thoughts on the Times, but chieﬂy on the proﬂigacy of our women (London, 1779). 33. Bennett, Strictures, pp. 138–41. The subject of girls’ friendships in the eighteenth century is a much troubled one but also much under-researched. The contrast in attitudes to boys’ and girls’ school friendships is explored more fully in Cohen, ‘Gender and the Public Private Debate’. 34. Rev John Bennett, Letters to a Young Lady on Useful and Interesting Subjects Calculated to Improve the Heart, to Form the Manners, and Enlighten the Understanding, 2 vols (Dublin, 1789), II, p. 29. 35. Bennett, Strictures, pp. 144, 150. 36. Knox, Liberal Education 2 vols (1789), I, 331. 37. Elizabeth Ham by Herself 1783–1820, ed. E. Gillet (London: Faber & Faber, 1945), p. 16; Jane Austen, Emma [1816] (London: Penguin, 1994) pp. 17–18. 38. The Governess, Act III, p. 57. For quacks and the eighteenth-century medical profession, see R. Porter, Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650–1900 (London: Reaktion Books, 2001). 39. J. L. Chirol, An Enquiry into the Best System of Female Education, or Boarding School or Home Education Attentively Considered (London, 1809), p. 123. 40. Skedd, ‘Women teachers’; C. Percy, “The Art of Grammar in the Age of Sensibility: The Accidence … for Young Ladies.” Insights into Late Modern English, M. Dossena and C. Jones (eds), Series: Linguistic Insights: Studies in Language and Communication (Bern: Peter Lang, 2003); de Bellaigue, ‘The development of teaching’. This point is particularly emphasised by historians of nineteenth century education: see R. O’Day, ‘Women and Education in nineteenth-century England’ in J. Bellamy, A. Laurence and G. Perry (eds), Women, Scholarship and Criticism: Gender and Knowledge c.1790–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). 41. ‘Oh what a noble man Sir Charles Grandison is I do think’ wrote thirteen year old Mary Chorley in her diary in 1779, cited in Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, p. 7. 42. Bennett, Letters, II, pp. 33, 35–6, 44. 43. Clare Brant notes that the term ‘autobiography’ is an anachronism for eighteenthcentury writing, ‘Varieties of Women’s Writing, in V. Jones (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain 1700–1800 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 292. 44. I. Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 15–16; The Early Diary of Frances Burney 1768–1778, ed. Annie Raine Ellis, 2 vols (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1913), I, p. 15; Memoirs of the Life of Mrs Elizabeth Carter, ed. Rev Montague Pennington, 2 vols [1808] (London, F C and J Rivington, 1816), I, p. 13; W. Austen-Leigh and R. Austen-Leigh, Jane Austen: A Family Record (London: The British Library, 1989), p. 54; Bridget Hill, The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 45. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. S. Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 91. It is ironic that Godwin ‘dismissed Wollstonecraft herself as “eminently deﬁcient in method and arrangement” ‘. D. Simpson, Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt against Theory (London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 106–7. 46. A. Grafton and L. Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (London: Duckworth, 1986), pp. 124, 130. 47. Grafton and Jardine, Humanism, p. 124, 149 . 48. W. R. D. Jones, David Williams: the Anvil and the Hammer (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1986), p. 55. 49. John Murdoch, The Pronunciation and Orthography of the French Language (London, 1778), p. 5. 50. They include James Elphinston, Plan of Education (1760); Thomas Sheridan Plan of Education for the Young Nobility and Gentry of Great Britain (1769); George Chapman,

Girls’ Education in Enlightenment Britain 241

51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76.

77. 78.

79.

Treatise of Education (1773); David Williams, Treatise on Education (1774) and Lectures on Education (1789); William Milns, The Well-Bred Scholar (1794); William Barrow, An Essay on Education, 2 vols (1802). Mr Lancaster’s Plan of Education (1794) is an example of the former, claims P. Bridgwater, Arthur Schopenhauer’s English Schooling (London: Routledge, 1998), while Thomas Sheridan, British Education or the Sources of the Disorder of Great Britain (London, 1756) is an example of the latter. Liberal Education, p. 3. Knox, Liberal Education, pp. 52, 251–2. C. Stray, Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities, and Society in England, 1830–1960 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 21. P. Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 88. Spadafora, Idea of Progress. Jones, David Williams, p. 61; Joseph Priestley, Miscellaneous Observations Relating to Education (London, 1778), p. 42. The Warrington Academy was the most famous Dissenters’ University. Liberal Education, pp. 3, 251. Rev. A. G. L’Estrange, The Life of Mary Russell Mitford, 3 vols (London: Richard Bentley, 1870) I, pp. 14–15. Carter, Memoirs, I, p. 13. Mrs Carter was famous in her day for her translation of Epictetus. See also H. Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning and Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Pennington, Memoirs, I, p. 13. To appreciate this comment fully, it is important to know that both Latin and Greek were taught through the medium of Latin. B. Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) pp. 28, 57. A. Jardine, Letters, I, pp. 312, 324. More, ‘Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education’ [1799] in Works, p. 367. Jardine, Letters, I, pp. 311, 320. More, ‘Strictures’, pp. 367, 368. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 91. A. Jardine, Letters, I, pp. 314, 320, 330, 335. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. 92. However see A. Chernock, “Men Respond to Mary Wollstonecraft” (unpublished paper). C. Meiners, History of the Female Sex, 4 vols (London, 1808), IV, p. 306. Mrs West, Letters to a Young Lady, 3 vols (London 1806), III, pp. 219, 224. More, ‘Strictures’, pp. 363, 367. More uses ‘foreign’ and ‘abroad’ to signify outside the home. More, ‘Strictures’, p. 372. However M. Leranbaum has argued that the ‘systematic use of extracts, abridgements, and summaries’ was Charles Rollin’s most important contribution to girls’ education. “Mistresses of Orthodoxy”: education in the lives and writings of late eighteenth-century English women writers’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 121, 4 (August 1977) 282–3. More, ‘Strictures’, p. 367. Richard Lovell and Maria Edgeworth, Practical Education, 3 vols (London, 1798), II, pp. 178–84. It is worth noting that R. L. Edgeworth originally wrote the chapter which contains his critique, ‘Grammar and Classical Literature’, in 1779, just before Knox’s Liberal Education was published. Liberal Education (1789), I, p. 69 (footnote). Grafton and Jardine, Humanism, pp. xv–xvi. For a critical evaluation of this thesis, see F. Waquet, Latin or the Empire of a Sign: From the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries (London: Verso, 2001). This is an example of the kind of rule Edgeworth was criticizing: ‘Relative sentences are independent; i.e., no word in a relative sentence is governed either of verb or adjective,

242 Gender and the Reasoning Mind

80. 81. 82.

83. 84. 85. 86.

87.

that stands in another sentence or depends upon any appurtenance of the relative; and that the English word ‘That’ is always a relative when it may be turned into which in good sense, which must be tried by reading over the English sentence warily, and judging how the sentence will bear it; but when it cannot be altered, salvo sensu, it is a conjunction.’ Practical Education, II, p. 179. Lady Pennington, A Mother’s Advice to her Absent Daughters (London, 1811), p. 29. Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft, p. 44. J. Roach, A History of Secondary Education in England, 1800–1870 (London: Longman, 1986), p. 71. This could also be said of the curriculum of various private academies, but this chapter focuses on classical ‘liberal’ education. Knox, Liberal Education (1789), I, p. 352 (footnote). Norma Clarke, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters’, paper read at the Colloquium ‘Feminism and Enlightenment’, June 2002. R. O’Day ‘Womens’ Education’, p. 96. Skedd, ‘Women Teachers’, p. 125. This comment echoes M. Bryant’s that home education was informal, ‘nearly always unsystematic and sometimes positively haphazard’, ‘Reﬂections on the nature of the education of women and girls’ in The Education of Girls and Women, Proceedings of the 1984 Annual Conference of the History of Education Society, June Purvis (ed.) (London: History of Education Society, 1985), p. 18. S. Harcstack Myers too uses the term ‘unsystematic’ to describe the bluestockings’ education, The Bluestocking Circle), pp. 155–6; See also Raftery, Women and Learning. Stray, Classics Transformed, p. 30.

4.3 Discourses of Female Education in the Writings of Eighteenth-Century French Women Jean Bloch

This essay focuses on printed contributions to the eighteenth-century French debate on women’s education. Following a brief discussion of two major male contributors to the ﬁeld, Fénelon and Poulain de la Barre, it concentrates on a dozen female writers, most of whom published in the second half of the century. These women ranged from high-ranking aristocrats such as the Marchioness de Lambert and the Countess de Miremont to bourgeois women who carved out literary or political careers for themselves, such as Mme de Puisieux, Mme Le Prince de Beaumont, and Mme Roland. The essay proceeds chronologically in order to pinpoint changes occurring over the century. The case for women’s access to knowledge and culture had many adherents by the late seventeenth century but it was to be another two hundred years before lycées (grammar schools) were opened to girls in 1880. Taking up the cause, eighteenth-century French women struggled to move out of the shadow of inﬂuential male opinion, but were overtaken in their aspirations by the dramatic intellectual, cultural and political changes of the revolutionary period. No study of French education in the eighteenth century can afford to lose sight of the strength and inﬂuence of the Catholic Church and this is particularly true of women’s education. If girls received an education in seventeenthand eighteenth-century France, it was normally from the parish petites écoles and the convent boarding schools, or in the parental home. There were, in addition, unauthorized schools (écoles buissonnières) some of which catered for girls, but these were regularly pursued by the authorities and closed down. The petites écoles operated at a local level, providing instruction in the catechism, some literacy and occasionally, numeracy. The convent schools offered, additionally, a limited curriculum focussed on religious and moral instruction as well as handicrafts, and ensured protection from the outside world for the daughters of the elites. This traditional Christian education kept its sights ﬁrmly on preparation for the afterlife, though it also provided girls with practical skills necessary for the running of religious establishments and, subsequently, for the home or, in the case of the highest social groups, decorative accomplishments. The ﬂagship institution of Saint-Cyr1 offered a reasonably extensive education to girls, while a few elite women beneﬁted from a good education at home, often administered 243

244 Gender and the Reasoning Mind

by their fathers or clerical uncles or, in some cases, by tutors.2 Barred from the secondary schools, colleges and universities which had been designed for boys, girls rarely had access to classical languages and literatures and, consequently, to the higher levels of learning to which Latin held the key. By the last three decades of the seventeenth century, however, reformist voices could be heard within the Church, suggesting that female education should be improved. At the same time the opposing force of upper-class and bourgeois opinion began to gain in strength, insisting that education should be as much for this life as the next. Despite the fact that in the course of the eighteenth century the Church hold over education began to falter and the desire for modernisation raised its head,3 the convent schools continued to dominate the education of girls. Some of these compromised with worldly values, allowing the introduction of music and dancing masters in order to meet the requirements of their fashionable and wealthy clienteles. Within the differing theoretical views that emerge in the second half of the seventeenth century, two major trends can be discerned. One, representing a reformist tradition coming from within the Church, is that of Fénelon’s Traité de l’éducation des ﬁlles (The Education of Young Gentlewomen) of 16874 and becomes the standard view. The other is the very different approach of Poulain de la Barre, a follower of Descartes, who in the mid 1670s produced three rationalist tracts arguing the case for the equality of the sexes.5 Poulain does not acquire the status of an authority on a par with Fénelon, but there are clear connections with Poulain’s line of thought in the work of several women writers on female education. Fénelon’s aim was to equip upper-class women to run their households, in some cases large estates, as well as to make them serious educators of their children. In this way he hoped to reinvigorate the provincial nobility and halt the decline of formerly prestigious families. Though his work succeeded in raising the rearing and educating of children to the status of a vocation and introduced a broader range of subjects deemed suitable for women,6 he stopped short of advocating wider knowledge for its own sake. The knowledge he sought to make accessible remained utilitarian at base, focussed around home economics and elementary law. Though, as a cleric, he kept his sights ﬁrmly on the desirability of religion, he also recommended the study of ancient and modern history on the grounds that inspiring historical examples can open the mind and inspire elevated sentiments. Fénelon’s moderate, reforming voice caught the attention of contemporaries and ensured that he was seen as an enlightened thinker to be heeded on the question of female education. The message conveyed was of the desirability of a sober lifestyle which, while remaining Christian, did not see the ﬁrst goal of education as the means to the Christian life. Neither pious nor mondain, his work could appeal to a wide range of moderate opinion, thereby guaranteeing its success throughout the eighteenth century and beyond. Poulain, on the other hand, was linked to the feminist views of seventeenthcentury salonnières, to which Fénelon was opposed.7 He was exceptional in arguing that women’s inferiority is cultural, not natural. Poulain did not suggest

Discourses of Female Education in the Writings of Eighteenth-Century France 245

that all women would beneﬁt from intellectual study, but neither did he suggest that all men would either. His thesis simply proposes the equal right of both sexes to intellectual pursuits and, potentially, equal access to the professions. Using rational arguments, Poulain opened up the ﬁeld of intellectual discovery to women and suggested a simpler and more effective method of study, based on Descartes, from which both sexes would beneﬁt. Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles, marquise de Lambert, our ﬁrst example of a woman writing on female education in the early eighteenth century, had links to both Poulain and Fénelon. The overall tenor of her writing, however, attached her most ﬁrmly to the line of thought established by Fénelon, making her acceptable to the reading publics of both France and England. Lambert came from the highest ranks of ancien régime society. Amongst many other writings, the celebrated salonnière authored two letters of advice on entry into society, one addressed to her son, the other to her daughter.8 Her ideas were consciously gendered insofar as she accepted that life would necessarily be different for her son and her daughter, but there was considerable overlap in what she valued and emphasized for both of them as human beings and as members of polite society. Above all, she believed that it was the education of the ‘heart’ that was most important. She was eager to cultivate in both her children those sentiments that would develop the character, conduct the mind, govern the will and guarantee the solidity and endurance of human virtues. The opening of Lambert’s Avis d’une mère à sa ﬁlle (1728) is very closely modelled on Fénelon’s Éducation des ﬁlles. She accepts his basic framework: that, compared to the care taken with boys’ education, girls’ is clearly neglected; that women’s education can affect a marriage both advantageously and detrimentally; and that it is women who normally have the care of their young and impressionable offspring, whom they ‘educate’ for better or for worse. Like Fénelon, Lambert argues that women are brought up ‘soft’ and lack both physical strength and moral ﬁrmness. Like him she favours the study of history for the promotion of courageous actions and sentiments and recommends the pursuit of ‘solid’ learning. Yet, despite the similarities, Lambert expresses her censure of prevailing attitudes much more forcefully than does Fénelon. Whereas he regrets the scant attention paid to the education of girls, Lambert claims that female education has always been neglected and women, who make up half the human race, treated as if they were another species: ‘comme si les femmes étaient une race à part, on les abandonne à elles-mêmes sans secours’9 [‘as if they were a separate species, women are left to educate themselves without the assistance of others’]. In the course of the work Lambert reveals her own interest in Cartesian philosophy, making the unusual statement that she would not be averse to women acquiring some modern philosophy for the clarity of method it provides.10 This brings her closer to Poulain, whose works are known to have been discussed in her salon. It has her parting company with Fénelon, who rejects philosophy for girls along with military studies, jurisprudence and theology. Though Lambert ultimately places limits on women’s intellectual curiosity – like Fénelon she is wary of subjects such as physics, maths and astronomy for

246 Gender and the Reasoning Mind

girls – and sees the public display of knowledge as undesirable in the female, we should not underestimate the contribution she makes to the strain of intellectual feminism that had developed in France in the second half of the seventeenth century. Though she doesn’t go as far as Poulain, she is, like him, touched by the inﬂuence of Descartes and has no doubt that a woman should be guided by reason. What seems to hold her back is the adverse reaction to the rational feminists of the late seventeenth century. Dubbed ‘précieuses’, the women who dominated salon society in Paris and the provinces in the second half of the seventeenth century not only seemed to rival established literary society but also to suggest everything that was modern, including the social and cultural advancement of women. Partly because of this and also as a result of the undoubted excesses of some of their members, the salons and their ideas on women were controversial.11 Opening her own salon only at the turn of the century and, by then, standing as a somewhat isolated ﬁgure, Lambert seems to have opted for respectability. Her considerable body of work leaves the impression of a person of taste and culture, with a desire to encourage upper-class women to achieve both discerning minds and civilised behaviour. What she has by way of boldness and originality is masked by the desire for social acceptability. Apart from Mme de Lambert, it is difﬁcult to ﬁnd a French woman publishing on the subject of education in the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth century. Although in the preface to her translation of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, Émilie du Châtelet railed against what she saw as an invisible barrier preventing women from reaching the creative heights achieved by men and laid the blame squarely on the effects of a bad education, her comments languished for two hundred years in the library of her former lover, Voltaire, until they were ﬁnally published by Ira O. Wade in 1947.12 Rousseau’s erstwhile employer, Mme Dupin, similarly commented on female education but her ideas remained in manuscript form and are only now in the process of publication. Though it is clear that women expressed their comments on education in correspondence, notes and memoirs, throughout the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth century the public pedagogical discourse was dominated by men. Rollin, who was accepted from the 1730s as the foremost modern authority on methods of study and the curriculum,13 found himself encouraged by enthusiastic women readers to apply his recommendations to female education,14 a clear indication that women felt a need for the subject to be discussed but were typically willing to leave the task to male authorities. Rollin accordingly brought out a supplement on the education of women in 1734, in which he humbly deferred to the authority of Fénelon. At the same time and without direct acknowledgement he reiterated Poulain’s guiding assumption that mind has no sex. Like Fénelon and Lambert he promoted the desirability of history (religious, ancient and modern) as a subject eminently suitable for girls. Recommending the study of ancient, as well as modern, history for girls had become possible as a result of the increasing number of works on ancient history being produced in the vernacular. Also in the 1730s we ﬁnd male innovators targeting the potential market offered by women in the promotion of new aids to literacy and the reform of spelling. Amongst a growing number of promoters of

Discourses of Female Education in the Writings of Eighteenth-Century France 247

new methods, Jacquier and Dumas appealed directly to a female clientele.15 This stress on methods of study is symptomatic of the 1730s when pedagogical works focus very clearly on the desirability of intellectual study and the spread of literacy. The new emphasis seems to discourage some of the traditional elements of educational treatises, namely the heavy stress on religion and the inclusion of discussion of the care of the body. Whereas earlier Christian educators had included elements of hygiene and diet in their rules and pedagogical writings, one rarely ﬁnds such details in the works of the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth century. Conduct books continue to concern themselves with the body, but treatises are now primarily concerned with the training of the intellect and the heart.16 It is only towards the second half of the eighteenth century that we ﬁnd a growing number of women writing pedagogical works, many of which deal speciﬁcally with female education. Some of these writers pick up the stress on intellect discernible in pedagogy from the 1730s and promulgate a widening of the intellectual terrain as well as better methods of study for women. An early example is Mme Le Prince de Beaumont, a practising upper-class governess who, from the 1750s to the early ‘70s, produced a proliferation of works designed for the education of girls, young women and mothers charged with the education of young sons.17 Best known for her novels and several volumes of educational dialogues between a governess and her pupils, which she titled Magasins,18 her works sold successfully throughout Europe, bringing her both praise and denigration. Although she never faltered in her belief in women’s rationality and her conﬁdence in female capabilities, the main message of her works is the need to uphold propriety, to exalt virtue and, increasingly, to promulgate Christian morality. This apparently conformist writer started her literary career by publishing a provocative pamphlet in reply to the abbé Coyer’s Année merveilleuse of 1748. This playfully predicted a universal sex change for 1 August 1748 and allowed Coyer to comment humorously on contemporary manners and thus lay out stereotypical arguments about the supposed differences between the sexes. Le Prince de Beaumont saw Coyer’s comments as intended to demonstrate the inferiority of woman and was at pains both to refute his arguments and establish the clear superiority of the female body, heart and mind. Although she does not refer directly to Poulain, her participation in a bout of traditional literary jousting on the relative inferiority or superiority of the sexes linked her to his line of argument. In his De l’excellence des hommes of 1675, Poulain had played devil’s advocate, trotting out the arguments that would normally be used to oppose the thesis of his earlier De l’égalité des deux sexes. Texts such as these belong to a speciﬁc genre that wends its way from the Renaissance to the late eighteenth century. Le Prince de Beaumont was not necessarily familiar with Poulain’s work, but her reply to Coyer demonstrates an overtly feminist stance, traces of which can be seen throughout her work, despite the predominantly conventional tone and aspirations of her pedagogical writings. It was the Comtesse de Miremont who, in 1779, produced not only a onevolume Traité de l’éducation des femmes but also a six-volume Cours complet

248 Gender and the Reasoning Mind

d’instruction. Although the latter mainly amounts to a précis of each subject and draws heavily on extracts from already-established male experts, her contribution suggests that here is someone who takes intellectual study for women seriously. The same can be said of Mlle Le Masson le Golft who, in her Lettres relatives à l’éducation (1788) aimed ﬁrmly at widening women’s sphere of knowledge and equipping upper-class women with an up-to-date, practical knowledge of science. She also criticised women for not taking advantage of already available works on science and educating themselves. Despite this indication of a line of thinking that backs women’s potential intellectual abilities, this is not the dominant message of the second half of the eighteenth century. By the time we ﬁnd a signiﬁcant number of women publishing on education, the intellectual scene has changed. Rationalism has given way to a greater emphasis on sensibility, medical theory is focussing attention on the importance of physiology in understanding gender difference,19 and the closing down of the Jesuit colleges is about to bring a renewed emphasis on the social and political dimensions of education in an attempt to ﬁll the gap created by their departure.20 We also have, of course, the publication of Rousseau’s Émile. Despite the fact that Émile was initially banned for its hostility to revealed religion and its unorthodox profession of faith, Rousseau soon became the new, but controversial, authority on educational theory, particularly in the ﬁeld of childcare and early education. He succeeded in bringing the empirical teaching methods of Montaigne and Locke ﬁrmly to the fore. Although he did not entirely displace Fénelon with upper-class readers, his constraining proposals for women’s education, which contrast with his innovative suggestions for boys, gained a great deal of currency in the years leading up to the Revolution. Rousseau inﬂuenced a number of women writing on female education, though it is important to note that, in several cases, his inﬂuence was not directly related to his ideas on female education but to the wider areas of feeling and virtue.21 Diderot, with whom Rousseau had quarrelled in the mid 1750s, shared some of Rousseau’s theoretical ideas, but at the same time held much more practical pedagogical notions resulting from his involvement in the education of his only child, Angélique. Despite strong opinions on the female condition and women’s unenviable lot, Diderot in fact made little impact on the discourse on female education.22 He may well, however, have inﬂuenced the ideas of Madeleine de Puisieux, to whom we will turn before examining women writers’ reactions to Émile and to Rousseau’s ideas on the proper education of women. Madeleine Darsant, who for a few brief years was Diderot’s mistress,23 was born into the bourgeoisie and married the lawyer Philippe Florent de Puisieux. It was long thought that the latter was the author of the feminist text, La Femme n’est pas inférieure à l’homme [Woman is not inferior to Man] (1750) (reproduced in 1751 as Le Triomphe des dames [The Ladies’ Victory]), which drew on Poulain de la Barre’s arguments in favour of the equality of the sexes. Modern scholarship, however, initially suggested that both he and Madeleine might be the joint authors of this text and, more recently, that it was written by Madeleine alone.

Discourses of Female Education in the Writings of Eighteenth-Century France 249

She hardly wrote about education in the sense of intellectual instruction, but in 1749, at the end of her liaison with Diderot, she produced a slim volume titled Conseils à une amie [Advice to a Womanfriend], which took a form reminiscent of Lambert’s advice to her daughter. She differed from Lambert, however, insofar as she was more concerned with how to operate satisfactorily in society than with establishing the rules of conduct that should be observed by honourable, upperclass men and women. She was primarily an observer of human types and social behaviour. Only brieﬂy did she comment positively on intellectual achievements for a woman and that was in a work of ﬁction published in 1753 (L’Éducation du Marquis de *** ou Mémoires de la Comtesse de Zurlac). The Conseils of 174924 are presented as the advice offered by a woman of sharp mind and extensive knowledge to an intelligent girl before she leaves her convent (with its lives of saints, bible stories, moral essays and sermons) for the very different reading and values of the world outside. The tone of the Conseils is set by recommending caution with worldly reading such as Crébillon, Prévost or Marivaux before marriage, while suggesting that afterwards, if a woman’s mind is deranged by reading ﬁction, then this will be her husband’s problem.25 This somewhat cavalier attitude recurs throughout the work, though a basic moderation, a cultivated taste and the beneﬁts of a virtuous life come through as the dominant message. A number of comments present ‘common female behaviour’ and convey the impression that the author is often critical of her own sex: women talk too much and about things they do not understand;26 if you display your talents and wit, less talented women will hide their own limitations by attacking your reputation;27 even female relatives can be dangerous for attractive women for all women compete for men’s attention and slander is often an easy weapon.28 Despite this emphasis on the lack of female solidarity, the most striking parts of the work highlight the injustices and advantages of men and the dilemmas experienced by women, especially in the area of sexual liaisons. Women are enslaved by the requirements of propriety, even if it is only the appearance and not the practice of propriety that is involved. Men entice women in unwise directions, then blame them for having followed their lead. This realistic appraisal of the conditions of life for middle- and upper-class women leads to an emphasis on the need for self-reliance. Abandoned by society once her beauty fades, a woman needs to be able to rely on her own resources.29 Yet study does not come high on the list for a young girl preparing for later life. Intellectual study is suitable neither for the young nor for women. If a woman acquires knowledge, then it should be kept modestly to herself and, especially, not revealed to other women, who will inevitably dislike her superiority. Puisieux lends her support to the common assumption that femmes savantes are undesirable in society and accepts that it is ridiculous for women to talk about subjects not designed for them, principally politics and religion.30 The result is that, like Lambert, her strong statements on women’s social lot lead to a cautious stance with regard to women’s conduct. It is, however, difﬁcult to ascertain in this particular case how seriously the dominant discourse should be taken or if, in fact, the reader should extend the tone of cynicism to the whole text.

250 Gender and the Reasoning Mind

The Conseils show similarities with sections of Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau, composed around 1760–1,31 which deal with the education of a daughter. In the Diderot text Lui (the title character) is used cynically to put forward the usual attitudes of society: surely you have tutors for your daughter? (that is, for music, and dancing masters); what is the point of developing her powers of reasoning? All a girl needs is to be pretty, entertaining and coquettish; wanting to train her intellect is impossibly idealistic. It is not possible to ascertain the line of inﬂuence here. Did Madeleine acquire her cynical approach from Diderot or did he take ideas from her? It is clear that she valued her own independence: she asserts in the preface to the Conseils that she had refused help with her text from a M[onsieur] D*** (presumably Diderot). Despite the fact that she may be the author of the contemporaneous La Femme n’est pas inférieure à l’homme, in the Conseils Madeleine de Puisieux does not make a clear proto-feminist stand. Instead, her position is an individual one. Her cynical view of women’s behaviour towards each other prevents her from looking toward female solidarity. She emerges as a strongly independent, but isolated woman. This, as well as her apparent lack of emphasis on women’s access to intellectual pursuits, limits the power of her otherwise subversive commentary. It is, however, neither the voice in favour of a widening of educational opportunities for women, nor the cynical stance of a Madeleine de Puisieux that dominates the discourse on female education in the second half of the eighteenth century. It is, rather, the presence and inﬂuence of Rousseau. The reputation of Émile quickly merged with widespread enthusiasm for Rousseau’s famous novel, La nouvelle Héloïse, published a year earlier in 1761. Together, these works epitomised a new emphasis on feeling and a shift away from reason towards the valorisation of sensibility and virtue. In the pedagogical ﬁeld Rousseau’s name became associated with the importance of childcare and the kindly handling of young children. Women were amongst his greatest admirers. Some felt inspired to change their lifestyles, abandoning the artiﬁciality of their upper-class social lives, or breast-feeding their babies instead of hiring the usual wet-nurse.32 Book V of Émile, however, contained a lengthy theoretical section on the nature of woman and her suitable education, culminating in an allegedly alluring portrait of the desirable young woman (Sophie) supposedly produced by following Rousseau’s principles. Modern readers usually see this section as misogynist, since it is based on the idea that male and female are naturally different and complement each other in such a way that it would be absurd to give a male-style education to the female. Rousseau declares that woman must be educated to suit her ultimate functions (presumed to be those of wife and mother) though in the early stages, when no sexual differentiation can be discerned, girls may receive the same education as boys. La nouvelle Héloïse, on the other hand, presents a strong heroine (Julie) who, although she knows her place and does not presume to go beyond it, is shown to be disciplined and virtuous, in control of her family and a large estate and, as a result of her sensibility, loved by all – family, friends and servants alike. For many contemporary readers the differ-

Discourses of Female Education in the Writings of Eighteenth-Century France 251

ing portraits of Sophie and Julie served to mask the full implications of Rousseau’s theory of woman.33 In relation to Rousseau’s theory, and to the education proposed for Sophie, the reactions of women writing on female education were usually more discerning than those typical of the general contemporary reading public. However, one occasionally ﬁnds a woman writer who extended her general enthusiasm for Rousseau to an espousal of the idea that girls should be prepared by their education solely for a domestic life. One such is Mme de Montbart. Her Sophie, ou l’éducation, published in Berlin in 1777, acknowledges Rousseau’s inspiration and his contribution to the ﬁeld of pedagogical theory. She accepts his claim that women would be worse off if given the same education as men, as well as his basic arguments concerning the physical and psychological differences between the sexes, defending him against all charges of misogyny. Her own work is simply meant to ﬁll the gaps left by what she considers to be his insufﬁcient detail on the education of girls and represents a resounding female endorsement of Rousseau’s plans for Sophie. A more usual reaction was to attempt to combine different strands of thought, going beyond Rousseau’s principles and his limited suggestions for female education, while retaining some of his ideas or expressing enthusiasm for his inspirational works. An early illustration of this can be seen in Mlle d’Espinassy’s Essai sur l’éducation des demoiselles of 1764 [Essay on the Education of Young Ladies]. She seizes on Rousseau’s general principle, widely endorsed in the Enlightenment period, that women ‘govern’ men by exerting a strong moral inﬂuence over them. She cleverly contrasts this with his apparently contradictory underestimation of woman’s capabilities and his belief that women should be educated in relation to men, always deferring to their husbands’ judgement. She transforms his idea into the claim that only a properly educated woman can be an acceptable guide for her husband. At the same time she indicates that Rousseau’s detailed statements for Sophie’s education are not dissimilar to her own. She therefore criticizes his general framework while supporting at least some of his speciﬁc suggestions. Though d’Espinassy seeks to widen women’s access to knowledge, she aims only at the level of a general veneer. The end-point of her educational programme is a reasonably informed, numerate and literate woman, who will devote herself to the task of supervising and educating her children (particularly her daughters) and will prove herself to be morally and intellectually capable of guiding her husband. Though she is scornful of Sophie’s paucity of ideas and seeks to equip women with a basic knowledge of all subjects, she sees real female superiority in the enlightened moral and religious example a woman can offer to her husband and children. At the end of her essay d’Espinassy returns to Rousseau’s insistence on women’s power over men, insisting that it is only after an improved intellectual education that a woman will rightly be in a position to ‘govern’ her husband. Louise Tardieu d’Esclavelles de la Live d’Épinay had known Rousseau personally but had broken with him deﬁnitively in the 1750s. Nevertheless, her lengthy Conversations d’Émilie (Leipzig 1774, deﬁnitive version Paris 1782)34

252 Gender and the Reasoning Mind

both countered his ideas and shared basic pedagogical assumptions with him. Espousing the new pedagogical methods based on the psychological theories of Locke and Condillac, d’Épinay demonstrated that learning by means of concrete examples drawn from everyday experience could be just as suitable for young girls as for Rousseau’s Émile. Where she parted company with Rousseau was in her assumption that a mother can be an enlightened and knowledgeable tutor to her daughter, and in her wish for girls to be introduced to social values and morality from an early age. Émile is only gradually introduced to moral and social ideas at the onset of puberty, which Rousseau assumes coincides with both the maturation of reason and the need for others. On the other hand, Rousseau believed in the early socialisation of the female, but d’Épinay’s educational method in fact suggests a close link to the education of Émile, not any consideration of Rousseau’s aspirations for Sophie. Similarly, in 1782, Mme de Genlis’s pedagogical novel, Adèle et Théodore, adopted Rousseau’s methods for both the male and female pupil, eschewing the differentiations of book V of Émile. The novel lure of sensibility, coupled with admiration for Rousseau, shows up in the works of both Manon Phlipon and Mme de Staël. Manon Phlipon is better known as Mme Roland, a woman of bourgeois origin who married JeanMarie Roland de la Platière in 1780, became actively involved in Girondin politics, and was guillotined during the Revolution. At the age of twenty-three, she responded to the Besançon Academy’s essay competition of 1777 on the question: Comment l’éducation des femmes pourroit contribuer à rendre les hommes meilleurs [In what way might the education of women contribute to the moral improvement of men?]. Her whole essay35 is centred on the importance of feeling. The epigraph, which heads it, states ‘Le sentiment est mon guide; puisset-il me tenir lieu d’esprit et de talent’ [‘Feeling is my guide; may it take the place of the intellect and talent I lack’]. Encouraged by the wording of the essay title, Phlipon takes the Rousseauist path of assuming that it is woman’s role to assist the improvement of the male and that nature has intended her for this purpose; education’s role is to work in the same direction as nature. Accepting that women are meant to be decorative more than decisive and active, she also believes that they are incapable of abstract thought and high-level intellectual activity. This reasoning results in the stereotypical response that men are made to govern empires while women govern men’s hearts. Phlipon is not opposed to women having access to knowledge, but she subordinates knowledge to feeling, convinced that the latter is the means to social virtues. The daughter of a high-level pre-Revolutionary ﬁnance minister, Anne-LouiseGermaine Necker, later Mme de Staël, also showed herself to be an ardent admirer of Rousseau. Her short 1788 Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractère de J.-J. Rousseau [Letters on the Works and Character of J.-J. Rousseau] expresses a fervent enthusiasm for both Rousseau and his achievements, which she places second only to the achievements of her own father, Jacques Necker. She sees Émile as the crowning glory of Rousseau’s works. However, both Phlipon and Staël part company with Rousseau on the subject of Sophie’s education. Phlipon

Discourses of Female Education in the Writings of Eighteenth-Century France 253

makes an explicit reference to Rousseau’s apparent liking of ignorance in women. For her, paucity of ideas presents an obstacle to the growth of feeling. If men are to be inﬂuenced for the good and children raised satisfactorily, women need both to think and to act well. Staël also turns her back on Rousseau’s speciﬁc recommendations for the education of girls. She does not agree that it is ‘in accordance with nature’ that girls should be educated differently from boys and believes that Rousseau’s suggestions for the education of girls will merely reinforce their weakness. In fact, she claims that Rousseau has condemned his own proposals by presenting the female pupil, Sophie, as unfaithful to Émile in the novelesque sequence to his work on education, Émile et Sophie. Staël considers that women will have to continue to submit to men, but that they should do so from a position of strength, not as the inevitable result of weakness. She suggests greater female autonomy in the form of self-controlled choices and decisions. However, she limits this autonomy to the private sphere, presenting happiness and independent choice as matters of individual, not social, consequence. She herself enjoyed an exceptional education, and seems to look no further than this for other women. As for Phlipon, she stands out among her contemporaries in one speciﬁc area. She espouses a consciously political stance insofar as she realizes that a new political programme will be necessary for both men and women if they are to escape the frivolity and artiﬁce of the modern world. Phlipon calls for just laws, equitable punishments and rewards and an equal distribution of wealth. It is only in these conditions that society will be able to rediscover human goodness and virtue. It is rare in this period to ﬁnd a writer who expresses the need for parallel political and educational change. Rousseau and Helvétius do so, but the majority of thinkers simply stress the moral and social change that will emerge from educational reform. Yet Phlipon’s questioning of society and the way in which it is governed does not go far. She highlights, for instance, the valuable example of ancient republics (an idea dear to Rousseau’s heart) which dictated women should remain at home, where they could demonstrate their patriotism by working towards the happiness and virtue of spouses and children. Such reference to ancient republics was common in the pre-Revolutionary years since it could be used to counter the frivolity and artiﬁce discerned in modern monarchies. As far as women are concerned, however, the example of the republic allows a fusion with Phlipon’s enthusiasm for the beneﬁcial effects of feeling. Her strong political stance is lost amongst the benign inﬂuence of hearth and home. In the run-up to the French Revolution a considerable number of pamphlets written by women or on behalf of women begin to appear and, amongst these, the demand for a better education is striking. Many of these are primarily concerned with education as a means to economic self-sufﬁciency and the need to provide for children. 36 Writings by women in the early Revolution suggest that a few have made steps in applying the newly formulated demand for individual rights to women and their education. 37 By 1793, however, such hopes turn out to be illusory. The Republic may present women as goddesses

254 Gender and the Reasoning Mind

and patriots participating in the public sphere, but at the same time it was closing down the women’s clubs, legislating against the public assembly of women and presenting them as Furies. 38 The ideal promoted was that of the nurturing mother based in the family home, transmitting her own civilizing virtues to the next male generation.39 Yet, it is not simply the advent of revolution and its aftermath that account for the lack of success of women’s aspirations for access to knowledge. Throughout the eighteenth century women were hedged about by considerations that limited their desire for a better education. Lambert seemed afraid to be labelled a femme savante and classed with the earlier ‘précieuses’; Châtelet failed to publish her stronglyworded piece; d’Espinassy aimed simply at a veneer of all-round knowledge; Phlipon subordinated knowledge to feeling and virtue. One of the problems for many of these women writers was that it was male writers who became the established authorities. Many women simply worked in their shadow, either inspired by the publications of male mentors or inﬂuenced by men they knew. Lambert drew on Fénelon, whom she knew personally; Puisieux may have been inﬂuenced by her celebrated lover, Diderot; d’Épinay had known both Diderot and Rousseau and was conversant with their ideas; Montbart, Phlipon and Staël all clearly admired Rousseau’s work and, along with others at the time, drew on his ideas. What was lacking in eighteenth-century France was female group solidarity and any rising curve of demands for the right to intellectual study. Whereas the salonnières of the late seventeenth century had voiced their claims and established a clearly female presence in the cultural world, eighteenth-century women were more circumspect. True, the salons continued until the Revolution and women played a signiﬁcant part in the Republic of Letters,40 but women writing on education appear as isolated individuals, not members of a concerted campaign. The number of women publishing on education grew signiﬁcantly, however, from the mid-century when they began to make a signiﬁcant impact. Their numbers were very small, though, compared with the high number of publications by male pedagogical reformers in the same period. If we take both male and female writers on female education together in this period, it seems that something like a campaign in favour of a better deal for women did emerge. Yet, although the claim to intellectual study ran throughout the period, it did not produce a strong, linear discourse. Masculine dominance of the intellectual sphere does not, however, supply the total explanation. Cultural, intellectual and political changes play stronger roles. In the 1730s when the focus moved towards teaching methods and pedagogical aids, most writing on female education was being produced by men, who typically did not see women as a main priority and tended to rely on Fénelon’s earlier ideas. However, at this date, the elementary stages of literacy were open to women, and women were even targeted as potential recipients of new teaching aids. The study of history too was available in the vernacular and seen as a subject eminently suitable for female education. Yet, women pedagogical writers were virtually non-existent. Women missed an opportune moment for backing new intellectual possibilities. Certainly, at mid-century Le Prince de Beaumont gained a signiﬁcant reputation for herself, but her aims remained modest and her

Discourses of Female Education in the Writings of Eighteenth-Century France 255

end target was very acceptably ‘feminine’. It is only from the 1760s on that a noticeable number of women began publishing their ideas on female education. Some of them did this, as we saw, out of admiration for Rousseau, others to mark their distance from him, and a number renewed earlier demands for access to knowledge. Ironically, however, just as some women began to move towards the idea of a more modern and intellectual curriculum for girls, the focus shifted to a growing emphasis on childcare, on recent medical theory and on the patriotic orientation of education.41 At the same time as women were promulgating a widening of the intellectual terrain and even, occasionally, female access to the scientiﬁc world, the alliance between the biological and the political was born. Childcare, including maternal breast-feeding, and family (especially an idealization of the mother’s role as guarantor of civic virtues) were the ideas and values that would triumph. Even as women writers focussed on access to knowledge, a new wave of cultural and, then, political change unfurled. Women’s chosen target was too limited and came too late. A generation of male pedagogues in the 1730s had offered them a partial widening of the traditionally masculine terrain, but a later generation, imbued with new ideas and supported by politicians, such as Mirabeau and Talleyrand, would look elsewhere. Not only did individual women seem to have difﬁculty in detaching themselves from male mentor ﬁgures, but also they were overwhelmed in the late eighteenth century by supposed ‘modern’ attitudes, which served to reinforce traditional limits. Thus, from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, we ﬁnd a long campaign for the widening of women’s access to knowledge, marked by a lack of dynamic continuity and a history of missed opportunities. The decision of eighteenth-century French women to go public on the subject of female education occurred at an unpropitious moment. In some cases their approach is rather cautious but, though they ultimately fail to ‘ﬁnd a voice’, many of their writings reveal a growing tactical awareness and subversive attitudes which should not be ignored.

Notes 1. Saint-Cyr was founded by Louis XIV in honour of Mme de Maintenon in 1686. Designed for the education of 250 girls from impoverished noble families, it offered literacy, numeracy, the study of French (including grammar), mythology, history, geography, drawing and dancing, as well as the usual catechism, scriptures, moral instruction and handicrafts. It was for the pupils of Saint-Cyr that Racine wrote two of his tragedies (Esther and Athalie). It was often suggested in the course of the eighteenth century that the state should establish other girls’ schools following the Saint-Cyr model. 2. For a particularly impressive example of private tutoring in the second half of the eighteenth century, see Martine Sonnet, ‘Le savoir d’une demoiselle de qualité, Geneviève Randon de Malboissière (1746–1766)’, L’Educazione dell’uomo e della donna nella cultura illuministica, Memorie dell’academia delle scienza di Torino, V, 24, 3 (Turin, 2000), pp. 169–85. 3. For changes in educational thinking and practice in eighteenth-century France, see Marcel Grandière, L’Idéal pédagogique en France au dix-huitième siècle (Oxford: Voltaire

256 Gender and the Reasoning Mind

4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

Foundation, 361, 1998) and R. R. Palmer, The Improvement of Humanity. Education and the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). For information on Paris convent-school education, see Martine Sonnet, L’éducation des ﬁlles au temps des Lumières (Paris: Cerf, 1987). Modern edition Paris: Klincksieck, 1994. See Siep Stuurman, ‘The Deconstruction of Gender: Seventeenth Century Feminism and Modern Equality’ in this volume. Fénelon allowed all women the power of reason and was not opposed to some being allowed to study Latin. He reserved this, however, for only the most intellectual and reliable girls, who would not abuse their knowledge. For information on the both the salonnières and Fénelon’s stance, see Carolyn Lougee, Le Paradis des Femmes. Women, Salons, and Social Stratiﬁcation in Seventeenth-Century France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). Madame de Lambert, Œuvres, ed. Robert Granderoute (Paris:Champion, 1990); Avis d’une mère à son ﬁls, pp. 43–93; Avis d’une mère à sa ﬁlle, pp. 95–150. Translations: The Works of the Marchioness de Lambert. Containing thoughts on various entertaining and useful subjects, reﬂections on education, on the writings of Homer and on various public events of the time (London: W. Owen, 1749). Further editions: 1756, 1769, J. Potts 1770, W. Owen, 1781; Advice of a Mother to her Daughter in The Young Lady’s Pocket Library, or Parental Monitor, 1790. Republished, with a new introduction by Vivien Jones (Thoemmes Press, 1995). Fénelon, p. [37]; Lambert, Avis … ﬁlles, p. 95. Lambert, ibid., p. 111. Lambert also supports the idea that women should study Latin, ﬁrstly, because it is the language of the Church, secondly, and more signiﬁcantly, on the grounds that it provides access to all branches of knowledge. For female proponents of Cartesianism and the fortunes of rational discourse, see Erica Harth, Cartesian Women. Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Régime (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992). For Mme de Lambert’s apparent reluctance to be seen as a ‘femme savante’ and associated with the so-called précieuses, see Roger Marchal, Mme de Lambert et son milieu (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 289, 1991). For detailed information on women’s claims to better education, see Linda Timmermans, L’Accès des femmes à la culture (1578–1715). Un débat d’idées de SaintFrançois de Sales à la Marquise de Lambert (Paris: Champion, 1993). On Mme du Châtelet and other eighteenth-century French women involved in science, see Londa Schiebinger, The Mind has no Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1989). Charles Rollin, De la manière d’enseigner et d’étudier les belles lettres (1726–32) [A Method for Teaching and Studying Literature], commonly referred to as the Traité des études. This was, of course, directed at male education. Rollin mentions the request in the preface to the 1740 edition of his Traité. Maurice Jacquier, Méthode aisée pour apprendre l’orthographe par principes, A ceux ou celles qui n’ont pas étudié le Latin; et utile aux personnes qui ont la connoissance des Belles-Lettres [A Simple Systematic Spelling Method, For those, both male and female, who have no Latin, and Useful to those with prior Knowledge of Literature] (Paris, 1726). Louis Dumas, La Bibliothèque des enfans, ou Les premiers élémens des Letres, contenant Le Système du Bureau Typographique [The Children’s Library, or The Basics of Literacy, containing the Typographical Desk] (1732). Jacquier’s title addresses both male and female students (‘ceux ou celles’) while Dumas stresses that his Bureau Typographique is entirely suitable for girls (p. 28). For evidence of this change, see Grandière, L’Idéal pédagogique … On Le Prince de Beaumont, also see Clarissa Campbell Orr, ‘Aristocratic Feminism, the Learned Governess and the Republic of Letters’ in this volume. These were variously translated into English as The Young Misses Magazine, The Misses Magazine, etc. Le Prince de Beaumont spent over fourteen years as a

Discourses of Female Education in the Writings of Eighteenth-Century France 257

19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

governess in England and it is thought that her Magasins may have been inspired by Sarah Fielding’s The Governess or, Little female academy of 1749. Barbara Kaltz has recently published a sample of Le Prince de Beaumont’s writings in Jeanne Marie Le Prince de Beaumont, Contes et autres écrits (Oxford: Vif [Voltaire Foundation] 2000). For a concise account of this, see Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 80–95. See R. R. Palmer, The Improvement of Humanity. In addition to the publications by Py and Trouille listed below, see Jean H. Bloch, ‘Women and the Reform of the Nation’, Women and Society in Eighteenth-Century France, ed. Eva Jacobs et al. (London: Athlone Press, 1979), pp. 3–18. For Diderot’s ideas on the education of girls, see Eva Jacobs, ‘Diderot and the Education of Girls’, Women and Society in Eighteenth-Century France, pp. 83–95. For information on her relationship with Diderot, see Alice Laborde, Diderot et madame de Puisieux (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984). There is a modernised version of the 1750 edition (itself identical to the ﬁrst edition of 1749) in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 329, 1995), pp. 419–70. Conseils, p. 426. Ibid., pp. 428–9. Ibid., p. 428. Ibid., p. 434. Ibid., p. 430. Ibid., p. 431. The ﬁrst publication of this text was in a German translation of 1804. The original manuscript was only rediscovered towards the end of the nineteenth century. For information on reactions to Émile, see Gilbert Py, Rousseau et les éducateurs. Étude sur la fortune des idées pédagogiques de Jean-Jacques Rousseau en France et en Europe au XVIIIe siècle (Oxford, Voltaire Foundation, 356, 1997). For an in-depth analysis of the responses of seven women authors to Rousseau, see Mary Seidman Trouille, Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment: Women Writers Read Rousseau (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997). See P. D. Jimack, ‘The Paradox of Sophie and Julie: Contemporary Responses to Rousseau’s Ideal Wife and Ideal Mother’ in Woman and Society in Eighteenth-Century France, pp. 152–65. Madame d’Épinay, Les Conversations d’Émilie, ed. Rosena Davison (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 342, 1996). Translation: The Conversations of Emily (London, 1787). In Roland de la Platière, Marie Jeanne (Manon Phlipon) Mémoires, ed. M. P. Faugère (Paris, 1864), II, pp. 333–57. A convenient sample of women’s pamphlets can be found in Paule-Marie Duhet, Cahiers de doléances des femmes en 1789 et autres textes (Paris, 1981). For example, the Pétition des femmes du Tiers-Etat au Roi [A Petition to the King by Women of the Third Estate (1 January 1789)]; Mme L***, Première lettre d’une femme sur l’éducation de son sexe [A ﬁrst Letter from a Woman on the Education of her Sex] sent 24 April 1791 to the Journal des Dames; Olympe de Gouges, Les Droits de la Femme [The Rights of Woman] (September 1791). For representations of women in this period, see Madelyn Gutwirth, The Twilight of the Goddesses. Women and Representation in the French Revolutionary Era (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992). For a general account of women under the Revolution, see A. Rosa, Citoyennes: Les Femmes et la Révolution Française (Paris, 1988); Catherine Marand-Fouquet, La Femme au temps de la Révolution (Paris: Stock/Laurence Pernoud, 1989). Olwen H. Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution (Toronto, 1992) provides an extensive bibliography on women and the French Revolution.

258 Gender and the Reasoning Mind 39. For a fuller account of revolutionary ideology and the status of women, see Suzanne Desan, ‘The Politics of Intimacy: Marriage and Citizenship in the French Revolution’ in this volume. 40. See Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters. A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994). 41. Opposition to the Jesuits signals an anti-ultramontane stance but the patriotic ﬂavour attached to many of the proposals for their replacement is more positive than this.

SECTION 5 WOMEN INTELLECTUALS IN THE ENLIGHTENED REPUBLIC OF LETTERS Introduction Carla Hesse

In the eighteenth century women throughout Europe, in increasingly unprecedented numbers, threw themselves into the project of creating an expansive world of learning and into the public exchange of ideas. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the French writer and bibliophile Fortunée Briquet could write with scholarly conﬁdence that ‘No other century has begun with such a great number of women of letters’.1 Indeed, in her Dictionnaire historique, littéraire et bibliographique des françaises, which compiled a list of some 580 francophone women writers from the beginnings of the French monarchy, she documented nothing short of an explosion of women into print in the last decades of the eighteenth century. We now know that the number of women writers in France trebled to over 300 in print in the revolutionary decade alone.2 This feminine literary revolution was not limited to France. The number of women publishing in the German-speaking states quadrupled over the course of the eighteenth century, provoking Friedrich Schiller to write to Goethe in 1797 that he was ‘truly astounded how our women today are capable, through mere dilettantism, of creating themselves as artful writers’.3 Similar trends can be documented from England to Sweden, and as two of the contributions to this section show, in corners as far ﬂung as Bologna and Edinburgh.4 The Enlightened ‘Republic of Letters’, in sum, was as much an affair of women as it was of men. The timing and pace of this awakening varied with place and setting. It was earlier and more gradual in Italy, England and France (although here the Revolution of 1789 exploded earlier constraints), later and more rapid in Scotland, Sweden and Germany. The institutional and social settings which offered opportunities for learning and intellectual exchange among women and between women and men were varied as well. Some institutions that promoted feminine intellectual development – Masonic lodges, for example – were truly cosmopolitan in nature and could be found throughout Europe.5 Other settings of mixed-sex intellectual sociability diverged along national, cultural or religious lines. In France, salons were spaces of hetero-social exchange from their inception in the early seventeenth century, whereas in England drawing room conversation was only desegregated in the latter half of the eighteenth century. In France and Italy academies and learned societies offered at least honouriﬁc memberships 259

260 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

to women and permitted their attendance from the early years of the eighteenth century, while in the Protestant countries men were more hesitant to admit the fairer sex into these bastions of serious scholarly and literary exchange. Of course women were excluded everywhere from some of the most critical settings for the acquisition of advanced education and participation in the exchange of enlightened ideas: universities, coffeehouses, cafes and taverns. Proportional to men, the number of women in print in the eighteenth century was miniscule.6 But these numbers themselves are difﬁcult to assess because women excelled disproportionately in some genres – most notably the novel – even exceeding, at moments, the number of publications by men. Moreover, so many of the secondary and more ephemeral genres, such as miscellanies, commentaries, private correspondence, occasional poetry, literary and political periodicals and, not least, learned conversation, have too often fallen beneath the radar of bibliographic science and hence scholarly scrutiny. Quantitative studies, as the contributions to this section make clear, all too often miss the strategic impact that women of letters – few as their relative numbers may have been – made on the advancement of enlightenment thought through the construction of networks of patronage and sociability. At every important nexus and at every strategic turning point, learned women played critical roles in the propagation of light: Laura Bentivoglio Davia – through her patronage and learned presence – galvanized the school of Cartesians in Bologna; Mme DuChatelet turned her chateau at Cirey into a storm-center for the propagation of Newtonianism on the continent; without the ‘bluestocking circle’ of the mid-century, the likes of Johnson, Boswell and Walpole would not have found a common hearth, nor would many of the radicals of late-century Edinburgh without their clever and sociable daughters and wives; its is hard to imagine the French Encyclopedists succeeding in their enterprise without the succor and inspiration of Mme Geoffrin, Mme Dudeffand or Julie de Lespinasse; and then there were the great cosmopolitan governesses of the century – Mme Le Prince de Beaumont, Mme de la Fite and Mme de Genlis, who for all their anti-materialism nonetheless actively spread the rudiments of Cartesian and Lockean rationalism to multiple generations of the ruling classes and set them on the path of moral and civic reform. Through patronage, pedagogy, correspondence and conversation women were among the greatest practitioners of enlightenment – spreading light and creating unprecedented possibilities for rational and critical discourse among men and women distinguished by their intellectual talents rather than birth. Of course, learned women not only encouraged others to think and write, they thought and wrote themselves; and they wrote, and excelled, in all genres – not just in the minor or the ﬁctional ones. There were the erudite and critical historians, Catherine Macauley (History of England, 8 volumes, 1763–83) and Louise de Kéralio (Histoire d’Elisabeth, reine d’Angleterre, 5 volumes, 1786–88) whose achievements in the genre, according to contemporary critics, rivaled and by some lights exceeded those of David Hume. There were political theorists like Marie-Charlotte-Pauline Robert de Lezardière, an intellectual descendent of Montesquieu, whose two major

Introduction 261

works – Esprit des lois canoniques et politiques (written in the 1770s and published in 1791) and the Théorie des lois positives de la monarchies française (1792) – played a strategic role in the French monarchy’s last pitch to remain in power after 1789. Madame Dacier’s learned French-Greek editions of Homer in two folio volumes (1699 and 1708) were recognized as a monument of enlightened classical scholarship. She found a worthy English successor in the bluestocking Elizabeth Carter whose translation from the Greek of All the Works of Epictetus (1758) was published to wide acclaim. There were famous poets such as Hannah More, whose verses were so admired by Walpole that he published them at his Strawberry Hill printing press. Dr. Johnson would write of More’s celebrated 1786 poem, ‘Bas Bleu, or Conversation, Addressed to Mrs. Vesey’, that ‘there is no name in poetry, that might not be glad to own it’.7 And ﬁnally, there were literary critics like Elizabeth Montagu, who patriotically refuted Voltaire with her Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare (1769). The great epistemological debates and textual innovations of the high Enlightenment are brilliantly refracted through these distinguished, though by no means unique, feminine literary careers. Not surprisingly, almost all these women of letters came from the upper ranks of European society: high court society, the landed gentry, the professions or the burgeoning ranks of royal ofﬁcialdom throughout Europe. But one detects, throughout the essays in this section, a gradual but deﬁnitive shift in the epicenter of feminine intellectual activity over the course of the century from the world of the high court aristocracy and landed classes to the rapidly expanding and increasingly prosperous commercial and professional classes of the European capitals and major provincial cities. At the beginning of the century the province of feminine learning was almost exclusively populated by a cosmopolitan elite of royal and aristocratic luminaries exempliﬁed by the likes of Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia, Queen Christina of Sweden, Mme de Maintenon of France and in England, Aphra Behn. But this rariﬁed circle of courtly amazons, who had personal access to the greatest private libraries and the most gifted tutors that money could buy, was increasingly eclipsed as the century unfolded by the precocious daughters of lawyers, ministers, businessmen and men of letters who found new paths to knowledge through religious education, their fathers’ libraries and the commercial market place. Paula Findlen deftly illuminates this generational shift in the world of natural philosophy at the University of Bologna, where the noblewoman Laura Bentivoglio Davia (1689–1761), known as ‘la bella Cartesiana,’ was forced, reluctantly, to cede her distinction as the pre-eminent Italian women of science to the Newtonian upstart, Laura Bassi (1711–78). In 1732, Bassi, the daughter of a lawyer, became the ﬁrst woman to graduate from the University of Bologna, and the ﬁrst woman to hold a university chair in any European university faculty. Her career marked not only the entry of women of the middling sort into the upper ranks of academia, but also the advent of a new model of feminine learning – the professional scientist rather than the clever dilettante. Similarly, Elizabeth Eger shows how the English daughters of the gentry and middling sorts, like modern-day Prometheuses, wrested intellectual power from

262 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

aristocratic divinities such as Apha Behn who had inhabited the Olympian heights of the British Parnassus and brought their ﬁre-power down to earth where it could be wielded for the improvement of humanity as a whole. These ‘bluestockings’ – most notably, Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Vesey and Hannah More – proudly appropriated what had been a term of socio-cultural derision and claimed it as their moniker for new forms of intellectual sociability aimed at harmonizing intellectual exchange between social classes rather than the maintenance of social distinctions. Whether through the semi-circular seating plan of Montagu which used the circle as a metaphor for social harmony, or the more dissonant drawing-room asymmetries artfully constructed by Vesey, conversation in the ‘bluestocking circle’ was meant to break down social distinctions and forge an enlightened republic of letters among the talented rather than the merely well-born. Parallel trends can be detected, albeit later, in France, where the world of Julie de Lespinasse gave way ﬁrst to that of Mme de Staël. Even more precipitous still, the Revolution of 1789 made it possible for a female genius of truly plebian origins, Mme Roland, to rise to the heights of both cultural and political power. In Germany, the reknown of Sophie von La Roche would give way to that of Rahel Varnhagen and the ‘bluestockings’ of mid-century England would ﬁnd cultural heiresses in the expansive social and intellectual networks fashioned by the women of the late Scottish Enlightenment. The essays in this section, and much other recent research, also permits us to trace a broad evolution in the philosophical convictions and intellectual aspirations of the several generations of women of letters who were central animators of the republic of letters in the age of Enlightenment. More than a decade ago, Erica Harth aptly characterized the courtly and aristocratic women of letters of the late-seventeenth and early eighteenth century as ‘Cartesian women’.8 The essays in this volume bear out and further conﬁrm her claim. Whether we look to Laura Bentivoglio Davia in Italy, or to the great governesses of the aristocratic households of Europe (LePrince Beaumont, De La Fite, Von Roche and Genlis) examined here by Clarissa Campbell Orr, we ﬁnd women inspired by the Cartesian possibility that ‘mind has no sex’ and committed to the transformative potential of rationalist analysis as a means to understand and improve their material and moral circumstances. By mid-century, this Cartesian rationalism was steadily infused with the newer and worldlier concerns of the middling classes. Preoccupations with the arts of abstract reason and spiritual self-mastery gave way to a passion for moral improvement and civic reform. This new generation of learned women refashioned themselves and their philosophical interests along sensationalist and sentimentalist lines. Learned women of the latter half of the eighteenth century began to champion their sex as the feeling sex and the sex therefore most capable of fulﬁlling the promise of sensationalist moral philosophy through the cultivation and propagation of reﬁned sentiments. Though there were libertine materialists to be found among them (Isabelle de Charrière and Germaine de Staël, and more controversially, Mary Wollstonecraft), women of letters of the late Enlightenment were for

Introduction 263

the most part acutely concerned to protect themselves and other women from the social and economic dangers of sexual experimentation. The majority of these women attempted to produce a philosophical synthesis between rational selfimprovement and Christian propriety, in both its Catholic and Protestant forms. Moral sentimentalism rather than scientiﬁc rationalism became the dominant discourse of this generation of enlightened women. In the hands of some (Genlis and Lezardière, for example) this translated into a political project of reforming monarchical political elites and institutions along more moderate and constitutionalist lines. In the hands of others, for example the women of enlightened Edinburgh who are explored here by Jane Rendall, rational discourse, moral sentimentalism and the language of classical republicanism were blended in a discourse of moral reform and civic virtue. Rendall shows how the secular aspirations of these women led them into surprising institutional alliances with reformed Evangelical women. In so far as the women of letters of the Enlightenment era had feminist aspirations these aspirations can best be described as civic rather than political. Almost none of them advocated political rights or equality for women. Almost all of them, however, from the monarchist Genlis to the republican Wollstonecraft insisted upon the moral equality, if not superiority of women, the rights of women to greater educational development as a basis for moral improvement, and greater legal and civil equality for women within an albeit patriarchalist political regime. And the agenda of this civic feminism did, as Rendall, among others, shows us, drive women of all political stripes to enter into the political arena to advocate an improvement of the moral, social and economic circumstances of women. In this sense, the civic feminism of the enlightened women of the eighteenth century republic of letters was the intellectual and institutional breeding ground for the political feminism of the next century.

Notes 1. Marguerite Ursule Fortunée Bernier Briquet, Dictionnaire historique, littéraire et bibliographique des françaises et des étrangères naturalisées en France, connues par leurs écrits, ou par la protection qu’elles ont accordées aux gens de letters, depuis l’établissement de la monarchie jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Gillé, an XII, 1804); For more on this text and the publishing history of women in eighteenth century France, see: Carla Hesse, The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), especially ch. 2. 2. For the eighteenth century, see in particular, Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). For the revolutionary era, see Hesse, ibid. 3. See Jeannine Blackwell and Susanne Zantrop, eds. Bitter Healing: German Women Writers, 1700–1830 (Lincoln Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), pp. 19–21; Friedrich Schiller, Schillers Briefe (June 30, 1797) (hg. F. Jonas Stuttgart: Berlin), cited in MarieClaire Hoock-Demarle, La Rage d’écrire: femmes-écrivains en Allemagne de 1790 à 1815 (Paris: Alinea, 1990), p. 65. 4. For England, see: Judith Phillip Stanton, ‘Statistical Proﬁle of Women Writing in English from 1660 to 1800’, in Eighteenth-Century Women and the Arts, Fredrich M. Keener and Susan E. Lorsch, eds. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), and more recently, Norma

264 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

5. 6. 7. 8.

Clarke, The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters (London: Pimlico, 2004). For Sweden ´´ hrberg, Vittra funtimmer: Fo´´fattarroll och retorik hos frihetstidens kvinnliga see: Ann O fo´´rfattare (Gidlunds Fo´´rlang, 2001). See, also, the chapters by Paula Finland and Jane Rendall in this section. Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-century Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Robert Darnton, Gens de lettres, gens du livre (Paris: Jacob, 1991), pp. 107–118. Cited below by Elizabeth Eger in her contribution to this section. Erica Harth, Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Order in the Old Regime (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1993).

5.1 Women on the Verge of Science: Aristocratic Women and Knowledge in Early Eighteenth-Century Italy Paula Findlen

The Cartesian woman’s dilemma In the spring of 1732, when a young lawyer’s daughter, Laura Bassi (1711–78), became the ﬁrst woman to graduate from the University of Bologna and later the ﬁrst woman to hold a university chair in any faculty in Europe, not all the women of her city celebrated her accomplishments. Somewhat curiously to our own sensibilities, the woman in Bologna who seemed most likely to appreciate Bassi – the noblewoman Laura Bentivoglio Davia (1689–1761), known to her contemporaries as the ‘beautiful Cartesian’ (la bella Cartesiana) – was most disparaging. From Bologna, she wrote to a friend in Rimini that she could not believe all the fuss over ‘the noisy, or better yet, ridiculous doctorate’ of Bassi.1 So well known and so widely publicized were her criticisms, and so in opposition to the general praise of Bassi, that she commented two weeks later, on 24 June 1732, that she feared she would be stoned by her fellow citizens for daring to suggest that the twenty-one year old Bassi was anything less than a miracle of a new age of knowledge.2 Laura Bentivoglio Davia’s opposition to Bassi’s degree was a product of several forces shaping the relationship of Italian aristocratic women to knowledge in the early decades of the eighteenth century. Known for her own advocacy of Cartesian philosophy, Bentivoglio Davia could not support a public celebration of a learned woman that rested, in part, on Bassi’s association with the Newtonian natural philosophy then ﬂourishing in Italy.3 As a Cartesian woman, Bentivoglio Davia belonged to an international community of learned women who had earned the approval of the Republic of Letters in the preceding century, since there were many famous women – from Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia (1618–80) to Queen Christina of Sweden (1626–89) – celebrated for their knowledge of Descartes’ philosophy.4 She represented an established system of knowledge in which women played an important role, both in the salons of northern Europe as well as in those of the Italian peninsula. It must have galled her to see men such as Francesco Maria Zanotti, the learned secretary of the Bologna Academy of the Institute for Sciences, who had celebrated her Cartesianism in poetry in 1723, now exalt Bassi and the new world of knowledge she represented.5 Bassi belonged 265

266 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

to a younger generation that embraced a philosophical transformation of mind about which Bentivoglio Davia, at age forty-three, was highly skeptical. In conversations with colleagues during the spring and summer, Bentivoglio Davia expressed her concern about the replacement of Cartesian physics with its Newtonian counterpart. French vortices collided repeatedly with the English idea of universal gravitation, and she was unmoved by the results. ‘Newton’s doctrine of attraction not only doesn’t please me at present,’ Bentivoglio Davia confessed to her friend, the physician Giovanni Bianchi, in June 1732, ‘but it will never know how to please me.’6 It was a modern knowledge of which she wanted no part, partly because it undermined the uniqueness of her own reputation. At the same time there were also fundamental intellectual issues at stake in the debates surrounding the reception of Newtonian natural philosophy in Italy. People took note of the fact that Bentivoglio Davia repudiated Newton’s universal law of gravitation in the very period when it began to ﬁnd its advocates in France and Italy.7 But since this important insight of Newton’s Principia (1687) was not under public discussion in Bologna in 1732 – in fact, the full implications of this idea could not be openly discussed within the Papal States since it would raise the specter of the condemnation of heliocentrism by the Catholic Church during the trial of Galileo in 1633 – this was probably not the real point of contention. Far more important in the eyes of the Bolognese was the fact that Bentivoglio Davia not only criticized Bassi but also refused to acknowledge the success of her friend Zanotti and his Venetian pupil Francesco Algarotti in conﬁrming Newton’s optical experiments in 1728 and 1729. Various Italian scholars had been reading and commenting on the Latin edition of Newton’s Optics (1706) since it ﬁrst made its way to the Italian peninsula in 1707. While efforts to replicate his famous prism experiments had been underway in different cities since the appearance of this work, the role of Italian scholars in conﬁrming Newton’s theories of reﬂection and refraction received new impetus in light of the provincial Venetian experimenter Giovanni Rizzetti’s efforts to develop an alternative optics in the 1720s. Following the publication of his anti-Newtonian Physico-Mathematical Model of the Affections of Light (1728), leading members of the Bologna Academy of Sciences decided that it deserved a response.8 The ﬁrst published report of their successful replication of Newton’s prism experiments appeared in the initial volume of the Commentaries of the Bologna Institute and Academy of Sciences and the Arts (1731), edited by Zanotti. The following year Algarotti celebrated Bassi in poetry as a perfect connoisseur of Newton, after she brieﬂy defended his optics as part of her thesis defense in the Palazzo Pubblico, before the citizens of Bologna and visiting dignitaries.9 By making Newton’s optical theories part of her public declaration of learning, Bassi seemed to emblematize the promise of an English rather than a French modernity for a new generation of Italians eager to associate themselves with English politics, culture, and especially science.10 It was during the public fanfare accompanying Bassi’s degree in 1732 that Bentivoglio Davia expressed her doubts about Newtonian optics. She told Zanotti in July 1732 that she did not ﬁnd Newton’s explanation of the cause of light’s refraction sufﬁciently clear. Zanotti tried to persuade her that ‘however little she

Aristocratic Women and Knowledge in Early Eighteenth-Century Italy 267

understood of it, she understood as much as all the others.’ Knowing the criticism that the Bologna Academy of Sciences’ conﬁrmation of Newton’s theories had received elsewhere in Italy, he was sufﬁciently worried about Bentivoglio Davia’s views to seek her out later in the summer to see if she had satisﬁed ‘the burdensome curiosity that has overtaken her to know the causes of refraction.’ Zanotti could not help but express his impatience with the fact that his own experiments had not quelled her doubts. No particular fan of Laura Bassi himself, he nonetheless appreciated her receptiveness to new ideas. ‘She has a great mind,’ he informed a friend in Rome, ‘which, as you know, can be a great evil in a woman.’11 By implication, Bentivoglio Davia was no longer deserving of this kind of praise. Zanotti shared his aristocratic patron’s reservation about the idea of making Bassi a university professor. Yet he nonetheless had to admire her Newtonianism, as one of the self-proclaimed ‘Signori Neutoniani’ of Bologna.12 There was more than just a generation gap, philosophical differences, or even personal jealousy, behind Bentivoglio Davia’s comments about Laura Bassi. As an aristocrat, along with her sister the last descendant of the family that had ruled Bologna until the early sixteenth century, Bentivoglio Davia expressed an aristocratic caution about the plebian Bassi that emanated from their differences in class as much as any philosophical disagreements. By the 1730s, Bentivoglio Davia had ﬁrmly established her reputation as the leading female patron of science in the city of Bologna, if not in the Papal States in general. Bassi represented a diffusion and expansion – we might even say mutation – of the idea of the woman natural philosopher which was, in its origins, highly aristocratic. Bentivoglio Davia’s criticisms of Bassi reﬂected her reservations about whether expanding the potential avenues by which women could participate in knowledge was a good thing at all. The fact that she made these criticisms in the context of a debate in Bologna about the future direction of scientiﬁc knowledge makes her position all the more interesting; she allows us to explore how the mutation of women’s roles in the Italian sector of the Republic of Letters coincided with a transformation of the philosophical landscape. Like the men and women who participated in the Accademia de’ Ricovrati’s famous debate on women’s education in Padua in 1723, Bentivoglio assumed that the right to study was an aristocratic privilege rather than a right for women ‘in general.’13 The mid-eighteenth century was the period, however, that challenged such traditional ideas by offering up new models of female learning. By the end of the century, a number of women would graduate from Italy’s universities, become professors, publish scientiﬁc books, and be admitted to the leading scientiﬁc and literary academies.14 Bologna, second city of the Papal States and the home to one of the oldest universities in Europe and Italy’s leading scientiﬁc academy, played a central role in these developments. Laura Bassi was the ﬁrst woman to receive a university degree from any institution since the Venetian patrician Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia (1646–84) was graduated with a philosophy degree from the University of Padua in 1678.15 She became a professor of philosophy at the University of Bologna, where she brieﬂy taught mathematics and primarily taught physics, from 1732 until shortly before her death in 1778.

268 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

Admission to numerous academies throughout Italy followed her 1732 degree. Bassi became one of the feminine icons of the Grand Tour, admired by foreigners and Italians alike for her learning and for the facility with which she imparted scientiﬁc knowledge to students in Italian, Latin, and (for the beneﬁt of foreign visitors) French. By the time of her death, Bassi held no less than three professorships in the city of her birth. In addition to her university position, she taught philosophy at the Collegio Montalto and, as of 1776, experimental physics at the Bologna Academy of the Institute for Sciences. She regularly presented the results of her research and published a small portion of her work in the Commentaries of the Bologna Academy of Sciences. She and her husband Giuseppe Veratti created a household not only ﬁlled with children – eight in total, of whom ﬁve survived infancy – but also crammed to capacity with the latest apparatus of experimental physics. They built one of the best private physics cabinets of their day. Bassi experimented and taught at home, and encouraged younger scholars to use her physics cabinet to further their own research.16 An acknowledged scholar, a professor paid to teach, and an experimenter recognized for her judicious appraisal of the ambiguities of experimental knowledge, she occupied a unique but well-deﬁned place in the scientiﬁc world of the Enlightenment. The relative absence of women who played a formal role in institutions of learning and culture in other European countries further underscores the uniqueness of these developments in the Italian peninsula where the celebration of philosophical women reached its height in the mid-eighteenth century. Laura Bentivoglio Davia’s comments on Laura Bassi allow us to see how women of an earlier generation responded to such changes. Bassi represented two distinct challenges to Bentivoglio Davia’s world view: one intellectual and the other social. Just as Bentivoglio Davia represented the apogee of Cartesianism, Bassi became the emblem of Newtonianism in the city of Bologna. It seemed quite clear that, in the latest version of the contest between the ‘ancients’ and the ‘moderns’ that shaped much of the cultural life of eighteenth-century Europe, the moderns won in 1732. At some unspeciﬁed point during the controversy over Bassi’s degree and impending professorship at the university, someone in Bologna ﬁnally decided to ask Laura Bentivoglio Davia why she was so critical of the other Laura. Fortunately for us, he wrote down her response. ‘It was most false,’ Bentivoglio replied, that she was disparaging of ‘the genius of the young Bassi.’ She did not know her especially well and what she did know had persuaded her of Bassi’s talent. It was how Bassi expected to put her learning to use – ‘the way in which she performed’ – that so upset the aristocratic Marchesa. Bentivoglio Davia, her anonymous conﬁdant reﬂected, ‘did not see any advantage to the university in awarding a degree to a woman, indeed she considered it disadvantageous, especially because the ceremonies would be noisy and manifest the weakness of her thought to all of Bologna.’ The question revolved around the problem of public knowledge. If Bassi taught, she ‘must teach philosophical things that would of necessity lead her to speak of things inappropriate for a woman of good character (Femina onesta) to

Aristocratic Women and Knowledge in Early Eighteenth-Century Italy 269

discuss.’ She would usurp the position and earn a stipend intended for men who could teach others – something Bentivoglio Davia evidently felt that Bassi neither could nor should do. Finally, she invoked the lack of precedent for Bassi’s current situation. ‘Madame Dacier and many other northern women did not become learned only in philosophy,’ she observed, ‘but in a rather larger range of material, and they never thought of taking degrees in their universities.’17 For all these reasons, Laura Bentivoglio Davia found Bassi’s apotheosis deeply troubling. This frank assessment of the problems that Laura Bassi’s degree and professorship posed allow us to see, with greater clarity than usual, the implications of different models for women’s education in eighteenth-century Italy. Women like Bentivoglio Davia had studied philosophy as one of a number of different subjects that they mastered. They had often come to science late in their intellectual formation. To the extent that they specialized, it was more in humanistic rather than in scientiﬁc subjects. For her generation, the memory of the formidable Anne Lefèvre Dacier (1651–1720), wife of the secretary of the French Academy and one of the leading classicists in Europe, known for her translations of Homer and many other ancient authors and for her ﬁerce polemics in the French debates between the ancients and the moderns, was still fresh as a model to emulate.18 Dacier had accrued considerable power without ever holding an ofﬁcial position in an academy or gaining any recognition from the University of Paris. Her numerous publications were well known in Italy and inﬂuenced a number of other women to hone their skills as translators of ancient and modern texts. This sort of informal position within the Republic of Letters was the antithesis of the situation in which Laura Bassi found herself in 1732.19 Bassi was decisively a woman philosopher who wrote and debated in Latin and who claimed the credentials of the university and the academy as her reward. She embodied an entirely different image of knowledge that explicitly challenged the aristocratic model of female education. Philosophers who had written poems in celebration of Laura Bentivoglio Davia’s learning in the 1720s now rushed to proclaim Bassi the newest star in the ﬁrmament of knowledge. They admitted her formally to their academies – something that they had not done for Bentivoglio Davia who was well aware that key members of the Bologna Academy of Sciences did not especially like her.20 Bassi’s degree, professorship, and academy memberships bound her to the public world of institutions in a manner that was truly unprecedented. It offered a marked contrasted to the kind of power exercised by aristocratic women in the Republic of Letters, rendering this older image of a philosophical woman almost immediately unsatisfactory, even illegitimate. If in 1723 Bologna’s leading intellectuals had clamored for ‘the favor of Signora Marchesa Davia,’ in 1732 they wondered why she did not understand the attractions of the young Bassi for their latest project to reinvigorate intellectual life in Bologna by drawing attention to its tradition of learned women.21 Bassi’s subsequent career as a physicist and experimenter is a subject that has been discussed elsewhere.22 It is a fascinating story of a woman paid and acknowledged for her learning. To understand how such a thing was possible in 1732, we

270 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

need to examine more closely the world of aristocratic women philosophers in Italy in the 1710s and 1720s. It was during these decades that the idea of the woman natural philosopher ﬁrst came into being, a product of a convergence of various ingredients that we might describe as the seventeenth century’s legacy to the eighteenth century. Understanding this neglected episode in the history of woman and knowledge helps to explain not why Laura Bentivoglio Davia was unhappy with Laura Bassi, but why she was there at all, engaged in the pursuit of Cartesian natural philosophy and reﬂecting on the obsolescence of her role within the Republic of Letters.

Aristocratic women and the pursuit of science During the ﬁrst two decades of the eighteenth century, Italian women in cities as disparate as Milan, Bologna, and Naples rose to prominence as patrons, readers, students, and practitioners of natural philosophy. Overwhelmingly such women belonged to the leading families of Italy – to such a degree that we must describe this era as a great age for the aristocratic pursuit of science. Laura Bentivoglio Davia was not the only female Cartesian, for example. In Naples princess Aurelia d’Este (1683–1719) was so closely associated with Paolo Mattia Doria’s critical reﬂections on Descartes that he dedicated an entire book on women’s virtues to his famous pupil, praising her for rising above the ordinary occupations of women to pursue the study of metaphysics. D’Este became such a devoted Cartesian – more than her mentor, in fact – that she composed poems inspired by her reading of Descartes’ Meditations.23 It was also in Naples that Giuseppa Eleonora Barbapiccola completed her Italian translation of Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, which was published in 1722. Justifying her decision to translate this important philosophical text, she explicitly invoked Descartes’ epistolary relationship with Elisabeth of Bohemia, and the fact that Queen Christina had been the last patron of Descartes.24 The image of Descartes as a philosopher who developed his ideas in conversation with women, and who was particularly well understood by his female readers, inspired a number of men and women to replicate the dynamic of this relationship in their own pursuit of knowledge. The most prominent women aristocrats engaged in the pursuit of natural philosophy in early eighteenth-century Italy were all born in the ﬁnal decade of Christina’s life and in a period – the 1680s – when Cartesian philosophy began to make more serious inroads into Italian intellectual life than it had done previously.25 While Christina herself was by no means a ‘Cartesian woman’ in the sense that she strictly adhered to Descartes’ philosophy, her association with this important philosopher, in conjunction with her subsequent role as patron of learning in Italy, made her a model for aristocratic women philosophers to emulate. Queen Christina became infamous following her highly publicized conversion to Catholicism, for which she abdicated her throne in 1654. She subsequently spent the better part of her life in Rome, creating a lavish court that rivaled that

Aristocratic Women and Knowledge in Early Eighteenth-Century Italy 271

of the papacy and cultivating her image as Minerva by sponsoring many of the important scientiﬁc and literary academies in late seventeenth-century Rome. In real life, she was a troublesome presence among the Catholic elite, a queen who had converted to their faith for intellectual more than religious reasons and who embodied the heterodox possibilities of Catholicism.26 But in death, encased in the enormous tomb erected in her memory in St. Peter’s by Clement XI in 1702, she seemed the very image of a pious philosophical woman, a foreign queen whose lengthy residence in Rome made her, in retrospect, a ﬁtting model for the learned Italian woman philosopher. Barbapiccola’s introduction to her translation of Descartes speciﬁcally mentioned Christina as a patron of philosophers and declared that ‘the memory is fresh.’27 Christina had been dead for over thirty years at the time of this publication. In Barbapiccola’s interpretive history of philosophy, her residency in Rome helped to establish an intellectual genealogy that brought Cartesian philosophy from northern Europe to the Italian peninsula through the ofﬁces of learned women. This was the implicit background for Bentivoglio Davia’s insistence on the importance of her Cartesianism to her status as a woman of learning in Bologna. The 1680s also produced an especially important Cartesian publication that further enhanced the idea of modern philosophy as a conversation between the sexes: Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686). Read, translated, and imitated in Italy, Fontenelle’s Conversations provided an inﬂuential literary sketch of an aristocratic woman engaged in the passionate pursuit of knowledge with the guidance of a male philosopher.28 The content of the book, which included a description of heliocentrism as part of its account of a world set in motion by Cartesian vortices, continued to be a subject of debate in Rome through the 1720s. There was a belated attempt to put it on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1729, which only the intervention of Laura Bentivoglio Davia’s patron, cardinal Giovanni Antonio Davia, prevented. Perhaps this latest controversy inspired the 1730 translation of Fontenelle in Bologna?29 All this is a reminder that discussing Cartesian vortices with aristocratic women was still a subject of some interest in the years immediately preceding Laura Bassi’s degree. Fontenelle’s Conversations continued to be a fundamental point of departure for the image of the aristocratic woman of science well into the eighteenth century. Like the Marquise of Fontenelle’s dialogue who educated herself through conversation in a thoroughly Cartesian worldview, the aristocratic women of eighteenth-century Italy sought to ﬁll their leisure hours with lessons in new knowledge. In Milan Clelia Grillo Borromeo (1684–1777) became so fascinated by scientiﬁc knowledge that she persuaded the Paduan naturalist Antonio Vallisneri to travel repeatedly to the city in the 1720s to help her found a new academy that would revive the goal of the long defunct Florentine Accademia del Cimento (1657–67) to make Italy a center for experimental knowledge to rival France and England.30 In Naples the princess of Colubrano, Faustina Pignatelli (d. 1785) became the patron of an equally important circle of mathematicians and ultimately one of Zanotti’s most cherished correspondents in the

272 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

exchanges between Bologna and the Kingdom of Naples; she was the second female member of the Bologna Academy of Sciences.31 In every important Italian city where scientiﬁc learning ﬂourished at the beginning of the eighteenth century, one could ﬁnd aristocratic women patrons who were informed participants in the debates over the shape of natural philosophy. The enthusiasm of Italian women for scientiﬁc knowledge is surely one of the many reasons why Francesco Algarotti was inspired to write Newtonianism for Ladies (1737), which he dedicated to Fontenelle. Transforming the Parisian Marquise into a Venetian Marchesa, Algarotti made the story of the aristocratic and feminine pursuit of science an Italian occupation by demonstrating that Fontenelle’s image of science, as a kind of knowledge transmitted by men to women in libertine conversation, could occur as easily in an Italian villa as in a French château. He implicitly suggested that the former might better house English ideas. Completing his work in Milan, home to Newtonian women such as Grillo Borromeo and the young mathematician Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Algarotti challenged – perhaps even parodied – Bentivoglio Davia’s well-publicized resistance to Newtonian natural philosophy. His Newtonianism for Ladies described the intellectual journey of a woman who, knowing nothing of philosophy at the beginning of his dialogues, became a convinced Cartesian towards the end of the ﬁrst dialogue. ‘Truly with these vortices one can do anything,’ enthused his imaginary Marchesa. ‘Say what you will, one can never admire enough the system of Descartes.’32 Yet unlike Marchesa Bentivoglio Davia in Bologna, her ﬁctional counterpart immediately recognized the inadequacies of Cartesianism at the beginning of the second dialogue; she subsequently became a devout Newtonian by the book’s end. Why couldn’t the real Marchesa change with the times?

The making of a woman philosopher In many respects, Laura Bentivoglio Davia was an ideal template for the aristocratic woman philosopher whom Algarotti sketched with such great wit and charm.33 Her desire for knowledge was strong and her willingness to ﬂout social convention was even stronger. Bentivoglio Davia typiﬁed the kind of aristocratic woman attracted to philosophy at the beginning of the century, since the Italian women philosophers of this era were independent, often rebellious minds whose relationship to learning seems to have been a direct outgrowth of their efforts to gain greater social freedoms. When Giuseppe Antonio Costantini criticized the ‘great fashion for liberty’ among Italian wives in 1743, he summarized well the climate in which women aristocrats connected reading, thinking, and learned conversation to a more modern deﬁnition of marriage.34 Like the female aristocratic poets of this period, who introduced the customs of French salon life into Italy and scandalized their contemporaries by ﬂouting social convention in their personal lives and writing about it in their poetry, their philosophical counterparts considered knowledge to be essential to the creation of a new public identity for women.35 They found justiﬁcation for their pursuit of philosophy not

Aristocratic Women and Knowledge in Early Eighteenth-Century Italy 273

only in the role of Queen Christina in Rome, but also in the arrival of French salon life throughout the Italian peninsula which had changed the nature and venue of philosophical conversation. Reading and understanding Descartes became the perfect intellectual declaration of a certain kind of social position. The trajectory of Laura Bentivoglio Davia’s life helps us to understand exactly how and where philosophy ﬁt into her life. Her marriage provides us with an important piece of the puzzle, since her transformation into a learned woman seems to have occurred partly as a solution to her marital problems. In September 1708 the nineteen year old Bentivoglio married the ex-soldier Francesco Davia (1677–1753) against her family’s wishes.36 The marriage was, from the start, a disaster. They ﬁrst got to know each other practicing their German together in the Bentivoglio palace. When her mother discovered some purloined love letters auf Deutsch, the family attempted to separate them. Laura rebelliously told her uncle that ‘no one should be patron of her will.’37 From that point on her reputation plummeted, leaving the family with no alternative but to marry her to a husband who had been ejected on numerous occasions from the city for his unruly behavior and who was largely responsible for the death of his younger brother. Their union was precisely the sort of misalliance that led social critics to comment on how the ‘mixing of bloods’ was gradually destroying the old Bolognese patriciate.38 Numerous public altercations occurred between the couple. Virtually no man in the city of Bologna could talk with Laura Bentivoglio Davia without being challenged to a duel, since Francesco was convinced that they were all rivals for his wife’s affections. So certain was he of his wife’s inﬁdelity that in 1713 he disguised himself as a priest in order to hear his wife’s confession; further demonstrations of impiety led the Holy Ofﬁce to arrest and imprison him.39 When he died in 1753, after years of litigating with his rebellious wife, pope Benedict XIV himself wrote personally to Bentivoglia Davia to rejoice in her husband’s passing, saying: ‘Whoever dealt with him had occasion to suffer, and you, a respectable person, must therefore be greatly pitied for living with him for forty-ﬁve years.’40 Bentivoglio Davia did not suffer quietly, however. By 1711 she had returned to palazzo Bentivoglio with her young son to separate them from her husband’s torrent of abuse. When he was released from the papal prison in Castel Sant’Angelo in 1715, she ﬂed to Lucca for two years to avoid being subject to his will. This time she abandoned her children and, against the wishes of both her family and her husband, requested a permanent separation. Francesco objected strongly to the ‘pretensions of my wife’ and argued that he had no obligation to pay for her expenses during this period since she had abrogated her part of the marital contract: ‘to obey and pay homage to the husband, and to stay with him.’ He threatened his father-in-law for helping his wife escape from the marriage and described his wife as a woman who had acted ‘against the laws of the marital contract, without respect for her husband, and against the will of the Pope.’41 The pope ordered her to do one of three things to resolve the scandal: return to her husband, enter a monastery, or live with her husband’s uncle, the learned cardinal Davia, who had been appointed bishop of Rimini in 1698 and settled there after the

274 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

abrupt end of his diplomatic career in 1705. Bentivoglio Davia agreed to the third option as long as she had reassurances that her husband would maintain her well.42 Francesco Davia begrudgingly paid for her living expenses and the upkeep of their sons at the home of his uncle. This decision proved crucial to her emergence as a woman philosopher in the 1720s. Cardinal Giovanni Antonio Davia (1660–1740) had studied with Marcello Malpighi and Geminaro Montanari during his student days in Bologna. He participated in the lively scientiﬁc discussions of Montanari’s Accademia della Traccia, continuing the academy in his own home when Montanari left Bologna. In 1681 he visited the Royal Society and the Paris Academy of Sciences, before enjoying a distinguished diplomatic and ecclesiastical career in many parts of Europe that made him such a well-respected ﬁgure that his candidacy for the papacy faltered by only a few votes in 1725 and 1730.43 In short, Davia was a man of enormous cultural and moral authority in the early eighteenth century. His patronage and protection of Laura Bentivoglio Davia gave her the latitude she needed to resist efforts to force reconciliation with her difﬁcult husband. Cardinal Davia also gave her further access to the world of learning because he was in the process of making Rimini into a city of science. His correspondence with the astronomer Eustachio Manfredi during the period immediately prior to Bentivoglio Davia’s arrival in his household suggests more than a casual interest in science. Davia measured longitude from Rimini, acquired the best telescopes from Bologna to observe a solar eclipse and stellar parallax, and consulted with Manfredi about how to improve his observational skills.44 He exposed Bentivoglio Davia to some of the best mathematical and observational astronomy of the time. Davia was no passive observer of the philosophical struggles of the early eighteenth century. He actively shaped their direction within the Papal States through his continued support of a modern philosophical agenda that was tempered by a strong belief that the Catholic Church could accommodate such views. It was Davia, after all, who donated a model of the Copernican system to the Bologna Academy of Sciences before returning to Rome in 1726.45 He gave his niece by marriage the opportunity to participate in some of the most interesting philosophical debates of the period. Bentivoglio Davia, for example, was present during discussions in Rimini of the Florentine edition of Galileo’s works published in 1718, the ﬁrst authorized version to appear in Italy since his condemnation in 1633. She probably heard the cardinal’s well-publicized views in 1722 about why reading John Locke was ‘a hundred times more perilous than Machiavelli.’46 More generally, she was exposed to Davia’s efforts to ﬁnd the middle ground between a full-scale acceptance of every modern philosophy of nature and a conservative rejection of any new idea that seemed to dislodge Aristotle from his pedestal. While the works of Descartes had been placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1663, they were hardly banned from discussion in the cardinal’s scientiﬁc academy.47 During this period of her life, Bentivoglio Davia had the rare opportunity to immerse herself in cardinal Davia’s vast library and physics cabinet, which

Aristocratic Women and Knowledge in Early Eighteenth-Century Italy 275

returned to Bologna after his death in Rome in 1740. The 1741 inventory contains traces of her presence in the library, not only in the numerous works of science – including Descartes and Newton – that she and cardinal Davia enjoyed reading but also in the presence of a copy of Molière’s controversial L’École des femmes in French.48 This famous parody of learned women must have been the topic of a lively conversation in a household where a woman was in the process of becoming learned. Yet the world that Laura Bentivoglio Davia inhabited was not a community of women rendered ridiculous by their learning, pace Molière, but a world of male scholars eager to tutor aristocratic women in the sciences. In the household of cardinal Davia Laura Bentivoglio Davia met a young physician named Giovanni Bianchi (1693–1775).49 Like his patron, Bianchi had close ties with the intellectual community in Bologna where he received his medical degree. He was the secretary of the cardinal’s literary and scientiﬁc academy. Moreover, he conducted a school in his house that emphasized scientiﬁc and philosophical learning. Bentivoglio Davia became his only woman student. As Bianchi’s intellectual stature within the Rimini academy grew, the group turned their attention from questions of astronomy and philosophy to problems in anatomy. Around 1724, two years before Bentivoglio Davia ﬁnally returned to Bologna and reconciled with her husband in 1726, she observed Bianchi and his friend and fellow physician Antonio Leprotti dissect one of the cardinal’s servants.50 In summary, Bentivoglio Davia received a thorough introduction to natural and experimental philosophy during her years in Rimini, thanks to the ministrations of these two enthusiastic tutors and her cardinal uncle. Very little documentation of the academy’s activities survives. Nonetheless, we can discern traces of Bentivoglio Davia’s position within it by reading the philosophical correspondence between Bologna and Rimini. In absentia, her reputation as a philosopher and patron of learning began to grow, even as gossip about her unhappy marriage persisted. It was in June 1723 that Francesco Maria Zanotti wrote his poem about the bella Cartesiana, declaring that no woman past or present could compare with Bentivolia Davia.51 Evidently she had reached a critical point in her philosophical education to merit this kind of public praise, as her reputation for learning transcended the conﬁnes of Rimini. Through the study of philosophy, she had achieved a kind of social redemption in the eyes of the Bolognese elite. One month later, Zanotti found himself in the midst of heated debate with her about Cartesian optics. Bentivoglio Davia had asked his opinion of Descartes’ theory of color. In good Cartesian fashion, Zanotti explained how light was formed by the circular and rectilinear motion of particulate matter, and that the relationship between the two created different colors. Bentivoglio Davia impatiently responded that she knew all this but still had questions about the ‘circular motion of light.’ The further their conversation proceeded, the more the two correspondents disagreed. Unlike the compliant Marquise of Fontenelle’s Conversations, Bentivoglio Davia did not simply accept the opinions of male philosophers but debated with them. She did not believe that shadow determined the

276 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

motion of light because, as she argued, ‘a negative thing … can never produce a positive effect.’ She had questions about Descartes’ explanation of refraction, wondering in particular how two rays could pass through the same point without mixing together. Zanotti’s subsequent diagrams still did not satisfy her. Her ‘great disdain’ for what she tartly called Zanotti’s ‘rhetoric’ drove him to despair. Finally, he wrote to Antonio Leprotti in Rome, asking him to conﬁrm that ‘she is wrong, wrong, and wrong, and that reason is entirely on my side.’52 At the same time, Zanotti wanted Bentivoglio Davia’s good opinion. She was one of the few women in Italy capable of discussing natural philosophy and the favored niece of a cardinal who seemed on the verge of becoming pope. Two days later, after expressing his utter frustration with her interpretation of Cartesian optics, he wrote that he wished ‘she were less disdainful of philosophers.’53 After this initial exchange, Zanotti could not stop thinking about the Marchesa in Rimini. He continued to send his greetings to her through mutual friends to ensure a place in her affections and lamented that he had no time to make the trip down the Adriatic. Finally in 1725, Zanotti got his chance to debate philosophy in person with Bentivoglio Davis when he visited Rimini. At this point, he took the liberty of becoming another of her tutors, deepening her knowledge of mathematics by explaining the ‘primary functions of Algebra’ to her. Their conversations inspired Bentivoglio Davia to request a copy of Eustachio Manfredi’s new translation of Euclid’s Elements.54 Zanotti continued to characterize her as strong-headed and independent-minded – she was a ‘ﬁghter’ (lottatrice) as he told his brother after his visit to Rimini. Nonetheless, he was happy to report that by the beginning of 1726, she was ‘up to her ears in geometry.’55 For approximately two years Zanotti took a special interest in the development of Bentivoglio Davia’s mathematical skills. We might say that he deliberately sought to transform her from the kind of aristocratic woman philosopher who understood Cartesian philosophy without mathematics – like every imaginary Marquise of his day – into a full-ﬂedged participant in discussions of natural philosophy. By January 1727, he reported approvingly, ‘Signora Marchesa Laura is well, and doing well in algebra. She has shown me some long and exact multiplications.’56 At the end of the month, he had her recalculate some of Euclid’s theorems; by May 1727, he informed his friend Leprotti that ‘she understands [algebra] marvelously.’ His highest compliment for her abilities came in October 1727, when their conversations were interrupted during his habitual retreat to his country villa. Despite the two-week hiatus in their algebra lessons, he reported: ‘She’s been doing very well. Indeed I never would have believed it of a woman. If she took daily lessons, I believe that she would do as well as a man in that science.’57 Since this is the last occasion in which Zanotti described Bentivoglio Davia’s intellectual progress, we cannot know whether their lessons continued into the period in which he began to replicate Newton’s optical experiments in earnest. Certainly their relationship did, and their conversations of the 1720s shed a different light on Bentivoglio Davia’s queries about Newton’s explanation of refraction; it was evidently a phenomenon of long-standing interest to her that she considered difﬁcult to explain. If Bentivoglio Davia had only been a bella

Aristocratic Women and Knowledge in Early Eighteenth-Century Italy 277

Cartesiana in 1723 – in the playful sense in which Fontenelle had invoked this image of an aristocratic woman pursuing knowledge – by the end of the decade she had earned her credentials as a seriously philosophical woman in two of the most important scientiﬁc communities within the Papal States. Zanotti characteristically deﬁned the limits of her learning when he suggested that, despite her evident talent, she did not yet study enough to be the equal of her male counterparts. But then she was a Bentivoglio, with many other responsibilities in the public life of her city. She was a philosophical woman, in his opinion, and not a philosopher. As he conﬁded to the papal physician Leprotti, he hoped that ‘this study would otherwise help her to tolerate the misadventures and unpleasant things that necessarily arise and that inevitably take hold of men as long as they live in this world.’58 Zanotti’s image of the pursuit of philosophy for his aristocratic pupil was, like Boethius’, consolatory. It was not a pathway to a career in science, but a kind of intellectual therapy for an intelligent woman trapped in an unhappy marriage and in a position to patronize male natural philosophers.

Salvaging a philosophical reputation The limits of this image of the woman philosopher became acutely apparent to Laura Bentivoglio Davia at the beginning of the 1730s. Whatever Zanotti considered her reasons for studying, Bentivoglio Davia had every intention of continuing to hone her philosophical skills beyond his tutelage. Yet she increasingly found obstacles in her path, culminating in the public furor over her opinion of Laura Bassi. In contrast to the warm reception her philosophical studies had received in two different cities in the 1720s, in 1731 she found herself – perhaps for the ﬁrst time – having to defend the quality of her erudition. When Zanotti felt that she misunderstood Descartes’ optics, he addressed this problem by offering to teach her geometry and algebra. By contrast, in the fall of 1731 an unnamed professor at the University of Bologna expressed his concern that she was not adequately prepared to pursue the course of study that they were undertaking. In response, Bentivoglio Davia wrote Giovanni Bianchi to request ‘an attestation that I not only learned but studied philosophy.’59 His letter would replace an earlier one from Leprotti that she had lost. Curiously, no mention was made of Zanotti’s ability to testify on her behalf. Bentivoglio Davia did not simply see her learning as a form of aristocratic adornment. She expressed considerable pride in her intellectual accomplishments. Having defended her honor repeatedly in the course of her marriage, she was acutely sensitive to slights of any kind. Her desire for public recognition of her learning only increased during the excitement about Bassi’s degree. In June 1732, she described how Bassi’s mentor Gaetano Tacconi demonstrated his disrespect towards my studies, about which he hardly has any idea since I have never discussed them. But now I will speak, since he has given women the liberty to speak. Too bad for him since I was the ﬁrst to raise the alarm against his philosophy.60

278 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

Contrasting her previous ‘silence in philosophical things,’ to her newfound public role, Bentivoglio Davia defended her right to reserve judgment on Laura Bassi, refusing simply to praise her ‘because I am a woman.’ She reminded Bologna’s philosophical community that she deserved their respect on her own terms.61 Years later, in 1736, still smarting from the snide comments of critics who compared her learning unfavorably to the erudition of Laura Bassi, she subsequently asked Bianchi to produce a sworn, fully notarized certiﬁcate attesting to her completion of a full curriculum in universal philosophy, logic, metaphysics, physics, geometry, and ethics under the tutelage of Bianchi and Leprotti. Not only, wrote Bianchi, was she equal to any man he had taught, but ‘no one was superior.’62 As it turns out, Zanotti was not her favorite tutor, undoubtedly because they quarreled too much. Instead it was the equally headstrong Giovanni Bianchi, who renamed himself ‘Ianus Planchus’ so as not to be confused with the other Bianchi from Turin. Of all the men who persuaded Bentivoglio Davia to study natural philosophy, he became her closest conﬁdante, producing a correspondence that lasted for over forty years. Both Bentivoglio Davia and Bianchi reveled in the intimacy of their friendship, perhaps inspired by the literary logic of such a relationship that the well-known philosophical correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and Descartes and its ﬁctional reinvention in Fontenelle’s Conversations suggested to their generation. Their correspondence remains the primary source for understanding her relationship to the Bologna scientiﬁc community in the period between 1732 and her death in 1761. During these decades the reputation of Bologna as a city of learned women grew by leaps and bounds. Many well-known women natural philosophers and mathematicians – Bassi, Pignatelli, Agnesi, and the French Newtonian Émilie du Châtelet – and the French poet Anne-Marie LePage Fique du Boccage (who openly confessed that she knew nothing of science but was a friend of Algarotti’s) were admitted to the Bologna Academy of Sciences. The mathematician Agnesi (1718–99) was also offered a professorship in 1749 in recognition of the success of her Analytical Institutions for the Use of Italian Youth (1748). Cristina Roccati of Rovigo became the second woman to graduate from the University of Bologna when she received her philosophy degree in 1751. One year before Bentivoglio Davia’s death, another Bolognese woman, Anna Morandi Manzolini (1716–74) became professor of anatomical wax modeling to ensure that the city did not lose her talent in combining artistic and anatomic skills to recreate the parts of the human body.63 To outsiders, it seemed that Bologna had become a repository of all the best female minds in Italy and beyond. No one suggested that Bentivoglio Davia should receive this kind of recognition. She was not admitted to the Bologna Academy of Sciences, though she seems to have attended some of their public academies and, judging by her correspondence, evidently kept herself well-informed about the politics of their elections. She did not participate in the life of the university, though it is clear that she continued to take an interest in the research done by Bologna’s natural philosophers. She sent her friend Bianchi news of their activities and,

Aristocratic Women and Knowledge in Early Eighteenth-Century Italy 279

occasionally, questions that arose from her reading of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.64 In other words, Bentivoglio Davia’s interest in natural philosophy did not diminish, but she seems to have ceded her public place in this world. Bentivoglio Davia’s statement in 1732 that she did not personally dislike Bassi bore fruit in the growth of a cordial relationship by the 1740s. They enjoyed the mutual friendship of Bianchi, who corresponded with all of the learned women in Bologna. It was Bassi, after all, who brought his greetings to the Marchesa from Florence in 1744.65 In the absence of further documentation, it is difﬁcult to speculate on the exact nature of their relationship. Perhaps they felt more sympathetic to each other’s situation as they came to understand the difﬁculties that the other endured in the pursuit of knowledge. In the 1730s Bassi’s reputation suffered from endless gossip about her imagined love affairs with male philosophers; she subsequently endured strong public criticism of her decision to marry Giuseppe Veratti in 1738.66 She also discovered that her professorship and academy memberships were largely ceremonial, and had to think creatively about how to expand their scope in order to teach and research. It may well have been the case that the difﬁculties of her own experiences led Bassi to realize that the characterization of Bentivoglio Davia’s learning as being something less than her own might also be a kind of construction of a learned woman. The closest we have to a discussion of these issues between these women occurred in 1744. That fall Bassi and Bentivoglio Davia enjoyed a spirited discussion of Bianchi’s latest publication, the Brief History of the Life of Catterina Vizzani (1744) – his dissection of a young Roman girl who had dressed as a man in order to love women and been killed attempting to elope with the niece of a priest.67 Bianchi did not simply dissect Vizzani but cut out her genitals, inspected them under the microscope, and dried them as curiosities. He added them to his collection of hymens that he had begun in Rimini, afﬁrming their importance in the medical proof of virginity. He contradicted the idea that lesbians had enlarged clitorises by afﬁrming that Vizzani’s was not only ‘very ordinary but among the small rather than the large or medium ones’ he had seen.68 Bassi described their mutual wonder at the ‘Amazon of their day’ who had died for her love of another woman and become famous for it. Bentivoglio Davia was characteristically frank in her opinion of Bianchi’s discovery, telling him that she would have advised Vizzani to enter a convent instead where ‘she could have satisﬁed her inclination without danger, and would have satisﬁed many others as well.’69 One year later, perhaps still thinking about the Amazons of her time, Bassi thanked Bianchi for comparing her favorably to Laura Bentivoglio Davia – ‘a Lady of such rare merit … my most venerable patron.’70 This description of Bentivoglio Davia summarizes well her position by the mideighteenth century. In the 1720s and early 1730s Laura Bentivoglia Davia crafted an explicit identity for herself as a philosophical woman who took positions in the debates over different kinds of modern philosophy. ‘If the Neapolitans follow Lucretius like they have followed Descartes until now,’ she observed in 1726 after Bianchi had visited Naples, ‘they will be suspected of atheism. Although these

280 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

two philosophies have a great deal of uniformity between them, however, there is always a great disparity: one destroys divine essence while the other makes every effort to demonstrate it.’71 Like her husband’s uncle, Bentivoglio Davia presented herself as an advocate of pious philosophy that was compatible with enlightened Catholicism. She had her reservations about the revival of atomism. She read the Philosophical Transactions, but did not advocate the pernicious doctrines of John Locke. Bentivoglio Davia may have been a social libertine but this did not mean that she simply embraced every new and controversial idea of her day. As she repeatedly told her friend Bianchi, she cultivated the ‘freedom to think,’ but did so with a critical intelligence that assayed the moral and religious consequences of new ideas.72 Despite her continued interest in natural philosophy and in Bologna’s scientiﬁc community and its institutions, Bentivoglio Davia did not maintain her public status as a philosophical woman in Bologna after 1732. By March 1733 she seems to have ceded this grounded entirely to her younger compatriot, Bassi. ‘I profess myself ever more obliged for the memory that you hold of me and for the kindness that you demonstrate in communicating your observations to me,’ she wrote to Bianchi in a moment of wistful self-reﬂection. ‘Since I do not want and perhaps could not be a learned woman in Bologna, there is no danger that what you wrote me will be made manifest either as your thoughts or as mine.’73 What indeed was the place of the aristocratic woman of science by the mid1730s? Bentivoglio Davia increasingly described herself as a patron of philosophy rather than a philosopher in her own right because she perceived a growing division between these two roles that no longer allowed her to claim both identities. In the tradition of a learned patron, she engaged in philosophical correspondence and asked questions about various natural phenomena, from the nature of light to the observations on static electricity provoked by a nobleman who wore multiple layers of stockings that sparked when his servant undressed him at night. She demanded information about the latest philosophical novelties, while joking that they would be ‘pearls cast before swine.’74 She also accepted new protégés, since doing this allowed her to become a protector rather than a critic of Laura Bassi. Bentivoglio Davia’s correspondence reﬂects her consciousness of these changed circumstances. By 1745 she jokingly described herself as ‘a poor little woman destined to tend the spindle’ (una Povera Donniciuola destinata a maneggiare il fuso) who had been saved from this fate solely by Bianchi’s decision to honor her with a little philosophy. She entertained her friend with an account of a would-be philosopher who appeared in her palace, thinking himself a combination of ‘a Galen and a Newton’ when she judged him to be ‘a balloon full of air and an exceedingly confused brain.’75 Relegating herself to the role of consumer of philosophy, Bentivoglio Davia nonetheless maintained the right to judge the quality of the minds she encountered through books, letters, and conversations. It was she, after all, who dubbed the ambitious physician Bianchi ‘a great philosopher,’ observing that she wrote to him with ‘such liberty’ because she judged his mind worthy of the encounter.76

Aristocratic Women and Knowledge in Early Eighteenth-Century Italy 281

During the late 1740s and 1750s, the correspondence between Bentivoglio Davia and Bianchi increasingly reﬂected another dimension of their relationship: that of a consulting physician and his aristocratic patient. Bentivoglio Davia reported not only her ailments but also those of family and friends, offering detailed accounts of their physical maladies. She asked his advice on the diagnoses and prescriptions of other physicians and offered her opinion on the various remedies that she tried. Fundamentally, Bentivoglio Davia trusted her philosopher with her body. In June 1747 she wrote him a lengthy description of an eye afﬂiction that she had for the past four winters that had left her barely able to see. She suggested that it might be connected to menopause – ‘In the midst of this time my ﬂows ceased, since I now am 57 years old’ – and subsequently described a series of skin eruptions on her shoulders and chest that led her to bathe her face and chest with linen cloths dipped in warm water. Sleeping with her head uncovered even on cold winter nights, she felt warm; on the hottest days of summer for the past three years ‘some ﬂashes stay with me that rose to my head and face.’ She experienced two weeks of painful blisters behind her ears and ultimately had the entire medical community of Bologna bleeding her, applying ointments to ease her aches and pains, and dilating her pupils daily to see if her eyesight might improve. Bentivoglio Davia wrote Bianchi a ‘history of the illness’ because she felt that he had offered her ‘that liberty that I desired to have’ to express such things. Of course Bianchi was a well-known physician so it seems natural that she should discuss her hot ﬂashes and amenorrhea with him in addition to a host of other ailments. But it seems striking that the condition of her body had not entered the conversation to this degree until she reached this point in her life. ‘The generosity of your spirit, that I observe has not changed in my regard, gave me the courage to write you, however badly, about the history of my illness so that you will understand it with discretion.’77 In some sense, her body became the experimental terrain for the ﬁnal years of their conversations which ended shortly before her death in 1761. Many men and women in the eighteenth century wrote their physicians frank and intimate letters about their physical ailments; consulting at a distance was not uncommon. But it is nonetheless interesting to consider the role of this kind of conversation in a philosophical correspondence that had begun, after all, with Bentivoglio Davia’s declaration of her passion for Cartesian thought. The trajectory of her epistolary relationship with Bianchi raises important questions about how people, in practice, understood the relationship between the mind and the body. Like her illustrious predecessor, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Bentivoglio Davia could not imagine a philosophy that did not allow her to use her powers of observation, description, and reﬂection to chart the transformation of her own nature. She thought about her body and invited trusted associates to discuss it with her, to use their minds to solve her corporeal problems. In this fascinating exchange between a physician, who was also a philosopher and an experimenter, and a philosophical woman, we can see Bentivoglio Davia’s growing desire to write the history of her own body. Philosophy permitted her to do this because

282 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

understanding the physical world was not simply an impersonal exercise; among philosophers who knew each other well, it could also be an intimate exchange of knowledge. Perhaps Bentivoglio Davia considered her body sufﬁciently troubling in its ailments to merit the kind of case study that Bianchi and other physicians of his generation routinely published of the most interesting bodies they encountered.78 Yet she did not invite him to record the pathologies of her body but did this herself, not simply to ask his advice but also to remind him of her keen powers of observation. Self-knowledge, after all, was a Cartesian principle among many women attracted to the study of philosophy. Philosophical liberty meant many different things in early eighteenth-century Italy. It allowed Laura Bentivoglio Davia to engage in scientiﬁc discourse and develop an epistolary relationship with her chosen philosopher over four decades. It provided her with opportunities to speak freely about knowledge and ultimately about herself when her questions about nature became more personal than philosophical. Bentivoglio Davia was certainly never an experimental philosopher in the fashion of Laura Bassi nor did she aspire to this role. As she discovered in 1732, her lack of ofﬁcial recognition denied her the title of ‘philosopher’ in ways that had not mattered in the age of Princess Elisabeth and Queen Christina, when philosophers and noblewomen made science together. Lacking a secure institutional position in the Bolognese world of science, she instead cultivated her role as its unofﬁcial patron. Increasingly it was not even clear that she cared much about defending Cartesian philosophy. It is little wonder that Laura Bentivoglio Davia initially envied Laura Bassi in the summer of 1732 and was, at the same time, rather puzzled by Bassi’s quite different aspirations. Bassi directly beneﬁted from the world of male philosophers and aristocratic women who had explored the possibilities for a new model of knowledge at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Her institutional position would not have been possible without an acceptance of this earlier model. Bentivoglio Davia was certainly not a ‘scientist’ by any stretch of the imagination, but then few philosophers – male or female – were in this era. She was, more accurately, a curious mind, a three-dimensional evolution of the ﬁctional Marquise sketched by Fontenelle. In order to imagine the woman scientist, a society must ﬁrst imagine the idea of women curious to acquire scientiﬁc knowledge and capable of talking to natural philosophers. This was indeed the world of the 1720s that paved the way for one of the most famous women philosophers of the eighteenth century to make her appearance in 1732.

Notes 1. Biblioteca Gambalunga, Rimini (hereafter BGR), Fondo Gambetti. Lettere autografe al Giovanni Bianchi. Posizione: Davia Bentivoglio, Laura (Bologna, 14 June 1732). 2. BGR, Fondo Gambetti: Bianchi. Posizione: Davia Bentivoglio (Bologna, 24 June 1732). 3. These intellectual developments are discussed in greater detail in Paolo Casini, ‘Newton in Italia, 1700–1740,’ in his Newton e la conscienza europea (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1983), pp. 173–227; Marta Cavazza, Settecento Inquieto. Alle origini dell’Istituto delle Scienze di Bologna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990); and Vincenzo Ferrone, The Intellectual

Aristocratic Women and Knowledge in Early Eighteenth-Century Italy 283

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

Roots of the Italian Enlightenment: Newtonian Science, Religion, and Politics in the Early Eighteenth Century, trans. Sue Brotherton (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995). For more on this image of the woman natural philosopher in France, see Erica Harth, Cartesian Women: Versions and Subervions of Rational Order in the Old Regime (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). For Zanotti’s description of Bentivoglio Davia as la bella Cartesiana, see the Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio, Bologna (hereafter BCAB), B. 181, n. 99, 101–3, letter 30 (Francesco Maria Zanotti to Giovan Battista Morgagni, Bologna, 29 June 1723). BGR, Fondo Gambetti: Bianchi. Posizione: Davia Bentivoglio (Bologna, 24 June 1732). Henry Guerlac, Newton on the Continent (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981); Mary Terrall, The Man Who Flattened the Earth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). On the Venetian critique of Newton, see Ferrone, Intellectual Roots, pp. 89–99; and Alan Shapiro, ‘The Gradual Acceptance of Newton’s Theory of Light and Color, 1672–1727,’ Perspectives on Science 4 (1996): 59–140. Massimo Mazzotti, ‘Newtonianism for Ladies: Gender, Gentility, and Subversion,’ British Journal for the History of Science (forthcoming) offers an excellent discussion of the Bolognese response to Venetian antiNewtonianism. I thank him for allowing me to see it in advance of publication. Francesco Maria Zanotti, ‘De lapide bononiensi,’ De bononiensi scientiarum et artium Instituto atque Academiae. Commentarii 1 (1731): 181–205. See Walter Tega, ed., Anatomie accademiche. Vol. 1. I commentari dell’Accademia delle Scienze di Bologna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986), pp. 77–78; and Cavazza, Settecento inquieto, pp. 242–243, 249–56. On the broader context of this cultural transformation, see Arturo Graf, L’anglomania e l’inﬂusso inglese in Italia nel secolo XVIII (Turin: Ermanno Loescher, 1911). Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan (hereafter Ambr.), cod. Y 107 sup., c.162r (Francesco Maria Zanotti to Antonio Leprotti, 5 July 1732); c. 163r (idem, Il dì di S. Anna 1732). St. Anne’s feast day is July 26. First and third quotes in this paragraph are from the 5 July 1732 letter. Ambr., cod Y 102 sup., c. 88r (Zanotti to Leprotti, Bologna, 2 August 1728). Discorsi accademici di vari autori viventi intorno agli studi delle donne (Padua, 1729), p. 67. This famous debate is discussed in Luciano Guerci, La discussione sulla donna nel Settecento (Turin: Tirrenia, 1987); and Rebecca Messbarger, The Century of Women: Representations of Women in Eighteenth-Century Italian Public Discourse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). These developments will be more fully discussed in Findlen, In the Shadow of Newton: Laura Bassi and Her World (forthcoming). They are also discussed in many of the articles cited throughout this essay. See especially Francesco Ludovico Maschietto, Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia (1646–1684) prima donna laureata nel mondo (Padua: Editrice Antenore, 1978); and Jane Howard Guernsey, The Lady Cornaro: Pride and Prodigy of Venice (Clinton Corners, NY: College Avenue Press, 1999). For more on Laura Bassi, see Elio Melli, ‘Laura Bassi Veratti: ridiscussioni e nuovi spunti,’ in Alma mater studiorum. La presenza femminile dal XVIII al XX secolo (Bologna: CLUEB, 1988), pp. 71–9;Alberto Elena, ‘“In lode della filosofessa di Bologna”: An Introduction to Laura Bassi,’ Isis 82 (1991): 510–18; Paula Findlen, ‘Science as a Career in Enlightenment Italy: The Strategies of Laura Bassi,’ Isis 84 (1993): 441–69; Gabriella Berti Logan, ‘The Desire to Contribute: An Eighteenth Century Italian Woman of Science,’ American Historical Review 99 (1994): 785–812; Marta Cavazza, ‘Laura Bassi e il suo gabinetto di fisica sperimentale: realtà e mito,’ Nuncius 10 (1995): 715–53; idem, ‘Laura Bassi “maestra” di Spallanzani,’ in Il cerchio della vita, ed. Walter Bernardi and Paola Manzini (Florence: Olschki, 1999), pp. 185–202; Beate Ceranski, ‘Und sie fürchtet sich vor niemandem’: Die Physikerin Laura Bassi (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1996); and Findlen, ‘The Scientist’s Body: The Nature of a Woman Philosopher in Enlightenment

284 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

Italy,’ in The Faces of Nature in Enlightenment Europe, ed. Gianna Pomata and Lorraine Daston (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafs-Verlag, 2003), pp. 211–36. BCAB, Fondo Mondini, cartone 2, n. 19. My thanks to Marta Cavazza for generously sharing her discovery of this manuscript with me. Giovanni Bianchi’s observations to Antonio Leprotti about the tensions between Bentivoglio Davia and Bassi also confirm the idea that it was how Bassi presented herself that troubled the former; see BGR, Sc. Ms. 963, Lettere autografe di Giovanni Bianchi a Monsignor Leprotti dal 1733 al 1745, f. 14r. Joan DeJean, Ancients Against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). For an assessment of women’s roles in the eighteenth-century French Republic of Letters, see Dena Goodman, Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). There is no comparable study of salon life in the Italian peninsula, though a number of scholars are currently at work on these issues. BGR, Fondo Gambetti: Bianchi. Posizione: Davia Bentivoglio (Bologna, 5 March 1727). BCAB, B. 181, n. 99, 101–3, letter 30 (Francesco Maria Zanotti to Giovan Battista Morgagni, Bologna, 29 June 1723). See note 17. Paolo Mattia Doria, Ragionamenti di Paolo Mattia Doria indirizzati alla Signora D’Aurelia D’Este Duchessa di Limatola ne’ quali si dimostra la donna, in quasi che tutte le virtù più grandi, non essere all’uomo inferiore (Frankfurt, 1716), sig. a. 4v. See the eulogy of d’Este in the Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia 32 (1719): 506–13. Unfortunately her philosophical poetry does not seem to have survived. Queen Christina invited Descartes to Sweden in 1649, where he died a year later. Barbapiccola’s activities are discussed in Findlen, ‘Translating the New Science: Women and the Circulation of Knowledge in Enlightenment Italy,’ Configurations 2 (1995): 167–206; and Manuela Sanna, ‘Un’amicizia alla luce del cartesianesimo: Giuseppa Eleonora Barbapiccola e Luisa Vico,’ in Donne, filosofia e cultura nel Seicento, ed. Pina Totaro (Rome: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 1999), pp. 173–78. Giulia Belgioioso, Cultura a Napoli e cartesianismo. Scritti sul G. Gimma, P. M. Doria, C. Cominale (Galatina: Congedo Editore, 1992). Susanna Åkerman, Queen Christina and Her Circle: The Transformation of a SeventeenthCentury Philosophical Libertine (Leiden: Brill, 1991). On Christina’s scientific patronage, see especially W. E. K. Middleton, ‘Science in Rome, 1675–1700, and the Accademia Fisicomatematica of Giovanni Giustino Ciampini,’ British Journal for the History of Science 8 (1975): 138–54; and Wilma Di Palma et al., Cristina di Svezia. Scienza ed alchimia nella Roma barocca (Bari: Edizioni Dedalo, 1990); and Wilma di Palma, ‘Urania nel salotto di Cristina,’ in Cristina di Svezia e Roma, ed. Börje Magnusson (Stockholm: Swedish Institute in Rome, 1999), pp. 129–41. Giuseppa Eleonora Barbapiccola, ‘La traduttrice a’ lettori,’ I principi della filosofia di Renato Des-cartes tradotti dal francese col confronto del latino in cui l’autore gli scrisse (Turin, 1722), sig.++1r. Gabriel Maugain, ‘Fontenelle et l’Italie,’ Revue de littérature comparée 3 (1923): 541–603. For further analysis of the role of Fontenelle in inspiring certain kinds of conversations among men and women about science, see Findlen, ‘Becoming a Scientist: Gender and Knowledge in Enlightenment Italy,’ Science in Context 16 (2003): 59–88. Readers can consult the modern edition: Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, trans. H. A. Hargreaves (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Fausto Nicolini, ‘Tre amici bolognesi di Mons. Celestino Galiani. Benedetto XIV, il card. Davia, mons. Leprotti,’ Atti e memorie della Reale Deputazione di Storia Patria per le provincie di Romagna ser. 4, vol. 20 (1930): 123; Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna (hereafter BUB), ms. 3768: Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Trattenimenti sopra la pluralità dei mondi … Trasportati dall’idioma francese nell’italiano da R. G. nel 1730.

Aristocratic Women and Knowledge in Early Eighteenth-Century Italy 285 30. In many respects, Grillo Borromeo saw herself as an heir to Queen Christina. The most recent study of her life and work is Giuliana Parabiago, ‘Clelia Borromeo del Grillo,’ Correnti 1 (1998): 36–60. 31. Zanotti eventually would immortalize her role as an arbiter in the vis viva controversy; Francesco Maria Zanotti, Della forza de’ corpo che chiamano viva libri tre (Bologna, 1752). Pignatelli was admitted to the Bologna Academy in 1732, the ﬁrst woman and for quite some time the last woman after Laura Bassi to receive such an honor. Archivio dell’Accademia dell’Istituto delle Scienze, Bologna, Registro degli Atti dell’Accademia, n. 5 (20 November 1732). 32. Francesco Algarotti, Dialoghi sopra l’ottica neutoniana, ed. Ettore Bonora (Turin: Einaudi, 1977; 1969), p. 25. This edition is based on the Livorno 1764–65 Opere so readers should be aware of the fact that Algarotti continued to alter the text of his work in a series of editions following the 1737 original. Mazzotti, ‘Newtonianism for Ladies,’ offers a more detailed analysis of the text itself. 33. While inspired by his conversations with Voltaire and Émilie du Châtelet at her château at Cirey, Algarotti did not forget the Bolognese world of his youth and made repeated references to it through the Neutonismo. 34. Giuseppe Antonio Costantini, Lettere critiche, vol. 1, p. 96, in Luciano Guerci, La sposa obbediente. Donna e matrimonio nella discussione dell’Italia del Settecento (Turin: Tirrenia, 1988), p. 93. 35. On the female poets of this period, see Elisabetta Graziosi, Avventuriere a Bologna. Due storie esemplari (Modena: Mucchi, 1998). 36. BCAB, B. 1331, f.45r (Alessandro Macchiavelli, Delle donne bolognesi, 1741); BUB, ms. 4207, vol. 29, f. 170r (Lodovico Montefani Caprara, Delle famiglie bolognesi). The financial aspects of the marriage are itemized in Archivio di Stato, Bologna (hereafter ASB), Archivio Bentivoglio-Manzoli, ser. I, b. 28, fasc. 7 (6 September 1708). 37. Adolfo Albertazzi, La Contessa d’Almond (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1894), p. 220. On the Davia family, see Gian Paolo Brizzi, ‘Davia,’ Dizionario biografico italiano (Rome, 1987), vol. 33, pp. 124–5; and Alfeo Giacomelli, ‘La dinamica della nobiltà bolognese nel XVIII secolo,’ in Famiglie senatorie e istituzioni cittadine a Bologna nel Settecento (Bologna: Istituto per la storia di Bologna, 1980), pp. 67–71. 38. BUB, Cod. 559 (770) (Anton Francesco Ghiselli, Memorie antiche manoscritte di Bologna), vol. 63, f. 99. See the description of her wedding in Albertazzi, Contessa d’Almond, p. 225, as being more a wedding ‘dalla gente di piu umil rango, o da quelli che sposano delle donne puoco honeste’ than a ceremony befitting a Bentivoglio. Compare with the cases discussed in Silvana Seidel Menchi and Diego Quaglioni, eds, Matrimoni in dubbio. Unioni controverse e nozze clandestine in Italia dal XIV al XVIII secolo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001). 39. Mario Fanti, ‘Prospero Lambertini Archivescovo di Bologna (1731–40),’ in Benedetto XIV (Prospero Lambertini). Convegno internazionale di studi storici, ed. Marco Cecchelli (Cento: Centro Studi Girolamo Baruffaldi, 1981), vol. 1, p. 172. 40. Archivio Davia, Bologna, E. Lettere 1. 845 (Benedict XIV to Laura Bentivoglio Davia, Rome, 24 November 1753). This letter was written exactly one week after Davia’s death on 17 November. 41. In Albertazzi, Contessa d’Almond, p. 273 (Francesco Davia, Venice, 14 May 1716); BCAB, Gozz. 184 (Manifesto del Sig.r Marchese Davia sopra la pendenza del divorzio intrapreso della Sig.ra Marchese Laura Bentivoglio Davia sua consorte), cc. 137r–v. Davia’s difficult relationship with the family is recounted in BCAB, B. 235, f. 9 (Maria Cammilla Caprara Bentivoglio to cardinal Giovan Antonio Davia, Bagnarola, 19 October 1719). 42. The messy aspects of Bentivoglio Davia’s attempts to request a formal separation from her husband are recounted in BCAB, Gozz. 184, cc. 136v–138r; and BCAB, B. 43, n. 32, ff. 165–166; the financial arrangements are discussed in the Archivio Davia, B. Rogiti e documenti. 13. 145, ff. 18r, 22v, 23r. The circumstances of her separation can be profitably compared to the cases discussed in Silvana Seidel Menchi and Diego Quaglioni,

286 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

43.

44.

45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

50. 51.

eds., Coniugi nemici. La separazione in Italia dal XII al XVIII secolo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000). Gian Paolo Brizzi, ‘Giovanni Antonio Davia,’ Dizionario biografico italiano (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1987), vol. 33, pp. 127–30. For a careful study of Davia’s engagement with theological debates, see Marta Pierini Francini, ‘Da Clemente XII a Benedetto XIV: Il caso Davia (1734–1750),’ Rivista di storia della chiesa in Italia 37 (1983): 437–71. Davia’s role in the scientific academies of Bologna is briefly discussed in Cavazza, Settecento inquieto, p. 34. Cardinal Davia’s academy is discussed in Carlo Tonnini, La coltura letteraria e scientifica in Rimini dal secolo XIV ai primordi del XIX, ed. Paola Delbianco (Rimini: Luisé, 1988; 1884), pp. 214–16, 233–34. BCAB, Collezione degli Autografi XXIII. 6546–78 (Giovanni Antonio Davia to Eustachio Manfredi, Rimini, 1709–38). See especially 6551, 6552, 6559, and 6571. Tega, ed., Anatomie accademiche, vol. 1, p. 59. BCAB, Collezione degli Autografi XXIII. 6546–6778. On reading Galileo, see 6592 (Rimini, 23 September 1719); on reading Locke, see 6661 (Rimini, 12 December 1722). Ferrone, Intellectual Roots, p. 13. Archivio Davia, U. Inventario di bene. 7. 163 (‘Inventario della Biblioteca Davia fatto l’Anno 1741’). The description of the text does not make it clear which edition of the play, first performed in 1662, Davia owned. On its controversial status, see Joan DeJean, The Reinvention of Obscenity: Sex, Lies, and Tabloids in Early Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 84–121. Bianchi awaits a modern biography, but readers can get an introduction to the range of his activities by consulting Stefano De Carolis and Angelo Turchini, Giovanni Bianchi: medico primario di Rimini ed archiatra pontiﬁcio (Verucchio: P. G. Pazzini, 1999). Tonnini, La coltura letteraria e scientiﬁca, p. 238. BCAB, B. 181, n. 99, 101–3, letter 30 (Francesco Maria Zanotti to Giovan Battista Morgagni, Bologna, 29 June 1723): Mentre, o Laura, le vaghe eterne forme L’agile ingegno tuo medita, e volge, E quadri, e cerchi insiem mesce e rivolge, Acciochè l’un nell’altro si trasforme. E donde qualità prenda, e s’informe qualunque corpo, e le cause altre svolge, E per sentiero, ov’Uomo raro s’avvolge, Bella Cartesiana, imprimi l’orme; Parmi veder Virtute, e Leggiadria Con Natura allegrarsi, e la Beltate, Che per te sola ornar tutt’altre obblia: E dir: qual fra le donne alme, e pregiate Simil si vide a la gentil Davia Nella presente, o nell’antica etate?

52. 53. 54. 55.

A published version appears in Francesco Maria Zanotti, Poesie volgari, 2nd ed. (Bologna, 1757), p. 36; and idem, Opere (Bologna, 1779–1802), vol. 8, p. 28. See also his brother’s poetry on Bentivoglio Davia in Giampietro Zanotti, Poesie (Bologna, 1741), part 2, p. 248. Ambr., cod. Y 107 sup., cc. 1r–2v (Zanotti to Leprotti, Bologna, 28 July 1728). Ibid, c. 3r. (Di villa, 30 July 1723). BGR, Fondo Gambetti: Bianchi. Posizione: Davia Bentivoglio (11 January 1726). BACB. B. 180, lett. 17 (Francesco Maria Zanotti to Giampietro Zanotti, Russo, 13 June 1725). Curiously the editor of Zanotti’s Opere describes it as a letter to Eustachio Manfredi (vol. 9, p. 41). The second quote is from Ambr., cod. Y 107 sup., c. 22v

Aristocratic Women and Knowledge in Early Eighteenth-Century Italy 287

56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62.

63.

64. 65. 66. 67.

68.

69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

(Bologna, 12 January 1726) and literally is: ‘La Sig.ra March[e]sa Laura sento, che è nella Geometria ﬁno alla gola … .’ Ambr., cod. Y 107 sup., c.44r (Bologna, 1 January 1727). Ibid., c. 48v (Bologna, 25 January 1727), c. 68r (Bologna, 2 May 1727); c. 73r (Bologna, 10 October 1727). Ibid, c. 68r (Bologna, 2 May 1727). BGR, Fondo Gambetti: Bianchi. Posizione: Davia Bentivoglio (Bologna, 12 October 1731; Bologna, 24 June 1732). Unfortunately the letters don’t indicate the exact subject she was studying. BGR, Fondo Gambetti: Bianchi. Posizione: Davia Bentivoglio (Bologna, 12 October 1731). Ibid (Bologna, 24 June 1732). ASB, Archivio Bentivoglio-Manzoli, ser. II, n. 101. 26 (‘Attestazione da Giovanni Bianchi per Laura Da Via Bentivoglio,’ Rimini, 20 October 1736); see also Simone Cosmopolito (pseud. of Giovanni Bianchi), Epistola apologetica pro Jano Planco ad Anonymum Bononiensem (Rimini, 1745), pp. 21, 26. Cavazza, ‘“Dottrici” e lettrici dell’Università di Bologna nel Settecento,’ Annali di Storia delle Università Italiane 1 (1997): 109–26; Mazzotti, ‘Maria Gaetana Agnesi: The Unusual Life and Mathematical Work of an Eighteenth-Century Woman,’ Isis 92 (2001): 657–83; Findlen, ‘A Forgotten Newtonian: Women and Science in the Italian Provinces,’ in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, edited by William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 313–49; Rebecca Messbarger, ‘Waxing Poetic: Anna Morandi Manzolini’s Anatomical Sculptures,’ Conﬁgurations 9 (2001): 65–97. BGR, Fondo Gambetti: Bianchi. Posizione: Davia Bentivoglio (Bologna, 21 March 1733; and Bologna, 24 January 1750). Ibid. (Bologna, 23 May 1744). Findlen, ‘The Scientist’s Body.’ The publication of this work seems entirely in keeping with Bianchi’s reputation as the Boccaccio of eighteenth-century Italy, based on his circulation of unpublished novelle among friends in Bologna, Padua, and Modena. Maria D. Collina, Il carteggio letterario di uno scienziato del Settecento (Janus Plancus) (Florence: Olschki, 1957), pp. 137–53. His correspondence indicates that Laura Bentivoglio Davia received at least one of these stories in 1727. Giovanni Bianchi, Breve storia della vita di Catterina Vizzani Romana (Venice, 1744), p. 24. The history of this publication is further discussed in Clorinda Donato’s forthcoming article in Modern Language Notes; and in Paula Findlen, ‘Anatomy of a Lesbian: Medicine, Pornography, and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Italy’, in Italy’s Eighteenth Century: Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour, ed. Paula Findlen, Catherine Sama, and Wendy Roworth (forthcoming). Ceranski, ‘Il carteggio tra Giovani Bianchi e Laura Bassi, 1733–45,’ Nuncius 9 (1994): 230 (Bologna, 28 October 1744); BGR, Fondo Gambetti. Lettere al Giovanni Bianchi. Posizione: Davia Bentivoglio (Bologna, 30 September 1744). Ceranski, ‘Il carteggio,’ p. 231 (Bologna, 27 October 1745). BGR, Fondo Gambetti: Bianchi. Posizione: Davia Bentivoglio (7 March 1726). Ibid. (Bologna, 15 August 1739). Ibid. (Bologna, 21 March 1733). Ibid. (Bologna, 15 July 1733; and 15 July 1739). Ibid. (Bologna, 23 October 1745; 24 October 1750). Ibid. (Bologna, 30 October 1745; 26 February 1752). Ibid. (Bologna, 24 June 1747). See Barbara Duden, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth Century Germany, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).

5.2 ‘The noblest commerce of mankind’: Conversation and Community in the Bluestocking Circle Elizabeth Eger

Hail, Conversation, heavenly fair, Thou bliss of life, and balm of care! Calls forth the long-forgotten knowledge Of school, of travel, and of college! The sage consumes his midnight oil; And keeps late vigils, to produce Materials for thy future use. If none behold, ah! wherefore fair? Ah! wherefore wise, if none must hear? Our intellectual ore must shine, Not slumber, idly in the mine. Let Education’s moral mint The noblest images imprint; Let taste her curious touchstone hold, To try if standard be the gold; But ‘tis thy commerce, Conversation, Must give it use by circulation; That noblest commerce of mankind, Whose precious merchandise is MIND! Hannah More, from ‘Bas Bleu, or Conversation. Addressed to Mrs Vesey’ (1786)1 Hannah More’s ‘Bas Bleu, or Conversation’ provides a distilled description of the social practice and moral beliefs of the bluestocking circle, a rare monument to the nature of their achievement. Dr Johnson considered the work to be ‘in my Opinion a Very Great performance’, adding that ‘there is no name in poetry, that might not be glad to own it’.2 First published in 1786, by Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill printing press, ‘Bas Bleu’ was probably written in the middle of the 1770s, when More ﬁrst met Elizabeth Montagu, ‘Queen of the Bluestockings’.3 More’s poem is a celebratory memorial of a particular intellectual community, ﬁrst formed in the 1750s around the prominent hostesses Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Vesey (to whom More’s poem is addressed) and Frances Boscawen. The 288

Conversation and Community in the Bluestocking Circle 289

bluestockings continued to meet well into the 1780s with a second generation of hostesses and societies appearing in London and the provinces. The phrase ‘bluestocking’ was originally used to abuse Puritans of Cromwell’s ‘Little Parliament’ in 1653. It was revived in 1756 when Benjamin Stillingﬂeet appeared at one of Elizabeth Montagu’s assemblies wearing blue worsted stockings, normally the garb of working men.4 The term ‘bluestocking’ came to be applied more generally to all Montagu’s visitors, who included the self-made Dr Johnson, clergyman’s daughter Elizabeth Carter, James Boswell, Edmund Burke, David Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Horace Walpole, Lord Lyttleton, the Earl of Bath and later Frances Burney, Anna Barbauld and Hannah More. As Betty Schellenberg and Nicole Pohl have recently pointed out: ‘these informal gatherings united men and women primarily of the gentry and upper classes, with the participation of numbers of more middle-class professionals, in the pursuit of intellectual improvement, polite sociability, the reﬁnement of the arts through patronage, and national stability through philanthropy.’5 More’s poem celebrates these ideals as the basis of civic virtue in a liberal society, conveying an effervescent enthusiasm for Enlightenment as a mode of being, a practice rather than an abstract philosophy. Learning is a value to be displayed and exchanged through conversation, which forms the ‘bliss of life’ and the ‘balm of care’. The title of the poem itself conveys the inextricable relationship between conversation and bluestocking culture, insofar as they are presented as equivalents. Through a close reading of More’s poem, this essay will discuss the bluestocking circle’s investment in conversation as an Enlightenment ideal, ‘the noblest commerce of mankind’, exploring the various ways in which women promoted conversation as a tool of moral and intellectual reform. ‘Bas Bleu, or Conversation’ encapsulates a particular mission to improve, selfconsciously advertising a belief in the possibilities offered by conversation as a means of asserting social and intellectual equality for women, of overcoming the restrictions of aristocratic decorum through a new form of sociability. The status women enjoyed as a sensitive and civilising inﬂuence over men in polite society has been widely acknowledged, both during the eighteenth century and subsequently.6 As Mary Catherine Moran argues elsewhere in this volume, the association of women with civilisation was an eighteenth-century idea, differing from the previous association of woman and nature. The privatisation of virtue and the attempt to offer an account of morality based on the proper management of passions, rather than purely on reason, gave greater public value to the feminine qualities of sympathy, charity and empathy. Philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, in particular, placed a new emphasis on the morally superior nature of woman in accounts of the progress of man. The female emerged as a vital element in contemporary attempts to moralise the public sphere. The bluestocking emphasis on the power of conversation should be viewed against this broader context of Enlightenment historiography, in which the rise of commercial society depended upon the reﬁnement of both sexes. Moran emphasises women’s social role in bringing private and public worlds together in a modernising commercial society, ﬁnding evidence that contemporary

290 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

historians such as John Millar and Lord Kames valued women’s ability to create ‘an intermediary social sphere that was thought to guarantee both civic and domestic virtue.’7 Jane Rendall, however, in her essay in this section of this volume, warns against making any sharp distinctions between public and private worlds in researching women’s participation in past political and intellectual culture, arguing that it might be necessary to transcend such stark divisions in order to understand fully the nature of women’s activity. I would argue that bluestocking women could be seem to share a similar impulse to transcend the traditional dichotomies of social organisation. Conversation, as a discursive space, is poised between private and public realms. Bluestocking conversation both elevated private concerns to the level of public signiﬁcance, and incorporated public spirit into the home. Bluestocking assemblies managed to cross the divide between public and private spheres, creating a unique blend of domestic, political and intellectual culture. As Harriet Guest has pointed out, Elizabeth Montagu was valued by her contemporaries for managing to transcend political factionalism, while nevertheless achieving political ends in that she removed men from their political context, ‘reconﬁrming their identities as what Habermas calls “human beings pure and simple,” as private men who participate in the literary public sphere.’8 As I have argued elsewhere, female correspondence and patronage, conversation’s parallel and interrelated networks of signiﬁcance, form important bridging discourses in the ﬁeld of literary history and interpretation more broadly, particularly in relation to our conception of the relation between private and public spheres.9 Here I will focus on speciﬁc bluestocking innovations surrounding the use of space in relation to conversation, inside and beyond the walls of their assemblies. The bluestockings inevitably invite comparison with their French counterparts, the salonnières, about whom Dena Goodman has written so persuasively, in that they too promoted notions of polite, enlightened behaviour through the practice of conversation.10 In sympathy with Goodman’s analysis of French culture, I am concerned to establish the links between conversation and writing, which have not yet been fully explored in the British context.11 The bluestocking circle developed the art of conversation as a form of rational exchange that was particularly valuable to women, not only as leading participants in the mixed society of metropolitan culture, but also as writers and educators. The link between speech and writing arguably had more urgent implications for female than for male intellectuals of the period.

Displays of learning: conversation in the bluestocking salon Women’s efforts to be taken seriously, and to re-shape contemporary attitudes to public space, should be seen in the context of a society which in general remained highly suspicious of intellectual women. From the end of the seventeenth century various attempts to promote conversation between the sexes were made in the pages of the periodical press and contemporary educational and conduct literature.12 However, in broad social terms women were expected to conﬁne themselves to a narrow and superﬁcial range of issues speciﬁc to their

Conversation and Community in the Bluestocking Circle 291

sex and were frowned upon if thought to be too eager to engage in rational discourse. Most households of the middling and upper classes segregated the sexes for conversation after dinner. Conduct books advised women to conceal their learning if they desired to attract a husband, recommending a model of passive virtue based on sublimation, silence and submission.13 The severity of restrictions imposed can be ascertained from the following extract from a novel by Sarah Maese, published in 1766, which praises older women who talk about learned subjects in mixed company: Those who do so are of service to their sex, as they will in time emancipate us from the fetters laid on our conversation; and by rendering such subjects more common in mixed company, will make discourse more rational, and prevent the charge of pedantry from being so liberally applied to any young woman, who ventures to stray from the triﬂing topics generally assigned to us; but my young friends, I would have you wait till this change is effected, before you indulge yourselves in the most moderate display of your reading; for more than the most moderate, even custom could not sanctify.14 Here the public ‘display’ of reading is considered dangerous and female speech is ‘fettered’. Maese offers a vivid picture of the claustrophobic restrictions placed upon women in the culture of the drawing-room. The standard inequality in contemporary social life was also commented on wryly by Elizabeth Carter, in a letter to Montagu: As if the two sexes had been in a state of war, the gentlemen ranged themselves on one side of the room, where they talked their own talk, and left us poor ladies to twirl our shuttles, and amuse each other, by conversing as we could. By what little I could overhear, our opposites were discoursing on the old English poets, and this subject did not seem so much beyond a female capacity, but that we might have been indulged with a share of it.15 Indeed, the discussion of ‘old English poets’ was arguably particularly suited to women, who were important contributors to a new sense of national literary identity. Elizabeth Montagu, for example, appealed to patriotic pride in being the only writer to address directly Voltaire’s criticisms of Shakespeare in her acclaimed Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare, with some Remarks on the Misrepresentations of Msr Voltaire, published in 1769, entering a critical dialogue avoided by her male contemporaries.16 Elizabeth Carter was famous for having deﬁed standard assumptions of ‘female capacity’ by making her living as a classical scholar. Her translation of Epictetus remained the standard English version until the beginning of the twentieth century. Conversant as she was in several languages, including Portuguese and Arabic, a little light discourse on the English poets would hardly have presented a challenge. In drawing attention to existing social boundaries, Carter and Maese’s comments nevertheless suggest the possibility of their dissolution – Maese looks

292 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

forward to a time of greater freedom. The bluestocking circle’s correspondence is often characterised by a similar urge towards emancipation. In 1769 Elizabeth Montagu wrote to her friend Elizabeth Carter: My imagination without wing or broomstick oft mounts aloft, rises into the Regions of pure space, & without lett or impediment bears me to your ﬁreside, where you set me in your easy chair, & we talk & reason, as Angel Host & guest Aetherial should do, of high & important matters. We will not deign to say a word of Mobs or Ministers; of fashions or the fashionable; of the Great who are without Greatness, or the little who are less than their littleness. Pray say you don’t let us talk nonsense! no my dear friend, nor will we talk sense, for that is worse. We shall say what has not been said before, or if the substance be old, the mode & ﬁgure shall be new.17 With its sense of space and freedom, and its utopian impulse, this intimate passage is perhaps exemplary of bluestocking ideas of conversation. Here the reader can sense Montagu’s self-conscious attitude to writing, and to conversation, and her effort to carve out a space in which the ‘mode and ﬁgure shall be new’. Furthermore, both Montagu and Carter’s sense of being bluestockings, of doing something new, of enlarging what they termed their ‘sphere of action’, existed within a self-conscious sense of bluestocking community. Their feeling of the expansive possibilities of self was inseparable from their sense of belonging to a group providing mutual support, identity, and friendship. This community existed in the ephemeral and imaginative realm of private correspondence but also took more precise physical shape in the salons, or assemblies, of the chief bluestocking hostesses, Elizabeth Montagu and her friend Mrs Vesey, known in bluestocking circles as ‘the Sylph’. Both women were renowned for the atmosphere of ease and elegance which they created in their homes as a congenial backdrop for conversation on literary subjects.18 As critics have noted, their emphasis on conversation between the sexes was not radical but rather aimed to build upon and consolidate new ways of thinking about the relation between private and public life, responding, in particular, to notions of civic virtue explored in the work of Addison, Shaftesbury and Hume.19 Addison’s famous statement of intent in the Spectator is relevant: ‘It was said of Socrates, that he brought Philosophy down from heaven, to inhabit among Men; and I shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables, and in Coffee-Houses.’20 As Deborah Heller has recently pointed out in her discussion of salons and the public sphere, the bluestockings were certainly inspired by Shaftesbury’s model but their mode of interaction was signiﬁcantly different. While Shaftesbury limited his deﬁnition of ‘free conversation’ to a select group of aristocratic men, gentlemen of the club, bluestockings insisted on a far greater degree of social diversity.21 The term ‘bluestocking’, with its associations of manual labour, itself signiﬁes the opposite of Shaftesbury’s aristocratic male. One of the most signiﬁcant ways in which the bluestockings adapted Shaftesbury’s and

Conversation and Community in the Bluestocking Circle 293

Addison’s models of polite conversation in order to overcome the superﬁcialities of fashion was through their self-conscious re-organisation of space in order to allow for greater social diversity. Elizabeth Montagu described Elizabeth Vesey’s talent for creating concord from discord in a revealing letter to Elizabeth Carter: I delight already in the prospect of the blue box in which our Sylph assembles all the heterogenous natures in the World; and indeed in many respects resembles Paradise, for there the Lion sits down by the Lamb, the Tyger dandles the Kid; the sly scotchman and the etourdi Hibernian, the Hero and the Maccaroni, the vestal and the demi-rep, the Mungo of Ministry and the inﬂexible partisans of incorruptible Patriots, Beaux esprits and ﬁne Gentleman, all gather together under the downy wing of the Sylph, and are soothed into good humour: were she to withdraw her inﬂuence for a moment, discord would reassume her reign and we should hear the angry clashing of swords, the angry ﬂirting of fans, and Sr Andrew and Sr Patrick gabbling in dire confusion the different dialects of the Erse language. Methinks I see our Sylph moving in her circle, and by some unknown attraction keeping the whole system in due order. By what art does she thus satisfy the pride of Duchesses, the conceit of Authors, the arrogance of Statesmen, the vanity of beauties, and the unquiet spirits of Coquettes? for no one leaves her assembly till the Watchman has given repeated warnings to withdraw! I have as much in art of this as she, but cannot make things thus; if I should get all these contraries and contrarieties into my house every evening, ﬁve or six duels, and ﬁve or six libels would be the consequence every winter.22 Montagu emphasises Vesey’s gift for promoting conversation, creating harmony from diversity. Emma Major has recently read this passage as an expression of polite patriotism, emphasising its millennial references, its union between religion and civilization, as indicative of bluestocking public ambition.23 Vesey’s apparent artlessness was infact a calculated attempt to deﬁne her assemblies against those of Montagu, who arranged her guests in large circle or semi-circle in order to promote unity of conversation. Vesey favoured a ‘random’ arrangement of small groups, thus hoping to erase the formal aspects of literary assemblies in favour of more relaxed company. Hannah More, who addressed ‘Bas Bleu’ to her in a gesture of approval and respect, refers to her innovations in the poem: See VESEY’S plastic genius make A Circle every ﬁgure take; Nay, shapes and forms which wou’d defy All science of Geometry; Isoceles, and Parallel, Names hard to speak, and hard to spell! Her potent wand the Circle broke; The social Spirits hover round,

294 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

And bless the liberated ground. Ask you what charms this gift dispense? ‘Tis the strong spell of Common Sense. Away fell ceremony ﬂew, And with her bore Detraction too. (lines 140–53) Vesey’s ‘plastic genius’ was sometimes in danger of becoming a parody of itself, as Fanny Burney observed: Her fears were so great of the horror, as it was styled, of a circle, from the ceremony and awe which it produced, that she pushed all the small sofas, as well as chairs, pell-mell about the apartments, so as not to leave even a zigzag of communication free from impediment: and her greatest delight was to place the seats back to back, so that those who occupied them could perceive no more of their nearest neighbour than if the parties had been sent into different rooms: an arrangement that could only be eluded by such a twisting of the neck as to threaten the interlocutors with a spasmodic affection. While Burney conveys the absurdity of Vesey’s interventions, she ultimately emphasises the ‘zest and originality’ of her parties, But there was never any distress beyond risibility: and the company that was collected was so generally of a superior cast, that talents and conversation soon found – as when do they miss it? – their own level: and all these extraneous whims merely served to give zest and originality to the assemblage.24 Once again, conversation acts as a leveller, binding the company together. The delicate balance of fashionable and intellectual polish required by bluestocking society is conveyed in Hester Thrale’s concise description of Elizabeth Montagu: ‘Brilliant in diamonds, solid in judgment, critical in talk.’25 Reading the correspondence of the time, one is struck by the overpowering nature of contemporary visual ornament at polite assemblies, where the impressions created by dress, furniture and paintings were an integral part of the occasion. More’s depiction of conversation as a form of currency that increases in value through circulation is redolent of a thriving commercial society in which new goods had transformed social space. Bluestocking meetings took place in rooms rich with sensation for the eyes, ears and tongue. More describes conversation as a contemporary ‘Goddess of the social hour’: Still be thy nightly offerings paid, Libations large of Limonade! On silver Vases, loaded, rise The biscuits’ ample sacriﬁce! Nor be the milk-white streams forgot

Conversation and Community in the Bluestocking Circle 295

Of thirst-assuaging, cool orgeat; Rise, incense pure from fragrant Tea, Delicious incense, worthy Thee! (lines 224–31) Orgeat, a cooling syrup made from barley, almonds and orange-ﬂower water, serves here as a synecdoche for an increasingly luxurious yet sophisticated urban lifestyle. Like tea and lemonade, it was one of the newly fashionable drinks originating from the East – exotic, yet not intoxicating. While More evokes the delicate sensual pleasures of metropolitan life, she emphasises the moral superiority and reforming zeal of the bluestocking attitude to manners: ‘Let Education’s moral mint/The noblest images imprint.’ She contrasts the bas bleu meetings with the ‘tainted affectation and false taste’ of the Hotel de Rambouillet, the seventeenth-century Parisian salon, and also with her contemporary society, where ‘Cosmetic powers’ and ‘polish, ton and graces’ rule the day. For her, the most impressive sort of display is that of intellect, not dress or jewels. The bluestocking zest for knowledge exceeded their thirst for liquid refreshment. Conversation was perceived as an alternative and higher form of social pursuit, which should replace more empty modes of entertainment. Hester Chapone deﬁned its importance thus: I have always considered the universal practice of card-playing as particularly pernicious in this respect, that, whilst it keeps people perpetually in company, it excludes conversation. The hours that are spent in society may be made, not only the most agreeable, but perhaps the most useful of any, provided our companions are well chosen. […] it seems almost impossible that an evening should pass in mutual endeavours to entertain each other, without something being struck out, that would in some degree enlighten the mind. If we are not instructed by what we hear, we may at least derive some advantage from the exercise of our own powers, from being obliged to recollect and produce what we know or what we think on the topics which arise; and while the mind is thus kept in action, tho’ perhaps on subjects not very important, it is certainly more likely to acquire some vigour, than whilst its attention is conﬁned to a hand of cards.26 Conversation is cast in terms of a discipline, which must be practised regularly to strengthen the mind. In her description of Montagu’s ‘Bas Bleu Societies’, ‘still famous in the annals of conversation’, Fanny Burney describes her experiment in social control, in which diversity was cherished, as at the parties of Elizabeth Vesey, but hierarchy was perhaps more apparent: At Mrs Montagu’s the semi-circle that faced the ﬁre retained during the whole evening its unbroken form, with a precision that made it seem described by a Brobdingnagian compass. The lady of the castle commonly placed herself at the upper end of the room, near the commencement of the curve, so as to be

296 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

courteously visible to all her guests; having the person of the highest rank, or consequence, properly on one side, and the person the most eminent for talents, sagaciously on the other, or as near to her chair and her converse as her favouring eye and a complacent bow of the head could invite him to that distinction. Her conversational powers were of a truly superior order: strong, just, clear, and often eloquent. Her process in argument, notwithstanding an earnest solicitude for pre-eminence, was uniformly polite and candid.27 Montagu was famous for her semi-circle, in which conversation was necessarily uniﬁed and controlled. While Burney notes the presence of guests eminent in both rank and talent, she suggests that there is nevertheless a hierarchy of sorts in that people vie for Montagu’s attention, eager to receive her ‘favouring eye’. She also conveys the huge size of Montagu’s circle by referring to Swift’s fabulous region of Brobdingnag, where everything was gigantic. Hannah More also had reservations about the formality of Montagu’s drawing-room and the overwhelming size of her assemblies, regretting with Mrs Boscawen, ‘that so many suns could not possibly shine at one time; but we are to have a smaller party where, from fewer luminaries, there may emanate a clearer, steadier, and more beneﬁcial light.’28 Her moralised vocabulary of enlightenment suggests the active sense in which she viewed conversation as a means of radiating a particular kind of improving knowledge. Such reﬁned levels of spatial innovation were perhaps linked to women’s particular sensitivity to the gendered politics of social display. Women were inevitably aware of the tensions between inward and outward displays of learning, and between the solid and ephemeral signs of knowledge. They were also conscious of the uncomfortable relationship between knowledge and conventional ideas of female beauty. The physical space that provided the context of their conversation was something that they could control and manipulate to their own advantage. In More’s picture of conventional society, the female voice was stiﬂed and lost: […T]h’ astonish’d guest Back in a corner slinks, distrest; Scar’d at the many bowing round, And shock’d at her own voice’s sound, Forgot the thing she meant to say, Her words, half utter’d, die away; In sweet oblivion down she sinks, And of her ten appointments thinks. (lines 114–21) At the bluestocking assemblies, however, there is room for expression. More stresses the importance of balancing various types of knowledge in such assemblies, which are made up of a mixed body of individuals: Here sober Duchesses are seen, Chaste Wits, and Critics void of spleen;

Conversation and Community in the Bluestocking Circle 297

Physicians, fraught with real science, And Whigs and Tories in alliance; Poets, fulﬁlling Christian duties, Just Lawyers, reasonable Beauties; Bishops who preach, and Peers who pray, And Countesses who seldom play; Learned Antiquaries, who, from college, Reject the rust, and bring the knowledge; And, hear it, age, believe it, youth, Polemics, really seeking truth; And travellers of that rare tribe, Who’ve seen the places they’ve described; Ladies who point, nor think me partial, An Epigram as well as MARTIAL; Yet in all female worth succeed, As well as those who cannot read. (lines 168–85) In this celebration of social diversity, More’s style is playful and verging on the satiric. The above extract is double-edged in its social observation, managing to mock while it reassures the potentially sceptical reader. The fact that she presents the female intellectual as maintaining the standard virtues of her illiterate counterpart is a measure of the contemporary prejudice against learning in women, which was associated with slipshod appearance and morals. An argument common to several women who wrote on female education in this period was that learning was an investment for the future, which did not threaten virtue. Unlike the excesses of fashionable display encouraged in young ladies to attract husbands, a good education could only grow in worth and usefulness as the years went by. More betrays a concern to reassure the reader that women’s inﬂuence will facilitate the existing order of things rather than overturn it. And yet in acknowledging their potential to subvert the existing order, she hints at the difﬁculty inherent in women’s public identity as writers.

Beyond the walls of the salon: education and the bluestocking literary community Bluestocking innovations in the social sphere of the salon permeated the broader intellectual culture beyond its walls, contributing to the deﬁnition of contemporary literary public life. Elizabeth Montagu’s house was something of a literary headquarters in London. Aspiring authors desired admission to the famous semi-circle, to absorb the rays of her inﬂuence. Nathanial Wraxall’s Memoirs provide a glimpse of her stature. An ambitious writer himself, Wraxall was keen to be accepted: At the time of which I speak, the ‘Gens de Lettres,’ or ‘Blue Stockings,’ as they were commonly denominated, formed a very numerous, powerful, compact

298 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

Phalanx, in the midst of London. Mrs Montagu was then the Madame du Deffand of the English Capital; and her house constituted the central point of union, for all those persons who were known, or who emulated to become known, by their talents and productions.29 Wraxall concludes by paying homage to the unique quality of Montagu’s assemblies: She was constantly surrounded by all that was distinguished for attainments or talents, male or female, English or foreign; and it would be almost ungrateful in me not to acknowledge the gratiﬁcation, derived from the conversation and intercourse of such society.30 While critical of her wealth, Wraxall is ultimately impressed, like Hannah More, by Montagu’s ‘conversation and intercourse’ and her undeniable cultural capital. Montagu’s intellectual status, wealth and patronage undoubtedly drew writers into her circle. More signiﬁcantly, she propelled little-known female writers, who might not otherwise have ventured forth, into the literary public sphere. Bluestocking hostesses were pioneers in encouraging women from a diversity of backgrounds to participate in print culture. Over the course of Elizabeth Montagu’s life her assemblies became associated with the promotion of women’s education, even sought out as a place where women supported each other’s literary endeavours. As we have seen, her salon formed a semi-public arena in which women could freely exercise their opinions on the most pressing topics of the day and form important connections with literary and political men in power. Montagu formed a link between salon culture and London literary life, acting as an intermediary between authors and their public. Perceiving that her duty to do good might extend into the emerging professional literary arena, she made it her business to support women in particular.31 Montagu’s large income, derived from her carefully managed coal mines in the north, allowed her to grant annuities to Elizabeth Carter, Hester Chapone, Sarah Fielding and her sister, Sarah Scott. She also gave money to several charities on a regular basis.32 Hannah More described her as ‘the female Maecenas of Hill Street.’33 The bluestocking community itself came to represent female scholarship in the public imagination. Its members cultivated this aspect of their identity by emphasising the reforming mission of the group to provide better education for women and to offer support for female authors. More describes their goals thus: Yet not from low desire to shine Does Genius toil in Learning’s Mine; Not to indulge in idle vision, But strike new light by strong collision. O’er books, the mind inactive lies, Books, the mind’s food, not exercise Her vigorous wing she scarcely feels, ‘Till use the latent strength reveals;

Conversation and Community in the Bluestocking Circle 299

Her slumbering energies call’d forth, She rises, conscious of her worth; And, at her new-found powers elated, Thinks them not rous’d, but new created. (lines 264–75) In this new world, the feminine personiﬁcation of ‘mind’ is proud and noble, rekindled from the ashes of contemporary neglect. More describes the complicity and recognition between the members of the ‘bas bleu’ as something alchemical and later, ‘electric’: But sparks electric only strike On souls electrical alike; The ﬂash of Intellect expires, Unless it meets congenial ﬁres. The language to th’Elect alone Is, like the Mason’s mystery, known; In vain th’unerring sign is made To him who is not of the Trade. What lively pleasure to divine, The thought implied, the hinted line, To feel Allusion’s artful force, And trace the Image to its source! Quick Memory blends her scatter’d rays, ‘Till fancy kindles at the blaze; The works of ages start to view, And ancient Wit elicits new. (lines 286–301) More’s description bursts with the energy of ‘lively pleasure’, suggesting the sense of privilege amongst those admitted to such ‘congenial ﬁres’. Her allusion to Freemasonry suggests a rhetorical emphasis on fraternity, equality, and religious toleration, and the capacity of reason to effect political and moral regeneration, a programme which has obvious afﬁnities with the social aims of the bluestocking sorority.34 While it is impossible to assert speciﬁc links between women writers and freemasons in this period, one can acknowledge the analogous relationship between these groups, both of whom were committed to social change and analysis. Hester Chapone’s essay ‘On Conversation’ conveys the sense in which speech was considered a ‘sphere of action’ available to women: When we are considering what are the means of doing good entrusted to us, perhaps the sphere of conversation is seldom thought of; yet surely it gives ample scope for the exertion of that active principle of beneﬁcence in which true virtue consists; and it is a sphere of action from which not station or circumstances can exclude us.35

300 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

Once again, conversation is deﬁned as an active moral virtue that is particularly suited to feminine social practice. The bluestocking belief in conversation’s reforming power was linked to their investment in an idea of female community supported by charity and social compassion. Sarah Scott, Elizabeth Montagu’s sister, depicted such a community in her utopian novel, Millenium Hall [sic]. Scott’s heroines advocated the bluestocking philosophy of rational self-improvement through conversation: You will pity us perhaps because we have no cards, no assemblies, no plays, no masquerades, in this solitary place. The ﬁrst we might have if we chose it, nor are they totally disclaimed by us; but while we can with safety speak our own thoughts, and with pleasure read those of wiser persons, we are not likely to be often reduced to them.36 Scott develops in ﬁction the earlier feminism of Mary Astell’s Serious Proposal to the Ladies, offering a utopian vision of a harmonious group of women who, secluded from the public gaze, produce a cottage industry through various arts, manufactures and acts of charity.37 In Scott’s deﬁnition of society, bonds of rational friendship are conceived as the foundation of collective happiness: However fortune may have set us above any bodily wants, the mind will still have many which would drive us into society. Reason wishes for communication and improvement; benevolence longs for objects on which to exert itself; the social comforts of friendship are so necessary to our happiness, that it would be impossible not to endeavour to enjoy them. In sickness the languor of our minds makes us wish for the amusements of conversation; in health the vivacity of our spirits leads us to desire it. The ‘mental enjoyments’ of the bluestocking circle relied on the free communication of thought between equals. Elizabeth Montagu wrote to her friend Elizabeth Vesey, that ‘Heaven is always represented as a society.’38 Sarah Scott envisions such a utopia in prose. Both sisters were instrumental in allowing women the ‘valuable gift’ of speech, bestowing the means by which their voices might be used in an active sense.39 From being viewed as mediating and socialising ﬁgures, the bluestockings came to be considered and represented as a literary community in the public sphere. Their reforming attitude to literature and sociability should be understood in the context of pleas for better education for women.40 Later and more radical writers, such as Anna Barbauld and Mary Wollstonecraft, were arguably inspired by the bluestocking model, seeking out the conversation of men as equals. While diverging from bluestocking values in many signiﬁcant respects, Wollstonecraft and Barbauld might nevertheless be seen to inherit bluestocking culture’s emphasis on female advancement through dialogue. Both authors addressed the education of women as a speciﬁc social and political mission, using simple, instructional dialogues to form moral lessons in their early educational writings.41 The title

Conversation and Community in the Bluestocking Circle 301

of Barbauld’s Female Speaker (1811), an educational anthology of literature for young women, asserts the ‘valuable gift’ of speech ﬁrst championed by Scott, Chapone and their bluestocking sisters.42 *** As theorists and practitioners of conversation, in the salon and in writing, the bluestockings created a strong sense of community between women. By reforming the social habits of their peers, replacing cards and polite gossip with serious intellectual conversation, they were explicitly concerned to educate women, and implicitly to change contemporary attitudes to the relationship between idleness and work, leisure and scholarship. In becoming published authors, they extended their enthusiasm for learning into the public sphere of literary production.43 By listening to bluestocking discourse on the nature of conversation it becomes possible not only to see a moral and intellectual community of enormous importance to Enlightenment culture, but also to expand the ﬁeld of literary study beyond its usual generic parameters. As Clare Brant has recently argued, the feminist recuperation of eighteenthcentury women’s writing has tended to focus on the novel and poetry at the expense of genres of more uncertain status, such as memoirs, miscellanies, essays, life-writings and dialogues.44 Conversation, as I hope I have shown, could arguably be added to this list. As Brant argues, the conversational model allowed women to develop an ironic relation to their own writing, and to their contemporary culture and its institutions. Moreover, several bluestockings published satirical comments on their society’s treatment of women, learning and the church in the form of literary dialogues. The form naturally lent itself to the play of different voices, allowing a freedom denied by a uniﬁed narrative voice. Close to drama and letters, dialogues could explore the contrasts between divergent viewpoints and different historical eras to comic effect. Elizabeth Montagu’s Dialogues of the Dead, for example, convey a moral message with dramatic economy and satirical bite.45 Whether between Mercury and a modern Fine Lady; Plutarch, Charon and a Modern Bookseller; Hercules and Cadmus, these conversations share the ability to exploit a counterpoint of ideas. Montagu was just one among many female exponents of this literary form, who included Catherine Talbot, Hester Thrale, Anna Barbauld and Hannah More.46 Bluestocking experiments in writing literary dialogues, which often subvert contemporary political and sexual prejudice, would provide a rich topic for another essay. Here, ﬁnally, it is worth noting that Montagu’s Dialogues of the Dead, like More’s poem ‘Bas Bleu’, was originally written in an intimate context for a semi-private circle of friends. However, both works became known and widely read beyond the bluestocking circle, a fact which urged Montagu and More to publish.47 The journey of these texts across the boundary between private and public spheres can be seen as analogous to the unique ability of conversation not only to bridge and connect the two realms, but also to open a new intellectual space for Enlightenment women.

302 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

Notes 1 Hannah More, ‘Bas Bleu, or, Conversation. Addressed to Mrs Vesey’, Selected Writings of Hannah More, ed. Robert Hole (London, 1996) p. 32, lines 239–52. Hereafter, line numbers will be cited in the text. 2. Alice C. C. Gaussen, A Later Pepys: The Correspondence of Sir William Weller Pepys, 2 vols (London, 1904), p. 47. 3. For the life of Hannah More, see Anne Stott, Hannah More: the First Victorian (Oxford, 2003), Patricia Demers, The World of Hannah More (Lexington, Kentucky, 1996) and M.G. Jones, Hannah More (Cambridge, 1952). For the life and significance of Elizabeth Montagu, see Sylvia Myers, The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship and the Life of the Mind (Oxford, 1990) and Elizabeth Eger, ed., Elizabeth Montagu, vol. 1, Bluestocking Feminism, Gen. Ed. Gary Kelly, 6 vols (London, 1999). 4. White silk hose was the mark of the gentry, or of a successful London tradesman; blue knitted wool was the dress of the working man. See: Anne Buck, Dress in EighteenthCentury England (New York: Homes & Meier, 1979), 31. One of Stillingfleet’s earliest publications was, incidentally, An Essay on Conversation (London, 1737), an enthusiastic if plodding poem on the merits of rational interaction: We see, when Reason stagnates in the Brain, The Dregs of Fancy cloud its purest Vein; But Circulation betwixt Mind and Mind Extends its Course, and renders it reﬁn’d. (pp. 18–19) 5. Nicole Pohl and Betty Schellenberg, eds, Reconsidering the Bluestockings (San Marino, California: Huntington Library Publications, 2003), Introduction, p. 2. 6. See Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘The Enlightenment Debate on Women’, History Workshop Journal 20, Autumn (1985), pp. 101–23; and ‘Reﬂections on the History of the Science of Woman.’ in Marina Benjamin, ed., A Question of Identity: Women, Science and Literature (New Jersey, 1993). See also the essays in Section 2 of this volume, in particular Mary Catherine Moran, ‘Between the Savage and the Civil: Dr John Gregory’s Natural History of Femininity’. John Gregory and Elizabeth Montagu were friends – he accompanied her on a tour of Scotland in 1766. His daughter, Dorothy Gregory, lived with Montagu after her father’s death in 1773 until her marriage to the Scottish clergyman and writer on taste, Archibald Alison, in 1784. 7. See Mary Catherine Moran, ‘“The Commerce of the Sexes”: Civil Society and Polite Society in Scottish Enlightenment Historiography’, in Frank Trentmann, ed., Paradoxes of Civil Society: New Perspectives on Modern German and British History (New York and Oxford: Berghann, 2000), p. 80. 8. Harriet Guest, ‘Bluestocking Feminism’, in Nicole Pohl and Betty Schellenberg, eds, Reconsidering the Bluestockings (San Marino, California: Huntington Library Publica tions, 2003), pp. 59–80. This article refocuses and revisits some of the central arguments of Guest’s groundbreaking study, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000). 9. See Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Penny Warburton and Cliona O’Gallchoir, eds, Women, Writing and the Public Sphere: 1700–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Introduction. 10. See Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca and London, 1994), in particular, ch. 4, ‘Governing the Republic of Letters: Salonnières and the Rule(s) of Polite Conversation’, pp. 90–135. Recent scholarly studies of the French Enlightenment have led the way in revealing the integral role of gendered assumptions of value in shaping our understanding of intellectual and cultural history. See Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French

Conversation and Community in the Bluestocking Circle 303

11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

Revolution (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1988); Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) and The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Carla Hesse, Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1810 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) and The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Clarissa Campbell Orr’s contribution to this volume provides a fascinating analysis of role of dialogue as a spoken and written form in the context of aristocratic elite culture. She makes a persuasive case for the vital role of aristocratic educational literature in contributing to contemporary reforms in women’s education and ‘the new, more broadly based, cultural conversation and cultural consumption of the century.’ See, for example, S.C., The Art of Pleasing in Conversation (London, 1691) and Anonymous, An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (London, 1696). For a selection of contemporary writings on female conduct, see Vivien Jones’s anthology, Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity (London, 1990), pp.14–56. Sarah Maese, The School 3 vols (London, 1766) iii, p. 142. Elizabeth Carter, Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter to Mrs. Montagu between the years 1755 and 1800, ed. Montagu Pennington, 3 vols (London, 1817) iii, p. 68. Judith Hawley, ‘Shakespearean Sensibilities: Women Writers Reading Shakespeare, 1753–1808’, Shakespearean Continuities: Essays in Honour of E. A. J. Honigman, eds Joan Batchelor, Tom Cain and Claire Lamont (London, 1997) pp. 290–304. For an anthology of women’s writings on Shakespeare, see Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts, eds, Women Reading Shakespeare 1600–1900, An Anthology of Criticism (Manchester and New York, 1997). See also my ‘“Out rushed a female to protect our Bard”: The Bluestocking Defence of Shakespeare’, in Huntington Library Quarterly, Spring 2003. Vol. 65 (2002), nos 1 and 2, pp. 127–52. Huntington Library manuscript MO 3258, 10 October, 1769. See also Bluestocking Feminism, I: lxii. Chauncey Tinker, in his history of the English salon, characterised the achievement of such assemblies in gendered terms: ‘The shift from the coffee-house to the drawing room was indeed a plain tribute to woman, the new critic and the new patron.’ See Chauncey Brewster Tinker, The Salon and English Letters: Chapters on the Interrelations of Literature and Society in the Age of Johnson (New York, 1915) p. 33. The economic historian Werner Sombart has also argued that women used their gender to secure a dominant role in shaping the social reﬁnement and sensual pleasures of the Enlightenment. See Werner Sombart, Luxury and Capitalism, trans. Philip Siegelman (Ann Arbor, 1967). However, each fails to acknowledge women’s intellectual contribution to such revolutions in taste and manners, viewing women as facilitators rather than leaders of cultural change. For a discussion of bluestocking attitudes to wealth and culture, see Elizabeth Eger, ‘Luxury, Industry and Charity: Bluestocking Culture Displayed’, in Berg and Eger, eds, Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 190–204. Lawrence Klein has explored the implications of this shift in the map of knowledge for the gendering of discursive practices and for women’s relation to discourse in society. As he acknowledges, the work of historians such as Amanda Vickery and John Brewer has shown that the traditional gendering of the private, ‘domestic’ sphere as feminine, and the public sphere as masculine has obscured our view of the range of women’s cultural and political activity during the eighteenth century. See Klein, ‘Gender, Conversation and the Public Sphere in Early Eighteenth Century England’, Textuality and Sexuality, eds Judith Still and Michael Worton (Manchester, 1993) pp. 100–115. For discussions of women’s relations to the idea of a ‘public sphere’, see Amanda Vickery,

304 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

40.

‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History’, Historical Journal 36:2 (1993) pp. 383–414, and Eger, Grant, O’Gallchoir and Warburton, eds, Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830 (Cambridge, 2001). Spectator no. 10, in Donald F. Bond, ed. The Spectator, 5 vols (Oxford, 1965) I, p. 44. Deborah Heller, ‘Bluestocking Salons and the Public Sphere’, Eighteenth-Century Life, vol. 22:2 (1998), pp. 59–82. Elizabeth Montagu to Elizabeth Carter, 4 Sept, 1772, MO 3304, Huntington correspondence. Emma Major, ‘The Politics of Sociability: Public Dimnesions of the Bluestocking Millenium’, Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 65 (2002), nos 1 and 2, pp.175–92. Frances Burney, Memoirs of Dr. Burney (London, 1832), p. 276. Diary and Letters of Mme D’Arblay, vol. 1, pp. 460–61. Hester Chapone, The Works of Mrs Chapone, containing Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, 2 vols (Dublin, 1775) Vol II, Essay II, ‘On Conversation’, pp. 16–17. Frances Burney, Memoirs of Dr. Burney, 3 vols (London, 1832) ii: 270–2. See More, Selected Writings, ed. Robert Hole, p. 6. Sir N. William Wraxall, Historical Memoirs of My Own Time, 2 vols (London, 1815) I, pp. 136–8. Wraxall, Memoirs, I, p. 140. She was also helped by her friends. Mrs Vesey, for example, organised and funded a printing of Montagu’s Essay on Shakespeare in Dublin in 1769 See Edith Sedgwick Larson, ‘A Measure of Power: The Personal Charity of Elizabeth Montagu’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 16 (1986) pp. 197–210. More, Selected Writings, pp. 8–9. See J. M. Roberts, ‘The Origins of a Mythology: Freemasons, Protestants and the French Revolution’, BIHR 44 (1971) 78–97, and The Mythology of Secret Societies (London, 1972). Recently there has been much critical interest in women’s involvement with Freemasonry, especially in Amazonian rituals of citizenship, which emphasised the importance of scientiﬁc education and the upholding of arms. See Margaret Jacob, Living in the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth Century Europe (Oxford, 1991). Hester Chapone, ‘On Conversation’, pp. 25–6. Scott, Millenium Hall, p. 112. For a comparison of four eighteenth-century utopian novels, see Ruth Perry, ‘Bluestockings in Utopia’, History, Gender and Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Beth Fowkes Tobin (Athens and London, 1994). See also Mary Peace, ‘“Epicures in Rural Pleasure”: revolution, desire and sentimental economy in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall’, Women’s Writing, vol. 9, no. 2, 2002, pp. 305–15. Quoted in S. Riordan, ‘Bluestocking Philosophy: Aspects of Aristocratic Thought in Eighteenth Century England’, Diss. University of Cambridge, 1995, ch. 3. Millenium Hall was successful, passing through four editions by 1778, earning Scott 40 guineas. Like her heroines, she invested her money for the good of others, running a small charitable school in Bath with her companion, Barbara Montagu. For Sarah Scott, who separated from her husband within weeks of marriage, writing was a form of subsistence. Her sense of literary authority was inherent to her sense of identity as a rational individual in a society that did not recognise her status. Hester Chapone summarised the all-embracing importance of conversation thus: The great and irresistible influence, which the choice of our company, as well as the mode of our own conversation, has on our habits of thinking and acting, and on the whole form and colour of our minds, is a subject too common to be much enlarged upon; it cannot, however, be too deeply considered, as it seems the leading circumstance of our lives, and that which may chiefly determine our character and condition to all eternity. Hester Chapone, The Works of Mrs Chapone, containing Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, 2 vols, Dublin, 1775. Vol II. Essay II, ‘On Conversation’, 26–27. The ﬁrst volume of the ‘Works’ is dedicated to Mrs Montagu and the second to Mrs Carter.

Conversation and Community in the Bluestocking Circle 305 41. Anna Laetitia Barbauld Lessons for Children (London, 1779). Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (London, 1787). 42. Catharine Macaulay’s Letters on Education (1790) similarly gave voice to women’s reason in a series of lessons articulated through a letters between the ﬁctional characters of Hortensia and Euphrasia. 43. As recent critics have explored, the active presence of groups of successful women authors posed difficult questions for male Romantic writers, unsettling their sense of what it meant to be an author. See: Sonia Hofkosh, ‘A Woman’s Profession: Sexual Difference and the Romance of Authorship’. Studies in Romanticism 32 (Summer 1993) pp. 245–272; and Marlon B. Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry (New York and Oxford, 1989). 44. Clare Brant, ‘Varieties of Women’s Writing’, in Vivien Jones, ed., Women and Literature in Britain, 1700–1800 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 285–305. 45. Montagu’s Dialogues originally appeared as the last three contributions to the George Lyttelton’s anonymously published Dialogues of the Dead (London, 1760). She later added them to the fouth edition of her Essay on Shakespeare in 1777. For a full discussion of their publication history, see Eger, ed., Elizabeth Montagu, ‘Dialogues of the Dead’, pp. 115–40. For a full bibliography of the genre in this period, see Frederick M. Keener, English Dialogues of the Dead. A Critical History, An Anthology and a Check List (New York and London, 1973). 46. See, for example, Anna Letitia Barbauld, ‘Dialogue in the Shades’, The Works of Anna Barbauld. With a memoir by Lucy Aikin, vol. 1 (London, 1825), pp. 339–49; and M. Zamick, ed., ‘Three Dialogues by Hester Lynch Thrale’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 16 (1932), pp. 77–113. 47. More’s ‘Advertisement’ to her poem states ‘The slight performance … was never intended to appear in print: It is, in general, too local, and too personal for publication; and was only written with a wish to amuse the amiable Lady to whom it is addressed, and a few partial friends. But copies having multiplied, far beyond the intention of the Author, she has been advised to publish it, lest it should steal into the world in a state of still greater imperfection; though she is almost ashamed to take refuge in so hackneyed an apology, however true.’

5.3 Aristocratic Feminism, the Learned Governess, and the Republic of Letters Clarissa Campbell Orr

Introduction This essay will explore some of the prescriptive advice given to women from the aristocratic elites. These were the eighteenth century women Mary Wollstonecraft was to dismiss in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) as beyond reform, addressing herself to the middling sort instead.1 She had given up on aristocratic women because she was disenchanted by her experience of working for the Kingsborough family, and had come to agree with a more thoroughgoing social and political critique of England’s ancien régime, based on a discourse of natural rights.2 But I think it behoves us as historians to avoid doing the same, and thereby read the century backwards from a critique that begins to preﬁgure the modern world of equal rights feminism. There was a tradition of the literary, if not the learned, governess in the 18th century, who operated within aristocratic and royal circles, and which lay behind Wollstonecraft’s appeal as a published authoress to Lady Kingsborough, and this is what I want to sketch in broad outline. The women who worked and wrote for a mainly elite clientele often took a proreligious yet also enlightened stance within the ‘culture wars’ of the period, defending Christian belief from the incursions of Deism, free-thinking, and philosophic materialism. This was a non-denominational battle in which writers from differing strands within both Catholicism or Protestantism drew on each other; it was thus a cosmopolitan tradition, embracing French, British, Swiss, Dutch and German writers. The print culture of the eighteenth century Republic of Letters meant that the stories they often included in their conduct literature were borrowed and adapted from a variety of sources by these writers, and their works in turn were translated again. But as French was the language of polite society, it was predominantly a francophone discourse, with a frame of reference embracing French social practices and historical examples. In this essay I shall therefore concentrate mainly on the learned literary governesses Mme LePrince de Beaumont, Mme de la Fite, and Mme de Genlis, who operated within princely or royal courts in Lorraine, London, The Hague, and Paris, and glance backwards to Archbishop Fénélon, Mme de Maintenon, and Mary Astell, and forwards to Hannah More. 306

Aristocratic Feminism and the Learned Governess 307

The discourse of these educators, I shall argue, was a discourse which embraced the Enlightenment in its moderate form, endorsing rational religion, and using this rationalism to refute what it saw as the mistakes made by philosophic materialism, and its dangerous social consequences, while also criticising religious fanaticism, doctrinal bigotry, and traditional folklore. In literary terms, it transformed the fairy story, transmitted ‘upwards’ to the elite through wet-nurses or household servants, into a kind of rococo moral fable. It sided with the new scientiﬁc philosophy against ignorance and credulity, and was strongly committed to the advancement of knowledge. The defence of Christianity had a feminist dimension, because these writers saw that libertinism, as it was called, whether as a type of behaviour, or as an intellectual attitude – the term was a synonym for philosophical free-thinking – was damaging to women’s interests. Religious discourse gave women a technology of selfhood which enabled them to judge the values and behaviour of the men and women in their circle, even if they were parents, suitors or husbands, and if necessary to distance themselves from the norms of fashionable society. There was often an underlying sense of female moral superiority in this discourse, either toward exploitative and irresponsible male behaviour, or extravagant and empty-headed female behaviour. These educational mentors fostered women’s sense of autonomy within a broader ethos of social and moral responsibility toward the family and social dependants, and gave them a critique of marriage in both its positive and negative aspects. It also gave them a shared language and set of values with like-minded men, and encouraged a new type of masculinity. Finally, the religious infrastructure of educated clergy, with their libraries and access to scholarship and print culture, and their role in educational institutions, created opportunities for women to pursue their own self-development. This could be accomplished with the assistance of books, and religiously minded mentors, mainly within the family, but also within the public dimensions of religious practice. While none of this challenged the economic, social or legal order, it nevertheless deserves to be considered a kind of feminism, or proto-feminism, because of the way it fostered women’s education, provided new ideals of marital behaviour for both sexes, and assisted women’s entry into the new, more broadly-based, cultural conversation and cultural consumption of the century.3 Moreover, many of the high-status women to whom this discourse was primarily addressed, (notwithstanding the fact that the aspirational gentry and middling orders also lapped it up), were not at all excluded form the public sphere, as they were eligible for public salaried positions in the various royal households of the ancien régime. Despite the critical rhetoric in the eighteenth century concerning women at court, condemning hidden inﬂuence and the mistress system, it would be incorrect to take this at face value and conclude that women wielded power only through illicit sexual relations.4 Even when a mistress did inﬂuence politics, it was usually as part of an aristocratic faction, to whom her intimacy with a ruler was useful because of the access to the ruler this facilitated. A mistress was able to inﬂuence male and female appointments (in court or other royal

308 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

households, government, army, navy, and the church ) beneﬁting her family and faction.5 Thus the sexual adventure becomes almost incidental, although then and subsequently it has been the scandalous detail that has attracted attention, not the underlying political realities.6 The elite women to whom these conduct books were addressed were in a sense career women, and their business was dynasticism: building a family that could successful operate the levers of power and patronage, and gain access to pensions and proﬁtable ofﬁces of state, for themselves, their husbands, their children, grandchildren, and other relatives and connections. The career of a woman from the debt-ridden gentry who became Britain’s wealthiest woman and one of its most inﬂuential political operators, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, is an important case in point.7 Often these women were at their most powerful as dowagers: Peter Robert Campbell’s study of the nature of politics in France c 1725–1750 repeatedly emphasises their intervention in making public appointments.8 Faced with either their husband’s gambling debts or their own, or inherited ﬁnancial liabilities on their estates, wives might need to lobby energetically for these appointments, whose salaries could ease the cash-ﬂow.9 It was very much in the interest of women such as these to acquire an adequate intellectual and social education, to succeed in keeping their marriages together, and to inﬂuence their children to be ﬁt for their responsibilities. Public failure of a marriage might reduce a whole family’s public standing and ability to hold court ofﬁce. Finally, it would be Hannah More contention, that the need for public respectability in high places, in reality and not simply appearance, had become more urgent because of the social and political challenges of the French revolutionary era, including the new kind of feminism deploying the discourse of rights. This prompted her re-statement of the need for the elite to justify their privileges by their moral behaviour, and that women needed to be strong minded and educated in order to provide moral leadership in their families.

‘Beauty and the Beast’ in its 18th century English context The story that encapsulates this discourse of enlightenment and proto-feminism, has remained well-known, ever since Mme LePrince de Beaumont gave it canonic form: it is ‘Beauty and the Beast’. She included it in her Young Misses Magazine published in London in 1756.10 As Madame LePrince de Beaumont retells the French fairy tale, in a version which moralised and standardised it, the story was part of a series of daily dialogues between some aristocratic girls between 10 to 12 and their governess, Mme Affable. The girls, who were modelled on Mme LePrince de Beaumont’s actual pupils, are given names such as Lady Witty, Lady Sensible and Lady Triﬂe. The dialogues cover natural history, geography, history, Bible stories, manners, and moral fables. Day six begins with a little conversation about eating politely and not bolting down meals. Then the story begins: we are told about a merchant who has six children whom he has educated well. When the father loses all his money, Beauty, the youngest, who has always been a great reader, adapts graciously, and keeps house, while her fashionable and mercenary

Aristocratic Feminism and the Learned Governess 309

sisters ﬁnd that without a dowry no-one wants to marry them. Father travels from home to recover his goods; after losing his way he is rescued by the Beast and taken to a castle, and released only if he gives a daughter to the Beast as a wife. On returning home with gold, Beauty begs her father to use it for her sisters’ dowries and insists on going to the Beast’s castle. She is given an apartment, where she ﬁnds a clue that the Beast is redeemable: for her rooms include ‘a large library, a harpsichord, and several music books’. LePrince de Beaumont is therefore giving cultural permission for the young ladies for whom she wrote to get into the library their fathers’ owned and to read. Books, and the habits of reasoned thinking and reﬂection they will encourage, will be the cultural tools for negotiating the unruly aggression of male sexuality, and perhaps too for making good marriage choices by looking beyond sexual magnetism to qualities of mind and heart. LePrince de Beaumont is not trying to ignore her charges’ preoccupation with their sex appeal so much as help them ground it on permanent foundations.11 Thus Beauty discerns that the Beast, who proposes daily, has a kind heart and she likes his sensible conversation. When she takes pity on him and promises to marry him, he turns into the proverbial prince. The sixth dialogue then concludes with a lesson on caterpillars, and the Old Testament story of Noah’s ark. The well-known story can be read on a class level: it is partly about aristocratic women eschewing idleness and superﬁcial attractions – the celebrity culture of their day – and practising instead the bourgeois virtues of order, method, charity and moral responsibility. As the dialogue on day 9 declares, ‘The whole world is bound to work; ‘tis a penance laid upon all, and to look after the family is as much the duty of a woman of quality as that of a tradesman’s wife.’12 But among other meanings, what can be stressed is that twelve year olds were being told to get into libraries and pursue a programme of moral and intellectual self-improvement. And these were twelve year olds with plenty of alternative attractions: they had social rank and money and could have concentrated on pleasure and dress. Indeed everything conspired to make them self-indulgent, and fashionable debutantes like the Gunning sisters could attract mobs when they appeared in public.13 But if they wanted to follow up other ways of spending their time, what LePrince de Beaumomt repeatedly shows is that they could learn to think their own thoughts: once in the library, they could read their way into new experiences. The conclusions they reached might also take them away from their governesses’ views. As Vivien Jones as argued, the conclusions young women drew from the conduct literature they read was not necessarily what their authors had intended them to have.14 The cultural permission to educate themselves must have rippled out directly or indirectly to those who were not LePrince de Beaumont’s actual pupils. The well-to-do young Catherine Macaulay, for example, who had the run of her father’s library and that of a local clergyman, became a radical Whig historian, in line with her family’s oppositional London politics.15 One of Madame LePrince de Beaumont’s actual pupils was the orphaned Sophia Carteret, whose mother Sophia Fermor died after giving birth and whose

310 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

father, Lord Carteret, 1st Earl of Granville, was a busy statesman. Her despairing grandmother, the cultured Henrietta-Louisa, ﬁrst Countess of Pomfret, considered her excessively spoiled by the deference of a succession of governesses and servants. After taking charge of her, LePrince de Beaumont turned her into a conscientious and socially responsible person, and the dedicatee of LePrince de Beaumont’s The Young Ladies Magazine,16 where she ﬁgures as the right thinking Lady Sensée. Sophia Carteret’s diaries after her marriage to the reforming Whig peer and political economist William Petty, Earl of Shelburne, show how she was able to hold her own with her husband’s high-powered political and intellectual acquaintance, including David Hume, and mix in blue-stocking circles.17 Another pupil was the Hanoverian court’s answer to the Whig socialite and politician, Lady Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire, Lady Mary Hillsborough, daughter of Wills Hill, 2nd Viscount Hillsborough, an adroit Irish courtier-politician. Father and daughter both subscribed to the ﬁrst edition of The Young Misses Magazine; so did Emily Lennox, the great-grand-daughter of Charles II through his mistress Louise, Duchess of Portsmouth.18 It was said after her marriage that Lady Mary’s husband, James, 7th Earl and 1st Marquis of Salisbury, was given his post as Lord Chamberlain because of his wife’s wit, grace and intelligence. She had herself painted wearing his Order of the Garter, perhaps to indicate that she was the man of the family, or that women should be given these honours. George III certainly contemplated awarding the Garter to suitable women. We cannot assume Mary Hillsborough entertained feminist attitudes, but we can see that she was part of the ancien régime public sphere, working hard to advance her family.19 What was LePrince de Beaumont’s message to young women like Sophia Carteret and Mary Hillsborough? For anyone looking for the origins of feminism it was not an unmixed one, but its very ambiguity is what was important, because it allowed for the insinuation of strong mindedness among young women and opened up psychological, moral and social spaces for them in ways that were not overtly destabilising. On the one hand her message was both religiously and socially conservative. Questions of theodicy – the role of evil in the world, why bad things happen to good people – were not to be agitated. In The Young Ladies Magazine, the two French princesses, Mme de Beaujolais and the Princesse de Conti, are cited as examples of virtuous women submitting to God’s will. The former died at 23 from her doctor’s ministrations and the latter died at 18 of smallpox.20 We may think we want riches and good health, LePrince de Beaumont intimates, but it is beyond our wisdom to know what is best for us. Similarly there is no point wondering why some are born to low rank and some to high. All social conditions are equal to God and moral behaviour is possible and indeed desirable for all. Each social group has duties, even the great serve the monarch, and social virtues grow out of mutual dependence.21 Several stories reinforce the view that rank is no excuse for arrogant behaviour, especially toward servants, and in the framing dialogues of the Young Misses Magazine one of the characters, Lady Tempest, is vigorously disciplined in order to master this lesson. Yet coexisting with this social conservatism is a clear commitment to the values of the Enlightenment. LePrince de Beaumont’s message is that women

Aristocratic Feminism and the Learned Governess 311

have the right to reﬂect on moral issues and acquire knowledge. In the same dialogue enjoining religious and moral acquiescence, Lady Mary asks why Mlle Champêtre has been praised as a philosopher for recognizing the wisdom of this advice. ‘I thought only men were called philosophers?’ Mme. Affable explains there are two kinds of philosophy, natural and moral, the former being scientiﬁc knowledge, the latter knowledge of how to achieve happiness by regulating the passions and acting reasonably. ‘The science taught by Socrates, is called moral philosophy, and you will see clearly, my children, that it belongs as much to women as to men: for the prerequisite for learning philosophy, is to be thoroughly reﬂective.’22 Lady Louisa then declares her regret at ridiculing a woman who went off to attend an astronomy lecture.23 Such lectures were indeed given to a mixed audience by Desaguliers, chaplain to Frederick, Prince of Wales, father of George III. Many of LePrince de Beaumont’s pupils came from aristocratic families connected to the Prince, and she may have been angling to try and join the royal household.24 Frederick’s widow Augusta, who had astutely retained control over her children, would have had no problem with the deﬁnitions of natural philosophy being given to the young ladies, as she was a keen botanist who started the gardens at Kew, and passed the taste on to her daughter-in-law, Queen Charlotte.25 As the dialogues continue, the girls are told never to accept anything they have been told or read unless they have reasoned about it – even if they have read it in a work of Locke.26 In the books rote knowledge is invariably followed by reﬂective commentary. Some of the information about customs in other times and places naturally leads to the awarenesss that such customs are adventitious rather than essential; brief mention of the Chinese customs of polygamy and footbinding for instance prompts Mme Affable’s comment ‘Education, ladies, is all.’27 Such enlightened relativism could lead the thoughtful reader to reﬂect that 18th century English customs too might simply be the product of habit.28 The children learn about l’esprit géometrique, clear, logical thinking based on irrefutable axioms, and are encouraged to apply this type of thinking to the question of how to be happy. The emphasis on reason is vehemently underlined; the ﬁctional Mrs. Affable even declares ‘I would prefer to love a thief, a libertine or even an Atheist, than a superstitious Christian or a religious hypocrite.’29 LePrince de Beaumont’s religious thinking is eudaemonist: God, being good, wants us to be happy. Happiness is further deﬁned as ‘A state in which the heart formulates no desire which can only be satisﬁed by creating self-loathing.’30 Ennui follows continual acquisitiveness and superﬁcial amusement. Happiness is virtue; we must learn to want what will do us good. There is more enjoyment to be had in educating a family than endless play, balls and gambling. But this rather optimistic rational Christianity is also tinged with Augustinianism: mankind is suspended constantly by a thread over a moral precipice, the girls are told, and always in need of God’s grace.31 As the children in the dialogues work their way through summaries of the Old Testament, the severity of God’s punishment of the errant Israelites is frequently justiﬁed in terms of God’s justice, and analogies are drawn to equivalent sins in modern life.32

312 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

Early enlightenment precursors Mme LePrince de Beaumont’s message, that a satisfactory life was impossible without moral seriousness, was not new. Fifty years earlier Mary Astell was preaching a similar message, inaugurating an English tradition of what might be called conservative moral feminism. Hilda Smith and Ruth Perry have both explored her debt to Cartesian rationalism, and the way this strengthened her conviction that moral reasoning was ungendered and accessible to women as well as men. 33 The importance of her network of aristocratic friends such as Lady Elizabeth Hastings, Lady Ann Coventry, Lady Catherine Jones, and Elizabeth Hutcheson in supporting Astell in her single life, and their extension of support to women of various social classes is clear from Perry’s biography. Astell’s circle of friends were the ﬁrst generation of women active in public philanthropy through the charity school movement and the SPCK. They were well-read women and often extremely competent estate managers of their own property or that of their brother’s and husband’s. Lady Betty Hasting’s endowments to schools, colleges and parishes are still being paid to this day; Lady Ann Coventry could have herself devised the lessons of Beauty and the Beast, as she had her own library of over 700 books.34 Astell’s writing on marriage must be understood in both an aristocratic and a courtly context, emerging from reﬂections on the disjunction between aristocratic rank and worldly entitlement in the one hand, and exploitative dependence and personal misery on the other. Some Reﬂections on Marriage, (1700), was occasioned by consideration of the marital and ﬁnancial disaster of Hortense Mancini, niece of Cardinal Mazarin, the co-ruler France during Louis XIV’s minority. She had been married to the Duke of Meilleraye and Mayenne, but he turned out to be a religious obsessive and domestic tyrant, who had run through millions of her dowry. Astell’s prescriptions for women clearly favoured celibacy over marriage, while recognizing that most women would marry. Her proposed college for women, outlined in her Serious Proposal to the Ladies, would give them a sheltered interlude before making, ideally, an informed choice of partner.35 They would at least enter the married state equipped with the moral and cultural tools to deal with what might have to be endured as a school of virtue for the afterlife. Twentieth century feminists have found extreme difﬁculty with the tendency of this strand of feminism to suppress female sexual desire. But when women could routinely die in childbirth, sexual experience was still a matter of life and death, and marriage made provision for orphans. A religiously based critique of aristocratic libertinism, which was seen as extremely exploitative toward women, was one way of enhancing the dignity of women, often at the expense of women of lower status in the sex trades, recognised as needing the charitable ministrations of socially well-connected women.36 The preface to the Young Ladies Magazine declares it will help girls choose between celibacy and marriage, and protect girls against their immoderate desire to please, which may delude them into accepting proposals simply in order to secure their own household. Lady Lucy later ponders out loud why any girl

Aristocratic Feminism and the Learned Governess 313

would willingly give up her peace and quiet for the care and trouble of marriage with some one scarcely known, who might have terrible faults? The question receives no immediately convincing answer, suggesting some ambivalence on Mme LePrince de Beaumont’s part.37 Mme LePrince de Beaumont’s moral fables and dialogues in the 1750s may not have been directly inﬂuenced by Astell’s writings, although their context demonstrates that there were already in England examples of women trying to acquire an intellectual culture and to model marriage and/or household management on terms satisfactory to themselves.38 In French discourse, which was also wellknown in England, there were several precedents for moralising the elite and creating an insider’s critique of the libertine aspects of court culture. Two ﬁgures are seminal: Mme de Maintenon and Bishop Fénélon. The former was Louis XIV’s morganatic wife, but was better known publicly for having undertaken the education of his children by Mme de Montespan. At her school at St Cyr she taught penniless girls from socially well-ranking backgrounds.39 Maintenon’s career was an important example of the cultural and moral power of the royal governess; she was Mme de Genlis’ model.40 Fénélon’s educational methods had much in common with Mme de Maintenon’s. His Traité de l’éducation des ﬁlles, (1687), though permeated with essentialist assumptions about ‘natural’ female shortcomings, was an important voice advocating women’s education for its time. It stressed the dependence of men on women: ‘Men themselves, who have all the authority in public, cannot by their deliberations establish any effectual good, without the assistance of women to put them into operation’; women have the ability to unman men utterly: ‘Can men themselves hope for any content in life, if their strictest Friendship and Alliance, which is that of marriage, be turned into bitterness?’41 This laid bare the sexual politics of marriage quite candidly. The roles of men and women were different, but their spheres were not so much separate as co-dependent, and some virtues, such as courage, were to be cultivated equally by both men and women. Fénélon’s book was mediated to English readers through the translation and revisions of a friend of Mary Astell’s, the Anglican non-Juror George Hickes, who recommended Astell’s Serious Proposal to the Ladies in his notes to the book.42 He dedicated it to the sister of the bibliophile Lady Ann Coventry, the Duchess of Ormonde, whom he regarded as a staunch ally in refuting the Deist’s anticlericalism, and emphasized that it was a book free of religious superstition – i.e. it could safely be read by Protestants. Fénélon was equally important for his role as moral instructor of that lost hope of the French monarchy, the legendarily pious Duke of Burgundy. He was Louis XIV’s grandson, and was expected to rule as a just and paternalistic prince who would cure the excesses of Louis XIV’s foreign aggression and burdensome taxation. Fénelon was brave enough to write directly to Louis XIV deploring his actions: much of the early French enlightenment is born out of a reaction to Louis XIV’s ancien régime. Fénélon wrote Telemachus for the Duke of Burgundy; it implicitly criticised absolutism in favour of constitutional monarchy. The book was disproportionately admired by Wollstonecraft’s partner, William Godwin.

314 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

Telemachus inaugurated a new genre of ‘mirror for princes’ literature, like LePrince de Beaumont’s Civan, Roi de Bungo, often written by royal chaplains, tutors and governesses. Where Telemachus was set nominally in the classical Mediterranean and followed the fortunes of Odysseus’s son, the new rococo school of fables was often set in a vaguely designated orient, sometimes Persian, sometimes Chinese. We may imagine them being read to princely and aristocratic children across Europe whose parents had landscaped gardens with Turkish tents, Chinese pavilions, classical temples, rococo Orangeries and rustic hamlets, like those commissioned by Princess Augusta for Kew Gardens.

The governess as cosmopolitan: Mme LePrince de Beaumont and Mme de LaFite Certainly when Mme LePrince de Beaumont found herself at the start of her career as a governess at Lunéville, the court palace of the duchy of Lorraine, she could look down from her attic rooms in the palace to glimpse both a Turkish kiosk, a Chinese pavilion and a model village.43 She was a true Enlightened cosmopolitan. One of her brothers made a successful career at the Russian court of Tsarina Anna as a decorative painter and obtained subscriptions there for his sister’s books. Russian subscribers to the Young Misses Magazine included Peter, heir to Tsarina Elizabeth, and his wife, the future Catherine the Great. The Lorraine ducal court had a vibrant cosmopolitan culture, with links to Italy, Vienna, France, and Poland. Its leading woman of letters was Mme de Grafﬁgny, author of the Lettres Peruviennes, and of playlets written for the HapsburgLorraine children at Vienna. The maîtresse en titre to ex-King Stanislas was MarieCatherine de Craon, Marquise de Boufﬂers, a friend of Montesquieu and Voltaire, while the mathematician and blue-stocking Mme du Châtelet, Voltaire’s mistress, resided nearby at Cirey.44 When LePrince de Beaumont’s patroness the Dowager Duchess (a niece of Louis XIV) died, her inherited pension made her the target of a mercenary marriage. The young bride and mother arranged an annulment of her marriage to protect herself; soon afterwards her husband was killed in a duel. All this prompted LePrince de Beaumont to think about the mis-education of young men, and why they mistreated women. She concluded the underlying problem was their espousal of free-thinking. Atheism and deism undermined the religious basis of morality, so young women could not protest convincingly that being sexually exploited endangered their souls. She argued against the naturalistic morality of Toussaint’s Les Moeurs (1750) in her Lettres Diverses et Critiques (1750) and in her didactic novel, the Triumph of Truth, (1751).45 Toussaint was a vehement critic of all exterior forms of religion, arguing that the law of nature could be found in the heart, and this was an adequate basis for all morality. In reply LePrince de Beaumont approved using reason to make moral arguments and agreed with Toussaint’s aim of making virtue attractive. She never relied on the idea that morality was to be taken as authoritative simply because of supernatural revelation. For her the Bible was a record of human behaviour and a guide to human psychology. But she thought that Toussaint was wrong to imagine that

Aristocratic Feminism and the Learned Governess 315

right living was a simple case of knowing the right thing to do and following it; the tendency for a multitude of inclinations to distract us from what we know to be right, suggested that the doctrine of original sin was psychologically accurate. After her failure to secure further patronage in Nancy, LePrince de Beaumont turned to combating the beast of libertinism in England instead, emphasizing that her Christian faith was non-denominational.46 Once in London she was not kept behind the green baize door but mixed in polite society through her various patronesses. One encounter speaks volumes of the cultural clash between her feminist, rationalist and Christian values and those of the freethinkers whom she saw as the enemy of women. She met Lord Chesterﬁeld, the dedicatee of the English translation of Toussaint’s Les Moeurs, and the philosophical hedonist who regarded women as children of larger growth, not to be taken seriously at all.47 ‘You are a brave woman’, he said, ‘who believes ﬁrmly in all you have been taught.’ ‘My goodness, yes,’ she replied, ‘You ﬂamboyant thinkers have a superabundance of intellectual energy with which to throw things into doubt … I only have enough intelligence for my beliefs and for knowing the grounds for my knowledge.’ Lord Chesterﬁeld apparently sighed and thought, and replied, ‘You are fundamentally quite right. At bottom it is doubt, not faith, which torments one.’48 There are direct links between LePrince de Beaumont’s social circle and some of the moralists assocated with George III’s Court, including Hannah More. Lady Charlotte Finch, aunt of LePrince de Beaumont’s pupil Sophia Carteret, became the royal governess to George III’s daughters, and LePrince de Beaumont’s third instalment of advice for young women, Advice to Young Ladies who are Entering the World and Getting Married (1764), was dedicated to the Countess of Egremont and Mrs Grenville, sisters-in-law whose husbands were both ministers to George III.49 In fact she seems to have had ambitions beyond conﬁning her attention to the education of young ladies, to becoming the female mentor of future male rulers as well. 1754 LePrince de Beaumont brought out an oriental fable in the ‘mirror for princes’ tradition, Civan, Roi de Bungo, dedicated to the Habsburg Archduke Joseph, grandson of her Lorraine patroness. One of the lessons the fable, set in Japan, teaches, is the danger of priestly power, and LePrince de Beaumont’s admirers credit it as an early inﬂuence predisposing the future emperor toward anti-clericalism. In the Young Misses Magazine, she may have been hoping to inﬂuence the future ruler of Great Britain, since some stories are tales about princely education, and preparation for virtuous rule.50 The king’s mother Augusta Princess of Wales had succeeded in bringing him up in relative seclusion from the fashionable laxity of George II’s court and he reproduced these Christian and domestic mores in his own family life.51 The court of George III and Queen Charlotte could be described as a feminized court. There was no mistress system and as far as was politically possible, court social life excluded men or women openly keeping a lover or living apart from their spouses.52 George III’s popularity as the reign progressed rested in part in his evident domestic probity.53 The libertine tradition by contrast was evident in the ancillary royal ménages of his brothers, and once he came of age, in the

316 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

entourage of the Prince of Wales and his friends among the Whig politicians like Charles James Fox.54 Queen Charlotte had Bluestocking afﬁnities and assembled a library of over four thousand books, partly as a resource for the education of her daughters as well as her own self-improvement.55 By the late eighties the monarchy was supporting the Evangelical Revival in the Church of England. One of the governesses teaching the royal princesses, Mme de la Fite, greatly admired the daughter of Lady Frederica Schwaub, a patroness of Mme LePrince de Beaumont, and cited her as a role model in her writings for young women, for her marital and family devotion, and her preference for the pleasures of a cultured retirement in the countryside at the house she and her husband lived in near Box Hill, Norbury Park. This female exemplar was Frederica Lock, wife of the connoisseur William Lock, and friend of Frances Burney’s sister Susan.56 Mme de la Fite also centred her stories around a version of characters she knew or taught. Like Mme de LePrince de Beaumont, Marie-Elisabeth de la Fite is an obscure ﬁgure now, but her cosmopolitanism and mediating role as a translator helps us glimpse an international culture of pietism and sensibility that continued to enjoin a life of moral and social responsibility on both men and women in high places, and to defend women against sexual and family exploitation.57 Where Astell and LePrince de Beaumont had respectively emphasised Cartesian logic, Lockean science, and rational reﬂection, la Fite reﬂects the new mood of tender, rather sentimental religiosity, and points toward the Evangelicalism of the late eighties.58 She translated Hannah More’s Thoughts on the Manners of the Great into French. One of the most important books translated by la Fite was Sophia von LaRoche’s novel, The Sorrows of Lady Sophia Sternheim. This was a novel of sensibility and a critique of German court society, written by a woman whose husband had a successful career as court administrator for several minor principalities in the Rhineland. Her heroine Sophia is groomed by her ambitious family to become the mistress of the prince. She avoids this but is seduced and betrayed by an English lord who, Lovelace like, had purported to help her. She is forced to ﬂee and suffers various hardships, but at every point tries to be philanthropic and to help educate those less fortunate than herself. Her happy ending comes in marriage to a Scottish nobleman, her ﬁrst love, who eschews public ofﬁce and devotes himself to social welfare. The Bibliothèque de Sciences et des Beaux Arts, the periodical la Fite co-edited with her husband and others in the Haague, considered it superior to the novels of Mme de la Fayette, whose characters cared more for their honour, conceived in purely aristocratic terms, rather than basing their behaviour on religious foundations.59 De la Fite’s conduct books took the form of conversations and epistolary stories. In Entrétiens, Drames et Contes Moraux, dedicated to Queen Charlotte, the conversations are mostly on natural history and the plays adapted from progressive German educators such as F. H. Jacobi, A. G. Meissner, and J. H. Campe, known for his adaptation of Robinson Crusoe for childen.60 Eugénie et ses Elèves was dedicted to Princess Elizabeth, the most intellectual of the princesses, who helped to run the charitable spinning school at Windsor.

Aristocratic Feminism and the Learned Governess 317

Educating royalty: Mme de Genlis and Hannah More De La Fite was always keen to cultivate her contacts in the Republic of Letters and to attach herself to writers of greater reknown than herself. One of these was Felicité de Genlis, the Gouverneur of the sons of Louis Philippe Joseph, duc d’Orléans, leader of the cadet branch of the French royal family. De Genlis helped publish Eugénie et ses Eleves in Paris, and through la Fite’s agency was introduced to Queen Charlotte, who admired her educational works and recommended them to her brother Charles when his daughters were left motherless.61 De Genlis was read throughout Europe, from Madrid to Moscow. De Genlis’ oeuvre represented a critique of the amorality and libertinism associated with Orléanist political and social values, but she was suspected of being her patron’s mistress (they had a very brief amour which she skilfully converted into an inﬂuential friendship).62 De Genlis became lady-in-waiting to his wife, and other household posts were found for her husband and brother.63 De Genlis’ patron was at the heart of a conﬂictual relationship between monarchy and aristocracy by virtue of his dynastic position as the most senior Prince of the Blood. Orléanism had afﬁnities with English Whiggism, and de Genlis’ patron and the Prince of Wales were cronies. Orléanism stood for limited monarchy and provincial rights, as well as for an individual liberty shading into personally libertine behaviour. The Parisian power base of the dynasty was the Palais Royal, one of the most important public spaces in Paris. Assisted by de Genlis’ brother it was developed to include arcades of shops and cafés; it was a key place for the printing and distribution of pamphlets, and for links to be made between aristocratic factions and popular support. Alongside the respectable shops were cafés and places of sexual assignation. However, de Genlis’ cultural power base was not in apartments at the Palais Royal, but in her suite at the convent of Belle Chasse, where she had set up her educational centre in 1777, when she was made governess to the new-born twin daughters of the duc and duchesse. She was already the author of several plays for children on sacred and moral subjects, and in this she was deliberately emulating the example of Mme de Maintenon, and her proximity to the convent of Port-Royal.64 In 1782 de Genlis was appointed Gouverneur to the Orléans princes, after deliberately undermining the work of their tutor the chevalier de Bonnard, and making strong claims as to the suitability of women to take on this role, even though customarily boys left the care of women at around 8.65 Her novel of education, Adèle et Théodore, was also written as a kind of manifesto for the task. As well as the ﬁctional parents who retire to Languedoc to supervise their children’s education, the cast of characters includes a Comte de Roseville, who is in charge of educating a prince. Their combined practices and letters to each other describe de Genlis’ methods and routine in the Orléans nursery. In 1790 she contributed to a pamphlet debate on the education of Louis XVI’s son, implying – in a way that gives the measure of her ambition to inﬂuence entire nations – that her methods could be a model for how future rulers all over Europe could be educated.

318 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

One of de Genlis’most reiterated messages was that religion provided the only basis for morality, which made her a ﬁerce critic of Deists such as D’Alembert within the French cultural establishment.66 She considered that her refusal to tone down her anti-Deist polemic cost her the chance of being elected to the Académie and the award of the Prix Montoyon.67 She believed that a sound religious education was particularly important for a future prince; he needed a reputation for virtue that was real, not superﬁcial. She even dismissed Louis Philippe’s confessor and in an extraordinary usurpation of masculine clerical privilege prepared him for conﬁrmation herself. Her view of religion is not particularly sacramental or metaphysical; she values it primarily for its social impact and as a framework for philanthropy. Some Catholic institutions received her approbation; for instance, she supported female convents with a teaching or social mission and deplored their closure in the early stages of the Revolution. But eclectically, she was an admirer of the Herrenhutters, Protestant communities who were part of the continental Evangelical awakening, and their mixed-sex religious communities providing work and welfare.68 She also re-invented folk customs to suit the age of sensibility and to foster aristocratic social responsibility. Most notably, she helped to popularise the rose-girl festivals, whereby a local village patron rewarded virtuous village girls with a marriage portion.69 For de Genlis, women’s “empire” extended over the formation of manners and morals; they differed from her role of teaching a future ruler only in degree, not in kind. Women’s role is not the same as men, but in this moral formation they are the equal of men, and the superior to those men who ignore the claims of talent and virtue.70 Girls on the threshold of marriage are allowed absolutely no choice, just as de Genlis’ own two daughters had none. This was in accord with the continuing French practice of arranged marriage, unlike English custom which allowed young women more say in their choice of partner. This lack of personal freedom differentiates de Genlis’ moral views from the masculine Orléanist tradition, which stood for personal liberty, tending toward libertinism, and individualism.71 By contrast, in her own practice, she seems to have succeeded in stamping out any tendencies to aristocratic libertinage in Louis Philippe, who fulﬁlled her ambitions in 1830 when he became constitutional monarch of France. In contrast to Mme LePrince de Beaumont then, de Genlis’ pupils were not encouraged to be quite as independently minded as the original audience for ‘Beauty and the Beast’. On the other hand they were taught to respect scientiﬁc knowledge as a corrective to all forms of ignorance and superstition. Evenings at the Castle was designed to provide stories that would supplant the ‘magic’ of fairy tales and peasant folklore. In ‘Alphonse and Dalinda’, Alphonse goes on a voyage around the world, repeatedly ﬁnding that the most fascinating and extraordinary phenomena in reality have a natural and rational explanation. De Genlis taught her pupils about trades and crafts; they were always visiting factories and workshops for educational purposes. De Genlis’ message that women should take their responsibilities as maternal educators seriously was to prove very inﬂuential in the post-revolutionary era,

Aristocratic Feminism and the Learned Governess 319

when there was a reaction against the interventionist tendencies of the Jacobin government and a desire to reinvent the privacy of the family and the institutions of civil society. Part of de Genlis’ message to her royal charges was also a kind of moral meritocracy: like LePrince de Beaumont, she explained they must earn their privileged position in society by their responsible behaviour, not by an assumption of birthright.72 Mme de Genlis did not articulate a discourse of rights, but her moral egalitarianism and humanitarian social agenda prompted elite men and women to see how they could deserve their position. This was a message which Hannah More thoroughly approved of, though her clarion call to the elite to reform their manners was not expressed in the language of classical republicanism but Christian evangelicalism. No-one looking at Hannah More’s life can doubt her success in using both aristocratic networks and the opportunities for lay philanthropy provided by the Church of England. But her educational activism aroused hostility. In the ‘Blagdon controversy’ her High Church opponents, believing More’s Evangelical allies acted like a church within a church, accused her of appointing methodists to teach in her schools. The complex episode is a reminder of how contested religious discourse was, and that it was easy to fault high proﬁle women by suggesting they were religiously heterodox. More was accused of seducing her young clerical protogés and of being a Bishop in petticoats. She successfully fought back to restore her reputation by rallying her High Church friends to defend her orthodoxy, but it was true that she had an inﬂuence on clerical appointments in her area.73 Her cultivation of useful and well-placed social contacts was much less controversial because it was such a tried and tested way for ambitious women to get on in metropolitan literay and cultural circles.74 More was also keen to ingratiate herself in royal circles. She wrote to her friend Mary Hamilton, a subgoverness to the princesses, ‘Pray say something handsome of me to Madame de la Fite, … I can truly say I am always pleased with what she does, … I admire Mme de la Fite and hope to cultivate her friendship. … Her Entretiens I have bought many sets of, and recommend to young people, for whom I think they are wll calculated and judicious.’75 Despite her assiduous networking, More never achieved her ambitions to be appointed to the royal household, though she was commissioned in 1805 to write her manual for the education of George III’s grandaughter Princess Charlotte, Hints on the Education of a Princess. This concentrated on history, constitutional theory, and moral reﬂection; there is a trace of Enlightened conjectural history in the comment that modern women can be glad to have advanced beyond the inferior position held in Greek society.76 More was a suitable choice for this commission, as the author of Strictures on Female Education (1799) which argued for a responsible aristocracy who resided on their estates and took notice of their parishioners.77 In this book she alluded speciﬁcally to the Earl and Countess of Harcourt, who both held Household posts with Queen Charlotte, as role models. Inﬂuenced undoubtedly by Mme de Genlis they had instituted a spinning festival at Nuneham Courtenay, which combined prizes for craftsmanship with annual merit awards to virtuous villagers.78

320 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

Hannah More like Astell can be seen as either empowering or repressive.79 I see her trying to articulate a model of femininity that would compromise with some elements of the learned lady. In her novel, Coelebs in Search of A Wife, Miss Stanley, the suitable bride for Coelebs, learns Latin privately – as well as urging women to be exemplary mothers, and parish philanthropists. More should also be seen as making a daring attempt to castigate the shallow values of her culture. In Thoughts on the Manners of the Great, (1788) she bravely borrowed a man’s voice to speak against the aristocratic propensity for social exploitation, destructive gambling, not paying fair wages to servants or tradesmen. Effectively, she was castigating men and women from the class of her patrons. In conclusion, it may be argued that feminism could not really take women – and men – very far until it allied itself with a social and political critique of an unequal society based on patronage and deference. But that society was not without self-criticism, and as demonstrated here, the educational discourses combined enlightenment, reason and religion in a way that could open up new possibilities as well as conferring a sense of character and subjective worth. They gave women – elite women in the ﬁrst instance – tools to develop an autonomous sense of self, to judge the conduct of the men who controlled its legal and economic structure, and to emerge as their moral equals, if not superiors, equipped to inﬂuence the socialization of future generations. Women too could be philosophers, and tame The Beast. Though Wollstonecraft, after her spell as governess with the Kingsborough family, was to reject the life of the learned governess networking among the aristocracy, she needs to be understood in the context of this tradition.

Acknowledgments I am grateful to Felicia Gordon, Janet Todd, and Sylvana Tomaselli for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this paper; to Jill Shefrin for our frequent discussions of Queen Charlotte’s educational attitudes and for generously sharing references and xeroxes of material on Mme LePrince de Beaumont, as well as pre-publication drafts of her study of Lady Charlotte Finch; and to the convenors and participants of the day-school at the Clark Library, Los Angeles, 19–20 October 2001, on ‘Genealogies of Feminism’ for inviting me to give an earlier version of this paper, and for all the good conversations held there.

Notes 1. ‘… I pay particular attention to those in the middle class, because they appear to be in the most natural state’. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Sylvana Tomaselli, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 76. 2. As Barbara Taylor has eloquently explored in Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003), the discourse of rights is by no means the only one represented in the Vindication. See also Eileen James Yeo, ed., Mary Wollstonecraft and 200 Years of Feminisms, London and New York, Rivers Oram Press, 1997.

Aristocratic Feminism and the Learned Governess 321 3. L. Klein, ‘Gender, Conversation and the Public Sphere in Early Eighteenth-Century England’, in J. Still and M. Worton, eds, Textuality and Sexuality, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1993; idem, ‘Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth Century Studies, 29, (1995), pp. 97–109; John Brewer, ‘This, that and the other: Public, Social and Private in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’ in Dario Castiglione and Lesley Sharpe, eds, Shifting the Boundaries, Exeter, University of Exeter Press, 1995. 4. Bluestocking ideals and social contacts are a part of this strand of literate, reasonable and mainly aristocratic feminism, excluded here only for lack of space. Sylvia Harstock Myers, The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind, Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1990, and Gary Kelly, ‘General Introduction’, in Bluestocking Feminism: Writings of the Bluestocking Circle, 1738–1785, vol. I, ed. E. Eger, London, Pickering and Chatto, 1999. Kelly tends to take the courtly social relations at face value from the Bluestocking critique. 5. See Peter M. Wilson, ‘Women and Imperial Politics: The Württemberg Consorts’, in Clarissa Campbell Orr, ed., Queenship in Europe 1660–1815, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004. 6. Peter Robert Campbell, Power and Politics in Old Regime France, 1720–45, London, Routledge, 1996, p. 32; Sonia Wynne, ‘The Mistresses of Charles II and Restoration Court Politics’ in Eveline Cruickshanks, ed., The Stuart Courts, Stroud, Sutton Publishing, 2000, and Nancy Klein Maguire, ‘The Duchess of Portsmouth: English Royal Consort and French Politician’ in R. Malcolm Smuts, ed., The Stuart Courts and Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. The status, function and legal position of the royal mistress functioned slightly differently in different European courts, but the essential point, that she was nearly always an element of a larger faction, holds true. 7. Frances Harris, A Passion for Government: the Life of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991; idem, ‘ “The Honourable Sisterhood”: Queen Anne’s Maids of Honour’ The British Library Journal, 19, 2, (1993), pp. 181–98; Judith Schnied Lewis, In the family way: childbearing in the British aristocracy 1760–1860, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1986; Amanda Foreman, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, London, HarperCollins, 1998; Elaine Chalus, ‘That epidemical madness’ in Barker and Chalus, Gender in Eighteenth-Century England, and idem, ‘“My Minerva at My Elbow”: The Political Roles of Women in Eighteenth-Century England’ in Stephen Taylor et al., Hanoverian Britain and Empire; K. D. Reynolds, Aristocratic Women and Political Society in Victorian Britain, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998, esp. Ch. 6; P. J. Jupp, ‘The roles of royal and aristocratic women in British politics c. 1782–183’ in Mary O’Dowd and Sabine Wichert, eds, Chattel, Servant or Citizen. Women’s Status in Church, State and Society , Historical Studies, XIX, 1995, 103–13. 8. Peter Robert Campbell, Power and Faction in Louis XV’s France, London, Routledge, 1994, esp. pp. 32, 72–3, 91–2, 130, 132, 168; Peter Wilson, ‘Women and Imperial Politics’; John Rogister, ‘Queen Marie Leszczynska and Faction at the French Court 1725–1768’ in Clarissa Campbell Orr, ed., Queenship in Europe. 9. Cf Lady Diana Spencer’s efforts, once married to the profligate 2nd Viscount Bolingbroke, to obtain a court appointment for him through her brother, the 4th Duke of Marlborough. Her own appointment as Lady of the Bedchamber to the new consort, Queen Charlotte, in 1761, preceded her brother’s success in getting an appointment as Lord of the Bedchamber for Bolingbroke by one year. See Carola Hicks, Improper Pursuits: The Scandalous Life of Lady Di Beauclerk, London, Macmillan, 2001, pp. 90–2. 10. Published originally in London in French as Le Magasin des enfants, 1756. Studies of Mme LePrince de Beaumont’s conduct literature include Geneviève Artigas-Menant, ‘La vulgarisation scientiﬁque dans Le Nouveau Magasin Français de Mme LePrince de Beaumont’, Revue d’histoire des sciences, 44, (1991), pp. 343–57; Alix Deguise, ‘Madame LePrince de Beaumont, Conteuse ou Moraliste?’ in Roland Bonnel and Catherine Rubinger, eds, Femmes Savantes et Femmes d’Esprit: Women Intellectuals of the French Enlightenment,

322 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

New York, Peter Lang, 1994; Patricia Clancy, ‘A French Writer and Educator in England: Mme LePrince de Beaumont’ , Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 201, (1982), pp. 195–208, and idem, ‘Madame LePrince de Beaumont, Founder of Children’s Literature in France’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 16, (1979), pp. 281–7. See also The Young Misses Magazine, Dialogue 26, the story of Bella and Monstrosia. For other readings of Beauty and the Beast, see Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blond, London, Chatto and Windus, 1994; Betsy Hearne, Beauty and the Beast: Visions and Revisions of an Old Tale, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1989. Young Misses Magazine (2nd edition,) London, 1767, vol. II, p. 167. See Caroline Gonda’s witty article, ‘Misses, Murderesses and Magdalens: women in the public eye’ in Women, Writing, and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830, ed. E. Eger, C. Grant, C. Ó Gallchoir, and P. Warburton, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001. Vivien Jones, ‘The Seductions of Conduct: Pleasure and Conduct Literature’ in Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Roberts, eds, Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century, Basingstoke, Macmillan 1996. Bridget Hill, The Republican Virago: the life and times of Catherine Macaulay, Historian, Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1992. Magasin des Adolescentes (1760). Translations from this edition are my own. Diary extracts are cited in Lord Fitzmaurice, Life of William Petty, Ist Marquis of Lansdowne, 2 vols., 2nd ed., London, 1911; I am grateful to Kate Fielden, Archivist at Bowood House, Wiltshire, for letting me see the diary in manuscript. I am grateful to Jill Shefrin for making available this subscription list from a French edition of the Young Misses Magazine not available to me. DNB entry on Wills Hill, 1st Marquis of Downshire; David Cecil, The Cecils of Hatfield House, London, Constable, 1973. Flamboyant to the end, she died in a fire which nearly destroyed all of the family’s power house at Hatfield, which started when candles caught light on her old fashioned wig and high feather head-dress. The Young Ladies Magazine, vol. I, p. 53. The princesses were nieces of LePrince de Beaumont’s patroness, Elisabeth Charlotte, Duchess of Lorraine. Magasin des Adolescentes, Dialogue 2. Magasin des Adolescentes, vol. I, pp. 82–3. Harriet Guest, Small Change, University of Chicago Press, 2001, Part I. For example, Louisa North, daughter of Francis North, 1st Earl of Guilford, (1704–1790), from 1750–1751 Governor to the future George III. Louisa’s brother Frederick, 2nd Earl of Guilford, (1732–92), was Prime Minister 1770–1782. Another subscriber to the Young Misses Magazine was Lumley Saunderson, 3rd Earl of Scarborough, Treasurer to Frederick Prince of Wales. See John Bullion, ‘“To play what game she pleased without observation”: Princess Augusta and the political drama of succession, 1736–56’ and Clarissa Campbell Orr, ‘Charlotte, ‘Scientific Queen’, in Orr, ed., Queenship in Britain, 1660–1837: Royal Patronage, Court Culture, and Dynastic Politics, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2002. Magasin des Adolescentes, vol. I, pp. 100–1. Young Misses Magazine, Bk. II, p. 185. Cf. Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France, and the Unites States, 1780–1860, London, Macmillan, 1985, Ch. 1, ‘The Enlightenment and the Nature of Women’. Magasin des Adolscentes, Bk. III, pp. 104–5. Ibid., vol. II, p. 22. Ibid., vol. I, Dialogue 4. E.g. The Young Misses Magazine, Bk. II, Dialogues 15 and 16. Ruth Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell, An Early English Feminist, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1986; Hilda Smith, Reason’s Disciples: Seventeenth Century English Feminists, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Ill, 1982; B. W. Hill, ed., The First

Aristocratic Feminism and the Learned Governess 323

34.

35.

36. 37. 38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

English Feminist: ‘Reﬂections on Marriage’ and other writings by Mary Astell; Joan Kinnaird, ‘Mary Astell and the Conservative Contribution to English Feminism’, in Journal for British Studies, 19 (1979), pp. 53–75; Regina Janes, ‘“Mary, Mary, quite contrary” or Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft Compared’ in Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, 5, 1976, pp. 121–39. For a subtle exploration of Cartesianism in the French context, see Erica Harth, Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1992. Perry, Mary Astell, ch. 8, passim, and Appendix B, book collections of the Countess of Coventry. The Countess was born Lady Ann Somerset, 3rd daughter of the 1st Duke of Beaufort. The family seat Badminton had a well-stocked library available for Hannah More’s patron, Henrietta Boscawen, 5th Duchess of Beaufort. Part II of the Serious Proposal was dedicated to Queen Anne. See Clarissa Campbell Orr, ‘Introduction’, pp. 39–41, in Orr, Queenship in Britain, for the court context of feminism. Bridget Hill, ‘A Refuge from Men: the Idea of a Protestant Nunnery’, Past and Present (1987), 117, pp. 107–30, discusses literary examples of a women’s college, including Sarah Scott’s Millennium Hall (1762). Scott’s husband was sub-preceptor to George III; her sister Elizabeth Montagu, the Bluestocking, subscribed to the Young Misses Magazine. Gary Kelly, ‘General Introduction’, p. xlvii, emphasises Bluestocking philanthropy as ‘the rescue and reclamation of women, especially lower-class women, from diffused forms of courtliness and exploitation’. Ruth Perry, ‘Mary Astell’s Feminism: The Veil of Chastity’, in Studies of Eighteenth-Century Culture, 9, (1979), pp. 25–43. Magasin des Adolescentes, vol. I, pp. 123–4. For further discussion of this aristocratic ‘counter-culture’ of moral seriousness and cultural activity prior to the Bluestockings, see Irene Q. Brown, ‘Domesticity, feminism, and friendship: female aristocratic culture and marriage in England, 1660–1760’ in Journal of Family History, vol. 7: 4 (1982), pp. 406–24. She famously commissioned Racine to write plays for them; for Mme de Maintenon’s theatricals and their influence on Mme de Genlis, see M. E. Plagniol-Dieval, Mme de Genlis et Le Théâtre de l’éducation au XVIIIe siècle, Oxford, Voltaire Foundation, 1997, Studies on Voltaire and the eighteenth century, vol. 350. Olwen Hufton, ‘Reﬂections on Women in the Early Modern Court’, The Court Historian, vol. 5:1, May 2000, pp. 1–13. Instructions for the Education of a Daughter, by the Author of Telemachus, done into English and Revised, by George Hickes, London, Joseph Bowyer, 1707. Perry, Mary Astell, p. 119. From Jean Robain, Mme LePrince de Beaumont Intime, Paris, La Page et Le Plume, 1999. For Stanislas’ court at Luneville: Guy Cabourdin, Quand Stanislas régnait en Lorraine, Paris, Fayard, 1980; Nancy Mitford, Voltaire in Love, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1957. Le Triumph de la Verité, Nancy, 1751, translated into English in 1775 at the suggestion of John Hawkesworth, author of an oriental princely fable, Almoran and Hamet. The translation was dedicated to Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Preface to Le Magasin des Adolescentes. Story cited in Robain, Mme LePrince de Beaumont, p. 50, my translation. Despite these differences of opinion, the Earl was a subscriber to the Young Misses Magazine. Instructions pour les jeunes dames qui entrent dans le monde, se marient, leur devoirs dans cet état. For Lady Charlotte Finch, see Jill Shefrin, ‘Such Constant Affectionate Care: Lady Charlotte Finch, Royal Governess to the Children of George III’, Los Angeles, Cotsen Occasional Press, 2003. Lady Charlotte and her mother the Countess of Pomfret subscribed to the Young Misses Magazine. E.g Prince Tity, Dialogues 19–22. John Bullion, ‘George, be a King!’ in Stephen Taylor et al., Hanoverian Britain and Empire; Essays in Memory of Philip Lawson, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 1999.

324 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters 52. Christopher Hibbert, George III, A Personal History, London, Viking, 1998, pp. 81–2; Alice Drayton Greenwood, Lives of the Hanoverian Queens of England 2 vols, London, G. Bell & Sons Ltd., 1911. 53. Marilyn Morris, The British Monarchy and the French Revolution, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1998; Linda Colley, ‘The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty and the British Nation 1760–1820’, Past and Present, 102 (1984), pp. 94–129. 54. Like Olympe Mancini, Caroline of Brunswick’s broken marriage to the Prince of Wales became the occasion to explore the nature of marriage and add to the new, late eighteenth century discourse on the rights of women discussion.. 55. For further discussions of Queen Charlotte’s cultural patronage see Clarissa Campbell Orr, ‘Lost Hanoverian Libraries’, in James Raven, ed., Lost Libraries, Palgrave, 2004; Orr, ‘Charlotte Scientific Queen’ in Orr, ed. Queenship in Britain 1660–1837, Orr, ‘Queen Charlotte as Patron: Some Intellectual and Social Contexts’, in The Court Historian, vol. 6, no. 3, 2001, pp. 273–212. 56. Vittoria Caetani, Duchess of Sermoneta, The Locks of Norbury, London, John Murray, 1940. Lady Shwaub’s husband Sir Luke was Frederick, Prince of Wales’ artistic advisor. He subscribed to The Young Misses Magazine. De la Fite, Eugénie et ses élèves, Paris 1787, Letter 1. 57. For de la Fite and German networks see Orr, ‘Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Queen of Great Britain and Electress of Hanover: Northern Dynasties and the Northern Republic & Letters’ in Orr, ed. Queenship in Europe, and entry by idem on de la Fife in Oxford DNB, online update, 2005. 58. G. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992. 59. Eisenstein, Grub Street Abroad, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992; Simon Schama, ‘The Enlightenment in the Netherlands’ in Roy Porter and M. Teich, eds, The Enlightenment in National Context, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981; The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century: Decline, Enlightenment and Revolution, ed. Margaret C. Jacob and Wijnand W. Mijnhardt, Ithaca & London, Cornell University Press, 1992. Bibliothèque de Sciences et des Beaux Arts, vol. 38, pp. 192–204, 259–65, 501–3 for the review of LaRoche’s novel. 60. Campe’s patron was Charles Frederick Duke of Brunswick, husband to Augusta, George III’s sister, and father of Caroline Princess of Wales. 61. Letter from Queen Charlotte to Charles, Duke of Mecklenburg, 9 July 1782, Hansarchir des Mecklenburg – Strelitzschen Fürsreuhauses/Briefsammlung, 4, 3–2, Nr 874. 62. There were also suspicions surrounding her adoption of two young English girls, brought up with her royal pupils to help them learn English. Rumour suggested they were her children by the duc d’Orléans, but this is unlikely. In spite of her admiration for de Genlis’ books, Queen Charlotte therefore cautioned Frances Burney against pursuing a semi-public literary correspondence with her. Diary and Letters of Mme D’Arblay, ed Charlotte Barrett, 6 vols., London 1903, vol. III, pp. 16–17.The ambiguities of de Genlis’ reputation are a helpful reminder of how intermingled were the ‘worldly’ and ‘unworldly’ elements in polite society on either side of the channel. Mme LePrince de Beaumont’s rigorist logic proved no proof against her falling for a military adventurer and double-agent, Thomas Pichon, who had given French military secrets to the British in the Seven Years War and was living off a British pension in London. It is unclear whether their relationship was ever legitimized in a secret marriage, and it broke down over financial disagreements over de Beaumont’s provision for her daughter and her departure for Savoy. Pierre Bagot, Marie Le Prince de Beaumont, Lettres à Thomas Pichon, Vire, J. Beauﬁls, 1924. 63. The new bride was the duchesse de Bourbon-Penthièvre, descendant of Louis XIV through his mistress Mme de Montespan; her father was a great friend of the Marquis de Puysieulx. The comte de Genlis became Captain of the Guard to the Chartres household, and her brother, the Marquis du Crest, was made the Duc’s Chancellor. Dowries

Aristocratic Feminism and the Learned Governess 325

64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70.

71. 72.

73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

were later provided for her two daughters and positions for her surviving son-in-law, the Comte de Valence, Gabriel de Broglie, Mme de Genlis, Paris, Librairie Académique Perrin, 1995. Plagniol-Dieval, Le Théâtre de l’éducation de Mme de Genlis, Guy Antonetti, Louis Philippe, Paris, 1994. See especially ‘ Les Deux Philosophes’ in Les Veillées du chateau, ( 1784) and La Religion Considerée comme l’unique base du bonheur et de la véritable philosophie, 1787. The Prix Montoyon was awarded for a work of social benefit. In 1782 this went to Mme d’Epinay instead for Conversations d’Emilie. de Broglie, Madame de Genlis, pp. 118–19. W. R. Ward, Christianity under the Ancien Régime 1648–1789, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999. Sara Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: the Causes Célèbres of Pre-Revolutionary France, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993. Harth, Cartesian Women, pp. 116–20, and Carla Hesse, The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern, Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2001, pp. 138–42 both discuss de Genlis’ belief in the moral and intellectual equality of men mainly in the light of her De L’Influence des Femmes sur la littérature, published in 1811 when de Genlis was becoming more conservative. Her advocacy of women as moral educators was arguably more vehement before the French Revolution. G. A. Kelly, Victims, Authority, Terror: the parallel deaths of d’Orléans, Custine, Bailly and Malesherbes, Chapel Hill, Ca, 1982. Louis Philippe later recalled ‘The love of virtue, or morality, and of everything that is good and honourable, sentiments which Mme de Genlis certainly drove home to us at every turn, became…a new stimulus toward democracy and revolution’. Louis Philippe, Memoirs, 1773–93, trans & with an introduction by John Hardman, 1973, p.15. Anne Stott, Hannah More, the First Victorian, Oxford University Press, 2003, and eadem, ‘Hannah More and the Blagdon Controversy, 1799–1802’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 51, (2000), 319–46. Stott, Hannah More, Chs 2 &3, and pp. 155–61; Norma Clarke, Dr. Johnson’s Women, London, Hambledon, 2001. Elizabeth and Florence Anson, ed., Mary Hamilton, … from Letters and Diaries, 1756 –1816, London, John Murray, 1925, p. 107. Stott, Hannah More, pp. 260–6. Hannah More, Strictures on female education, London, 1799, p. 148, note. Orr, ‘Queen Charlotte as Patron’. See Anne Stott, ‘Patriotism and Providence: the Politics of Hannah More’ in Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson, eds, Women and British Politics, 1760–1860, The Power of the Petticoat, Macmillan, 2000.

5.4 ‘Women that would plague me with rational conversation’: Aspiring Women and Scottish Whigs, c. 1790–1830 Jane Rendall

The death of Lord Jeffrey is indeed a mournful event to me. … It is about ﬁfty years since I ﬁrst met him. … He delighted in checking aspiring or ambitious women, as he used to call Mrs Millar and me – ‘women that would plague him with rational conversation’ – and for many years of our early acquaintance I feared more than I liked him.1 The women whom, ﬁfty years later, Eliza Fletcher represented as like herself, ‘aspiring or ambitious’ in early nineteenth-century Edinburgh society were, like Francis Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review from 1802, heirs to the Enlightenment in Scotland. The signiﬁcance of the Scottish Enlightenment for the language employed about the condition of women in the early nineteenth century, and potentially for the social and political practice of women of the middling to upper ranks has still to be identiﬁed. Much recent work has suggested that both the conjectural histories of the condition of women shaped by John Millar and Lord Kames, and the language of ‘complacency’ and female sensibility employed by Henry Mackenzie and his associates, served to differentiate more sharply a ‘private and intimate domestic realm’ within which alone women’s moral powers and inﬂuence might be fulﬁlled.2 But most recently Mary Catherine Moran has argued that conjectural histories of the condition of women may be read rather as indicators of progress and reﬁnement in the manners of men, implying a passivity for women, even if she also identiﬁed Millar’s qualiﬁed endorsement of a social role for women in a modernising commercial society as in ‘an intermediary social sphere that was thought to guarantee both civic and domestic virtue’.3 The emphasis of Millar and others on a progressive improvement in the situation of women, as a signiﬁcant index of the development of a commercial and civilized society characterized by free institutions, could however be employed in more challenging ways. Kathryn Gleadle has suggested its importance within the reforming language of early nineteenth-century radical and feminist thinking in England.4 These themes transcended Anglo-Scottish differences; but a perspective from Scotland can indicate slightly distinctive approaches to the appropriation, and reworking, of the language of progressive improvement in women’s situation. In an oppositional spirit, Scottish Whigs and 326

Aspiring Women and Scottish Whigs 327

radicals brought such historical perspectives together with the republican framework of civic humanism. As this essay explores, individual women, and men, appropriated these discourses to express aspirations for their familial lives, and in social and even civic contexts, in ways which cut across any simple distinctions between public and private worlds. Eliza Fletcher can be located within a small group of women from academic, professional and literary circles, Whiggish and progressive in their outlook, based in Scotland but with far wider connections. They included women from the families of two major ﬁgures of the Scottish Enlightenment. One was that of John Millar, Professor of Civil Law at the University of Glasgow between 1761 and 1801, and author of the Observations concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society (1771) which included his important chapter, ‘Of the Rank and Condition of Women in Different Ages’.5 Millar’s mother was a cousin of another distinguished member of the literati, William Cullen, Professor of Medicine ﬁrst at Glasgow, and then, from 1761 to his death in 1790, in Edinburgh. The connection between the Millar and Cullen families was to be maintained in subsequent generations.6 Adam Smith wrote in 1788 of John Millar’s ‘family of young daughters who are all remarkably well behaved women, very sensible and very clever, but not very handsome’.7 And in 1800 Frederick Lamb, a young, aristocratic, rather scornful boarder in John Millar’s household, wrote that ‘all the ladies [here] are contaminated with an itch for philosophy and learning. … they are all philosophers’.8 Of John Millar’s six daughters, four ﬁgure in the network I trace here. Two, Anne and Janet Millar remained in the family home at Milheugh, Blantyre, all their lives. Agnes Millar married James Mylne, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, who was the uncle of Frances Wright and Camilla Wright from Dundee, both of whom joined his household in Glasgow in 1813. Frances Wright was the utopian socialist whose dramatic but tragic career has been well told by many biographers, and was avidly followed in the letters of all the women discussed here.9 That career was followed especially closely by the daughters of William Cullen. Of Cullen’s household, Eliza Fletcher later wrote that David Hume, Adam Smith, Joseph Black and Henry Mackenzie had all been frequent visitors and that ‘in their society his highly gifted family had acquired a taste for all that was intellectual and reﬁned’. The youngest daughter, Robina, married John Millar’s eldest son, John Craig Millar in 1789, and rapidly became an intimate friend of Eliza Fletcher after her arrival in Edinburgh in 1791. Fletcher, from a liberal Yorkshire family, married the Edinburgh lawyer and burgh reformer Archibald Fletcher. She remembered of her friend in the early 1790s ‘the brilliancy of her talents and the charms of her conversation’.10 Robina’s husband, John Craig Millar was a member of the Edinburgh Society of the Friends of the People and associate of some of the radicals tried and sentenced for sedition after the British Convention had met in Edinburgh in autumn 1793; in 1795 the couple emigrated to what they believed to be the far more sympathetic political climate of the United States, where they enjoyed for a time the hospitality of Benjamin Rush, the

328 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

former pupil of William Cullen, whose republican and medical principles are described by Sarah Knott in this volume. John Craig Millar went ahead to purchase a farm on the Pennsylvania frontier but died before Robina could reach him. She returned to Scotland a young widow, and continued to correspond with Rush, as a quasi-paternal republican mentor. Twenty years later she was to inspire Frances Wright to visit the American republic, and write her Views of Society and Manners in America (1821).11 After her return Robina lived with her two surviving unmarried sisters, Margaret and Elizabeth Cullen. Elizabeth was in poor health and nearly blind. Margaret Cullen, however, published two novels, Home (1802) and Mornton (1817). Also important to this network was the marriage of Margaret Millar, who became the second wife of John Thomson, a young doctor who was also in the 1790s a member of the Edinburgh Society of the Friends of the People, but who later made a successful career in academic medicine.12 His two daughters, Isabella and Margaret, were educated on lines laid down by Margaret Thomson, sharing many interests with their brothers. The talented Isabella died young in 1824. There are many links between these households, and with the Fletchers, in the ﬁrst thirty years of the nineteenth century. The Cullen sisters corresponded frequently with John and Margaret Thomson over the biography of their father which he had undertaken, and on which Isabella Thomson worked as well as her brothers William and Allen.13 Through James and Agnes Mylne and Robina Millar, Frances and Camilla Wright were introduced into both the Millar and the Fletcher households. These women were united by a Whig and sometimes a radical political outlook, shared with husbands, fathers and brothers, and built in the difﬁcult political circumstances of the 1790s. The elder John Millar and William Cullen had been distinctive among the Edinburgh literati for their political Whiggism. The signiﬁcance of this for their daughters is sometimes obscured by their own later perspectives and by Victorian editors. Eliza Fletcher wrote of Robina Millar that that ‘sympathy we had in the political feelings and principles of our husbands was a strong bond between us’, in a sentence edited by her daughter to refer simply to ‘a sympathy in political sentiments’.14 Eliza Fletcher, and the Cullen and Millar sisters, had a wide network of friends, including other women activists and writers, in Scotland, England and beyond. Eliza Fletcher came to know Elizabeth Hamilton, educationalist and novelist, in Edinburgh in the ﬁrst decade of the nineteenth century; indeed she says, it was she who ‘brought me into fashion’ with her entrée into far wider literary circles. She wrote most warmly of her: She was a woman of liberal mind, much cultivation, and very considerable liveliness of imagination, quickness of apprehension and kindness of heart. She loved me and she loved my children and she respected my husband very highly. She became a friend also of the evangelical novelist Mary Brunton, author of SelfControl (1810) and Discipline (1815), who was married to Alexander Brunton,

Aspiring Women and Scottish Whigs 329

minister of the Greyfriars Church and Professor of Hebrew at the University of Edinburgh.15 Such associations could cross political differences, as in the friendships maintained with the more conservative Joanna Baillie, playwright and poet, and Anne Grant of Laggan, also a poet and author of Letters from the Mountains (1809). The Cullen household had given the family of Joanna Baillie much support on the death of her father, and continued the connection after her move to London; the Millar family had been close neighbours, and Anne Millar, in particular, had become a close and lifelong friend.16 In 1801 she gave Eliza Fletcher an introduction, and Baillie, writing to Millar, recalled her very great pleasure at her meeting with ‘a charming woman, & a pleasing woman & a very superior woman’.17 Baillie became a necessary point of call for women of this group in any visit to London. Anne Grant had moved near to Edinburgh in 1803, and took up residence there in 1810. She became close to both Eliza Fletcher and Elizabeth Hamilton, even though she classed them as of the party of ‘the Philosophers, whom we consider as disguised republicans’.18 There were also many English contacts. It may have been through Fletcher’s York background that by the late 1790s she already knew Catherine Cappe, philanthropist, writer and later autobiographer, and wife of the Unitarian minister in York, Newcome Cappe.19 In the summer of 1798 Cappe recorded that she was introduced to Robina Millar and Margaret Cullen there, and in 1801 the sisters took up residence in York for some years.20 In Edinburgh the Fletchers had been close to the Erskine family, including not only Henry Erskine, the leading reformer of the Faculty of Advocates but also his brother the radical antiquarian Lord Buchan, who had written on the education of women in his journal The Bee.21 Through Buchan, Eliza Fletcher was introduced to Anna Letitia Barbauld, Unitarian poet and educationalist, whose niece Lucy Aikin also became a friend.22 These circles were not conﬁned to Britain. Robina Millar continued to correspond with Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia on the republicanism of the United States, and introduced Catherine Cappe to him as a correspondent.23 In Scotland in 1816 Eliza Fletcher ﬁrst met Matilda Tone Wilson, whom she described as a person of ‘great energy, great talents and uncommon quickness of parts and the most intrepid public spirit’.24 Matilda (or Martha) Tone Wilson was the widow of Wolfe Tone, the United Irishman. After his death in jail in 1798, his widow and son found asylum in France, and then in the United States, after Matilda’s remarriage to an emigrant Scottish radical, Thomas Wilson, an old friend of John Craig Millar.25 Matilda Wilson gave the Wright sisters support on their arrival in the United States in 1819, and corresponded with Eliza Fletcher from 1820 to her death in 1849.26 In Paris in 1829–30, Janet Millar, the Fletchers and the Thomsons were all welcomed by General Lafayette for their relationship with Fanny Wright.27 The legacy of the politics of the 1790s could generate more radical possibilities, such as Fanny Wright’s utopianism. Both James Mylne and Eliza Fletcher were early friends of the New Lanark manufacturer Robert Owen. Though Fletcher’s reference to the ‘notorious socialist’ in her autobiography was inﬂuenced by Owen’s later career, she was on good terms with him in earlier

330 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

years. In London in 1819 he took her to visit Elizabeth Fry and William Godwin, at whose home she observed with pleasure Mary Wollstonecraft’s portrait by Opie hanging in his parlour.28 To the ambitious and aspiring women in these networks, Scottish Whiggism could have many meanings. In the political climate of the 1790s, Whig radicals, including John Millar, drew upon an older civic humanist ideal, that of the republic, and of the so-called commonwealthmen like Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, in opposition to a repressive government. Its elements were rejection of the corruption that a powerful executive and aristocracy might create, commitment to freedom of thought and expression, and belief in the possibility of political renewal through the pursuit of civic virtue. Archibald Fletcher, writing on ecclesiastical patronage in the 1780s, had defended the right of congregations to choose their ministers, to encourage ‘those lively and exalted sentiments, in relation to the interests of liberty, which ought to pervade, and to animate the citizens of a free government …’ and attacked William Robertson’s system of patronage in church government as one which ‘debases and prepares the mind for political servitude’.29 L. S. Jacyna, following Henry Cockburn, described such an outlook as ‘philosophic Whiggism’, and suggested – with reference particularly to medicine – that ‘the extension of the scientiﬁc spirit and the growth of liberty were viewed as aspects of the same process of enlightenment’.30 By the 1790s, however, elite Edinburgh society was dominated by the regime of Henry Dundas, portrayed by Henry Cockburn as ‘absolute dictator’ of Scotland, which systematically excluded those associated with political opposition – like Archibald Fletcher, Henry Erskine, and Francis Jeffrey – from all forms of ofﬁce and patronage.31 Even without political power, it was nevertheless to be the Whigs who over the next two decades were to be most inﬂuential in challenging and inspiring public opinion in Scotland and beyond. Archibald Fletcher and Henry Erskine were prominent among those reviving the cause of burgh reform when it became possible to do so after 1815. Within Edinburgh the dominant intellectual inﬂuence was Dugald Stewart, Professor of Moral Philosophy from 1785 to 1809, who transmitted the body of enlightened knowledge associated with Adam Smith, Lord Kames, John Millar and others to a later generation. He did so partly through an emphasis on a liberal education, grounded in the study of the philosophy of mind and the rediscovery of common sense principles of morality, and partly through his teaching and popularisation of political economy. Stewart inﬂuenced the group of young men, including Francis Jeffrey, Henry Brougham and Francis Horner, who founded the Edinburgh Review in 1802. In her study of this periodical, Biancamaria Fontana has demonstrated the complexities of the intellectual project of the reviewers. On balance, in their wide-ranging explorations of political economy, they tended to endorse a commitment to modernity and progress in a commercial society. But at the same time they constantly reworked the political lessons to be drawn from the French Revolution, seen not as a philosophical conspiracy, but as the product of legitimate grievances, which had found no effective political mediation. The reviewers identiﬁed

Aspiring Women and Scottish Whigs 331

less with John Millar’s late radicalism of the 1790s than with the stress apparent in his historical writings on the growing importance of the middling ranks in the making of a modern commercial society, which, if not democratic, needed a free press and more extensive education to secure its liberties. Fontana has suggested that the reviewers recast the idea of the Whig party not so much as a parliamentary faction but as a political force capable of mobilising public opinion.32 These different strands in the reforming politics of early nineteenth-century Edinburgh – the republican inheritance of civic humanism, the project of understanding the needs of a modern commercial society – were both relevant to the aspirations of Eliza Fletcher, Robina Millar and other women of this group. There are also, in their published writings and letters, some indications of awareness of the issues raised by the sexual politics of the 1790s. From Glasgow in 1794 Anne Grant had written that Vindication of the Rights of Woman was ‘so run after here, that there is no keeping it long enough to read it leisurely’.33 In the spring of 1798 Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman was critically reviewed in the Scots Magazine, which described Wollstonecraft as ‘a philosophical wanton’. However, the Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany, edited by the Fletchers’ friend, Robert Anderson, carried in April 1798 an exceptionally favourable discussion of Wollstonecraft, in a text virtually identical with that of the London Analytical Review, though with all the critical remarks cut from it, leaving an overall impression of Wollstonecraft’s ‘lively sensibility and instructive capacity’.34 That review also reﬂected on the need to reform European marriage laws, including the need for divorce, introduced in France in 1792, and already present in Scotland. Reformers in these circles had come to associate political change with the reform of marriage, even if such reforms did not carry the revolutionary implications described by Suzanne Desan for France elsewhere in this volume. In their published writings and in their daily lives, women from this group were concerned to project models of family life which were characterized not by authority or hierarchy, but by a considerable degree of equality and companionship between husband and wife. They advocated, too, the education of girls so that they might participate in an enlightened form of sociability, with a full awareness of the social and political issues of the period. Margaret Cullen’s ﬁvevolume novel, Home (1802) may be read in the spirit of the ‘war of ideas’ of the 1790s; it was not a good novel, but it was a didactic and provocative attack on the existing laws of marriage and inheritance, and on the ties of kinship.35 It may also be read in the context of the material circumstances of the Cullen sisters. Though William Cullen had executed a series of bonds in his daughters’ favour, they were left without effective provision on his death, intestate, in 1790. The scale of the disaster was clear to family and close friends, and Adam Smith, in the last months of his own life, and two weeks after William Cullen’s death, intervened directly with Henry Dundas through the Duke of Buccleuch to secure a modest pension for the sisters.36 Cullen’s estate, burdened by debt, was inherited by default by his eldest son, Robert, and was quickly sold.37 There is much evidence to suggest the continuing bitterness of the Cullen sisters towards their

332 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

eldest brother for his convivial and extravagant lifestyle, his ready assumption of the rights of the eldest son, and his failure to recognise their father’s intentions towards them. Home was dominated by the ﬁgure of a mature and rational woman, Mrs Almorne: Mrs Almorne was not of the common class of mankind; nature had been liberal to her of gifts, and had particularly distinguished her by a force of mind, which, uniting with other rare qualities, raised her to a high degree of human excellence. She thought and acted in an instance peculiar to herself; but though her conduct was singular, and her sentiments often avowedly at variance with common opinions, yet her actions so uniformly tended to the good of society, that she was always respected, and often extremely beloved.38 Those unusual opinions included her support for the reform of the marriage laws, in a way which would be sympathetic to women. The major thrust of the novel lay in its consideration of the condition of women within marital and family relationships. The heroine of the novel was Constantia Ornville, the daughter of the benevolent and domesticated Sir John and the rather more frivolous and misguided Lady Ornville. Constantia’s sister was married to an unprincipled bully, making the best of a very unhappy marriage. Of her three brothers, the eldest married a prostitute, and, in approaching his sister to help him gain parental approval for this, stressed that he did not wish to marry a sentimental or literary woman: It is indeed to be feared that the progress literature is making among women will be their ruin; the moment they pass the bounds of knowledge convenient for their place in society, adieu to all our comfort in them! Better far that they should be kept in profound ignorance, than o’er step the point, which keeps them chaste, obedient, and discreet.39 The youngest brother had an affair with a promiscuous married woman, Mrs Melfont, whom he married after her husband divorced her. Only Frederic, Constantia’s second brother, who had eloped with a young wife, but was tempted by another woman, was ﬁnally to be redeemed to care for his dying wife. The resolution of the novel turned on the theft of Sir John’s will, instigated by the eldest son, which left Constantia without an inheritance, asking Mrs Almorne whether there was no possibility of ‘a single employment, by which a woman of ordinary talents in my station, may render herself respectable and independent?’40 She found only retreat to a country cottage, but was saved by the reappearance of her suitor, the gift of an annuity from Mrs Almorne, and the confession of the servant who in stealing the will had allowed the eldest brother to inherit. When Sir John Ornville, a rational and sympathetic man, commented that Wollstonecraft, though possessing a ‘vigorous mind and independent spirit’ had lacked the judgement to promote her opinions, Mrs Almorne responded by

Aspiring Women and Scottish Whigs 333

alluding to Lord Auckland’s bill of 1800 to prohibit remarriage for women guilty of adultery: It is unfortunate … that any efforts in favour of the female sex should be ill conducted; for surely no candid or generous man will deny, that their lot in general is calamitous. – But is it not extraordinary, that no man thinks of proposing an alteration in the marriage laws, except one which would fall entirely, and, it must be owned, sometimes most cruelly upon women?41 She saw the reform of the marriage laws nevertheless as ‘one of the most essential measures that could be adopted for the promotion of true virtue’. Her sympathy for innocent women caught in an unhappy marriage led her to suggest the adoption of a divorce law for England comparable to that in existence in Scotland, where women could initiate a divorce. Though she had compassion for the seduced innocent, there was none for the deﬁant ex-prostitute, Sally Cusliffe, who married the eldest Ornville son, nor for the promiscuous and divorced Mrs Melfont, for both Mrs Almorne and Sir John were committed to the maintenance of sexual morality.42 Sir John Ornville stressed above all the signiﬁcance of the diffusion of property between women and men for a shift in the balance of power in marriage: I would not demand for a wife an equal power over her husband’s property, especially if she brought him none; but surely that woman is not ﬁt to be a wife or mother, who cannot be trusted with an independent right to such a share of his fortune, as may prevent her from being a slave. Civilization of manners may in many instances prevent the want of it from being felt; but in general, wives are too dependent to act with the freedom that is necessary to Peace or Virtue.43 Mrs Almorne’s ﬁnal advice to Constantia was that ‘a very great portion of the misery of mankind, that of women especially, ﬂows from the regard which is indiscriminately paid to the ties of blood’.44 Natural affections were, she suggested, nothing more than habitual sympathies, which would become less signiﬁcant as nations became more civilized. Talent and virtue should be the basis of advancement, rather than the accident of birth, and well-founded friendship should have stronger claims than consanguinity. Both primogeniture and the dependence of married women were explicit targets of this novel, which also looked to a reformation of public manners. Mrs Almorne’s society of the future was a progressive and civilized one, distinguished by the public spirit exercised by both women and men. That society would hope to achieve virtue, peace, and a domestic reformation in which home was to become ‘a secure refuge from the wicked, and the most delightful Asylum of Man’.45 In both her novels but especially in Home, Margaret Cullen advocated a social and political awareness which was not separate from, but capable of redeeming and reforming, the narrowness of family interests and blood ties, in the interests of a broader public.

334 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

The novel also argued that to achieve such progress nothing was more signiﬁcant than the improvement of women’s education. So many of the Ornville family’s failings could be attributed to the frivolity and superﬁciality of Lady Ornville, who failed in her responsibility to guide not only her daughters but her sons. Cullen’s work in many ways shared the educational philosophy of Elizabeth Hamilton, the best-known writer in this group, whose ﬁction and educational texts both had a clearly prescriptive purpose.46 From her Letters on Education (1801–02) to her Series of Popular Essays (1813) Hamilton consistently defended her position, with reference to women’s own responsibility for the education of their children, for: if women were so educated to qualify them for the proper performance of this momentous duty, it would do more towards the progressive improvement of the species, than all the discoveries of science and the researches of philosophy. She drew quite explicitly upon the work of Dugald Stewart, the Edinburgh moral philosopher, in her educational writing. In his lectures Stewart had, in the spirit of Millar and others, clearly identiﬁed the improving condition of women as characteristic of a modern as opposed to ancient societies, but his approach marked something of a breach with the conjectural history of an earlier generation. He was much less interested in the historical stages of development in the past, than in the application of an informed moral philosophy and understanding of the human mind, in the educational projects of the present. Though in his lectures he spoke in an apparently conservative spirit on the natural differences between the sexes, he also endorsed the expansion of education for women as part of the development of an enlightened public opinion, which would improve public happiness simultaneously with both public and private virtue. For Hamilton such an approach offered the possibility of taking up the language of Scottish moral philosophy and the philosophy of mind for her own educational project. She wrote of education as the foundation of moral improvement in a progressive society, one in which public and private goals were not to be separated.47 Eliza Fletcher left virtually no published work.48 Yet in 1817 she wrote a memoir of her second daughter, Grace, immediately after her death from typhus at the age of 21. It is in many ways an exemplary life, directed ostensibly to her other children, and published for the ﬁrst time in 1875.49 It is exemplary not merely as a record of goodness and suffering, or even of domestic interests, though it contains all that, and particularly an ‘uncommon disinterestedness of character’ evident from a very early age. Fletcher also recollected Grace’s desire for knowledge, for art, Latin, Italian, and her education through companionship with the women of the network discussed here. She mentioned Grace’s visits to the Millar sisters at Blantyre as ‘the acme of her intellectual enjoyment’, and her education in their taste, politics and morals as in ‘the humour and fun of some members of that Scottish sisterhood’. In 1812 she resumed the study of Latin under the guidance of Lucy Aikin on her visit to Edinburgh. She was intimately acquainted with Robina Millar, and, staying with her in York, was guided by

Aspiring Women and Scottish Whigs 335

‘her elevation of mind and quickness of sensibility’. With her sisters Grace attended a York county election standing for several hours in the crowd to hear the speeches, in a spirit, says her mother, ‘of genuine freedom and enlightened patriotism’. She paid many visits with and without her family to York and to London. On one occasion she travelled with Mary Brunton, visiting Anna Letitia Barbauld, with whom she stayed for an extended period, and Joanna Baillie. At Elizabeth Hamilton’s ‘she was always a welcome and cherished visitor’. In Edinburgh she enjoyed society and gaiety, but it was ‘the gaiety of intelligence, benevolence and peace’. Fletcher offers us a portrait of the last months of Grace’s life in which she balanced ‘usefulness and rational enjoyment’. Her evangelical religious faith was growing but it did not narrow her mind. She spent three or four days a week at the Canongate House of Industry or the Lancasterian school, though she did not neglect home duties. Fletcher gives a day-by-day account of Grace’s last week, which included an animated argument with a gentleman from the West Indies over slavery at dinner, a visit to the House of Industry, seeing Kemble play Hamlet in the evening, painting a portrait of Matilda Tone Wilson’s son to gratify his mother, an evening at Mary Brunton’s, and quieter evenings reading aloud to the family. Grace’s world is one of sociability and some learning, shaped by a community of like-minded women but also by active participation in the mixed cultural life of Edinburgh, and by commitment to civic virtue and responsibility. That commitment was illustrated through brief anecdotes: of the poor pregnant woman whom Grace had rescued from the harshness of the parish ofﬁcers of Tadcaster, and of the orphan child taken from her foster nurse to the workhouse by the managers of the Charity Workhouse of Canongate, but returned to her home through Grace’s inﬂuence. This portrait of Grace suggests some of the ways in which Fletcher saw the ideal female citizen, learned, domesticated and virtuous, yet also socially and politically aware, demonstrating a form of civic virtue through social responsibility, and unafraid in contending with harsh and arbitrary forms of authority. For Fletcher, such responsibilities were not in any way opposed to the demands of family and domestic life. Her autobiography, like her memoir of Grace, was simultaneously and inseparably a history of political awareness and a familial history. There is much to suggest the desire of members of this group of women for both an active sociability and a civic role; these aspirations could create tensions and hostility, expressed by Francis Jeffrey as by others. Eliza Fletcher’s retrospective account of Edinburgh society at the beginning of the nineteenth century is widely quoted by historians. Even before 1802 she and her husband had known the founders of the Edinburgh Review well, associated as they were with the radical minority, including young Whig lawyers like Jeffrey, and Henry Brougham, and radical medical men John Thomson and John Allen. Of the Review, she recalled ‘the electrical effects of its publication on the public mind’ and the discussion of articles that followed at every dinner table.50 Later, with the support of Hamilton, whom she suggested cleared her of the accusation of being a ‘ferocious Democrat’, Fletcher began to play a more conﬁdent role in the

336 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

‘delightful’ Edinburgh society of this period.51 She recounted how she, Elizabeth Hamilton and Anne Grant of Laggan helped to provide the sociable context in which such men as Scott, Jeffrey, Henry Mackenzie and lesser known ﬁgures such as Stewart’s successor Thomas Brown, John Playfair and Archibald Alison ﬂourished. She noted how the forms of literary society changed, as dinner parties gave way to larger gatherings devoted to music and conversation, sometimes with a light buffet later in the evening, for ‘people did not in these parties meet to eat, but to talk and listen’. She wrote of ‘a group (chieﬂy of ladies) listening to the brilliant talk of Mr Jeffrey’, as of the young male students surrounding Dr Thomas Brown or Professor Playfair.52 Some contemporary representations reinforce that picture. Anne Grant, a close friend of Eliza Fletcher though she did not share her political opinions, wrote of the Fletcher house as ‘for many years the centre of attraction to everything that is elegant or enlightened about town; for there is no place where worth and talents are so highly estimated as here, or where wealth can so little compensate the want of them’.53 Even in the hints of separate spaces suggested here, Fletcher’s memoirs give relatively little indication that women’s participation in such enlightened sociability was not always welcome. Her autobiography was written between 1838 and 1844, at a time when she had drawn closer, in her old age, to Francis Jeffrey, Henry Cockburn, and Henry Brougham, all of whom paid tribute in the 1830s and 1840s to her beauty, benevolence, and magnetism.54 But her memory of Francis Jeffrey’s response to ‘rational conversation’ suggests his conservative reaction. And there is much evidence for this. Fletcher was by no means the only woman to ﬁnd herself a little afraid of Francis Jeffrey. His scathing criticisms of women writers in the Review were notorious. Anne Grant wrote of the reviewers as treating ‘female genius and female productions with unqualiﬁed scorn, never mentioning anything of the kind but with a sneer’.55 Jeffrey did however draw distinctions. He criticized Joanna Baillie’s plays mercilessly in three notoriously harsh reviews, with particular reference to their didactic intent and philosophical pretensions; Anne Grant commented that ‘the ladies here were enraged beyond measure’ and that Jeffrey had nearly shared ‘the fate of Orpheus’.56 But he did express his appreciation, in the clearest of terms, of some aspects of the work of Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Hamilton, approving their writing as moralists of domestic life, rather than as novelists or educationalists. He praised Edgeworth for discarding ‘the jargon of fashionable life’ and for addressing herself in her Popular Tales rather to ‘that most important part of our population which consists of the well-educated in the low and middling order of the people’.57 Anne Grant suggested that ‘everything that he writes on manners tends to exalt the reign of the domestic affections and quiet home-born felicities above all that dazzles and captivates the children of this world’.58 Jeffrey’s support of ‘domestic affections’, and his hostility to female pretensions, were by no means the only positions to be found within Edinburgh Whig society, although he was the only founder member of the Review based there in these years. Some reformers were more sympathetic. Lord Buchan’s earlier essays on female education in The Bee in 1791, under the pseudonym ‘Sophia’

Aspiring Women and Scottish Whigs 337

had suggested a clear association between the principles of the rights of men and the education of women: The rights of men begin now to be everywhere felt, understood, and vindicated; by and bye, I would fain hope the rights of our sex will be equally understood, and established upon the basis of a new code of education, suited to the dignity and importance of our state in society …59 There were to be other voices within the Review itself. Sydney Smith identiﬁed the cause of progress with that of the education of women. If ‘mankind are much happier for the discovery of barometers, thermometers, steam-engines, and all the innumerable inventions in the arts and sciences’, so too public morals, national talents, maternal education and the pleasures of society and of marriage would all be vastly increased if ‘half the talent in the universe’, that of women, were to be improved.60 And Eliza Fletcher found in her old friend Henry Brougham a way of treating common political concerns inﬁnitely more sympathetic than that of Francis Jeffrey, with ‘no affected indifference on subjects of vital importance, no contemptuous sneer at rational conversation’; Brougham was, later in life, to be an active and sympathetic supporter of women’s education and the reform of the married women’s property laws.61 But the Whigs were divided. Henry Cockburn wrote grudgingly in his Memorials of Elizabeth Hamilton and Anne Grant as ‘excellent women and not too blue. Their sense covered the colour’. The ﬁgure of the bluestocking as a subject of ridicule and satire is a recurrent one in early nineteenth-century Edinburgh, and one which indicates the contested nature of the terrain. The differences among Edinburgh Whigs were noted with relish by conservative writers. John Gibson Lockhart’s conservative satire on Edinburgh society in Peter’s Letters to His Kinsfolk also sharply signalled the presence of bluestocking aspirations, and Francis Jeffrey’s hostility to them. Lockhart noted the absence of literary women at Jeffrey’s dinner-table as well as the pretensions of Edinburgh ladies ‘to be able to talk with ﬂuency about the Politics and Belles Lettres of the day’.62 He described a party attended by Jeffrey, Professor John Leslie, Dr Thomas Brown and the Earl of Buchan, at which ‘the redoubtable critic had been so unfortunate as to fall into an ambush laid to entrap him by a skilful party of bluestocking tirailleures [riﬂewomen]’. He contrasted ‘Scottish Bluestockings’ unfavourably with those of France, for the favourite topics of conversation of the Scottish ladies were less likely to be the latest novel than ‘the Resumption of Cash-payments, the great question of Borough Reform, and the Corn-Bill’. It is difﬁcult not to see the reference to burgh reform as one to Eliza Fletcher.63 The reviewers of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in the 1820s blamed Edinburgh Whigs for the growth of such female pretensions, for, they wrote, until Blackwoods had begun to ﬂourish ‘bluestockingism was in its cerulean altitude’ in Edinburgh.64 The extent of such satire effectively acknowledged the claims of women to participate in the mixed sociability and conversation of literary Edinburgh. But it also signalled rather different aspirations from those of the earlier bluestocking

338 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

generations discussed by Elizabeth Eger and Norma Clarke. For these women were not distinguished scholars like Elizabeth Montagu and Elizabeth Carter, but actively concerned with the social and political issues of their day. Fletcher, Hamilton, and others desired more direct engagement with the challenges of their rapidly changing environment. Most immediately, they became involved in philanthropic activism largely directed towards women and girls. In April 1798, at the height of political repression, Eliza Fletcher founded the Edinburgh New Town Female Friendly Society, ‘the ﬁrst Female Beneﬁt Society’, she claimed, in Scotland, and one opposed by the Deputy Sheriff and magistrates to a degree which ‘marked the spirit of the time at that period in Edinburgh, both as regards politics, and with regard to the condition of women’. In April 1798 it advertised itself in the Edinburgh press as ‘… a Friendly Female Society, to be composed of two classes; … those females in the higher ranks who chuse to subscribe a small sum annually in aid of the funds, but to receive no beneﬁt’ and ‘servants and married women of good characters’. She may well have been following the early model of a Female Beneﬁt Society set up by Catherine Cappe in York in 1786.65 Fletcher continued to take an interest in the society until it was wound up in 1844.66 Cappe’s work remained an inspiration for the group. Robina Millar, while living in York, shared her commitment to women visitors in hospitals, and was among the ﬁrst group of women to visit the York Lunatic Asylum in 1814. Cappe and the Cullen sisters were also active followers of the campaigns in London and Shefﬁeld to replace climbing boys by mechanical chimney sweeps.67 In Elizabeth Hamilton’s memoirs a ‘most intimate friend’ – who is very likely to have been Fletcher – recalled that not only had Hamilton helped to dispel prejudices against literary women, but that after 1806 she helped to give a ‘new direction to the pursuits of her own sex … by extending the sphere of female usefulness’. Fletcher and Hamilton were both early subscribers to the Edinburgh Magdalen Asylum founded in August 1797 in the name of the Edinburgh Philanthropic Society. One of Fletcher’s daughters recalled her mother’s personal interest in the asylum, and involvement in the reclamation of a prostitute, Nelly Wilson, who later married happily. Fletcher and Hamilton do not however appear to have been active in the committee of women visitors well established there by the second decade of the century.68 Hamilton spent much time on the management of charitable institutions, especially the House of Industry, presiding at the regular meetings among ladies, where her rule was distinguished for its ‘humanity towards the individual objects and judicious economy in the application of the funds’. Few records have survived of this House of Industry, probably that founded by George Baird in 1801; though Grace Fletcher was attending such an institution regularly in 1816.69 Such interests are evident in Hamilton’s printed works. Her Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800) is most frequently read for its satirical critique of Godwin and Mary Hays, though it also endorsed the case for the rational education and the employment of women, especially single women It included a portrait of a Mrs Fielding – the ‘Mrs’ was a courtesy title – a benevolent, single and independ-

Aspiring Women and Scottish Whigs 339

ently wealthy philanthropist, who had created a house of refuge for the destitute and seduced, and even a refuge, though a separate one, for former prostitutes, as had the Edinburgh Magdalen Asylum.70 At Mrs Fielding’s Asylum for the Destitute habits of industry in needlework were taught, inspiring, she hoped, ‘the invigorating stimulus of self-approbation’ and the products proﬁtably sold to an American merchant. Rescuing the seduced Julia, Mrs Fielding, as Hamilton describes her, neither ‘disgraced by bigotry’ nor ‘enﬂamed by superstition’, did not magnify her offences but urged her to ‘re-assure her conﬁdence in the possibility of future happiness from future exertions of virtue’.71 Julia unfortunately but inevitably was doomed to die, but Mrs Fielding continued to choose the single philanthropic life over marriage. But perhaps it was Hamilton’s Cottagers of Glenburnie (1800) which most effectively and popularly illustrated the kind of active intervention advocated. This was a didactic work which, she suggested in her Preface, she had once thought of issuing in a form like Hannah More’s Cheap Repository Tracts. It is the story of a strong woman, a Mrs Mason, well educated but not genteel, once an upper servant, who, staying, with her Highland relations the McClartys, attempted to improve the dirt and lack of comfort – though not dire poverty – which she found there. Superﬁcially, Mrs Mason was not dissimilar to one or two such women in More’s Tracts. But Mrs Mason had no good word to say for ‘professors of evangelical righteousness’, or for ‘doctrines so far from the pure morality of the Gospel’.72 She emphasized not the learning of resignation and humility, but the new role as a village schoolmistress found by Mrs Mason, who introduced among the girls innovative methods of teaching reading, writing, domestic work and needlework, rotating responsibilities and offering incentives. The school and the inﬂuence of Mrs Mason, the agent of both moral and material improvement, transformed the life of the village. Similar principles were applied in an organisation founded in Edinburgh in 1813, the interdenominational Society for the Suppression of Beggars, which drew upon the initiatives of the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor in its concern to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving beggar, and to shape industrious and domesticated habits among the poor. The Edinburgh Society was founded on the model of one established in Bath in 1805 by Lady Isabella King, which had an unusually high proportion of women subscribers and a strong Ladies Committee, concerned for the relief of the female poor.73 In Edinburgh too the Committee of the Society immediately identiﬁed the importance of ﬁnding employment for the female poor ‘by far the most numerous class we have’, and the need for the cooperation of a Committee of Ladies. In its ﬁrst month, March 1813, the society interviewed 501 applicants, 346 of whom were women.74 The Ladies Committee, of which Eliza Fletcher and Mary Brunton were prominent members, took charge of providing employment for women. Every day at the society’s repository in Hunter’s Square, one of the ladies attended to organize the provision of work to applicants for relief, sewing, spinning and knitting. There was disappointment in the productivity of the applicants in the early months, though this gradually improved. The Society’s

340 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

report suggests this was due to the ‘liberal premiums’ offered personally by Eliza Fletcher.75 By 1815 the masculine leadership was fulsome in their praise for the Ladies Committee: Besides keeping the books, which are to serve as a check upon the housekeeper, they do not disdain to cut out every article of clothing which is made at the Repository, and to examine the work brought in; and by their inﬂuence, their advice, or their animadversion, contribute most powerfully towards the promotion of cleanly, sober and industrious habits among the poor people under their charge.76 Much of the ladies’ energies, however, went not only into the provision of work for the adult poor, but the establishment of another school of industry for the children of the poor, including but not limited to the children of beggars and vagrants. A room was borrowed from the patronesses of the House of Industry for a straw plaiting school, which provided instruction in reading, and religious education along with rewards for industry and ﬁnes for idleness, as ‘a preparatory school for acquiring habits of industry and cleanliness’.77 However though the school made a small proﬁt in its ﬁrst years, the market for straw plait declined very fast, and by 1819 it had become clear that such work could no longer provide the basis for philanthropic supervision of such schools.78 From 1822, with Lady Carnegie of Dalry House, Fletcher established a House of Refuge intended to reform young delinquents, which lasted seventeen years.79 In all these initiatives rational and dissenting women acted in alliance with evangelical women of different denominations and most of their work was indistinguishable in practice. They shared a Christian benevolence and commitment to the monitoring and the surveillance of the deserving and the undeserving poor. Yet their projects were conceived not in terms of an evangelical philanthropy, but with reference to civic virtue and social responsibility, capable of being extended further to that ‘enlightened patriotism’ which Fletcher had identiﬁed in her daughter. To a limited extent, these discourses might be placed in a distinctive Scottish context. Graeme Morton has argued that, in the absence of a Scottish state, the nineteenth-century Edinburgh middle classes were able to exercise a ‘governing role’ in Scottish civil society through the strength and extent of their voluntary institutions.80 More speculatively, it would be interesting to look more closely and comparatively at the philanthropic practice of the families of that substantial section of the reforming elites of English cities – especially the dissenting ministers and the medical men – who were, like the men of the Cappe family, trained in Edinburgh and Glasgow. They too were the heirs of a modernizing British Enlightenment.81 The women discussed here shared the overwhelming hopes in Whig circles for political reform, given even greater urgency in Scotland because of the extent of political corruption. There are indications of an active desire among them if not to participate at least to observe in person the political battles in which they were so interested. But there are also clear signs of tension and contested space.

Aspiring Women and Scottish Whigs 341

Between 1821 and 1826 ﬁve annual dinners were held by the Whigs to celebrate Charles James Fox’s birthday, and their own revival as a political force. The elder Margaret Thomson attended the ﬁrst, held in 1821. But she wrote to her stepson of the debate which had arisen over whether she should attend the second dinner, on 24 January 1822. She sent some comments on the event to William Thomson, but ‘I am sorry to say that I send you these remarks at second hand for ﬁnding that your father was rather nervous at the idea of my second attendance. I was obliged to make one of Jeffrey’s friends and was even a voluntary absentee … however Miss Millar took her station accompanied by Miss Foster, an excellent Whig, and the two Lady Campbells’.82 ‘Jeffrey’s friends’ clearly referred to Jeffrey’s well-known hostility to women’s political interests. Eliza Fletcher too had hoped for much from the ‘Scotch Millennium’, the Reform Bill of 1832, writing to Matilda Tone Wilson of a programme ‘nothing short of a revolution for Scotland especially. The aristocrats of Scotland are foaming with rage at this Reform Bill while the people from one end of the land to the other hail it as the real Magna Carta’.83 And when the hustings were erected in Edinburgh for the ﬁrst time ever in December 1832, she took her three grandsons there to show them how both their grandfather and their father, her son, by then both dead, would have rejoiced to see that day. She spent the day with her family and the Thomsons at the house of Francis Jeffrey, elected as member for Edinburgh in a Whig triumph. Her daughter Mary recollected Henry Cockburn ‘looking round the crowd of Whig ladies and girls … and calling out “Where’s Mrs Fletcher? she’s the woman I want” and … they … had a good ‘greet’ [cry] together’.84 Much later, in 1872, the younger Margaret Thomson, who was present at that moment, and who in 1843 married her cousin, John Millar Mylne, recalled how that experience had created the desire for political equality: … the new, and, as it seemed to us, splendid idea of ‘a hustings at the Cross of Edinburgh’, drove its inhabitants, both male and female, half frantic with delight. I caught the infection; and as soon as ever I understood the beneﬁts expected from a £10 franchise, I began to wish that female householders should have it too, thinking it only fair.85 In 1841, in a pioneering article, ‘Woman and her Social Position’, in the Westminster Review, she drew upon the arguments of her grandfather John Millar to suggest that in spite of inequalities created by the growth of wealth ‘on the whole it must be allowed that civilization equalises the condition of the sexes’.86 Anne Grant wrote of Eliza Fletcher as ‘a Roman matron, a Cornelia, an Arria or a Portia … entirely engrossed by benevolent exertions for her fellow-creatures, and the pure enjoyments of intellect, that she thinks less about herself than anyone I know’. Henry Brougham also, much later, described her as possessing ‘the inﬂexible principles and deep political feeling of a Hutchinson or a Roland’.87 The image of the republican woman, the legacy of a reforming civic humanism, still carried some force in the world of the Reform Act. But Elizabeth

342 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

Hamilton, Margaret Cullen and Eliza Fletcher attempted to balance the values of a republican past and reforming present with the new challenges facing the middling ranks, as deﬁned by family, class and property, and as inseparable from a sense of civic and patriotic duty, to the needs of a changing civil society as well as of the political order. Within Whig and reforming circles, both older republican sympathies, and, more often, the language of political, social and material progress allowed a few, limited, spaces for the participation of women. The network forged through the distinctive professional, literary and academic circles of early nineteenth-century Edinburgh makes it possible to identify some of those spaces. Our reading of them nevertheless requires the transcendence of sharp distinctions between public and private worlds and an understanding of the different possibilities of familial, social, civic and patriotic identities.

Notes 1. Eliza Fletcher to her daughter, Margaret Davy, 1 February 1850, Autobiography of Mrs Fletcher with Letters and Other Family Memorials, edited by the survivor of her family [M. Richardson] (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1875), p. 279. 2. J. Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse. Sensibility and Community in Late Eighteenth Century Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987), pp. 117–137, here 137; idem, The Age of the Passions. An Interpretation of Adam Smith and Enlightenment Culture (East Linton: Tuckwell Press,1998); M. Ignatieff, ‘John Millar and individualism’, in I. Hont and M. Ignatieff (eds), Wealth and Virtue. Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 345–62. 3. M. C. Moran, ‘“The Commerce of the Sexes”: Civil Society and Polite Society in Scottish Enlightenment Historiography’, in F. Trentmann (ed.), Paradoxes of Civil Society. New Perspectives on Modern German and British History (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2000), p. 80. 4. K. Gleadle, The Early Feminists. Radical Unitarians and the Emergence of the Women’s Rights Movement, 1831–51 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), esp. pp. 64–8. 5. London, 1771, repr. as Origin of the Distinction of Ranks …, 3rd ed. (London: John Murray, 1779); for much biographical information on Millar and his family, see W. C. Lehmann, John Millar of Glasgow, 1735–1801 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), esp. pp. 410–4. 6. See the family tree attached as Appendix A. 7. Adam Smith to [Henry Herbert, Lord Porchester], Edinburgh, 23 September 1788, in E. C. Mossner and I. S. Ross (eds), The Correspondence of Adam Smith (Oxford, 1987, repr. Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1987), p. 431. 8. Frederick Lamb to Lady Melbourne, Wednesday n.d., L. C. Sanders (ed.), Lord Melbourne’s Papers (London: Longmans Green and Co., 1889), p. 5. 9. C. Eckhardt, Fanny Wright. Rebel in America (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); see also: A. Perkins and T.Wolfson, Frances Wright Free Enquirer: the Study of a Temperament (New York: Harper Bros, 1939); W. R.Waterman, Frances Wright (New York: AMS Press, 1967) 10. Fletcher, Autobiography, pp. 64 and 71. 11. Eckhardt, Fanny Wright, p. 23. 12. On Thomson, see: M. Barfoot, ‘Introduction’, J. Thomson, An Account of the Life, Lectures and Writings of William Cullen (2 vols., 1859, repr. Thoemmes Press, Bristol, 1997), and also A. Thomson in ibid., pp. 1–84, ‘Biographical notice of Dr Thomson’; L. S. Jacyna, Philosophic Whigs. Medicine, Science and Citizenship in Edinburgh, 1789–1848 (London: Routledge, 1994), passim.

Aspiring Women and Scottish Whigs 343 13. See the correspondence between Robina Millar and John and Margaret Thomson, Cullen MSS 608/1–19, University of Glasgow Archives; and that of the Thomson family in National Library of Scotland (NLS) MS 9236. 14. ‘Autobiography of Mrs Eliza Fletcher (1770–1858) …’, NLS Acc. 3758 f. 46; Fletcher, Autobiography, p. 64. The ﬁnal sentence is omitted in the published version. 15. On Brunton, see [A. Brunton], ‘A Memoir of her Life …’ preﬁxed to M. Brunton, Emmeline, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Manners and Miller, 1820) 16. Robina Craig Millar to Margaret Thomson, 24 April 1821, Glasgow University Archives, Cullen Papers, MS 608/8; for the early friendship of the Baillie sisters with the Millar family, see Royal College of Surgeons of England, Hunter-Baillie collection, vol. 2, ff. 27, 29 and 32, Agnes Baillie to Matthew Baillie and her brother, 14 May 1782, 25 February 1783, and n.d. 17. Joanna Baillie to Anne Millar, 8 August 1801, NLS MS 9236 ff. 1–2. 18. Anne Grant to John Hatsell, 27 November 1806, Memoir and Correspondence of Mrs Grant of Laggan … edited by her son J. P. Grant, 3 vols., 2nd edn (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1845) vol. I, pp. 77–8. 19. NLS Acc. 3758 ‘Autobiography of Mrs Eliza Fletcher …’, ff. 71–2 for Fletcher’s discussion of Cappe, omitted from the printed version. 20. C. Cappe, Memoirs of the Life of the Late Mrs Catherine Cappe, written by herself, 2nd ed (London: Longman, 1823), pp. 296–7, with thanks to Helen Plant for this and later references to Catherine Cappe; Robina Millar to Benjamin Rush, 13 April 1802, Rush MSS, Library Company of Philadelphia (LCP) on deposit with the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP), vol. 25, f. 87. I am grateful to the Library Company of Philadelphia for permission to quote from the Rush MSS. 21. On these brothers, see the Dictionary of National Biography; A. Fergusson, The Honourable Henry Erskine, Lord Advocate for Scotland with notices of certain of his kinsfolk and of his time … (Edinburgh: Blackwoods,1882); J. G. Lamb, ‘David Steuart Erskine, 11th Earl of Buchan: a study of his life and correspondence’, DPhil, St Andrews 1963. 22. Fletcher, Autobiography, p. 79. 23. Robina Millar to Benjamin Rush, 1797–1813, Rush MSS, LCP at HSP, vol. 10, ff. 44 and 51, and vol. 25, ff. 84–97, here especially f. 87, 13 April 1802; Catherine Cappe to Benjamin Rush 3 August 1804, and 23 October 1806, Rush MSS, LCP at HSP, vol. 3, ff. 16 and 17. 24. NLS Acc. 3758 ‘Autobiography of Mrs Eliza Fletcher (1770–1858) …’ ff. 88–9; Fletcher, Autobiography, pp. 143 and 354, in which Fletcher’s tribute to, Wilson is omitted; on Wilson, see N. Curtin, ‘Matilda Tone and virtuous republican femininity’, in D. Keogh and N. Furlong (eds), The Women of 1798 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998), pp. 26–46. 25. Thomas Wilson was also the son of William Cullen’s legal man of business, William Wilson of Howden, to whom Archibald Fletcher had once been apprenticed. See my forthcoming article ‘The reputation of William Cullen: gender, politics and medicine c. 1790–1830’; Register of the Society of Writers to Her Majesty’s Signet (Edinburgh: for the Society by Clark Constable, 1983); Scottish Record Society, The Faculty of Advocates in Scotland 1532–1943,with genealogical notes ed. Sir F. Grant (Edinburgh: for the Society, 1944). 26. Eckhardt, Fanny Wright, pp. 26–33; J. Rendall, ‘“Friends of Liberty and Virtue”: Women Radicals and Transatlantic Correspondence 1789–1848’, in Gender, the Letter and Politics, ed. C. Bland and M. Cross (Ashgate Press, 2004). 27. Janet Millar to the Miss Millars March-April 1829, NLS MS 9236 ff. 133–8; Fletcher, Autobiography, pp. 191–7. 28. Ibid., pp. 136–7. 29. [A. Fletcher] An Inquiry into the Principles of Ecclesiastical Patronage and Presentation, in which are contained, Views of the Inﬂuence of this Species of Patronage, on the Manners and Character of the People … (Edinburgh: James Donaldson, 1783), pp. 79, 96. 30. L. S. Jacyna, Philosophic Whigs, p. 9; Lord Cockburn, Life of Lord Jeffrey, with a selection from his correspondence, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1852), vol. I, p. 66.

344 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters 31. Cockburn, Memorials of His Time ed. H. A. Cockburn (Edinburgh: T.N. Foulis, 1909), pp. 82–7. 32. B. Fontana, Rethinking the Politics of Commercial Society. The Edinburgh Review 1802–32 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 43 33. Anne Grant to Miss Ourry, 2 January 1794, Letters from the Mountains; being the real correspondence of a lady between the years 1773 and 1807, 3 vols, 4th ed. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme, 1809), vol. II, pp. 268–77. 34. Scots Magazine (May 1798), pp. 295–301; Edinburgh Magazine or Literary Miscellany, new series, XI (April 1798) pp. 259–66; Analytical Review, 27 (June 1798) pp. 235–40. 35. M. Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). 36. The Duke of Buccleuch to Adam Smith, 24 February 1790, Correspondence of Adam Smith, pp. 323–4. 37. For the full story of this family conﬂict, see my ‘The reputation of William Cullen …’ the legal battles can be traced most easily through National Archives of Scotland (NAS) CS 26/853 ‘Interim Decreet. Mr Archibald Cullen and his attorney Against Mr Robert Cullen. 20 Jany 1795’. In contrast, possibly in awareness of this, in November 1798, three years before his death, John Millar established a trust for his daughters, allowing them a home and income for life as long as they remained unmarried. NAS RD 3/289 f. 96. 38. [M. Cullen] Home. A Novel, 5 vols (London: J. Mawman, and York, T. Wilson and R. Spence, 1802),vol. I, p. 19. 39. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 52 40. Ibid., vol. 5, p. 125 41. Ibid., vol. 3, pp. 211–13; on the anti-adultery bills, see L. Stone, Road to Divorce. England 1530–1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 335–9. 42. Cullen, Home, vol. 3, pp. 55–8, 100–19 and vol. 4, pp. 209–17. 43. Ibid., vol. 5, pp. 218–19. 44. Ibid., vol. 5, p. 352. 45. Ibid., vol. 5, pp. 363 46. Recent work on Hamilton includes: G. Kelly, Women, Writing and Revolution, 1790–1827 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); J. Thaddeus, ‘Elizabeth Hamilton’s Domestic Politics’, Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 23 (1994), pp. 265–84; J. Rendall, ‘Writing History for British Women: Elizabeth Hamilton and the Memoirs of Agrippina’, in C. Campbell Orr (ed.), Wollstonecraft’s Daughters (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). 47. E. Hamilton, Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education, 2nd edn (Bath: R. Cruttwell, 1801, 02); see my forthcoming article ‘Adaptations: Gender, History, and Political Economy in the Work of Dugald Stewart and Elizabeth Hamilton’, in T. Ahnert, S. Manning and N. Phillipson (eds), The Science of Man (Cambridge University Press, 2007). 48. Her only published work, Elidure and Edward. Two Historical Dramatic Sketches (London: privately published, 1825) owed much to Joanna Baillie. 49. E. Fletcher, ‘Memoir of Grace Fletcher, by her mother, 15 July 1817’, Autobiography, pp. 341–59; the account above draws entirely on these pages. 50. Fletcher, Autobiography, p. 82 51. Ibid., pp. 85–6; NLS Acc. 3758, ‘Autobiography of Mrs Eliza Fletcher 1770–1858’, ff. 61–2; E. Benger, Memoirs of the late Mrs Elizabeth Hamilton … 2 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1818), vol. I, pp. 176–182, and see also correspondence in vol. II, in which Mrs. F. can be identiﬁed as Eliza Fletcher, and Miss J– BH as Joanna Baillie. 52. Ibid., p. 102. 53. Anne Grant to Miss Matilda Feilding, 27 April 1810, Memoir and Correspondence of Mrs Grant of Laggam, vol. I, pp. 239–41. 54. Lord Cockburn, Life of Lord Jeffrey, vol. I, p. 394; Jeffrey to Eliza Fletcher, 24 July 1844, vol. II, pp. 387–8; Henry Cockburn to his daughter Elizabeth, 9 July 1848,

Aspiring Women and Scottish Whigs 345

55. 56.

57.

58. 59.

60. 61.

62.

63. 64. 65.

66.

67.

68. 69.

70. 71. 72. 73.

H. A. Cockburn (ed.), Some Letters of Henry Cockburn … (Edinburgh: Grant & Murray, 1832), pp. 62–3; H. Brougham, Speeches of Lord Brougham …, 4 vols (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1838), vol. III, p. 346. Anne Grant to John Hatsell, 27 November 1806, Memoir and Correspondence of Mrs Grant of Laggan, vol. I, pp. 77–8. Edinburgh Review (ER) 2 (July 1803), 269–28; 5 (January 1805), pp. 405–21; 19 (February 1812), 261–90; Anne Grant to Catherine Fanshawe, 13 December 1814, Memoir and Correspondence of Mrs Grant of Laggan, vol. 2, p. 46. ‘Miss Edgeworth’s Popular Tales’, ER, 4 (July 1804), p. 330; see I. Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority. Gender, History and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991), ch. 2. Anne Grant to Mrs Gorman, 16 July 1815, Memoir and Correspondence of Mrs Grant of Laggan, p. 77. [Lord Buchan], ‘Sophia’, ‘Education of young ladies’, The Bee or Literary Weekly Intelligencer, III (22 June 1791) 225–31; and also: III (29 June 1791) 263–9; III (6 July 1791) 312–6; IV (20 July 1791) 54–6; IV (27 July 1791) 82–88; these essays are reprinted in The Anonymous and Fugitive Essays of the Earl of Buchan … (Edinburgh: J. Ruthven, 1812), pp. 26–47. S. Smith, ‘Female Education’, ER, 15 (January 1810), 299–315, here 310–11. Eliza Fletcher to her daughters, 11 September 1823, Fletcher, Autobiography, p. 161; ‘Lydia Tomkins’ [H. Brougham], Thoughts on the Ladies of the Aristocracy, 2nd edn, (London: Hodgsons, 1835); L. Holcombe, Wives and Property. Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1993), pp. 56, 62–3, 86. 90, 124. Cockburn, Memorials of His Time, p. 259; [J. G. Lockhart], Peter’s Letters to His Kinsfolk, 3 vols, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1819), vol. I, pp. 293–4; see J. Rendall, ‘Bluestockings and Reviewers: Gender, Power and Culture in Britain, c. 1800–1830’, in Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 26, 3 (2004), 1–20. Ibid., vol. I, pp. 303, 305–9. ‘An Hour’s Tete-a-Tete with the Public’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, VIII (October 1820), 99. Cappe, Memoirs, pp. 281–2; idem, An Account of Two Charity Schools for the Education of Girls and of a Female Friendly Society … (York, 1800). On the issue of philanthropy and women’s civic virtue I have beneﬁted greatly from the work of Helen Plant and Simon Morgan. Fletcher, Autobiography, p. 76 and 160; Regulations for the Edinburgh New Town Female Friendly Society, instituted 12th April 1798 (Edinburgh: Neill and Co, 1832), NAS FS 1/17/58; Caledonian Mercury, 21 April 1798. Lady Visitors Report Book 1814–1830, Bootham Park Hospital Archives, BOO 1/8/4/1, Borthwick Institute of Historical Research; Catherine Cappe to Mrs Cockle, 14 June 1817, British Library Add. MS 18204 f. 70. List of Contributors, Report of the State of the Magdalen Asylum from 25th November 1801 to 13th October 1802, [Edinburgh?: n.p., 1802], Edinburgh Central Library. Benger, Memoirs of … Elizabeth Hamilton, vol. 1, p. 278; T. Bernard, ‘Extract from an account of an establishment for the beneﬁt of the poor, in the city and suburbs of Edinburgh’, The Reports of the Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor, 5 vols (London: for the Society, 1811), vol. II, pp. 168–75. E. Hamilton, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, ed. C. Grogan (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2000), Part III passim. Ibid., pp. 302 and 371. Hamilton, The Cottagers of Glenburnie: a Tale for the Farmer’s Ingle-Nook, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Manners and Miller, 1808), p. 356. M. J. D. Roberts, ‘Reshaping the Gift Relationship. The London Mendicity Society and the Suppression of Begging in England 1818–69’, International Review of Social History 36 (1991), 201–31; J. S. Duncan, ‘Extract from an Account of the Bath Society for the

346 Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters

74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85. 86. 87.

Suppression of Vagrants, the Relief of Distress and the Encouragement of Industry’, in Reports of the Society for Bettering the Condition … of the Poor, vol. V, pp. 96–101. First Report of the Society, instituted in Edinburgh on 25th January 1813, for the Suppression of Beggars, for the relief of occasional distress, and for the encouragement of industry among the poor … (Edinburgh: Alex Smellie, 1814), pp. 19–20. Ibid., pp. 25–8. Third Report of the Society … for the Suppression of Beggars … (Edinburgh: Alex Smellie, 1815), p. 17. Fifth Report of the Society … for the Suppression of Beggars … (Edinburgh: Alex Smellie, 1817), pp. 16–17. Eighth Report of the Society … for the Suppression of Beggars … (Edinburgh: Alex Smellie, 1820), p. 19. Fletcher, Autobiography, p. 156. G. Morton, Unionist Nationalism. Governing Urban Scotland, 1830–1860 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1999), especially Ch. 4. For a pioneering discussion of this general theme, see A. Chitnis, The Scottish Enlightenment and Early Victorian English Society (1986), ch. 5. Margaret Thomson to William Thomson, 29 January 1822, NLS MS 9236 ff. 96–7. Eliza Fletcher to Matilda Tone Wilson, May 24 1831, NLS MS Acc. 4278; for the use and signiﬁcance of the term ‘Scotch Millennium’, see K. Miller, Cockburn’s Millennium (London: Duckworth, 1975), pp. 28, 105. Fletcher, Autobiography, pp. 209–10. M. Mylne, Woman and Her Social Position. An article reprinted from the Westminster Review, No. LXVIII, 1841. (London: C. Green and Son, 1872), p. iii. Mylne, ‘Woman and Her Social Position’, Westminster Review 68 (1841) pp. 24–52, here 46. Anne Grant to Catherine Fanshawe, 15 April 1810, Memoirs and Correspondence of Mrs Grant of Laggan, vol. I, pp. 232–3; Brougham, Speeches, vol. III, p. 346.

Appendix A The Cullen and Millar Families John Millar = Margaret Craig 1735–1801 d.1795 Prof. Civil Law, Glasgow

William Cullen = Anna Johnstone 1710–90 d.1786 Prof. Medicine Glasgow, and Chemistry and later Medicine, Edinburgh

Agnes = James Mylne Robert Archibald Charles Heny Elizabeth Margaret Ann John William James Robina = John James Ann 1742– 1755– d.1827 d.1790 d.1823 d.1837 d.1803 1768– Craig 1762– 1764– b.1768 1752–1839 Prof. Moral 1810 1824 1844 1760–96 1838 1852 = = Fenella Sinclair Prof. Maths Philosophy, Mary Russell Glasgow Glasgow d.1818 (nieces) William Sinclair David Anna Robinia

Janet plus 2 1775– sons 1849 and 2 daughters

Frances Camilla Wright Wright 1795–1852 1797–1831 Margaret Crawford d. 1804

= 1. John Thomson 2. = Margaret 1765–1846 b. 1771 Prof. Military Surgery and Pathology, Edinburgh

Isabella John Gordon d.1824 d.1818 Margaret James b.1799 1800–55

John Millar = Margaret 1804–80 1807–92

*This is a highly selective family tree: much is omitted, and children are not necessarily shown in birth order

Allen 1809–84

347

2 others

William 1802–52

This page intentionally left blank

Part II Feminism, Enlightenment and Revolution

This page intentionally left blank

SECTION 6 CHAMPIONING WOMEN: EARLY ENLIGHTENMENT FEMINISMS Introduction Clarissa Campbell Orr

This section explores important facets of the character, chronology and diversity of the European Enlightenment. All three authors demonstrate that the topic of gender was integral to the Enlightenment from the outset, and can also be traced before the late seventeenth century, when its origin is usually discerned. From the Renaissance, and throughout the seventeenth century, a variety of discourses offered materials from which could be fashioned, in a kind of bricolage, an evaluation of women’s intellectual potential, and, in particular, the idea of rational equality. The Cartesian moment was especially signiﬁcant, though not the only source of intellectual support for the idea of equality. Since intellectual discourses do not exist in an abstract vacuum, the essays also discuss the ‘cultural infrastructure’ of the Enlightenment. Enlightened discourses could be fostered by court cultures, aristocratic coteries, or urban, merchant oligarchies. This section thus explores the Republic of Letters, discussed in section ﬁve, at an earlier stage of its development. Women often found space to operate in the informal networks which emerged in salons and among publishing houses of early ‘Grub Street’, as ideas spilled into print, and print culture, including female authorship, became more commercialised. However women’s participation in informal networks was seldom allowed to develop further, once these networks were formalised into institutions such as learned and scientiﬁc academies, which rarely allowed female membership. Nonetheless, these communication networks, new forms of heterosociability, and a commercialised print culture, became a pan-European phenomenon. The diversity of the Enlightenment is reﬂected in the dialogues between and inﬂuence of seminal ﬁgures, who are read and received in new national contexts, but with differential timing, as peripheral centres of Enlightenment – here illustrated by the Spanish example – ‘catch up’ with the patterns established earlier in the advanced cultural setting of France, The Netherlands, and Britain. And if the Enlightenment was diverse, so were its feminisms. One way to conceptualise the European Enlightenment is to consider it as a dissemination of debates initiated in the Renaissance, but now continued in a much broader context, with a more concerted attempt to base concepts in a science of humankind and society, and with a deliberate attempt to disseminate ideas into 351

352 Championing Women

new media. Dialogues, magazines, popularisations, philosophical ﬁctions all helped intellectual discussion moved away from tiny elite coteries, and the correspondence links between a handful of learned men in universities and the church, and into the drawing rooms, coffee houses and publishers’ milieux of the Republic of Letters. This process of dissemination and popularisation was already under way early in the seventeenth century. The classical and Christian discourses developed in the Renaissance and Reformation were seen a generation ago by historians of feminism as inherently misogynist. But as these essays show, there was material to hand in these traditions which could be used in order to articulate visions of sexual equality. As discussed in the next section’s exploration of the relationship between women, Enlightenment and religious agency, some of this material was theological. Stuurman’s essays in this and section 7 show that the idea that the sexes were equal because, paradoxically, the soul had no sex, was both a Christian and a Platonic idea, and after the Reformation divide, was a concept shared by both Protestant and Catholic traditions. In seventeenth century France the equality of souls was important to Marie de Gournay, while Elisabeth Marie Clement reinterpreted the Biblical account of Eve being taken from Adam’s rib to justify companionate marriage, not female deference. Perry shows the importance of Christian Platonism in the education Mary Astell’s uncle gave her, and explicates her Christian epistemology in refuting Locke’s empiricism and the idea of consciousness as a tabula rasa. Astell’s Serious Proposal to the Ladies advocated a college for women before marriage, which would give them the temporal and literal space to develop their intellectual gifts and inner ﬁbre, both of which would be essential spiritual resources were their marriages to be unhappy, in which case they were to be taken as school for their eternal welfare. As a High Anglican with Jacobite sympathies, Astell was also a doughty polemicist within the complicated denominational politics of Restoration England. Peruga’s essay explains how Spain’s Benito J. Feijoo’s advocacy of gender equality must be seen in the light of Spain’s rich tradition of female religious writing, from ﬁfteenth century nuns to women writers of the Golden Age, such as Marìa de Zayas, who recast spiritual equality in a half rationalist, half materialist, language. In Peruga’s exposition of Feijoo, the most signiﬁcant early 18th century proponent of rational equality, she distinguishes his intellectual scepticism from his Catholic loyalty as a Benedictine monk and theology professor, whose Scriptural study was one factor making him critical of Aristotleian models of natural philosophy, including its assertion of female defectiveness. Faced with the dissonance between his belief in natural equality and the historical fact of social hierarchy, Peruga interprets his acceptance of this as Providentially ordered not as a recourse to conventional argument, but as a way of articulating his doubts. The implication that social order was contingent, not necessary, was predictably controversial. Alongside these religious discourses, the most important discourse provided by Renaissance humanism which paved the way to articulating arguments for

Introduction 353

gender equality in the late seventeenth century, was the fabrication of histories of worthy women, which stressed female superiority rather than equality, and formed a strand in the ‘querrelle des femmes’, in which masculine and feminine virtues and deﬁciencies were constructed and canvassed. Stuurman traces a line from Baldassare Castiglione and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, to Lucrezia Marinella and Marie de Gournay. Marinella counter-pointed misogynistic stereotypes of women with examples of female wisdom and male stupidity, while insinuating that the Amazons showed women could dispense with men more easily than vice versa. De Gournay presented equality as a mean between male arrogance and female self-gloriﬁcation, and as well as this humanist stress on moderation, deployed scholastic arguments to explain that the soul’s substance was neutral, ungendered, though its accident or bodily appearance took male and female shape. Stuurman also shows how these Renaissance ‘feminists’ were known to mid-century savantes such as Anna Maria van Schurman, when she defended female learning against André Rivet, in 1641, while in turn Schurman and Gournay are referred to in the 1660s by Jean de la Forge and Jacquette Guillaume. Perry also shows how Astell’s work was reﬂected in a continuing eighteenth century tradition of learned women. Peruga however stresses that it is important to think of inﬂuential ideas not in terms of lineal descent so much as the sometimes untidy coexistence of older and newer developments. She shows Feijoo’s debt to the querelle tradition, as well as contextualising his advocacy of female equality as part of a wider agenda to rid other discourses of their ‘errors’, from science to medicine to aesthetics, and to keep Spanish intellectual life open to cosmopolitan inﬂuences. The seventeenth century ferment of the scientiﬁc revolution also generated discourses which could support female equality. Feijoo was especially eclectic, reading English empiricists and French érudits and sceptics; Gassendi’s atomism was important to his animus against scholasticism. Locke’s empiricism enabled men and women to argue for the importance of nurture against essentialist notions of female inferiority, while Descartes’mind-body dualism facilitated the argument that the mind has no sex. Stuurman’s essay shows how Poulain de la Barre’s feminism was grounded in a systematic Cartesian social philosophy, coupled with cultural relativism and conjectural history, both of which were to be extremely inﬂuential throughout the eighteenth century Enlightenment. Perry’s essay on Astell demonstrates how the Cartesian notion of clear reasoning gave her the conﬁdence to embark on philosophical, mathematical, theological and political discussions with her contemporaries in person and in print. She urged women to think clearly and use language accurately. Perry also shows the diversity of the English Enlightenment, with Astell providing a critique of Locke’s materialism, inﬂuenced both by Cartesianism and Malebranche’s idealism. To Astell, it was important to distinguish mind as a non-material substance, albeit linked to the body, otherwise, if matter could think, this would mean that differently constituted male and female material bodies would have to be understood as differentially equipped in terms of brain and intellect: the equality of the non-sexed mind would be lost.

354 Championing Women

But the Cartesian moment was not unambiguously good for women. Concentrating on intellectual equality made biological difference problematic, and tended to privilege celibacy over sexual activity or fulﬁlment. Astell’s legacy to English feminism was the life of virtuous singleness typiﬁed by Bluestockings such as Elizabeth Carter, rather than the intellectual and sexual partnerships to be found in the French salons. (However, if women did enter into a reproductive life, they could argue their need for education to ﬁt them better for motherhood, and this was often the strategy used by women who had no wish to subvert the social order confrontationally). Malebranche’s interpretation of Descartes helped Astell to criticise the materialist drift of Locke, but his notion that female brain ﬁbres were excessively subtle lent itself to the idea that women’s sensitivity was an obstacle to reason. This preﬁgured later eighteenth century debates on sensibility, which on the one hand privileged women’s allegedly superior moral and emotional make-up, but also led them into a subjective immersion in their feelings that might all too ready endorse subjection to male sexual passion. How could an intellectually emancipated woman have a fulﬁlling emotional and sexual life? Even Mme de Staël’s Corrinne found it impossible to reconcile love with artistic genius. All three essays underline the dialogical and polyvalent character of the various discourses from which feminism emerged. Looking at the cultural infrastructure of the Republic of Letters helps to explain why this was so. It was not just a question of the revival of Platonism and its characteristic format of the philosophical dialogue. Once women began to publish, they automatically entered into a realm of printed debate, in the form of books or pamphlets, of replies to replies. The responses were also to other media, especially to the theatre, where in France Molière’s Les Précieuses Ridicules provoked a whole sequence of repostes. As Stuurman shows, some were modelled on speciﬁc characters: in the Apologie de la science des dames (1662) the ﬁgure of Cléante defends women against Aristide, probably modelled on Schurman’s critic André Rivet. Cléante also speaks as one who has met intellectual women in that vital context, the salon, which virtually invented the idea of civilised conversation between men and women. Elisabeth Marie Clement modelled her Dialogue de la Princesse Sçavante et de la Dame de Famille on her recent actual conversations, while her ﬁctional moderator of the debate was based on a founder of the Académie Française, Valentin Conrart. As Stuurmann shows, Clement’s dialogue functions as a commentary on the failure of the new Académie to include the well known savantes Madeleine de Scudéry, Antoinette Des Houlières and Anne Dacier, all published authors. Thus print culture broadened the dialogue between the member of a private salon coterie and addressed a much wider public. Dialogues on women’s role were also found in the public debates sponsored by schools of oratory such as Jean de Richesource’s, which (in a helpful example of the importance of cultural geography) Stuurmann points out was physically located near the Paris Parlement. This enables us to see how feminist ideas could percolate naturally into legal and literary circles in the capital. But these public debates also had their imitators outside Paris in the provinces, and their counterparts in

Introduction 355

public lectures on various kinds of science, which gave women practice in learning and talking about philosophical matters in their broadest meaning. Stuurman also reminds us that women were not the only amateurs; for men, too, science and intellectual debate were a form of aristocratic dilettantism. Although Paris and its salons, debating societies, theatres and print culture ﬁgures largely in Stuurman’s essay, and French culture was disproportionately inﬂuential throughout Europe in the reign of Louis XIV, Paris was not the only context for emergent feminisms. The Italian humanist debates took place partly in courtly circles such as Castiglione’s Urbino, but also in the mercantile oligarchy of republican Venice, home of Lucrezia Marinelli and an important publishing centre. The Italian University cities Milan, Bologna and Naples would also prove hospitable to aristocratic and middling sort women philosophers and scientists in early eighteenth century, as Paula Findlen’s essay in section 5 shows. It is not surprising that the commercially advanced and religiously diverse polity of the United Provinces (or Netherlands) in the seventeenth century should provide a setting in which Anna Maria Schurmann could argue that women could pursue a full-time intellectual career. Women were less subsumed in patriarchy, kept their maiden name in conjunction with their husband’s after marriage, and managed businesses as well as charitable initiatives during the Dutch Golden Age. In Paris, there were in fact several milieux which facilitated feminist thought and activity. The salons constituted an oppositional culture to the royal court at Versailles and provided a setting in which the brash manners of the sword nobility could be tamed and the learned aggression of the universities moderated. They were attended by aristocrats from older, sword families as well as members of the robe nobility and extended hospitality to men of talent and who were of lower rank. The Précieuses were just one, extremely aristocratic coterie, amid a much greater diversity of circles in which people of rank, professional ability and talent circulated in various ways. Unlike the Italian courts, the French court was not especially helpful to women of learning; Louis XIV’s desire to control and regulate cultural initiatives through his Académies resulted in women’s exclusion from institutionalised culture. Great Britain after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was catching up with the kind of commercial expansion and religious toleration pioneered in William III’s native Holland. By contrast, Mary Astell was an adherent of the High Church and espoused divine right political views. Nonetheless, the absence of censorship after the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1696 made for a lively print culture, and enabled her to emerge as an author. Her independent life was facilitated by a mixture of old and new social structures typical of English society in the long eighteenth century from her own times to those of Hannah More. On the one hand were patron-client relationships, such as the encouragement Astell received from Archbishop Sancroft, and a network of well-to-do female aristocrats. On the other hand the new patterns of commercial organisation typical of Britain’s ﬁnancial revolution were adapted to charitable purposes, such as the school she ran in Chelsea, funded by charitable subscription. Astell also looked to royal

356 Championing Women

patronage for her proposed women’s college, hoping it would ﬂourish when Queen Anne ascended the throne, but ran into the English prejudice against anything that smacked of Catholic nunneries. This also ignored the continuing tradition of Protestant nunneries in the Holy Roman Empire which provided the kind of genteel communal living Astell envisaged. Astell’s polemical career shows that women living in the conditions of English ‘liberty’ did not necessarily side with those trends – Whig religious toleration, parliamentary monarchy, Newtonian empiricism – which in retrospect seem the progressive element s of English society. Debate meant debate; European intellectual life during the Enlightenment should be seen as a perpetual series of major and minor culture wars and skirmishes, with no neat alignment between feminist sympathy and political and religious conﬁgurations. Nor did Enlightened ideas spread at the same pace uniformly throughout Europe. The Spanish situation discussed in Peruga’s essay underlines this. Spain was a relative latecomer to the Enlightenment; enlightened debate was part of an effort to conquer Spanish xenophobia in the early eighteenth century and keep the country open to international inﬂuence. Feijoos’discussion of the woman question was only one essay in his Universal, Critical Theatre of Common Errors (1726–40), modelled on Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique published a generation earlier. Though much indebted to Poulain de la Barre, as Peruga shows, Feijoo was born three years after the latter’s De l’égalité des deux sexes had already appeared. Nonetheless after 1750 Spain had seen the emergence of a public sphere not dissimilar to other countries: a developing print culture including female authorship, the foundation of literary clubs in Madrid and the provinces, the diffusion of polite sociability. Peruga explores further developments in the debate on woman’s role through the example of women’s eventual admission in 1787 to the patriotic and improving Economic Society of Madrid: opinions for and against contrasted a Rousseauist conﬁnement of women to the domestic, with their equal participation in modern social and cultural life, as argued by the one female protagonist in the debate, Josefa Amar. Peruga also instances the occasional female poet, playwright and translator, who defended women’s right to publish. Spain may not have had the volume of women writers found in Britain or France, but Peruga stresses that to comprehend the diversity of European feminisms, we need, as a model of intellectual circulation, the concept of a common pool of ideas from centre to periphery, rather than a simpler, lineal, chronological model of one writer inﬂuencing another. Twenty-ﬁve years ago Roy Porter and Mikula´sˆTeich inaugurated a revision of Enlightenment studies by emphasising the importance of national context, of theme and variations, similarity and difference. Gender played little part in their seminal The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, 1980), but this section, and indeed this whole volume, redresses this deﬁciency in conceptualising, periodising and analysing the Enlightenment, and beneﬁts from uniting the vibrant, multilingual scholarship of the European continent with the Anglo-American tradition of feminist history.

6.1 Mary Astell and Enlightenment Ruth Perry

All the contradictions of the period we call the ‘enlightenment’ were embodied in the life and writings of Mary Astell, a feminist intellectual who lived from 1666 to 1731. She argued for women’s right to an independent intellectual life yet she upheld absolute monarchy in the state. She believed in Reason but distrusted the materialism of the new way of ideas. An extremely devout Anglican, she rigorously observed all the vigils, fasts, and feasts of the established church. Yet her notion of heaven was a rationalist’s notion: a place where all knowledge was complete, all mysteries made clear. ‘Poor we that toil in life’s hard drudgerie,’ she poeticized as a young woman, ‘Pick scraps of Knowledge here and there,/While the blest Souls above do all things know;/ All things worthy to be known … .’1 To be in heaven must include being as learned as one wished to be, she thought, dwelling in a society that increasingly valued knowledge as an instrumental means to power, but which steadfastly refused to educate its women. Nevertheless, despite her gender, Astell was a ﬁgure of the English Enlightenment, her intellectual tendencies encouraged by the world in which she found herself. The English enlightenment came signiﬁcantly earlier than the French or Spanish enlightenment because of the seventeenth-century political ferment of the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution in England – and, according to Voltaire, because of the extent of English commerce and literacy. 2 Hobbes, Locke, and Newton – thinkers associated with the English enlightenment – are all seventeenth-century ﬁgures. Montesquieu was just born when Locke ﬁnished his Principia. By the time of the philosophes in France, England was already very secular and individualistic, with widespread amateur scientiﬁc interest and fairly high literacy. As Margaret Jacob puts it in Scientiﬁc Culture and the Making of the Industrial West, ‘it was possible to learn more about applied mechanics at a London coffee house lecture series than it was in any French college de plein exercise prior to the late 1740s.’3 I stress this fact because the ﬁrst phase of any enlightenment – whether English, French, or German – encouraged women thinkers and intellectuals. Women are always an asset to new enterprises; they contribute human energy and intellectual venture capital. Only when enterprises begin to be proﬁtable and are institutionalized are women dropped out. Early English women writers such as Bathsua 357

358 Championing Women

Makin, Margaret Cavendish, Mary Astell, Elizabeth Elstob, and Damaris Masham thrived on the interest in learning in late 17th-century England, when learned women were still so rare as to constitute an interesting oddity rather than a threat. These women were interested in science and philosophy, in controversies about democracy and individual conscience in government and religion, and in the possibilities of reason to at least improve the human lot if not perfect it. They did not consider themselves ‘women writers’ so much as thinking persons, scholars, or natural philosophers. The so-called bluestockings appeared a generation or two later, consolidating the gains of these earlier intellectuals and confronting the ridicule that by then had built up against women so affected and pretentious as to pronounce on public affairs, enter into religious and philosophical debates, and study the new works of science and mathematics.4 Mary Astell was one of that earlier generation of women encouraged and even liberated by the percolating enlightenment of the late 17th-century England. She came from a family of Newcastle coal hostmen – coal merchants – at a time when that medieval guild gained new importance as an international monopoly because the scarcity of timber in Europe was creating a growing market for fossil fuel. She was educated by her paternal uncle Ralph Astell, a clergyman who had studied with Henry More and Ralph Cudworth at Cambridge – as had Newton. She apparently inherited his library for a number of his books, annotated in her hand, have been traced to the possession of her executrix.5 Like all autodidacts, she was an insatiable reader in the particular areas she marked off as her own specialties. She preferred abstract theological and philosophical argument to polite literature; she wanted to understand her place in the cosmos more than she wanted to read romances or pastorals. She did not care one whit for love, it seems; and she valued the life of the mind more than the life of the body. Her family was well-to-do until her father died, middle class in income, possessions, educational level. After her father died the family suffered, and her mother had to be given charity by the coal hostmen’s guild until she died. Astell’s one brother became a lawyer. Astell herself came to London at the time of the Glorious Revolution, when she was 22 or so, and had a difﬁcult time surviving. Her literacy saved her: Archbishop Sancroft responded to her written appeal to him and became a patron of sorts. Her extraordinary rhetorical gifts and capacity for philosophical reasoning conferred on her an honorary class status in London society that she had not been born to, raising her to a kind of social equivalence with the aristocratic women who became her friends and patrons.6 Mary Astell never married, but lived by herself in a little house in Chelsea, on the outskirts of London. There she developed an active social involvement with many friends and acquaintances, read widely, and wrote poems, letters, essays, and polemical high church pamphlets and Tory tracts. A true enlightenment thinker, Astell was interested in science and practical education as well as philosophy and politics. She studied with Flamsteed at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich between September 1697 and February 1698.7 Her interest in mathematical concepts is evident from the metaphors she uses. She believed that Truth was accessible to reason. She optimistically imagined new institutions to allow

Mary Astell and Enlightenment 359

her fellow women to improve themselves. In the ﬁfteen years from the ages of twenty-eight to forty-three, Mary Astell published eight books: three feminist tracts; a volume of correspondence with John Norris about how to love God and how to love his creatures; three political works defending hereditary monarchy and warning that rebellion and unrest followed whenever dissenters were allowed to hold public ofﬁce and wield political power; a treatise on the meaning and practice of the religion of the church of England, and a ﬁnal book contesting Shaftesbury’s notion that the free marketplace of ideas was an appropriate place to test religious faith or moral ideas. Always serious about women’s education, she started a charity school for the daughters of pensioners in the Royal Hospital in Chelsea – locating the site, learning enough property law to understand deeds and land titles, raising money for it, and planning its curriculum. The doors of this school opened in 1709 and it served veterans’ daughters into the next century. Her feminist works are her earliest writings. One could argue that she needed to write them ﬁrst because in them she defended her right to write even though she was a woman. In the earliest of them, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694) written ‘By a Lover of Her Sex,’ she argues that by not educating women, not introducing them to philosophers and religious thinkers who could lead them to understand the higher purposes of human life, women were conﬁned to trivial ornamental status and petty concerns. She speaks directly off the page to other women in this book: ‘How can you be content to be in the World like Tulips in a Garden, to make a ﬁne shew and be good for nothing,’ she exhorted them. With little use for male admiration she continues: Let us learn to pride ourselves in something more excellent than the invention of a Fashion: And not entertain such a degrading thought of our own worth, as to imagine that our Souls were given us only for the service of our Bodies, and that the best improvement we can make of these, is to attract the Eyes of Men. We value them too much, and our selves too little, if we place any part of our Worth in their Opinion; and do not think our selves capable of Nobler Things than the pitiful Conquest of some worthless heart.8 Although men with ‘more Wit than Wisdom and perhaps more malice then either’ claimed that ‘women are naturally incapable of acting prudently,’ the truth was that women’s incapacity, if there was any, was hardly natural. It was the work of many years of forced inactivity – long hard years during which they were kept from serious education, turned away from productive intellectual work, kept from using their minds in ways that had prestige in the culture. ‘Women are from their very Infancy debar’d those Advantages, with the want of which they are afterwards reproached,’ she wrote. They are ‘nursed up in those Vices which will hereafter be upbraided to them. So partial are Men as to expect Brick where they afford no Straw,’ wrote Mary Astell.9 Astell never merely argued as did the other ‘educationalists’ that women had a right to an education. She criticized the social institutions (schools, marriage)

360 Championing Women

which thwarted women’s intellectual ambition and thereby prevented their most important human function. She recognized that the attitude towards gender in her society was oppressive; not simply favor of extending the opportunity for formal learning to more people, she thought the capacities of the female mind and spirit had to be completely reassessed. She appealed to women to recognize their ‘real Interest,’ and urged them to improve their minds rather than just tinkering with external appearance. This is a Matter inﬁnitely more worthy your Debates, than what Colours are most agreeable, or whats the Dress becomes you best … you may be as ambitious as you please, so you aspire to the best things … remember, I pray you, the famous Women of former Ages, the Orinda’s of late, and the more Modern D’acier and others, and blush to think how much is now, and will hereafter be said of them, when you your selves (as great a Figure as you make) must be buried in silence and forgetfulness!10 Her vivid, direct, engaging style made an impression on eighteenth-century readers. This book was widely discussed in her day, and new editions were issued in subsequent years, with four editions by 1701. A Serious Proposal was particularly admired by a set of single, aristocratic, philanthropically-minded women of the day. Among them were Lady Catherine Jones, Lady Elizabeth Hastings and her half sisters, and Anne, Countess of Coventry, who lived at Badminton – a large and wealthy estate in Gloucestershire, with Canelettos on the walls, imposing blue and white Ming vases standing in the entry, and Grinling Gibbons’ carvings over the mantlepiece. These women took up Astell and became her patrons and supporters. One of them, a Chelsea neighbor, Lady Catherine Jones, became an especially close friend to Astell; in Astell’s ﬁnal years she moved in with Lady Catherine. Any of these women might have introduced Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies to the prospective queen, then Princess Anne of Denmark. The remedy that Astell proposed for the lack of women’s education was a women’s community, a seminary, a secular convent, where women could spend their time in study and contemplation, reading ‘judicious authors’ and enacting good works, enjoying the friendship and ingenious conversation of one another. It is said that Princess Anne was so impressed by Astell’s proposal that she was prepared to donate £10,000 to establish the educational retreat proposed by Astell. That she allowed Astell to dedicate A Serious Proposal to the Ladies Part II (1697) to her indicates some measure of her regard for the author. But Anne was talked out of her enthusiasm for Astell’s utopian plan by Bishop Burnet, it is said, who disapproved of the papist ﬂavor of this ‘protestant monastery.’ Astell’s reply in her sequel, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies Part II, suggests what Burnet’s objections must have been. But since such Seminaries are thought proper for the Men, since they enjoy the fruits of those Noble Ladies Bounty who were the foundresses of several of

Mary Astell and Enlightenment 361

their Colleges, why shou’d we not think that such ways of Education wou’d be as advantageous to the Ladies? or why shou’d we despair of ﬁnding some among them who will be as kind to their own Sex as their Ancestors have been to the other? … They must either be very Ignorant or very Malicious who pretend that we wou’d imitate Foreign Monasteries, or object against us the Inconveniencies that they are subject to; a little attention to what they read might have convinc’d them that our Institution is rather Academical than Monastic.’11 Identifying women’s education with convents and Catholicism was one way of discrediting learned women in Protestant England; but it was an historically accurate association, for women’s monastic institutions in England – as elsewhere in Europe – had been the formal educational centers for women through the Middle Ages. It took Henry VIII’s act of breaking from the Catholic church and disbanding its monastic establishments to disrupt women’s education in England. From that time forward, until a few secular schools were established in the later seventeenth century, there was little if any formal institutional provision for women’s education in England. Astell was simply harking back to that earlier age in her proposal. Moreover, her mother had been an Errington, from an old Northumberland Catholic family, and papism did not frighten her half as much as did Dissent. She pointed out that although unheard of in her own day, only 150 years before learned educations for women had not been unusual and ‘Plato and Aristotle untranslated, were frequent ornaments of their closets.’12 Astell’s proposed communities of religious retirement not only solved the problem of educating women but also solved the problem of where a woman might live if she were an adult but did not want to marry. Astell thought of these communities as an alternative to marriage – or at least a resting place for women between their parental homes and marriage.13 They were to be a haven for ‘hunted heiresses’ importuned for their fortunes by adventurers and impoverished gentlemen. Astell had wealthy women in mind when she proposed this ‘protestant monastery.’ Her proposal was thus directed to just that class of women of independent means who did not have to marry for an establishment. This was the community that constituted her readership and that admired and supported her. A Serious Proposal (1694) was the most popular and well-known of Mary Astell’s works, along with her other major feminist book, Some Reﬂections Upon Marriage (1700). In between them, she published two other books, Letters Concerning the Love of God (1695) the letters she exchanged with John Norris about the philosophical contradictions of living a spiritual life (whether one owed love to God or to his creatures, how to respond to life’s pain and misfortune, and whether God of the material world was the efﬁcient cause of all sensation) and A Serious Proposal To the Ladies Part II (1697) in which she distilled a particular method of philosophical thought, derived from the Port Royal philosophers, to put women on the right track in meditating upon moral principles.

362 Championing Women

According to Patricia Springborg, A Serious Proposal To The Ladies Part II ‘contains one of the most brilliant disquisitions of the age of Descartes’ clear and distinct ideas and the possibility of moral certitude.’14 Astell enjoined women to elude the tyrannical custom that kept them ignorant and subservient and to think their way through to new principles of behavior and desire. But to think properly about the ‘plain and ﬁrst Principles of Action,’ one had to learn to use language accurately and to clarify one’s terms ﬁrst, by separating and distinguishing the ideas annexed to each word. ‘Thus many times our Ideas are thought to be false when the fault is really in our Language, we make use of Words without joyning any, or only loose and indeterminate Ideas to them, Prating like Parrots who can Modify Sounds, and Pronounce Syllables ….’15 She warned her women readers to pay particular attention to their use of ‘particles’ – what we call conjunctions – the words that provide the connections among ideas. She advised them to read Locke’s section on ‘particles’in Book III of the Essay on Human Understanding. She stressed accuracy in this part of speech because although she did not think women as illiterate as they were generally thought to be – and was convinced that they often pretended to spell worse than they knew how in order to avoid being called proud, pedantic, or unwomanly – she believed that the grammatical mistake women were most prey to was the misuse of ‘particles’ which denoted the relationship between clauses and therefore between ideas. It was Norris who insisted on publishing their exchange of letters about how and why one loved God. Astell’s capacity for philosophical reasoning astonished him. He was surprised to ﬁnd such philosophical command by a woman and was sure his readers would too. He even thought some might ‘be tempted to question whether my Correspondent be really a Woman or no.’16 When pressed, Astell reluctantly agreed to publish their letters, but only on the condition that he not use her name, not even her initials. She further stipulated that the book be dedicated to Lady Catherine Jones, and the dedication she wrote was both familiar and arch. Steadfastly single, Lady Catherine was a woman, she wrote, who in the Bloom of her Years, despising the Temptations of Birth and Beauty, and whatever may withdraw her from Mary’s noble Choice, has made such Advances in Religion, that if she hold on at this rate, she’ll quickly outstrip our Theory, and oblige the World with what was nevermore wanted than now, an exact and living Transcript of Primitive Christianity.17 Astell’s other books continue the concerns of these early works. In Some Reﬂections Upon Marriage (1700) she argues that since the marriage contract requires a woman’s absolute obedience to her husband, no woman ought to marry except where her husband’s moral superiority warranted that kind of obedience. As a conservative Tory, Astell believed in the necessity of citizenly obedience to a monarch, and she disagreed with those who, following Locke, argued that obedience in a state was contractual and negotiable. Astell asserted that since one was born into a state one owed obedience to its sovereign. But in

Mary Astell and Enlightenment 363

the case of marriage one had a choice about undertaking such obligations on a voluntary basis. A woman did not have to agree to these supererogatory vows of obedience. She had better look around her and think long and hard before entering into such a despotic living arrangement. The philosophical ferment of the late seventeenth century – about religious toleration, about the rights of the governed and the authority of the monarchy, about the relative weight of reason and faith – these public debates created an arena for Astell in which she participated from the respectable anonymity of print. She did not ask that women hold public ofﬁce, although she was thrilled by Anne’s ascension to the throne. Let men, as she put it, ‘busy their Heads with Affairs of State, and spend their Time and Strength in recommending themselves to an uncertain Master, or a more giddy Multitude, our only endeavor shall be to be absolute Monarchs in our own Bosoms.’18 Her feminist claims were limited to asking that women be given access to education and that they be permitted to live singly or with other women if they did not choose to marry. Marriage, she said, gave husbands undue power over women’s ‘free born souls.’ Astell wrote four more books on political subjects after this, all of them exploring the dangers possible in allowing dissent and subversion in the state and religious pluralism in Parliament. She wrote Moderation Truly Stated (1704) and A Fair Way with The Dissenters And Their Patrons (1704) as interventions in the current debate about occasional conformity, inveighing against the bill currently being discussed in Parliament. She criticized the law that made it possible for dissenters to hold public ofﬁce if they occasionally took communion in the Church of England. Occasional conformity made it possible for Quakers or Methodists or Anabaptists or Presbyterians – men loyal to churches other than the Church of England – to hold public ofﬁce if they occasionally conformed, thus demonstrating their good will for the English state, interconnected as it was with the Church of England. Daniel Defoe wrote several pamphlets on the opposite side of the question, in favor of occasional conformity, satirizing Astell’s rigid position against it. Astell’s third pamphlet of that year, An Impartial Enquiry Into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War in This Kingdom (1704), began by deploring the execution of Charles I, and went on to compare the seditious tactics of the Whigs and dissenters of 1688 – and by implication the Whigs and dissenters currently in favor of the Occasional Conformity Bill – to the positions of the patricidal rebels of l641. After that, she wrote The Christian Religion As Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England (1705), which she thought of as her magnum opus, a major exposition of her religious philosophy. In 1709, she published her last polemical work, Bart’lemy Fair: Or, An Enquiry after Wit, opposing Shaftesbury’s claim that ridicule could separate sound religious beliefs from absurd ones, and arguing that religious truth was not guaranteed by the free exercise of wit in the marketplace of ideas much as today we might argue that ethical standards are not guaranteed by the pursuit of proﬁt in the economic marketplace. The bedrock of faith had to be accepted unconditionally rather than debated according to rules of logic. Mary Astell’s critique of Shaftesbury’s liberal permissiveness was based on a profound distrust of any political solution which did not have the weight of

364 Championing Women

custom, religious sanction, and absolute law behind it – such that it could withstand the vicissitudes of party politics, economic interest, and the other winds of change which blew from different directions with varying and unpredictable force, threatening the stability of the state. Her philosophical belief in idealized Platonic forms is consistent with her political belief in a stable ruling class which limited the political responsibility of all others in managing the affairs of the state. Reasoning from fallible, self-centered, individualized deﬁnitions of right and wrong meant sacriﬁcing the possibility of perfection at the outset, whether one was trying to deﬁne absolute moral virtue as distinct from private good, or to enunciate a public policy for England that did not concern itself with the interests of separate, fragmented groups. Although Astell is best known today as an early feminist and high Tory polemicist, she was ﬁrst and foremost a philosopher. One of Locke’s earliest critics, she found questions of epistemology and moral certitude most compelling. Her feminist texts were written to defend’s women’s right to education and to the life of the mind; she exhorted them to be proud of their capacities as reasoning creatures and not to be guided by custom or prejudice in deciding the most important questions of their lives. She debated her contemporaries – John Norris, John Locke, Bishop Berkeley, and Shaftesbury – on all the major questions of the day: the role of God in the production of pain and pleasure; the place of faith, of reason or propositional logic, and of sensory experience in determining what we know; whether or not human beings are born with innate ideas or are tabulae rasae upon which experience writes its predictable lessons; whether or not ideas are both clear and distinct; the meaning of a mind/body dualism, and whether or not matter thinks. It is impossible to give an exhaustive description of her position on all these issues and how they differed from the positions of her worthy interlocutors. But let me summarize a few major points. In A Serious Proposal Part II she synthesizes the contemporary philosophical debate about the extent to which knowledge comes directly from God or is merely gathered by the senses – an issue she began debating in her letters with Norris and clinched in The Christian Religion As Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England (1705). She took issue with Locke’s materialism in this particular because she felt that if the only ideas available to people came through the senses there would be no way to advance, to surmount the status quo, or, to use the terms of our day, to make a paradigm shift. In The Christian Religion she wrote of a kind of knowing that carried one beyond the ‘prejudices of sense’: You look thro’ the Creature to the Creator as the Author of all your Delights, and thus every morsel gives a double Pleasure, considering the hand that feeds you, to to speak more correctly [i.e. philosophically], the Power of GOD giving you divers modiﬁcations (141). Astell was convinced that the highest purpose of human thought was the contemplation of pure ideas, which by virtue of their abstract nature, had the

Mary Astell and Enlightenment 365

power to draw the mind away from sense, moderate the passions, and focus the distractable mortal mind on an immaterial Good. She objected to the doctrine of the tabula rasa as she did to any formulation of absolute individualism, because she felt that humans were born into preexisting social worlds of families, villages, countries, and cultures. She thought it absurd to imagine the production of people abstractly, as if children came from nowhere like so many mushrooms. As she wrote in one of her 1704 pamplets: ‘I had hitherto thought that a State of Nature was a meer ﬁgment of Hobb’s Brain … till you [meaning Locke] were pleas’d to inform me ‘of that Equality wherin the Race of Men were plac’d in the Free State of Nature.’ How I lament my stars that it was not my good fortune to Live in those Happy Days when Men sprung up like so many Mushrooms or Terrae Filii, without Father or Mother or any sort of dependency.’19 Such a formulation erased women’s reproductive agency, Astell recognized, for the sake of a theory that proclaimed all men equal and women irrelevant.20 She thought that faith, knowledge, and opinion were not so much different ways of knowing as much as knowledge with different degrees of evidence. She felt, for example that humans could have clear, certain, and indubitable ideas of their own minds – and of God – but that they could not know their nature distinctly because the mind is too complex to know itself and because God is inﬁnite. Locke, of course, objected to conceiving of religion as the contemplation of abstract ideas, because he thought religion in that form was beyond the grasp of ‘vulgar capacities.’ In Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) he had written, ‘you may as soon hope to have all Day Labourers and Tradesmen, the Spinsters and Dairy Maids perfect Mathematicians, as to have them perfect in Ethics this way. Hearing plain Commands, is the sure and only course to bring them to Obedience and Practice’ (279). Astell was acutely aware that in this statement, Locke had dismissed women along with the lower classes as incapable of following the reasoning which set up God as the fountainhead of Good, the source of that absolute idea. She denied that such concepts were mysterious or inaccessible. They were only ‘plain Propositions and short Reasonings about things familiar to our Minds, as need not amaze any part of Mankind, no not the Day Labourer and Tradesmen, the Spinsters and Dairy Maids, who may very easily apprehend what a Woman cou’d write.’21 As usual, she disclaimed any special abilities but used herself as the example that proved the capacities of all women. ‘All the difference if there be any,’ she wrote, between herself and any other woman, arose ‘only from her Application, her Disinterested and Unprejudiced Love to Truth, and unwearied pursuit of it, notwithstanding all Discouragements, which is in every Woman’s Power as well as in hers.’ As for Locke’s argument that matter thinks, that information comes through the senses and is recombined on the blank slate of the mind, and that the superaddition of thought to matter is trivial for an all-powerful God, Astell replied that

366 Championing Women

even making such an argument was tantamount to conceding the separation of mind and body. Locke’s arguments amounted to nothing more, she wrote, than that God can do what we ﬁnd He has done, (viz.) make another Substance besides Body, whose Essential Property, if not its very Essence shall be Thought, and can Unite this Thinking Substance to Body, which is what we call the Union between Soul and Body. For … God’s bestowing on some Parcels of Matter a Power of Thinking, is neither more nor less than the making of an Arbitrary Union between Body and something that is not Body, whereby this Composite has Properties that Matter as Matter is no way capable of … So that it is not Body that Thinks, but the Mind that is United to it, Body being still as incapable of Thought as ever it was.22 This distinction was important to her because she believed that all human beings, whatever their bodies and sensory capacities, had the same ability to reason their way to the Absolute Good. Astell’s conclusions can hardly be called paradigmatic of the Enlightenment thought. Whenever she had a chance, Astell attacked what today we would call the central principles of the Enlightenment: the rights of individuals within the state, religious toleration, and class leveling. Instead of questioning authority, she strenuously defended it, both on historical and theoretical grounds. She thought of most objections to monarchical government as seditious. But although she felt called upon to defend the disembodied, spiritual nature of the soul from Locke’s materialist ontogeny, for the most part she valued the spirit of discovery abroad in the culture; she was interested in reconciling religion and science by showing that they were not mutually exclusive but explored different kinds of knowledge. In her own time, Astell was recognized as a serious thinker. Her writings were well-known in the ﬁrst three decades of the eighteenth century. Defoe copied her proposal for an academy for women in his 1696 Essay on Projects, claiming that he had thought of it ‘long before the Book call’d advice to the Ladies, was made Publick.’ He satirized her high Tory pamphlets on the question of occasional conformity in 1704, the very pamphlets that earned her the admiration of such high churchmen as George Hickes and Francis Atterbury. Her philosophical idealism, inﬂuenced by the French idealist Nicholas Malebranche, was engaged and discussed by the platonist John Norris. In a number of her published works she refuted Locke’s empiricist conception of thought, his materialist rejection of innate ideas and his reliance on experience as the source of all ideas. Some of her arguments from A Serious Proposal Part II were copied verbatim by George Berkeley, later Bishop of Cloyne, into his compilation, The Ladies Library of 1714.23 In 1709, Richard Steele mocked her in several columns of The Tatler, calling her the leader of ‘an order of Plantonick Ladies’ determined to remain unmarried virgins and ‘resolv’d to join their Fortunes and erect a Nunnery.’24 Samuel Richardson’s hero, Sir Charles Grandison, refers approvingly to this scheme for a ‘Protestant Nunnery’ in the second volume of his last novel. There is also some evidence that Clarissa’s ﬁnal preparations for death –

Mary Astell and Enlightenment 367

bringing her cofﬁn into her bedroom, praying, and refusing all food – are modelled on Mary Astell’s last days.25 Astell was also an important model and inspiration to other eighteenthcentury women writers and intellectuals such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary Chudleigh, Elizabeth Elstob, Elizabeth Thomas, Sarah Chapone, and the bluestockings of the following generation. She tried to convince Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to publish her so-called ‘Turkish Letters,’ the meditations and observations she wrote during the years her husband was ambassador to the Court of Turkey. These letters are now recognized to be some of Lady Mary’s most vivid and witty writings. Astell wrote a preface to them in 1724, urging Lady Mary to publish them at the time. But the class-inﬂected prohibition against a woman’s publishing her work – especially an aristocratic woman – was insurmountable and Lady Mary’s Turkish letters were not published until after her death. Astell’s independent spirit and unequivocal claim to an intellectual voice inspired Lady Mary Chudleigh’s poems and Elizabeth Elstob’s determination to be an Anglo-Saxon scholar and then an educator of women. Her books were read and admired by Sarah Chapone, a link to the bluestockings of the next generation, and a good friend to Samuel Richardson. As one of the earliest English authors in the modern age of printing and mass dissemination to write what we would now call feminist analysis, her ultimate inﬂuence on the history of the English-speaking women’s movement is incalculable. London, the sophisticated urban center where she lived, was the locus of controversies on all subjects, conducted in the many journals and pamphlets printed there, in parlours, and in coffee houses. Astell came to hold her place in that society precisely because it valued individual accomplishment, departures from tradition, and literate intellectual polemic – whatever her own views were on these matters. One could say that the Enlightenment atmosphere drew forth and encouraged certain aspects of Astell’s human repertoire: her intellectuality, her argumentativeness, and her pride in self. These qualities resonated with the zeitgeist even though the particular content of her own ideas ran counter to it. None of us is immune to the spirit of the times in which we live, and Astell was no exception; she absorbed much in spite of herself. One ﬁnds, for example, the rhetorical imprint of contemporary political theory on her prose. She describes herself as an honest English subject ‘with an English Spirit and Genius, set out upon the Forlorn Hope, meaning no hurt to any body, not desiring any thing but the Publick Good, and to retrieve, if possible, the Native Liberty, the Rights and Privileges of the Subject.’26 Such diction, ironically enough, sounds like Locke, whom Astell read and admired but with whom, ﬁnally, she always had to disagree. To sum up then: Mary Astell’s place in the Enlightenment is a complicated one. On the face of it she ran against the current, and yet her very existence as an intellectual and a feminist is a testimony to the values of the age. Her position as an educated woman permitted her the speculative mode she valued above all others. Her Reason, and the philosophic implications of that attribute, permitted her to choose a life of celibacy and devotion to study and writing. As she expressed it in a poem of 1689, just after she came to London, the terms of that

368 Championing Women

chosen life were simplicity and liberty – the avoidance of stultifying convention, and the rational use of her own time. O how uneasy shou’d I be, If tied to Custom and formalitie, Those necessary evils of the Great, Which bind their hands, and manacle their feet Nor Beauty, Parts, nor Portion me expose My most beloved Liberty to lose. And thanks to Heav’n my time is all my own I when I please can be alone; Nor Company, nor Courtship to steal away That treasure they can ne’er repay.27 The diction and sentiments are reminiscent of a poet like Abraham Cowley, an early favorite of Astell’s, when appreciating the beauties of nature or re-dedicating himself to the muse. And seventeenth-century England has many examples of aristocratic women living on their estates who praise – in letter, essay, and poem – the satisfactions of retirement, religious mediatation and prayer.28 But Astell emphasizes her ‘Liberty’ in these lines, not her devotion to God or to art. She did not want to perform charitable acts nor discipline a wayward heart. She enjoys her leisure, her autonomy, and repeats the paradox that she is richer for not having beauty or portion, courtship or company, because time is her greatest treasure. Moreover, she used her precious solitude to read philosophical treatises on political rights, rationalist defenses of religion, histories of the Civil War, tracts on party politics, books of economics about the effects of trade on English culture and government, and philosophical investigations of the causes of the universe, the purposes of human life, the rational basis of knowledge, and the like. And we know that she wrote her own opinions on these subjects as well, documenting the sources of her ideas with exact and copious notes. She exercised her lively curiosity about the world around her; she read the newspapers and discussed current events with her friends; she wrote letters; she examined the latest Grub Street pamphlets and speculated about their authorship with the cognoscenti; she went into society and was visited – and generally followed the intellectual debates and discoveries of literate Londoners. Such a phenomenon would have been unthinkable earlier, not only because these issues were not commonplace subjects of speculation among private citizens, but also because women were not expected to think about them (with the exception of royal women located in the public sphere from birth), and certainly not to write, much less publish, about them. Astell was very much a product of her times in the conﬁguration of her intellectual life, the range of her acquaintance, and the autonomous independence of her urban life – despite the conservative cast of her mind. She had the character of an Enlightenment thinker, although her attitudes often belong in the seventeenth century in which she was raised. Thus, in the very contradictions of her life and thought she illustrates important cultural shifts of the era in which she lived.

Mary Astell and Enlightenment 369

Notes 1. These lines were sent to Archbishop Sancroft in 1689. The entire poem, ‘Heaven,’ is reproduced in R. Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), Appendix D, pp. 429–35. 2. This is what Voltaire wrote in Lettres anglaises, drafted between 1726 and 1729 during his exile in England. Banned in France, the volume was not published until 1734. 3. M. C. Jacob, Scientiﬁc Culture and the Making of the Industrial West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 136. 4. See Elizabeth Eger’s essay in this volume for an account of the mid-century bluestockings including Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Carter, and Sarah Scott. Kathryn Sutherland gives an account of the still later generation of educationalists inﬂuenced by Astell following these bluestockings: Catharine Macaulay, Hannah More, Priscilla Wakeﬁeld, Mary Wollstonecraft. ‘Writings on education and conduct: arguments for female improvement,’ in Women and Literature in Britain 1700–1800, ed. Vivien Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 25–45. 5. Derek Taylor has made this discovery. 6. The details of this story can be found in The Celebrated Mary Astell. Clarissa Campbell Orr’s ﬁne essay in this volume, ‘Aristocratic Feminism, the Learned Governess, and the Republic of Letters’ shows the inﬂuence of Mme LePrince de Beaumont on aristocratic patrons in both France and England, and the upward mobility made possible in France for women as educationalists. 7. Flamsteed’s ‘List of pupils’ in the Royal Greenwich Observatory archives in the Cambridge University Library (RGO 1/15, ff 165v–166v). Frances Wilmoth called this to my attention and kindly shared her research notes with me. 8. My citations follow the pagination of an excellent new edition of A Serious Proposal To the Ladies Parts I & II, ed. P. Springborg (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1997), pp. 7–8. 9. A Serious Proposal, p. 10. 10. A Serious Proposal, pp. 6–7. 11. A Serious Proposal Part II, p. 178. 12. Astell is quoting William Wotton’s 1694 Reﬂections on Ancient and Modern Learning (349–50) to this effect. A Serious Proposal, p. 22. 13. In Clarissa Orr’s succinct phrase (in her essay in this volume), Astell proposed community would have provided women ‘[a]n interlude of celibacy before entering on the treadmill of reproduction’ (14). 14. See the Introduction to Springborg’s edition of A Serious Proposal Parts I & II, p. xviii. 15. A Serious Proposal To the Ladies Part II, p. 122. According to Elizabeth Elstob, Astell kept a pet parrot! 16. John Norris’ Preface to Letters Concerning the Love of God (1695). 17. Ibid. 18. Springbourg, p. 234. 19. Mary Astell, ‘A Prefatory Discourse to Dr. D’Avenant’ in Moderation Truly Stated (London: 1704), p. xxxv. 20. This sentence – and a much fuller discussion of Astell’s critique of Locke’s liberal political sentiments – can be found in my article ‘Mary Astell and the Critique of Possessive Individualism,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 23, 4 (1990) 444–57. 21. The Christian Religion, pp. 399–400. A fuller discussion of this exchange can be found in The Celebrated Mary Astell, pp. 91–3. 22. The Christian Religion, p. 261. 23. According to Patricia Springborg, it was Bishop George Berkeley rather than Richard Steele who compiled The Ladies Library (1714) which lifts 147 pages of Astell’s 1697 edition of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies Part II. See her Introduction, p. xviii. For details on the attentions and attitudes of Defoe, Steele, Swift, Hickes, Atterbury, Richardson and others towards Astell, see The Celebrated Mary Astell.

370 Championing Women 24. See Tatler, nos. 32 and 63. 25. See The Celebrated Mary Astell, pp. 100, 133, 331, 488 n.8. For more detail of verbal echoes of Astell’s language and sentiment in Richardson’s novels, see Jocelyn Harris, Samuel Richradson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 3–4, 15–16, 18, 25, 42, 117, as well as her ‘Richardson: original or learned genius?’ in Samuel Richardson: Tercentenary Essays. ed. Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 193–4. 26. 1706 Preface to Some Reﬂections Upon Marriage. 27. The Celebrated Mary Astell, ‘The Thanksgiving,’ Appendix D, p. 451. 28 For examples of these genres, see Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenthcentury Englishwomen, eds Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby, and Helen Wilcox (London and New York: Routledge, 1989); The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett and Ann, Lady Fanshawe, ed. John Loftis (Oxford: Clardendon Press, 1979) or see Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s Writing 1649–88 (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1989) and Clare Brant, ‘Varieties of Women’s Writing,’ in Women and Literature in Britain 1700–1800, ed. Vivien Jones, op. cit., pp. 285–305.

6.2 The Deconstruction of Gender: Seventeenth-Century Feminism and Modern Equality Siep Stuurman

Introduction In the course of the seventeenth century, the notion of the ‘equality of the sexes’ became part of the vocabulary of many educated Europeans, especially in France, and probably elsewhere as well. While mainstream educated opinion continued to take male domination in all walks of life for granted, there was a – perhaps increasing – number of men and women who refused to accept is as a ‘natural’ or ‘divine’ ordering of the world. Many of them believed that the opportunities open to women should be enlarged, in particular in intellectual life. The notion of the ‘equality of the sexes’, though it was sometimes also applied to the body, usually foregrounded the equal cognitive potential of men and women. It is important to note that this feminist voice made itself heard well before the onset of the Enlightenment.1 Early-modern feminism cannot, therefore, be explained as a belated application of Enlightenment philosophy to gender: it should rather be regarded as one of the critical discourses that went into the making of the Enlightenment. This essay argues that seventeenth-century feminism made two seminal contributions to the early Enlightenment: 1. It contributed to the invention of a modern, universalist concept of equality; 2. It made gender into an essentially, and publicly, contested concept. By their ‘deconstruction’ of the ancient notion of a timeless, God-given and natural hierarchy of the sexes the feminists paved the way for the Enlightenment idea that gender was the product of the social environment, and could therefore be discussed in terms of political theory, the transformative power of education, and the conjectural history of humanity. In their critique of masculinist thought feminist authors, women and men alike, freely borrowed from philosophy, theology, history, literature, and mythology. Some did so in a rather eclectic fashion, but others sought to set forth a systematic theoretical argument. The notion that the soul or the mind ‘has no sex’ could be taken from major strands in Christian theology, as well as Platonic and Stoic philosophy, and later from Descartes. From the mid-century onwards, most feminist writing was in some way connected to the ‘Cartesian moment’ in the development of European thought. In this, too, the trajectory of seventeenthcentury feminism was closely intertwined with the origins of the Enlightenment. 371

372 Championing Women

Seventeenth-century feminism comes in many varieties but at its core we invariably ﬁnd a defense of the female partipation in intellectual life. In Renaissance Europe, women had entered the literary-intellectual ﬁeld as participants in conversation, and, even more important, as authors. It is here that we must look for a potential experience of equality. The literary ﬁeld was the only sphere of intellectual life from which women were not formally excluded. Speaking and being listened to, and even more important, writing and being published, could give rise to a new self-awareness, a sense of full personhood, and ﬁnally to the claim, or the dream, of being a speaker or a writer on a par with those who had always been speakers and writers: that is, with men. The other side of the coin was, of course, the anger and frustration that came from speaking and not being listened to, from writing and being ignored or ridiculed. The seventeenthcentury discourse of the ‘equality of the sexes’ moves in the tension-ridden space between those two experiences. This accounts for the polemical tone of most feminist writing. Authors frequently employed the genre of the dialogue to underline the point: the egalitarian conclusion is only reached after lengthy exchanges with its adversaries. Though difﬁcult to prove it seems probable that many such texts were in fact literary adaptations of real-life discussions.

The legacy of the Renaissance Several of the arguments deployed by seventeenth-century feminists were pioneered by Renaissance authors, notably by Baldassare Castiglione in Il Cortegiano (1528), one of the most widely read books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.2 While Castiglione presented his readers with arguments for and against the equal capacities of women and men, his contemporary Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa was less reticent: ‘the woman’, he declares right at the beginning of his treatise in defense of the female sex, is endowed ‘with no less excellent faculties of mind, reason, and speech than the man’.3 Another contemporary, Galeazzo Flavio Capella, decried the dishonesty of his fellow men who ﬁrst excluded women from all the employments of society, and then went on to ‘prove’ that they lacked the abilities to exercise them.4 Writing half a century later, Lucrezia Marinella and Marie de Gournay were certainly aware of these arguments. Both were self-taught women of letters who fashioned their feminist discourse in response to the ubiquitous misogyny they personally experienced. They spoke for themselves as well as ‘on behalf of their sex’. Both Marinella and Gournay were frequently mentioned by later feminists, and Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique, one of the most widely read works of the early Enlightenment, contained an entry on Marinella, which also mentions Gournay and several other seventeenth-century feminist authors, such as François Poulain de la Barre, Anna Maria van Schurman and Jacquette Guillaume.5 Lucrezia Marinella was the daughter of a Venetian philosopher and physician whose well-stocked library she used to educate herself.6 Her La nobilità et l’excellenza delle donne, co’difetti et mancamenti de gli uomini, ﬁrst published in Venice in

Seventeenth-Century Feminism and Modern Equality 373

1600, and ampliﬁed and reissued in 1601 and 1621, had a European inﬂuence, just like Agrippa’s sixteenth-century treatise on which it was party based. Marinella, however, added a great number of scathing attacks on men, by way of a counterblast to a virulent misogynist tract published in 1599. She actually seeks to establish that women are ‘more excellent’ than men, but she is well aware of the argument that the male and the female soul are ‘of the same nature and substance’, which she attributes to Plato and to Moderata Fonte (Tredeci canti di Floridoro: Venice, 1581).7 While championing female superiority her argument takes the validity of the egalitarian argument for granted. However, the greater part of Marinella’s treatise is not concerned with philosophical matters, but with countless examples of virtuous and learned women – a genre that was already well-established in Italy8 – as well as refutations of all the main arguments for male superiority. Men, she avers, obstinately cling to their prejudices: After an encounter with one wicked woman they unthinkingly pass sentence on all women, thus committing ‘the grave error of basing a universal criticism on one particular case.’9 The argument that men are physically stronger is easily rebutted: in that case ‘blacksmiths would be nobler than kings and learned men of science, which cannot reasonably be true’. Moreover, the power of brute force generally leads to tyranny.10 Nature, Marinella declares, values both sexes equally ‘since both are needed to procreate’.11 The argument that women’s inferior status is conﬁrmed by the Law is no more than an effect of male usurpation: ‘I reply that men make the laws, and thus, like tyrants, exclude women from ofﬁcial posts, even though they know that they would be good and perfectly capable of governing.’12 Marinella adduces countless examples of female valour and intelligence, and even more numerous instances of the defects, cruelty and stupidity of men. To the present-day reader this may sometimes seem overly repetituous, but to Marinella it was a necessary counterpoint to the ubiquitous misogyny of the classical and Christian canon. She does not, however, propose that women, having superior souls, should rule over men. Instead, she pictures the correct relationship between the sexes as one of mutual support. Coupled with her criticisms of male supremacy this gives the text a distinctly egalitarian tone. However, Marinella cannot resist the aside that when all is said and done the relationship is not entirely symmetrical: ‘Man cannot live without women, though women, such as the Amazons, have ruled and governed not just cities but entire provinces without men.’13 Marie de Gournay (Égalité des hommes et des femmes, 1622) was perhaps the ﬁrst to organize her entire argument around the concept of equality. When she published it she was already well known in the literary world, thanks to her friendship with Montaigne and her editorship of his Essais.14 However, the female author was still an exceptional phenomenon in the ﬁrst half of the seventeenth century, and Gournay’s anomalous status was repeatedly brought home to her in a most unpleasant way.15 Men, she often complained, speak with contempt about womens’s writings without even taking the trouble to read them. In the Égalité she lashes out against men who cannot even imagine that women might

374 Championing Women

achieve real excellence: to them it seems to be unthinkable ‘that a great woman could deﬁne herself as a great man, with the sex changed.’ The detractors of women, Gournay caustically observes, ‘are truly braver than Hercules, who only slayed twelve monsters in twelve ﬁghts, for they do away with half of humanity by means of a single word’.16 Gournay’s reasoning follows the conventions of the humanist canon.17 Her defense of the female sex relies on standard humanist values, such as erudition, the authority of canonical texts (she cites Erasmus, Agrippa and Castiglione as champions of women), and the belief that wisdom can only be attained by an elite. Gournay’s sceptical irony has a close afﬁnity to the intellectual style of the ‘libertins érudits’ whose company she frequented.18 Renaissance humanism highly valued the virtue of moderation. Accordingly, Gournay presents her case for equality as a mean between male arrogance and female self-gloriﬁcation: ‘Shunning all extremes’, she states, ‘I am satisﬁed to make them [women] equal to the men, nature opposing itself in this respect as much to superiority as to inferiority.’19 The invocation of ‘nature’ calls to mind the concept of ‘natural equality’ found in the philosophy of natural law, but Gournay does not frame her principal argument in those terms.20 Instead, she invokes the Scholastic dinstinction between substance and accident. The differences between men and women, she declares, are solely external: ‘the human animal is neither man nor woman, the sexes not being made directly but accidentally, in the language of Scholasticism, … the unique form and speciﬁcity of this animal consists exclusively in the human soul’.21 As a thinking being the human person is thus not gendered at all. Gournay’s chief arguments against inequality, apart from the soul/body dinstinction discussed above, concern education and history (her theological views are discussed elsewhere in this volume). If women were to receive the same education as the men, she declares, they would surely emulate their accomplishments.22 Her historical examples are mostly taken from Antiquity and Sacred History, but there are also some recent ones, such as Jeanne d’Arc and Anne of Austria, the spouse of Louis XIII and future queen-regent to whom Gournay dedicates the Égalité. Gournay further seeks to minimize the importance of the Salic Law which excluded women from the Royal succession: it is conﬁned to France, she asserts, and it was ‘invented’ at the time of Pharamond (the mythical ﬁrst king of the Franks).23 The arguments about education and history drive home the same point: if women would receive a proper education and if they would have the opportunity to act on the stage of history they would easily demonstrate that they are in no way inferior to men. Constance Jordan situates Marie de Gournay at the end of Renaissance feminism. She quotes Gournay’s explanation of the epigraph on the title page of l’Ombre de la demoiselle de Gournay (‘Man is the shadow of a dream and his work is his shadow’): ‘this device serves to declare that I feel the opprobrium of my time and I accuse my century, which holds me back in it as much as I strive to move out of it.’24 Looking at the subsequent career of Enlightenment feminism we may indeed see her work, like that of Marinella and others, as a ‘beginning’. In that connection it is signiﬁcant that most later seventeenth-century feminist

Seventeenth-Century Feminism and Modern Equality 375

authors were familiar with Gournay’s writings. Gournay died in 1645, but the shadow of her dream lived on.

Equality restated: polemics and dialogues The issue of learning and letters remained central to feminist writing. A famous mid-century polemical exchange was the debate between the Dutch savante Anna Maria van Schurman and the Huguenot minister André Rivet, originally published in Latin in the Dutch Republic (1641), then in a French translation in Paris (1646), and ﬁnally in English in London (1659).25 Schurman’s main point is that a full-time intellectual career is a suitable pursuit for women who have the means and the leisure to do so.26 Rivet’s objections concern female nature and utility. He counsels women to abide by the prevailing customs which follow ‘the temperament of the body’. He further observes that women are not admitted to State and Church ofﬁces, nor to university chairs, so that their knowledge cannot be put to any practical use. Only in exceptional cases, Rivet believes, might some women devote themselves to the bonnes lettres, but not to the higher sciences.27 Schurman retorts that she does not seek to elevate her sex above that of men. The question under discussion, she repeats, is not about generalities, but whether ‘in the century we are living in’ it is ‘in principle’ suitable for an unmarried woman to pursue learning for its own sake. In support of this claim, she cites Marie de Gournay and Lucrezia Marinella.28 Schurman’s reference to Gournay and Marinella demonstrates that she is aware of the arguments made by earlier feminist authors. Moreover, her male opponent is conversant with them as well. This shows that these early-modern feminist writings are more than isolated utterances. They constitute a tradition, a feminist ‘counter-canon’, which was available to those who sympathized with its arguments. Schurman herself subsequently played a similar role, for the outstanding example of her learning and her easy command of Latin were frequently cited in later feminist texts. References to Schurman and Gournay are found, for example in Jean de la Forge’s Le Cercle des Femmes Sçavantes (1663) and Jacquette Guillaume’s Les Dames Illustres (1665).29 Both De la Forge and Guillaume seek to convince their readers of the intellectual abilities of women by means of an avalanche of, mostly contemporary, examples. Guillaume sets forth a hyperbolic argument about female superiority which for the most part boils down to an eulogy of the feminine virtues. Women, she contends, are more faithful, pious and compassionate than men. Those men who delight in speaking ill of women, Guillaume declares, are often debauched and atheistical. Such men say that women ought to be chaste and ignorant, but that is errant nonsense: ‘I say’, Guillaume concludes, ‘that it is ignorance and not knowledge that brings about coquetry.’30 The Apologie de la science des dames, published in Lyon in 1662, tackles the issue of the savantes in a series of pelemical exchanges.31 The discussion is opened by a debate between ‘Cléante’, who defends the savantes, and Aristide, who was perhaps modelled on the ﬁgure of André Rivet. One of Cléante’s points

376 Championing Women

is that the ‘précieuses’, in whose company he spent some time ‘the other day’, conduct a reasonable conversation about serious subjects, not just about parties and fashion.32 This is obviously a ﬂing at Molière’s play Les précieuses ridicules which was ﬁrst staged in the fall of 1659. The Apologie takes the feminist side in the controversy over Molière’s criticism of the précieuses, which by its metonymic effect made all learned and independent women the butt of ridicule.33 In the pages of the Apologie the debate is ﬁnally won by Cléante: he concludes that women may know as much as men, and engage in conversation about all subjects, on the condition that they do not parade their knowledge too openly. This reads like a softer version of the line Molière will later take in the Femmes Savantes (1672). Cléante further declares that the ladies should not appear in the colleges and the lawcourts.34 However, in the second part of the book the argument takes a more radical turn. A collective female voice takes issue with Cléante’s standpoint. The ladies praise Cléante for his criticism of Aristide, but they wonder why he does not go all the way: why can women, for example, not ofﬁciate as judges? Why can they not wield poltical power, as they did in ancient Gaul? Why do men like Aristide believe that they have a sovereign right to knowledge? God has bestowed the gift of reason on both sexes: ‘With men we partake in life’s journey, and thus we need the same lumières as men to illuminate our path. … All of nature lies open before our & your mind alike. … On her treasures we have the same rights as you.’35 The ladies further observe that knowledge is ‘like a light that shines in all directions without dilution’: women can thus be enriched without impoverishing the men. In a general way, the sciences are depicted as a realm of liberty: ‘When the sciences are an empire, it is an empire in which the two sexes, and even all individuals, can be equally sovereign.’36 After all, the ladies ask rethorically, ‘what calamity would come to pass if the women would become as learned as the men? Would the Heavens cease their ordinary revolutions?’37 Two years later, Elisabeth Marie Clement also used the genre of the dialogue to intervene in a contemporary debate. The Dialogue de la Princesse Sçavante et de la Dame de Famille begins with a dispute between the learned Pauline and the solid, down-to-earth Penelope, presided over by a male arbiter. Like the Apologie, the argument becomes more radical and egalitarian in the course of the book. The narrator who introduces the debate situates it in the context of real-life conversations she recently had with some acquaintances in Paris. In particular, she refers to a dispute in which only she herself and a very illustrious man championed the cause of the savantes. What had really exasperated her was that several women condemned the savantes and thus ‘spoke against themselves’.38 To Pauline, Penelope’s aversion to the savantes is saddening and perplexing. Penelope questions the utility of female learning for the commonwealth. She prefers to govern her own domain, for which she has the requisite skills and knowledge: in her opinion the housewife who runs a family is the true ‘femme forte’ of which Homer’s Penelope is the shining example. The learned woman pales in comparison. Pauline assures her that she holds the family mother is higher esteem than the ‘coquettes’, but she thinks that the ‘enlightened mind’ of

Seventeenth-Century Feminism and Modern Equality 377

the savante ranks still higher. She is aware of the opinion that learned women tend to neglect their apparel. Be that as it may, the ‘philosopher’ understands that clothing and fashion are not really important. The critique of fashion is expressed in the (Christian as well as Stoic) metaphor of the inner self versus outward appearances, a metaphor that returns again and again in the course of the dialogue. The ﬁrst instalment of the dialogue ends with the verdict of the arbiter who, to the utter astonishment of Pauline, sides with Penelope. Like her, he questions the utility of knowledge in the household, but he also voices some apprehension: if women begin to study the sciences, their next demand might well be to become members of the senate.39 Pauline will have nothing of this. Just like the ‘ladies’ who took issue with Cléante’s conclusion of the ﬁrst part of the Apologie de la science des dames she squarely confronts the arbiter: ‘I dare say that your judgement is quite defective if you want to deprive the Ladies of the sciences and the art of war, that is: of all the noble pursuits women are no less capable of than men, & if you are so wise as you pretend to be, you would not treat me with such injustice.’40 When the arbiter objects that most men avoid the company of the savantes like the plague, out of fear that such women will surpass them in knowledge and ﬁnally lord it over them, Pauline retorts: ‘Well well, great man, I see that you have been instructed by some inferior, envious and cowardly spirit … [The men] think of nothing but to exclude us from the learned academies, the scientiﬁc cabinets, and all places where one gets instruction in the sciences.’41 After a few further exchanges the judge gives in, and reluctantly agrees that women may become learned. The next issue the arbiter brings up is marital authority. Would not learned women be prone to disobey their husbands? Instead of answering the question in concrete terms, Pauline questions the patriarchal theory of marriage the arbiter appears to take for granted. Like many feminist authors before her, she uses the Biblical story of Eve’s creation out of Adam’s rib to make her point: ‘[Eve was fashioned out of Adam’s rib] not out of his foot nor out of his head, & that was to declare that she would be neither the mistress nor the slave of the man; but she was made of his rib, so that she would be his companion, his equal, & his helpmate.’42 The judge now protests that by the introduction of sacred matters in the debate she oversteps the bounds of her sex. Pauline holds her ground, saying that she is not the ﬁrst woman to discuss theological matters: as beﬁts a real savante, she knows the pagan classics as well as the Bible. The judge now ﬁnally comes round to Pauline’s standpoint, an he calls her a ‘princess of learning.’ Just as the Apologie de la science des dames has to be read in the context of the polemics occasioned by Molière’s attack on the précieuses, Clement’s dialogue was part of a contemporary debate. At the end of the book the identity of the male judge is disclosed. His name is ‘Monsieur de Conrat’:43 that is, Valentin Conrart, one the founding members and long-time secretary of the Académie Française. Clement dedicated her book to the Duchess and the Duke of Saint-Aignan,

378 Championing Women

addressing the latter as a member ‘of that learned academy of beaux esprits which nearly equals the Sorbonne’. Saint-Aignan had entered the Académie Française in 1663, a year before the publication of Clement’s book. Two other ‘illustrous authors’ mentioned in Clement’s preface, the Abbé Tallement and François de La Mothe le Vayer, were likewise members of the Academy. These connections to the Academy milieu explain the point of the book. In the 1650s, Gilles Ménage and Gervais Charpentier had nominated several kearned women, notably Madeleine de Scudéry, Antoinette DesHoulières and Anne Dacier, for membership in the French Academy, but their proposal was turned down.44 Clement’s dialogue should be read as a literary comment on this episode. It represents an alternative scenario in which Conrart, who personiﬁes the Academy, ﬁnally welcomes the savantes. In 1668 Marguerite Buffet published the Nouvelles observations sur la langue françoise … avec les Eloges des illustres savantes tant anciennes que modernes. The second part contained a long list of learned women, prefaced by a short treatise on the equality of the sexes. Like many before her, Buffet declares that women as well as men are created in the image of God. Like several of her predecessors, she cites Van Schurman as a radiant example of female learning. Buffet also adduces Plato’s arguments for gender equality in the Republic, while she has nothing but contempt for Aristotle. She ﬁnally concludes that ‘souls having no sex at all, it follows that the accomplishments of the mind do not share in the difference between man and woman.’45 The style of all the authors discussed above is highly polemical, as if they are adressing an imaginary male-chavinist audience. The genre of the dialogue is, of course, especially well suited to present controversial arguments. As we have seen, these arguments often refer to the literary controversies of the day. Much of what they say reﬂects their arduous struggle to create some intellectual space for themselves, to secure a virtual ‘room of one’s own’ in the masculinist literary world of the seventeenth century. These writings, then, give us an inkling of what it must have been like for women to argue for equality in those days.

The Cartesian moment According to Descartes, the faculty of judgement (‘reason’) is ‘naturally equal’ in all human beings. He illustrates the point with an example that brings out the egalitarian implications with particular force: ‘Those who have the best arguments and who put their thoughts in the best order … will always be the most persuasive, even though they speak only in a provincial dialect [bas breton] and have never been instructed in rhetoric.’46 The Cartesian grounding of truth in ‘clear and distinct’ perception was potentially subversive of the established social and political hierarchy because most traditional claims to authority could not be demonstrated with sufﬁcient logical rigour and conceptual clarity. This was, of course, also true of most of the prevailing arguments for male supremacy. Descartes himself was an extremely cautious man who always avoided political and social issues. But his critique of ‘prejudice’, his epistemological egalitarianism,

Seventeenth-Century Feminism and Modern Equality 379

his mechanistic physiology and his theorization of the mind-body relation opened up certain possiblities. Others would explore those possibilities and not all of them would be so cautious as the master himself. The feminism of François Poulain de la Barre, a former Sorbonne theology student, demonstrates the potential of Cartesian philosophy when it was joined with a radically egalitarian and feminist conviction.47 The last addition is essential, for Poulain’s feminism was not simply a consequence of his Cartesianism. Poulain’s famous and frequently quoted argument that ‘the mind has no sex at all’ was not original with him. It had Platonic, Stoic and Christian roots, and, as we have seen above, it had been employed by several previous feminist authors. What Poulain did was to ground this argument in a Cartesian social philosophy. But his egalitarianism is not conﬁned to the mind. The title of his ﬁrst book must be read carefully: On the Equality of the two Sexes: A Physical and Moral Discourse in which one sees the Importance of getting rid of Prejudices.48 Poulain’s ‘physical’ discourse is precisely about the body: the brain and the rest of the body, except for the sexual organs, are the same in both sexes. One should not sexualize the entire body, Poulain declares, that would be ‘pushing sexual difference too far.’49 Poulain was probably the ﬁrst to turn feminism into a systematic social philosophy. Drawing on Cartesianism, but also on the philosophy of modern natural law (notably Hobbes), travelogues, Jansenist cultural relativism, Biblical criticism, and the querelle des anciens et des modernes, Poulain put together an egalitarian social philosophy in which the equality of the sexes was theorized as part of a wide-ranging critique of all types of inequality (rank, gender, and even ‘race’.) Likewise, Poulain’s interest in education can be seen as a continuation of earlier feminist literature. Again, he systematized and radicalized the argument, arriving at an environmentalist psychology that was more proto-Lockean than orthodox-Cartesian. Poulain explains that ‘female nature’ is not ﬁxed but the product of education and the social environment: Women are brought up in a manner that occasions them to be frightened of everything. They do not receive enough enlightenment to avoid to be caught unawares in matters of the mind. They take no part in the training in the art of attack and defense. They have to suffer the outrageous and unpunished behaviour of an unruly Sex which looks down upon them with contempt, and frequently treats its fellow men with greater cruelty and rage than wolves.50 In the Éducation des dames (1674) Poulain outlined a totally non-gendered curriculum for female education, with geometry, Cartesian epistemology and physics, plus the Port Royal Logic, at its core.51 This is far cry from Fénelon’s better-known Éducation des ﬁlles (1687), and Fleury’s Traité des études (1686) which both argue that women are best served with a more ‘feminine’ and ‘less difﬁcult’ type of instruction.52 Generally, Poulain argues that the only condition of successfully exercising a given art is the mastery of the rules governing it, that is, the mastery of a speciﬁc kind of knowledge. To take one, particularly signiﬁcant, example: he maintains

380 Championing Women

that women can be army commanders by pointing out that modern warfare is about strategic intelligence, not physical prowess: an army needs good strategists, not Hercules-like heroes or Amazon warrior queens. All the arts and occupations in society depend on cognitive abilities which can be attained by all human beings. The prevailing hierarchy of gender, rank and ‘race’ is thus neither natural nor rational, let alone just. Generally, Poulain declares, relations of social dependency are the product of chance, power, and custom.53 Another argument that plays a more important role in Poulain than in previous feminist texts, is cultural relativism. Drawing on contemporary travelogues, Poulain dismisses the opinion that women cannot participate in civil employments because of pregnancy and childcare: all over Africa and in the Americas women perform heavy manual labor without being impeded by childbirth.54 Poulain uses such reports on ‘strong women’ to buttress his feminist argument, but generally he does not have a high opinion of the status of women in the extra-European world, noticing that men in Turkey, Asia, Africa, and America were in the habit of treating their women no better than servants or slaves.55 In his critique of the notion of a ﬁxed ‘nature’ of women and men, Poulain introduces another new intellectual genre, conjectural history (‘conjecture historique’). Just as the apparent movement of the sky is no reliable guide in astronomy, we should not believe that the behaviour of men and women in the present state of society reﬂects the true nature of the sexes. Poulain asks his readers to imagine how men in an early and rude stage of society subjected women by brute force, kept them in subjection ever since, and ﬁnally succeeded in shaping women culturally and psychologically in the image of their degraded status.56 History thus plays a new role in Poulain’s argument: the traditional appeal to exempla is supplanted by a reasoned account of human evolution, a genre that was to become extremely popular in eighteenth-century social theory. Poulain’s social philosophy demonstrates the corrosive potential of Cartesian reason. Virtually all the traditional ideas underpinning the social hierarchy could be redescribed as ‘prejudices’ in the Cartesian sense. Moreover, Descartes’ conception of the mind made it sexless by deﬁnition, while his mechanistic biology minimized the salience of sexual difference for the functioning of the human body. Combining Cartesianism with other critical and ‘modern’ discourses, Poulain welded feminism and the ‘new philosophy’ together. He gave the feminist argument a philosophical foundation, and therewith carved out a space for feminism in Enlightenment discourse.

The destabilization of gender in the public sphere To appreciate the signiﬁcance of the feminist arguments discussed thus far we must read them against the background of the changing place of women in upper-class society and the public debates and polemics it occasioned. The issue of women and learning, for example, was not only discussed in feminist treatises and tracts on pedagogy. it was also taken up in public debates between men, and it was addressed in a practical way by public lecturers who

Seventeenth-Century Feminism and Modern Equality 381

catered to a mixed audience of women and men. On the other side of the fence, Molière and, though in a more sympathetic manner, his contemporary Samuel Chappuzeau, satirized female learning on the stage. Chappuzeau’s Academie des Femmes was staged in 1661, and Molière’s more hostile Femmes Savantes in 1672. We have seen above that the feminist authors of the 1660s were well aware of contemporary opinions. They disliked Moliere, but Clement, for example, spoke highly of those teachers of philopsophy who opened their teaching to women, such as Louis Lesclache, Jean de Richesource, René Bary, Descartes and Samuel Sorbière.57 This is a rather mixed company comprising traditional ﬁgures as well as typical representatives of the ‘new philosophy’. The mention of Richesource is especially interesting, for we know that issues of gender were regularly discussed in his Académie des Orateurs, a school of eloquence frequented by young members of the Parisian Robe and Sorbonne students (the young François Poulain de la Barre among them). Active participation in the debates was restricted to men but women could follow the debates from the gallery.58 Topics discussed in Richesource’s academy included: whether the passions of women were more violent than those of men, whether an orator would encounter more obstacles in persuading a man or a woman, and whether it was better to grant women liberty, as in France, or to keep them in conﬁnement, as in some other countries.59 In the debate on gender and rhetoric, conducted in the summer of 1660, one speaker deplored the one-sided composition of the Academy: if women could participate, he asserted, they would surely confound any man who dared to accuse them of weakness of mind.60 In the spring of 1661 the Academy discussed the issue of the savantes: was the study of the sciences ﬁtting ‘for ladies’? The main adversary of female learning, a Monsieur de Godonville, started from the assertion that knowledge was power: granting it to women was therefore a highly dangerous experiment for they would undoubtedly use it to reduce the men ‘to utter subjection’.61 Godonville’s standpoint was critized by a Monsieur Prieur. He began with the traditonal feminist topos of historical examples, but then went on to ground his egalitarian argument in ‘nature’ which had indiscrminately bestowed imagination, understanding and memory on both sexes.62 Prieur’s speech was followed by an impassioned defense of women by a lawyer, Philippe Cattier. Cattier adduced historical exemples from antiquity, but he also cited the shining example of ‘that illustrious maiden, the Dutchwoman Marie Anne de Schurman’. Richesource himself drew up the conclusion of the debate. He took the side of the champions of female learning, arguing that women were rational beings only differing from men in some physical organs, and in some degrees of hotness and humidity.63 The ﬁrst part of this conclusion is plainly Cartesian, while the second part shows the inﬂuence of the Aristotelian-Galenic theory of the bodily humours which theorized men as ‘hot and dry’, and women as ‘wet an cold’. Another example of discussion about the equality of the sexes is reported by Esprit Fléchier. As a member of a commission of inquiry to Clermont (Auvergne) in 1665, Fléchier had, apart from the Fronde affairs he was sent to investigate, entered into polite conversation with several men and women. One day they talked about the

382 Championing Women

numerous ladies and demoiselles in Paris who possessed good sense and intelligence, demonstrating ‘that the mind is of both sexes, and that nothing prevents the majority of women from becoming learned, if only they can obtain instruction and the liberty to acquire knowledge’. Thereupon one of the ladies exclaimed: ‘It is an injustice that our minds have been held in captivity for so many centuries, and men are wrong to imagine that the faculty of reason was entirely theirs’.64 Fléchier’s example shows that the arguments of the feminist treatises discussed above were widely disseminated in France, also outside Paris. Apparently they fell on sympathetic ears among many men in elite society, for (if we can believe Fléchier) most of the men present assented to the opinion of the lady in Clermont. We ﬁnd something very similar in Richesource’s academy: the lawyer Cattier intimated that the majority supported his plea for equality. This may of course be a rhetorical exaggeration, but it ﬁts in with the fact that Richesource in his formal conclusions usually defended the intellectual equality of the sexes and liberty for women, albeit within the conﬁnes of the established institutions of marriage and civil society. What is also noteworthy, is the mixture of Cartesianism and more traditional discourses of gender and society in the Académie des Orateurs. Such moderately enlightened opinions on gender, philosophy and sociability are probably representative of a sizeable part of the Parisian magistracy and the literary world. Richesource’s academy was only a few minutes’ walk from the seat of the Parliament of Paris. Several of the members of the academy were Parliament lawyers. The subject of the savantes was tabled for debate by Perachon, a Parliament lawyer, and the report of the session was dedicated to Guillaume de Lamoignon, the First President of the Parliament. Several of the feminist treatises published in the 1660s carry dedications or other compliments to robe personages and members of the French Academy. This also ﬁts in with the popularity of Cartesianism in the robe milieu as well as among elite women.65 The public lecturers who catered to a female audience belonged to the same social milieu. Apart from Lesclache, there were Gilles de Launay’s Gassendist lectures, De Fontenay’s lessons of physics and chemistry, Lemery’s lectures on chemistry, and Duverney’s on anatomy. The most popular were Jacques Rohault’s lectures on Cartesian physics. In the 1670s Rohault was succeeded by Sylvain Régis. Gustave Reynier observes that these lecturers introduced a number of intelligent women and men to a philosophical culture that had hitherto been altogether exceptional in upper-class circles.66 Recently, Erica Harth and Eileen O’Neill have demonstrated that a fair number of women in this period engaged in the study of Cartesianism.67 The groundwork for the dissemination of the ‘new philosophy’ among a broader elite public of both sexes, which in the historiography is often attributed to Fontenelle’s popularization of Cartesianism in the 1680s, was laid by these public lecturers in the 1660s and 1670s. Without them, the tremendous success of Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes habités (1686) would have been impossible. Together with the salons, these lecturers helped to create a public space in which women could participate in intellectual life. Admittedly,

Seventeenth-Century Feminism and Modern Equality 383

there was an element of frivolity and aristocratic divertissement in all of this, but that applies to the male audience as well, as Geoffrey Sutton has shown in his discussion of the culture of scientiﬁc performance in this period.68 Even so, we must be careful not to overstate the gains women made. In the ﬁrst place, their role was largely conﬁned to listening: speaking in public remained the exclusive privilege of men. Second, the new, institutionalized, academic world, which began its triumphal march into the Enlightenment with the founding of the Académie Royale des Sciences in 1666, entirely excluded women from its ranks. The literary academies, in the provinces and in Paris, did the same. In France there was only one exception: the admittance of the two Antoinette Deshoulières (mother and daughter) to the Royal Academy of Arles, in 1689.69 Only in Italy women got the opportunity to enter academic institutions. Several Italian literary academies admitted women, and in 1678 the University of Padua awarded a doctorate to a savante, Elena Lucrezia Cornara. This was probably a European ﬁrst, and it attracted a lot of attention, also outside Italy.70 In France both the Journal des Sçavans and the Mercure Galant reported it. Donneau de Visé, the editor of the Mercure, was waxing lyrically about this ‘most glorious event’: ‘the Equality of the two Sexes’, he declared, ‘will today be demonstrated in practice, as it has of late been demonstrated by solid reasons’71 (the ﬁnal remark probably referred to Poulain de la Barre’s recent work.) Donneau de Visé was perhaps no feminist but he was deﬁnitely aware of the severe constraints on women’s freedom and he applauded attempts to overcome them. When a reader inquired into his judgement of the opinion that the condition of women was more advantageous than that of men, Donneau retorted that he had met numerous discontented women who would rather be men, but that he had never come across a single man who preferred the female condition to his own.72 Vented by the Mercure Galant, such utterances tell us something about the climate of opinion in upper-class circles for it was probably the most widely read periodical of the time, with readers in Paris and at least ninety provincials towns. The Mercure encouraged contributions of its readers, women as well as men, and sometimes ochestrated semi-public debates, for example on the proper judgment of the conduct of the heroine in Madame De LaFayette’s novel La Princesse de Clèves.73 It is perhaps no coincidence that the Mercure also ran a veritable advertising campaign for Fontenelle’s works in the 1680s. Fontenelle’s inclusion of women in the public for Cartesian physics, though much qualiﬁed by his ﬂirtatious gallantry, is of a piece with the intellectual trends discussed above.74 Finally, it should be noted that this period saw the coming of the novel as an accepted literary genre and the emergence of the author as a public personage.75 As Joan DeJean has shown, women were in the forefront of these developments, and the female author became a familiar, though contested, phenomenon in the ﬁnal decades of the century.76 Eilzabeth Goldsmith and Dena Goodman have pointed out that ‘[f]rom the very emergence of the literary public sphere in the seventeenth century intellectual activity among women ﬂourished’. But they add that, just as with science, women were excluded from the formal institutions of this new literary world.77 The salience of that exclusion is underscored by Alain

384 Championing Women

Viala’s ﬁnding that networking in institutions was a necessary precondition for lasting literary fame.78 The evidence of public debates, lectures, the theatre, and the literary ﬁeld shows that the equality of the sexes was taken seriously by an important part of upper-class opinion, even though its adversaries were probably far more numerous than its supporters. Male supremacy in marriage and the state was still a solid fact of life, but its cultural and intellectual foundations could no longer be taken for granted. Perhaps the most important development was the presence of numerous women in the literary and intellectual world. While this presence always remained contested and fraught with ambiguity, it nonetheless changed the structure of feeling of French elite culture. The visible presence of intellectual women and female authors subtly altered the ‘common sense’ about the ‘nature’ and behaviour of women. The feminist writings of the second half of the seventeenth century should be read against this background. Their ideas, we may conclude, were not simply ‘utopian’ dreams, but rather attempts to grasp the meaning of the new opportunities open to women as well as the obstacles standing in the way of their further advance. In such circumstances it is understandable that feminist writings frequently expressed feelings of anger and frustration as well as a cautious hope for a better future.

Conclusion: the deconstruction of gender Seventeenth-century feminist discourse and, as we have seen, women’s new agency, subverted the traditional conception of a ﬁxed ‘nature’ of women and men. At the same time, however, it remained a discourse about ‘the two sexes’. In most feminist writing the ideal of equality harmoniously coexisted with eulogies of the ‘feminine virtues’, such as ‘douceur’, elegance, and peacefulness. Even in Poulain, who was at pains to distantiate himself from ‘gallantry’, there are traces of this. Generally, the emphasis on equality was strongest in intellectual matters and weakest when it came to manners and taste. That feminist authors were so keen on the non-gendered nature of reason is readily understandable in an age that went through such a profound intellectual upheaval as the seventeenth century. Large parts of the traditional world view were dissolving, and, from the 1660s onwards, the ‘new philosophy’ founds its way into the salons and other venues of French elite society. In 1672, Molière took it for granted that his audience would have no trouble understanding witty allusions to Cartesian vortices and Gassendist atoms. The upgrading of the ‘feminine virtues’ was likewise linked to certain broader trends in French society, notably the transformation of aristocratic culture from the swashbuckling masculinity of the Fronde years to the cultivated politeness of the age of Louis XIV.79 The Salon and the Court now became complementary forces in French culture, whereas the Salons of the early seventeenth century had been conceived as an alternative to the Court which was at that time seen as ill-mannered and licentious.80

Seventeenth-Century Feminism and Modern Equality 385

One difference between the various types of feminist discourse deserves some emphasis. Rationalist arguments for equality did not seek to change the content of the reigning male culture, they were essentially arguments for female participation in that culture. The advocacy of the feminine virtues, however, was a different matter, for it was clearly connected to the efforts to ‘civilize’, or even ‘domesticate’ – a beautifully ambiguous term in this context – the traditional male culture of the French aristocracy. Its message was that men should not only make room for women, but also change their own ways. Traditionally, the ascription of certain general characteristics, virtuous or otherwise, to women as a group, was part of a gender-speciﬁc discourse that refused women the versalitity and universality implicit in the concept of ‘man’. But when it was linked to an afﬁrmation of the equality of the sexes, the entire text became unstable, because its contradictory discourses had to be read in terms of each other. In this way, the discourse on the equality of the sexes was connected to a broader public debate on the manners and morals of both sexes. It was, then, both ‘marginal’ and ‘central’ to the issues that divided French society in the closing decades of the seventeenth century. Marginal, because feminism always remaind the voice of a small minority; central, because gender, a notion that pervaded all social relations, was destabilized. The nature of women and men became a battleground of competing discourses, and in the end the notion of ‘nature’ itself could be subjected to critical scrutiny. Poulain de la Barre does precisely that: he challenges the philosophers of natural law to explain clearly and distinctly what they mean by ‘nature’ when they afﬁrm the ‘naturalness’ of masculine supremacy.81 Thus to have turned gender into an essentially contested concept was perhaps seventeenth-century feminism’s most enduring accomplishment and its major legacy to the Enlightenment. It is surely no coincidence that Poulain’s feminism is one of the earliest examples of a recognizable Enlightenment social philosophy. His work marks an important intellectual breakthrough in which feminism plays a key role. Reading the major eighteenth-century philosophes, from Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes to Rousseau and Diderot, one immediately notices that gender has become a problematic concept in their writings in a way it never was to the great thinkers of the generation of Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza. Whatever their standpoint in the debate, ‘pro-feminist’ or ‘anti-feminist’, the ‘naturalness’ of women’s subjection was forever gone. Seen in this perspective, we can conclude that seventeenth-century feminism made a major contribution to the formation of the esprit de critique that was the hallmark of the Enlightenment.

Notes 1. See Carolyn Lougee, Le Paradis des Femmes. Women, Salons, and Social Stratiﬁcation in Seventeenth-Century France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976);Ian MacLean, Woman Triumphant. Feminism in French Literature, 1610–1652 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977); Maité Albistur and Daniel Armogathe, Histoire du féminisme français (Paris: Des Femmes, 1978); Joan Kelly, ‘Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle des

386 Championing Women

2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

Femmes’, Signs, 8 (1982), 4–28; Jeanette G. Rosso, Études sur la féminité aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècle (Pisa: Libreria Goliardica, 1984); Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1990); Joan DeJean, Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Danielle Haase-Dubosq & Eliane Viennot (eds), Femmes et pouvoirs sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Rivages, 1991); Erica Harth, Cartesian Women (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1992); Siep Stuurman, ‘L’égalité des sexes qui ne se conteste plus en France: Feminism in the seventeenth century’, Perspectives on Feminist Political Thought in European History, eds Tjitske Akkerman & Siep Stuurman (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 67–84; Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). See Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, transl. and intr. George Bull (London: Penguin, 1976), 210–25; on its reception, see Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s ‘Cortegiano’ (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995). De Nobilitate et Praeeccellentia Foemini Sexus (1529), cited from The Feminist Controversy of the Renaissance, ed. Diane Bornstein (New York: Delmar, 1980), 2. Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, 72. Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, (Amsterdam, Des Maizeaux, 1740), vol. 3, 344–5. See Ginevra Conti Odorisio, Donna e Società nel Seicento: Lucrezia Marinelli e Arcangala Tarabotti (Rome: Bulzoni, 1979), 50–53 (Odorisio spells Marinelli, following modern usage; in early-modern Italy female members of a family would change the -i in -a). Lucrezia Marinella, The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Man, ed. & transl. Anne Dunhill; intr. Letizia Panizza (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 2, 40, 55. See Burke, Fortunes of the Courtier, 49–51. Marinella, Nobility, 121. Marinella, Nobility, 131. Marinella, Nobility, 135. Marinella, Nobility, 135. Marinella, Nobility, 144. See Maryanne Cline Horowitz, ‘Marie de Gournay, Editor of the Essais of Michel de Montaigne’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 17 (1986), 271–84. See Marjorie H. Ilsley, A Daughter of the Renaissance. Marie le Jars de Gournay: Her Life and Works (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1963). Marie de Gournay: La ﬁlle d’alliance de Montaigne, ed. Mario Schiff (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1910), 62 (all quotations from the 1622 Égalité refer to this edition). See Patricia Francis Cholakian, ‘The economics of friendship: Gournay’s Apologie pour celle qui escrit’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 25 (1995): 407–17. See Giovanni Dotoli, ‘Montaigne et les libertins via Mlle de Gournay’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 25 (1995): 381–405; Constant Venesoen, Etudes sur la littérature féminine au XVIIe siècle (Birmingham, Al.: Summa Publications, 1990), 25; Gisele Mathieu-Catellani, ‘La quenouille ou la lyre: Marie de Gournay et la cause des femmes’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 25 (1995), 447–61, at 457. Gournay, Egalité, 61. The sudden change in the course of the argument is also noted by Ginevra Conti Odorisio, ‘Montaigne e Marie de Gournay’, Pensiero Politico, 22 (1989), 227–47, at 234. Gournay, Égalité, 70. Gournay, Égalité, 65. Gournay, Égalité, 68. Jordan, Renaissance Feminism, 286. See Anna Maria van Schurman, 1607–1678: Een Uitzonderlijk Geleerde Vrouw, ed. Mirjam de Baar et. al. (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 1992).

Seventeenth-Century Feminism and Modern Equality 387 26. Question Celèbre s’il est necessaire, ou non, que les Filles soient sçavantes, agité de part & autre, par Mlle Anne Marie de Schurman, Holandoise, & le Sr. André Rivet, Poitevin (Paris: Rolet le Duc, 1646), 9, 14–15. 27. Question célèbre, 51–2, 58–9. 28. Question célèbre, 71–4. 29. [Jean de la Forge], Le Cercle des femmes sçavantes, par monsieur D.L.F. (Paris: Jean Baptiste Loyson, 1663), 15ff (non paginated); Jacquette Guillaume, Les Dames illustres, ou par bonnes et fortes raisons, il se prouve que le Sexe Féminin surpasse en toute sorte de genres le Sexe Masculin (Paris: Thomas Jolly, 1665), 282–92. 30. Guillaume, Dames illustres, 197. 31. Apologie de la science des dames, par Cléante (Lyon: B. Coral, 1662). 32. Apologie, 29–30. 33. See Arthur Tilley, Molière (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1921), 69, 242–45, 256–8; Roger Duchêne, Les Précieuses, ou comment l’esprit vint aux femmes (Paris: Fayard, 2001), 253–4. 34. Apologie, 47. 35. Apologie, 81–2. 36. Apologie, 85. 37. Apologie, 85. 38. Elisabeth Marie Clement, Dialogue de la Princesse Sçavante et de la Dame de Famille; Contenant l’art d’élever les jeunes Dames dans une belle & noble éducation (Paris: Baptiste Loyson, 1664), 2–4. 39. Clement, Dialogue, 77–9. 40. Clement, Dialogue, 89–90. 41. Clement, Dialogue, 133–4. 42. Clement, Dialogue, 160–1. 43. Clement, Dialogue, 261. 44. See DeJean, Tender Geographies, 67, 234–5n52. 45. Marguerite Buffet, Nouvelles observations … (Paris: Jean Cusson, 1668), 199–200. 46. René Descartes, Discours de la méthode, AT VI, 7. 47. For a full treatment of Poulain, see Siep Stuurman, François Poulain de la Barre and the Invention of Modern Equality (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. 48. François Poulain de la Barre, De l’Égalité des deus Sexes, Discours Physique et Moral où l’on voit l’Importance de se défaire des Préjugez (Paris: Jean Dupuis, 1673). I quote from the reprint: Paris: Fayard, 1984. 49. Poulain, Égalité, 91. 50. Poulain, Égalité, 99–100. 51. Poulain, De l’éducation des dames pour la conduite de l’esprit et dans les moeurs. Entretiens (Paris: Du Puis, 1674), 307–10. 52. Fénelon, De l’éducation des ﬁlles (Paris: Nelson, 1916), 102–3, 112, 131–2; Claude Fleury, Traité du choix et de la méthode des études (Paris: J.-Th. Herissant, 1759), 264–70. 53. Poulain, Égalité, 54. 54. Poulain, De l’Excellence des hommes contre l’égalité des sexes (Paris: DuPuis, 1675), 270–1 (the title of this treatise is ironical). 55. Poulain, Égalité, 19. 56. Poulain, Égalité, 21–6. 57. She also refers to pro-woman authors such as Le Moyne, DuBosq, Saint Gabriel and Jean de la Forge, see Dialogue, 261. 58. See ‘advis de l’Académie’ in La première partie des conférences académiques et oratoires sur toutes sortes de sujets problématiques, utiles et agréables, accompagnées de leur décision où l’on voit l’usage des plus belles maximes de la philosophie et les plus beaux preceptes de l’éloquence, par I.D.S. Escuyer, Sieur de Richesource, moderateur de l’académie, & La seconde partie etc., in one vol., Paris, chez l’Autheur, à l’Académie des Orateurs, Place Dauphine,

388 Championing Women

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69.

70.

71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81.

1661 (Henceforth quoted as: Richesource I–II); followed by La troisième partie etc., Paris, etc., 1665 (quoted as Richesource III). Richesource I–II, 383–92, 409–18; Richesource III, 75–86. Richesource I–II, 410 (29 July 1660.) Richesource III, 26. Richesource III, 31. Richesource III, 35–6. Mémoires de Fléchier sur les Grands-Jours d’Auvergne (Paris: Mercure de France, 1984), 100–1. See Francisque Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne (Paris: Delagrave, 1868), 436–7. See Gustave Reynier, La femme au XVIIe siècle: ses ennemis et ses défenseurs (Paris: Tallandier, 1929), 165. Their interpretations differ, see Harth, Cartesian Women; Eileen O’Neill, ‘Women Cartesians, ‘Feminine Philosophy,’ and Historical Exclusion’, Feminist Interpretations of René Descartes, ed. Susan Bordo (University Park PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 232–57. See Geoffrey V. Sutton, Science for a Polite Society: Gender, Culture, and the Demonstration of Enlightenment (Boulder & Oxford: Westview Press, 1995). See my article: ‘Literary Feminism in Seventeenth-Century Southern France: The Case of Antoinette de Salvan de Saliez’, Journal of Modern History, 71 (1999), 1–27, for full references on the Academy of Arles, the Italian Academies, and the dissemination of the Mercure Galant. See Patricia H. Labalme, ‘Women’s Roles in Early Modern Venice: An Exceptional Case’, Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, ed. Patricia Labalme (New York & London: New York University Press, 1980), 129–52. Mercure Galant, Sept. 1678, 150–1; see also Journal des Sçavans, 12 Sept. 1678. Extraordinaire du Mercure Galant, January 1679, 29. See Joan DeJean, Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 59–66. See Aileen Douglas, ‘Popular Science and the Representation of Women: Fontenelle and After’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 18 (1994), 1–14; Mary Terrall, ‘Gendered Spaces, Gendered Audiences: Inside and Outside the Paris Academy of Sciences’, Conﬁgurations, (1995), 207–32; Harth, Cartesian Women, ch. 3. See Alain Viala, Naissance de l’écrivain (Paris: Éd. de Minuit, 1985). DeJean, Tender Geographies, 127–8. ‘Introduction’, Going Public: Women and Publishing in Early Modern France, eds. Elizabeth C. Goldsmith and Dena Goodman (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995), 5. See Viala, Naissance, 305–16. See Jonathan Dewald, Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture. France, 1570–1715 (Berkeley etc.: University of California Press, 1993). See Emmanuel Bury, Littérature et politesse: l’invention de l’honnête homme, 1580–1750 (Paris: PUF, 1996), 47. Poulain, Égalité, 54.

6.3 ‘Neither Male, Nor Female’: Rational Equality in the Early Spanish Enlightenment Mónica Bolufer Peruga

Introduction In Spain, as elsewhere in the early Enlightenment, the rational equality of men and women was crucial to discussions of gender or, to use the term of the day, the ‘woman question’. Early modern pro-woman positions had been based on women’s moral worth and spiritual equality. Now they focussed on intellectual equality and, later in the eighteenth century, on women’s entitlement to education and public participation in literary and social circles. Enlightenment arguments for equality – like earlier arguments for women’s ‘excellence’ – were invariably polemical, designed ﬁrst to be weapons against popular and learned assumptions of women’s necessary inferiority. Like other social inequalities, gender differences were traditionally thought of in terms of a simple hierarchy of power relations, social roles, and ‘natural’ aptitudes: women’s inferior physical, moral and rational abilities. Women’s natural inferiority, usefully explained as natural and divinely ordered, was widely touted in both popular and learned texts, from proverbs to scriptural and patristic references, Scholastic philosophy and humeral medicine. Voices countering this prevailing misogyny were not lacking in early modern Europe. Alternative representations of gender, as well as criticism of inequalities between the sexes, can be found in men’s as well as in women’s writings, particularly from the ﬁfteenth century. Scholars have sought to draw a clear line between (earlier) discourses stressing women’s worth and ‘excellence’ in terms of their superior moral and spiritual qualities, and (later) discourses labelled seventeenth-century rationalist or Enlightenment ‘feminism’.1 Modern feminism is deemed to have its roots in these later debates, which advocated gender equality rather than women’s ‘superiority’ and which used rational rather than historical, theological, biblical, or even alchemical arguments. But there are problems with this deceptively straightforward approach. The evolution from pre-modern to rational or Enlightenment ‘feminism’ was not a simple and linear development, but a process that included the reworking of older concepts and arguments and within which different traditions coexisted. It is too easy to dismiss ‘traditional’ advocacies of women as rhetorical, irrational, theoretically irrelevant and bound 389

390 Championing Women

to die, as did the Ancien Régime to which they belonged, and to reserve approval for those intellectual lines taken to be directly related to the origins of modern feminism. What we need is a less teleological position. For the querelle des femmes did not simply vanish, swept away by a rational feminism that heralded Enlightenment egalitarianism. Rather, it coexisted side by side (and sometimes face to face) with new pro-woman arguments, and often blended with them. In his work on the early French Enlightenment, Siep Stuurman suggests that feminism existed prior to the Enlightenment. It was an important factor in the making of the Enlightenment, he tells us, not its consequence.2 We might have reservations about searching for the origins of modern feminism or about the use of ‘feminism’ as a category in early modern times. But certainly the Enlightenment did not open the path of critical considerations of gender, or even of egalitarian arguments. Both had a long prior history. Arguments for rational equality between the sexes were based on intellectual positions and social experiences that long predate the eighteenth century, and can best be understood as a crucial component, not a result, of Enlightenment debates. Stuurman rightly implies that we should abandon a study of history that isolates ‘forerunners’ of feminism, in favour of a richer, more nuanced picture which examines inherited traditions as well as contemporary debates: one that seeks to reconstruct the links between intellectual discussion and its social framework and places individual thinkers in both a national and an international context. This essay takes a comparative perspective on debate around the ‘woman question’ in the early Spanish Enlightenment. It focuses on the debates generated by Benito J. Feijoo’s Defense of women, a 1726 work that was crucial to the development of a discourse of gender equality. It shows, ﬁrst, how the Spanish version of the querelle des femmes had, by the late seventeenth century, established a basis for the advocacy of women’s moral dignity, spiritual equality, and literary entitlement. Secondly, it traces the emergence of egalitarian arguments in Spain, connecting them to contemporary European debate, and particularly with those positions usually labelled ‘rational feminism’. The essay concludes by exploring the contested legacy of these arguments in later debates between those who sought to reconcile conventional concessions to equality by pointing to women’s diminished reason, enhanced sensibility and domestic role, and those who used rational equality to build arguments for women’s access to Enlightened sociability and publication.

From ‘excellence’ to equality: ﬁfteenth- to eighteenth-century developments Early modern Spain had been intensely involved in the Renaissance and Baroque European tradition of the querelle des femmes. From the ﬁfteenth to the eighteenth centuries, as a response to mainstream misogyny, hundreds of dialogues, apologies, tracts, and lists of ‘illustrious women’, all seeking to prove women’s nobility and merit, were published in almost every European language.3 Works belonging to this genre were often dedicated to women of the royalty or of high

Rational Equality in the Spanish Enlightenment 391

rank, and represented the political, social and cultural inﬂuence of a female elite. The discussion of women’s ‘excellence’ found its natural milieu in courtly and aristocratic circles. Intellectually, it was often found in the philosophical orbit of neoplatonism, with its stress on physical beauty as sign of a superior soul and a reﬂection of divinity. Even more crucially, this discourse corresponded to the logics of privilege in the Old Regime, where social hierarchies of rank and gender were thought of as sanctioned by nature, and difference between women and men tended to be represented in terms of ‘preeminence’ or ‘superiority’ of one sex over the other. Works written in Castilian and Catalan in early modern times, such as Álvaro de Lunas’s Libro de las virtuosas y claras mujeres (Book of Virtuous Women, 1444), Cristóbal de Castillejo’s Diálogo de las mujeres (Dialogue on Women, 1540), and Juan de Espinosa’s Diálogo en laude de las mujeres (Dialogue in Apology of Women, 1580) belong to this rich tradition, as do many others published in Spain up to the eighteenth century.4 In a different social context, that of religious life, early modern Spanish women writers (like the ﬁfteenth-century nuns Teresa de Cartagena and Isabel de Villena) defended spiritual equality, to vindicate women’s equal dignity and justify their own incursions in theological writing.5 The religious argument for the non-gendered nature of souls, which also had Platonic and Stoic roots, was used in Christian theology (by Saint Augustin, among others) to argue that women, inferior to men by nature, were their spiritual equals by grace. Because of the vagueness of the very concept of ‘Soul’ (meaning immortal spirit as well as mind), it became a reference not only to spiritual, but also to intellectual equality, a thesis to which Cartesian dualism gave a sound philosophical basis. Seventeenth-century women such as Marie de Gournay, Anna Maria van Schurmann, Elisabeth Marie Clément and Marguerite Buffet, were among the ﬁrst to use the concept of spiritual equality to build arguments for women’s natural equality with men. For them, Siep Stuurman argues, intellectual equality as a theoretical principle was tightly linked with their experience as learned women struggling to be considered as equals by their fellow men of letters.6 A similar experience and intention might have inspired their Spanish contemporary María de Zayas, who developed this position in the preface to her Exemplary novels (Novelas ejemplares, 1637; ‘To the Reader’): ‘If this matter, of which we, men and women, are formed, be it a mixture of ﬁre and clay, or a mass of spirit and earth lumps, is not nobler in them than in us, if our blood is the same, as are the same our senses, powers, and organs, and our souls the same, for souls are neither male nor female, why should they be wiser and pretend that we are not?’.7 She followed this half-materialist, half-rationalist declaration with the argument that intellectual inequalities between the sexes were the result of differences in upbringing and education: ‘the true reason why women are not learned is not their lack of aptitude, but of application. … If they gave us books and teachers, we would be as ﬁt as men for any ofﬁce or University professorship’. In her arguments, humeral medicine and Aristotelian philosophy were coupled (quite contrary to custom) with a defense of natural equality between the sexes. María de Zayas was a celebrated writer, whose short narratives were

392 Championing Women

widely read, reprinted, translated, and copied during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.8 Her lasting popularity suggests that her plea for women’s rational equality and entitlement to intellectual activity must have been widely known, even if this aspect of her work was seldom mentioned either in her own time or thereafter. Many women writers of the Spanish ‘Golden Age’ (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) acted, like María de Zayas, as men’s spiritual and intellectual equals in religious experience or in the world of letters.9 However, almost a century had to elapse before we ﬁnd another explicit discussion of rational equality between the sexes, that undertaken by the cleric and Enlightened writer Benito Jerónimo Feijoo in his Defense of women (1726).10 Feijoo’s essay, which caused lively debate, was innovative in its Spanish intellectual context and illustrates the international connections and similarities of early Enlightenment discussion of gender. Spain did not lead in the birth and development of the Enlightenment, but played a rather marginal role in the eighteenth-century European republic of letters. However, the Spanish Enlightenment, notwithstanding its distinctive features – moderation, limited diffusion, pragmatism and close connection (as well as conﬂict) with ofﬁcial reformism and Enlightened absolutism – shared many of the main concerns of the general European Enlightenment.11 Although it had its origins in the 1670s, the Spanish Enlightenment did not ﬂourish completely until the 1760s. This accounts for the later framing of a distinctively Enlightened pro-woman discourse, and makes Feijoo, to a great extent, a symbolic contemporary of seventeenth-century French women’s advocates, most prominently Poulain de la Barre (discussed below.) Feijoo’s Defense of Women (a work that was widely read and frequently cited) was published as essay XVI in the ﬁrst volume of his most popular work, the Universal, Critical Theater of Common Errors (Teatro crítico Universal de Errores comunes,1726–40), an extensive collection whose title seems modelled on Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697).12 The general aim of this collection was to ﬁght ‘errors’ and ‘prejudices’ by means of reason; this particular essay (Defense of Women) assertively set out to prove gender equality, both moral and intellectual. Feijoo recognized the difﬁculties of such a project, opposed as it was to general opinion and to most intellectual authorities. Because of the wide and ﬁerce reactions it provoked, this essay stands out among Feijoo’s extensive and highly controversial writings.13 It has long been recognized as one of the most relevant texts of early Spanish feminism, while Feijoo has been praised as a lone forerunner of modern feminism, rather than being considered in the wider intellectual context of early modern European debates. The result is that its arguments usually have been oversimpliﬁed, its paradoxes omitted and its debt to early modern pro-woman arguments (dismissed as highly formal, conventional and chivalric) played down.14 In fact, instead of being an absolutely original, unprecedented personal creation, Feijoo’s work had deep roots in the Spanish and European tradition of the querelle des femmes. He acknowledged his debt in particular to Lucrezia Marinella’s La nobilità e l’eccellenza delle donne (1600), and also mentioned

Rational Equality in the Spanish Enlightenment 393

Madeleine de Scudéry’s Les femmes illustres (1636) and abbé de Bellegarde’s ‘Si les femmes sont inférieures aux hommes par le mérite de l’esprit’ (Lettres curieuses de littérature et de morale), among other ﬁfteenth to eighteenth-century French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, English and German works (Bufﬁer’s Examen des prejugez vulgaires, Anna Maria van Schurmann’s Question célèbre, dialogues by Juan de Espinosa, Geronimo Ruscelli and Giacomo del Pozzo, and the anonymous Defence of the Fair Sex, or Women, the main work of creation).15 Feijoo, however, clearly aligned himself with the ‘moderns’. As the totality of his work shows, he was well acquaintanced with English authors such as Newton and Locke, and particularly with Boyle’s empiricism and Bacon’s scepticism (his friend the famous physician Martín Martínez labelled him ‘a new Bacon’). He had read many French writers, among them Descartes, Bayle, Fontenelle, Malebranche, the libertins erudits (Diodati, La Mothe Le Vayer, Gassendi, Naudé), Nollet, Pluche and Maupertuis. Bayle’s Dictionnaire was, in fact, one of his main references, taken as an endless source of erudition and the model of a critical attitude he pursued (only as far as faith and moral certitudes were not shaken.) In these authors he found support and nourishment for his intellectual (never religious) scepticism, which he shared with other Spanish writers and scientists of his time. He captured this scepticism brilliantly when he wrote: ‘I do not concede, I do not deny, but I doubt.’ He distanced himself from Rousseau, Voltaire and Montesquieu, his own thought and religious beliefs being far removed from their critique of the Catholic Church and of the Old Regime. The rhetorical construction, strategies and arguments of Feijoo’s Defence of women are a mixture of old and new. Although he repeatedly distanced himself from champions of women’s preeminence, many of his arguments are full of resonances of the querelle, such as his defense of female moral ‘excellence’ as based in a set of gendered virtues and particularly women’s sexual continence. He discusses qualities usually attributed to men and women (‘feminine’ beauty, docility, simplicity and modesty; ‘masculine’ strength, constance and prudence) and concludes that they counterbalance each other and have, therefore, the same moral dignity, although ‘masculine’ virtues are more useful for the public good, while ‘feminine’ ones are nobler in themselves.16 His assertion is based on the traditional theme of women’s ‘excellence’ on the grounds of their moral superiority over more lascivous men, but he introduces signiﬁcant variations: a utilitarian notion of virtue, and a nuanced approach to gendered moral values, which, while opposing ‘masculine’ utility to ‘feminine’ moral worth, does not consider them dichotomic pairs, but qualities to be found and appreciated in both sexes. Nevertheless, Feijoo’s major concern is the defense of women’s intellectual equality, which he considers the most innovative and difﬁcult to demonstrate of his theses. He devotes the longest part of his essay to this, using both modern and traditional arguments. He ﬁrst rebuts the theories which pretend to establish a natural foundation for inferiority; he then gives examples of illustrious women of the past; and ﬁnally, he inquires into the social obstacles which interfere with women’s achievements and concludes that social opportunities, and

394 Championing Women

not invariable natural differences, account for the imbalance in men’s and women’s intellectual success.17 His essay, taken as a whole, makes a signiﬁcant departure from previous advocacies of women, by building an argument for gender equality which relies on reason and empirical evidence, rather than authority and example. In this sense, an interesting comparison can be drawn between Feijoo’s discourse and that of Poulain de la Barre, whose ‘social Cartesianism’ focussed on women’s intellectual and moral inferiority. Although Feijoo may never have read Poulain, he did mention him as the author of De l’égalité des deux sexes (with a wrong spelling – ‘Mr. Frelin’ – literally taken from Bayle’s République des Lettres.18) Their works, it must be admitted, show relevant divergences. Women’s inferiority was for Poulain ‘the most universal of prejudices’, and its overturning his main intellectual concern; Feijoo did not give to the ‘equality of the sexes’ such a central position, but took it as one more of his encyclopaedic interests, which included, under the banner of the ﬁght against prejudices in the name of reason, subjects as varied as astronomy, medicine, education, agriculture, religion, ortography and aesthetics. Their social and intellectual contexts were also very different. Poulain wrote in a period of intense intellectual life and cultural sociability in France. The salons, presided over by women, and public lectures and academies of debate (to one of which, Richesource’s Académie des Orateurs, Poulain was himself a regular attendant) offered spaces of social mixing and literary and philosophical discussion open to men and women. These set the foundation for the difussion of new philosophical theories (mainly Gassendism and Cartesianism) among an educated public of both sexes.19 Women participated signiﬁcantly in conversation, cultural sociability, writing and publication, to such a extent that seventeenthcentury French feminism, Stuurman argues, emerged from the contradiction between women’s (limited) experience of equality in the literary ﬁeld, and their exclusion from the more institutionalized Académies. Poulain has to be understood in this context, as a heir to seventeenth-century debates, whose prowoman arguments he reshaped into a coherent and innovative theory of gender equality. Feijoo belonged to a later generation: he was born in 1676, three years after the appearance of Poulain’s De l’égalité des deux sexes, and he published his Defense of women in 1726, three years after Poulain’s death. The cultural atmosphere in which he wrote was, unlike Poulain’s, that of a backward country in Europe’s cultural periphery. Although signiﬁcant improvements had started to take place in Spain, both in intellectual and scientiﬁc innovation and in cultural practices from the 1670s,20 intellectual gatherings, which were neither as numerous nor as inﬂuential as in other parts of Europe, were attended less often by women, and literacy levels and editorial production lagged behind those of England and France. Feijoo was one of that minority of Spanish intellectuals and members of the cultivated elites who were eager to propel their country out of its intellectual decline since the sixteenth century; they urged politicians to take responsibility for cultural renewal, and strove to educate the public in favour of change.

Rational Equality in the Spanish Enlightenment 395

Rational equality of the sexes became the battleground between the ‘ancients’ and ‘moderns’ in Spain, one in which defenders of intellectual progress looked to Europe as a model, while supporters of tradition feared that foreign inﬂuence would contaminate Spanish morals and religious orthodoxy. Feijoo was well aware of the cultural gap between his country and those most advanced in Europe; he took the belief in women’s inferiority to be one of the ‘prejudices’ no cultured individual and no Enlightened country should maintain. Feijoo was not a man with a lively social life: he was a Benedictine monk who seldom left his provincial town of Oviedo, which was far from the capital and its cultural life and political opportunities.21 Feijoo led a secluded and austere existence and hardly ever travelled, in contrast with the increasing cosmopolitanism of the ‘republic of letters’ in the eighteenth century. However, he had extensive intellectual contacts with distinguished Spanish and foreign scholars, who paid him visits or corresponded with him, such as the erudite Father Sarmiento, the royal physician Martín Martínez, and members of the cultured elites who granted him their protection and friendship. He kept well informed about contemporary issues and was an active and assiduous participant in the debates of his time, including polemics about his own work and that of others. In fact, he despised intellectuals who conﬁned their activites to limited circles and prided themselves on communicating only with the learned. On the contrary, he seems to have enjoyed controversy, and he represented himself as an intellectual involved in public discussion, ready to take up his pen every time an issue of social interest and implications arose. Happy to stir debate, he conceived the lifetime project of his Critical Theater and Erudite Letters as a battle against ‘prejudices’ and a means of Enlightening public opinion and modernizing his country. Feijoo addressed his works not only to scholars, but also to a general, cultivated public – an audience ideally constituted of ‘wise’ readers (discretos) with whom he engaged in a complicit dialogue, as opposed to ‘foolish’ readers (necios), whether uneducated or learned. Because of the design of his intellectual project, as well as its wide reception, he played a key role in the formation of Enlightenment public opinion in Spain. His writings were reprinted many times, were translated into several languages and provoked passionate debate until in 1750 a Royal Order declared Feijoo a favourite author of King Fernando VI (who had honoured him two years before with the title of royal counsellor) and forbade further attacks on him.22 Some of the social foundations of Feijoo’s defense of gender equality can be found in his explicit support for the modernization of Spain, and in his admiration for European, particularly French, models. He considered gender equality an issue which required no discussion. When praising learned women of the Renaissance and Baroque, he wrote with particular approval about seventeenth and early eighteenth-century French women (Marie de Gournay, whom he praised as a learned woman, rather than as a defender of her sex; Mlle. de Lafayette; Catherine Descartes; Mme. Dacier), presenting them as examples of the achievements of which women would be capable if allowed to study and write (‘There are very many French learned women, because in that country

396 Championing Women

women have more opportunity, and I would dare say more freedom to study’23). Whether his thought was also shaped by his more immediate social experience, though likely, is hard to assess. Although women’s participation in cultural life in early eighteenth-century Spain can hardly be equated with that enjoyed by women in France or Britain, aristocratic women such as the duchesses of Lemos and Osuna had a signiﬁcant role in cultural sociability, which Feijoo could not have ignored. Also, he corresponded with a woman, Ana María Moscoso de Prado, and discussed with her some of his views on gender differences (allowing himself to express in this private writing some conventional ideas he had not developed in his published work, about women’s suitability for wit rather than for poetic rapture, because of their ‘feebler temperament’).24 More signiﬁcantly, Feijoo and the other participants in the polemic, both the misogynists and the ‘defenders of the sex’, seem to have been addressing their arguments to an audience that included women readers. A sympathetic journalist, when reprinting in his periodical Feijoo’s essay in 1772 , summarised the latter’s contribution in these terms: ‘Dear Ladies: the sciences were not written for men only. Souls have no sex or, to put it more clearly, they are neither male, nor female; women can learn if they put themselves to the task’.25 At the other end of the spectrum, Feijoo’s opponents showed considerable anxiety about female readers using his arguments to justify resistance to male authority. Feijoo’s writing, although largely framed as an abstract, philosophical dissertation, was in fact closely linked to his social environment: it suggested the emergence of a stronger female presence in Spanish public opinion and viewed other European countries (Britain, Italy and particularly France) as idealized models of women’s wider participation in intellectual life.

Reason’s tribunal Notwithstanding their differences, Feijoo and Poulain shared similar concerns and attitudes, in a common environment of intellectual and social change (the ‘crise de la conscience européenne’ in France and the early Enlightenment in Spain).26 They had both studied theology, which provided them with solid scriptural knowledge and a strong hostility towards Scholasticism. They both took the side of the ‘moderns’ in debates of their time: they defended the use of vernacular language rather than Latin as a vehicle for intellectual communication, and used rational evidence against ‘vulgar’ beliefs and ‘learned’ scholastic or humeral theories of women’s inferiority. Both were strongly convinced of the novelty and rigour of their own arguments. They not only refused to use authoritative references but undermined the very principle of intellectual authority by afﬁrming that only reason and evidence could prove equality. However, while Poulain derided the usual arguments for men’s superiority (evidence, nature, universal opinion, authority) and substituted historical examples of women’s worth for conjectural history (arguing that isolated cases could not prove a general statement), Feijoo was more inclined to make concessions to traditional arguments, using erudite references for cultivated readers, or examples of virtuous and

Rational Equality in the Spanish Enlightenment 397

learned women, warriors and sovereigns of the past, which were more likely in his view to persuade ignorants than abstract propositions.27 Feijoo showed his debts to the querelle des femmes to a greater extent than did Poulain, but, like his French predecessor, he diverged in many ways from this well-trodden path. For instance, he made rational equality, rather than women’s moral or physical aptitudes, the central point of discussion: ‘we arrive now at the main battleﬁeld, which is the question of women’s understanding. Regarding this I must admit that I have the sole help of reason and no recourse to authority, because authors who have treated this subject (with a very few exceptions) are so inclined to vulgar opinion, that they despise women’s understanding’.28 Both writers expressed their disdain for the style of chivalric respect displayed for centuries by the champions des femmes and proudly adopted instead the role of the ‘impartial philosopher’.29 Although their philosophical orientations were different (Poulain was a Cartesian and Feijoo an eclectic with Gassendian and Lockean sympathies) they both drew on Descartes’ mind-body dualism as a rhetorical device to prove rational equality of women and men; both used abstract, formal arguments as well as empirical evidence to discount the relevance of anatomical differences between men’s and women’s brains. By limiting gender differences to the body, more speciﬁcally to the reproductive organs (‘cette partie qui serve à la production des hommes’), they reached the conclusion that ‘women are not differently formed from men in respect to the organs which serve to discursive ability, but regarding those which Nature has assigned to the propagation of the species’.30 Feijoo’s friend Martín Martínez supported this view, throwing into the debate the weight of his opinion as a highly-regarded physician: ‘As an Anatomy Professor I can afﬁrm that, not being the organization which makes the difference between the two sexes the instrument of thought, and being woman equal to man in the fabric of knowledge (the only site of ideas), they must have the same aptitudes for Science, because their organs are not different’.31 Rationalistic demonstration and material evidence thus served to deny any natural foundation for women’s inferiority, and supported a non-gendered concept of reason: ‘L’esprit n’a point de sexe’, in Poulain’s words, or, in those of Feijoo, ‘the Soul is neither male, nor female’ (‘la Alma no es varón ni hembra’).32 Aristotelian philosophy and Galenic medicine drew an analogy between mind and body and the natural and the social; this analogy was extended to women’s inferiority and social subordination, which were seen as natural and divinely ordered. A staunch anti-Scholastic, Feijoo despised those for whom the revered name of Aristotle was in itself a token of truth (‘we must not be persuaded by some doctors, no matter how grave, who afﬁrmed the female sex to be defective, only because Aristotle had said so’33), and insisted that Aristotelian principles did not prove women’s inferiority. In this he was not alone: while these theories were still respected by conservative intellectuals, they had been subject to considerable criticism and were no longer respected in Enlightenment circles. But he also attacked another justiﬁcation of women’s inferiority which was taking the place of older theories: the notion of women’s sensitivity (that is, of the excessive

398 Championing Women

subtlety of the brain’s ﬁbres) as an obstacle to reason, elaborated by the French Cartesian Malebranche (De Inquirenda Veritate).34 Taking his usual sceptical approach, Feijoo set out to dismantle Malebranche’s theory in both rational and empirical terms. On the one hand, he questioned its experimental basis (‘I really do not know whether these suppositions about the alleged softness are true. Two Anatomics I have read, who do not say a word about it’); on the other hand, he pointed at the paradox implicit in a reasoning that used women’s allegedly more sensible ﬁbres to assign them diminished rational aptitudes, instead of considering this to be an advantage, given that, according to empiricist epistemology, all knowledge had its origins in impressions received through the senses.35 If Feijoo’s rebuttal of Aristotle looked at a philosophical position from the past which was still present in Spanish intellectual life, in a way his disagreement with Malebranche anticipated debates about gender which would arise later in the eighteenth century in the context of the new culture of sensibility.36 Feijoo and Poulain both believed that equality of intellectual aptitude between the sexes was something no reasonable and informed reader could deny. How to account, then, for women’s more limited achievements? It was here that the argument of education and environment, although not absent from the earlier querelle, came to play the central role that was so characteristic of the Enlightenment. Women’s ignorance, Feijoo argued, was not a sign of their lack of intellectual aptitude but the result of inequal opportunities for education and participation in cultural interchange and social life. Implicit in his argument was an empiricist view of human nature (a basic feature of Enlightenment discourse) which took individuals to be the result of their experience and education: ‘Nobody knows but what one has studied, and only the most barbarous would argue that ability is the same as application’.37 A secluded life and limited options for intellectual fulﬁllment were, according to him, obstacles which prevented women from developing their own potential. Here he seems to have been looking at the social experience of the local elites and middle classes, where women’s educational opportunities and mixed cultural sociability were particularly limited. However, he made no speciﬁc proposals for educational improvement (unlike Poulain’s Cartesian-based model in De l’éducation des dames), his defense of equality being rhetorically shaped as a theoretical critique of intellectual ‘prejudices’ rather than as a program for social reform. Feijoo’s concept of gender equality, rooted in the language of rationalism and empiricism, was stated in moral and intellectual terms. Rational equality, for him as for many of his contemporaries, should not question men’s authority both in the family and in society at large. Unlike Poulain, who suggested that all inequalities, although justiﬁed as based in nature, were in fact constructions of custom and power, Feijoo did not explicitly undermine, in any of his writings, the foundations of social hierarchies. He admitted historical and anthropological exceptions, conceding that ‘exceptional’ women had ruled countries and had led armies in the distant or recent past, and that some remote, exotic cultures (such as those of Meroe or Borneo) might have granted them power over men. However, he considered women’s subordination – the prevailing practice in

Rational Equality in the Spanish Enlightenment 399

‘almost all societies’ – to be in accordance with reason and with God’s will, as imposed on Eve after the Fall.38 Probably in an effort to deprive his thesis of any menacing implications, give it additional respectability, and appease men’s anxieties about women’s ﬁdelity and obedience, he argued that recognising women’s equality with men would contribute to morality and social harmony, by increasing their self-esteem, thus making them better wives and mothers.39 Feijoo, nevertheless, realized that removing all natural foundations for gender inequality gave rise to an uncomfortable and difﬁcult-to-answer question: why social hierarchy between natural equals? As a pious Church man, he resorted to the obscurities of Providence to explain what he clearly considered a puzzling paradox: ‘Why, if one of them had to be superior, being talents equal, did God want it to be the man? We can suggest some explanations, such as men’s superiority in virtues as constance or fortitude …, but we would better say that we ignore the reasons for divine decisions’.40 Rather than seeing this appeal to divinity as a prudent or conventional reliance on traditional arguments, it should be viewed as a rhetorical device which allowed him to bridge a theoretical gap and bring together rational equality and social order, without ignoring the resulting apparent contradiction. His humble prostration before God’s designs was a lucid and courageous recognition of doubt about this crucial matter. He could not answer this question in terms which were at the same time rationally sound and attuned to social order, but, all the same, he dared to formulate it. His antagonists were not assuaged by his prudence but were outraged by the possibility of doubt. For them, the social and the ontological orders should be tightly bound; gender equality was a revolutionary concept, full of disruptive and potentially subversive implications. Claiming that society should be a reﬂection of nature, in accordance with God’s will, they considered that any alternative, even a purely intellectual one, endangered essential hierarchies and questioned not only women’s subordination but also the whole chain of social obediences and dependencies. ‘Father [Feijoo] wants wives to answer back to their husbands, consider themselves their equals and not acknowledge their superiority. … Believe me, this Father has found the way to ruin all republics, Catholic and nonCatholic, because the subject could say to the ruler, that he owed him no obedience’, argued one of them.41 Even Feijoo’s appeal to Providence was for them a dangerous concession to the idea that nothing in nature justiﬁed women’s subordination and therefore social order was contingent rather than ontologically necessary, and could admit alternative conﬁgurations: It is as if he had taken the divine decree to be out of the natural order, and [implied], that we cannot understand it but by reference to the incomprehensible character of God’s resolutions. Good Heavens, how inclined he is to put the world upside down; I think that if he had ordered the decree himself, he would have declared women, rather than men, to be the Head.42 The analysis above makes it clear that Feijoo was not an isolated predecessor of Spanish modern feminism, but a part of the European rationalist reassessment of

400 Championing Women

gender differences, which was a crucial bridge between the early modern querelle des femmes and Enlightenment advocacy of rational equality. He questioned the empirical basis of past and present justiﬁcations of women’s inferiority, and undermined the so-called ‘scientiﬁc’ viewpoint, which used untested hypotheses, rather than research, to deﬁne ‘nature’: ‘It is known that everyone seeks physical explanations and points at them when one is, or thinks to be, sure of their effects by experience’.43 Thus rational equality allowed him to reveal intellectual strategies which relied on constructed evidence. His advocacy of equality stemmed from a non-dogmatic use of rationalism, which left open questions and doubts about the complexities of gender difference and of reason itself. Unlike many writers, who pretended a position of infallible neutrality when discussing ‘woman’s nature’, Feijoo openly admitted the difﬁculty of ﬁnding absolute truth in a matter about which no-one could claim absolute disinterest and equanimity. He expressed this view in an elegant manner: ‘Neither they [women] nor we can be judges in this trial, because we are all parts in it, and thus we should leave the sentence to Angels who, having no sex, are indifferent in this matter’.44 His irony reminds us of Poulain’s: ‘tout ce qu’on en dit les hommes doit être suspect, parce qu’ils sont Juges et parties’.45 Both men made a self-critical use of ‘reason’, which gives to their works a particular richness. They used it as a critical device to examine their own well-rooted beliefs as well as those of others and as a constructive instrument to assert women’s moral and intellectual equality. At the same time they acknowledged that absolute objectivity was an unattainable goal, inasmuch as the philosopher cannot ignore the personal and social circumstances which inﬂuence judgment, the philospher’s own gender being among these.

Late eighteenth-century debates: equality afﬁrmed and contested in the public sphere The late eighteenth century, in Spain as in the rest of Europe, was a period of particularly intense debate about women’s nature, moral and intellectual capacities, education and social roles. This discussion took multiple forms: essays on the ‘women’s question’; educational treatises; medical advice books; and debates on luxury, morality and social reform, marriage and the family. Intellectual polemic in Spain was ﬁrmly connected with cultural and social changes: commercial development; the expansion of printing (which came later and was more modest than in other countries); a push for economic and cultural reforms; the rise of polite culture and sociability; and the development of the concepts of privacy and the sentimental family. Some aristocratic women became prominent contributors to the expansion of Enlightenment thought and culture by keeping salons and participating in cultural and reformist institutions, or through the practice of patronage. As well, women writers increasingly participated in an expanding literary market.46 Crucial connections with the wider European Enlightenment were made possible by translations, adaptations and readings, and revealed shared concerns, anxieties and values.

Rational Equality in the Spanish Enlightenment 401

The language of gender difference was modiﬁed during the later decades of the eighteenth century, in the course of a debate which many contemporaries perceived as more widely spread and sharper than ever. Unlike the earlier debate on Feijoo’s Defense of women, later discussion was not a dispute between ‘ancients and ‘moderns’, but rather among Enlightened reformers themselves. The debate seems to have cut across ideological lines, with more restrictive views sometimes being found in ostensibly more ‘advanced’ political or social circles. Elucidating the nuances of Spanish Enlightenment discourse on gender goes beyond the aims of this paper.47 But I would like to show, by means of a few examples, how arguments for rational equality were assumed, appropriated and sometimes distorted in the late eighteenth century, and how debate about that thorny issue would give birth to two opposed lines of thought: nineteenthcentury discourse on women’s domestic role (that of the ‘angel in the house’), and Spanish liberal feminism. Feijoo’s words clearly resonated in Enlightened circles, with the result that overtly misogynistic positions became unacceptable. In these milieux, when the ‘women’s question’ was discussed, a certain, limited version of equality was usually taken for granted (or at least lip service was paid to it), and Feijoo, highly regarded by ilustrados (Enlightened writers), was constantly cited and invoked. For those who prided themselves on representing enlightened attitudes, on raising the banner of reform and modernization of the country against the forces of traditionalism and reaction, admitting the ‘equality of understanding’ between men and women became an inescapable requirement, at least in public writing and speech. However, recognition of this equality, while brandished as a necessary concession to modernity, was often used to close debate and prevent further developments which might endanger social conventions. As a result, in this particular formulation rational equality lost its cutting edge, and was not incompatible with a sharp deﬁnition of women’s and men’s ‘complementary’ and radically different cognitive potential, moral and sentimental inclinations, responsibilities and roles. This position is illustrated by the reference made by the royal minister Pedro Rodríguez Campomanes to the ‘woman question’ as a controversy that had already been resolved in a society struggling to deﬁne itself as modern, and one which did not need further discussion: ‘it would be impertinent to enter a dispute where Father Feijoo surely took the best position, by considering a vulgar error the difference that common opinion used to establish in favour of men and against women’.48 Some decades later, the liberal Valentín de Foronda, in an essay entitled On all understandings being equal (1820), considered equality to be a self-evident truth ‘which reason admits, and many centuries of History confess’. He urged his readers, in a somewhat condescending tone, to forget ‘that fastidious question of men’s preeminence over women’: he thus halted debate without stopping to weigh the implications of his statement.49 However, over the course of the century the concept of equality was also used and reformulated in more assertive ways, to support further demands for education and for the social and intellectual enhancement of women’s roles and

402 Championing Women

status. Two particularly signiﬁcant examples should be mentioned here: the debate on women’s admission to the Economic Society, and the struggle of women writers to take part in the public world of letters. From soon after its foundation in 1775, to 1787 and beyond, the Economic Society of Madrid was a platform for debate on women’s and men’s ‘nature’ and social roles.50 Economic Societies were voluntary, patriotic associations, created by the Enlightened elites as a way to contribute to agricultural innovation, domestic industry, charity and education of the lower classes; the Societies provided a public sphere for discussion, debate and social criticism. Therefore, the question whether to admit women in their ranks had powerful symbolic implications. Essays dealing with this contentious issue were widely published and read; some of them were translated and elicited responses from abroad. The essays revealed a signiﬁcant difference of opinion among the members.51 One faction, lead by Francisco de Cabarrús, did not accept any public role for women and used Rousseauian ideas to urge a redistribution of the social space, both physical and symbolic, envisaging a rigid sexual division in public and private spheres (a point of view which foreshadowed 19th century bourgeois society.) Nevertheless, many distinguished members of the Economic Society favoured women’s admission (with interesting differences in the rationales for their support, which are discussed below) and it was this position which prevailed, by royal decree of King Carlos III in 1787. For a majority of its advocates, including the monarch himself, women’s admission had an essentially pragmatic sense – they saw the contributions women would make to moral and social reform through economic, educational and charity projects as ‘suitable to their sex’ and thus not contradicting, but rather reinforcing the speciﬁcity of their role. A minority, however, maintained that admission was a logical and desirable consequence of women’s intellectual equality; entitlement to equal participation in social and cultural life, it was argued, should be acknowledged by any society wanting to deﬁne itself as modern. One of the members of the Economic Society to publicly adopt this viewpoint was Ignacio López de Ayala. He disagreed with Rousseauian ideas of sharply differentiated gender identities and took as his starting point a notion of humanity as essentially deﬁned by reason. Anatomical differences, in his view, were completely irrelevant as a basis for establishing hierarchies: There is absolutely no reason to privilege men over women as far as reason – the foundation of human excellence – is concerned. Claiming superiority on the basis of our strength or resilience would amount to preferring horses or elephants to men. Our distinctive feature is reason, not force, and the true mark of superiority is a superior lucidity of mind.52 While other members discussed the practicalities of women’s admission, López de Ayala’s text was a philosophical dissertation on the natural equality of the sexes. He considered recognition of this equality as a theoretical principle to be a welcome sign of progress, and an inescapable requirement for the enlightened

Rational Equality in the Spanish Enlightenment 403

members of these voluntary associations: ‘In our time, and even more at this place, that women are capable of the same instruction, and almost the same employments as men, is something that should not be disputed.’ Instead of summing up, in the name of social utility, pragmatic arguments about women’s potential collaboration, he tried to expose the inherent incoherence of a negative position: ‘Equality accepted, why should we exclude the ladies from Societies?’ By taking ungendered reason as the very essence of humanity, López de Ayala can be considered an intellectual heir to seventeenth and early eighteenthcentury ideas of rational equality between the sexes. At the same time, because he accepted the practical consequences of this principle in terms of women’s equal participation in public life (at least in some of its eighteenth-century facets), his position can be related, in spite of crucial differences in political context and position, to arguments in favour of women’s enfranchisement expressed by men such as Antoine Caritat de Condorcet during revolutionary France’s debate on citoyenneté. Like López de Ayala, the reputed scholar Josefa Amar, in her Discourse in Defense of the Talent of Women (1786) represents the fullest development of the discussion of equality in the late Enlightenment. In her works, as well as in her life, she displayed a solid conﬁdence in her own merit and entitlement and in women’s intellectual equality, saying: ‘He who doubts this truth wants to shut his eyes to the light’.53 However, for those who did close their eyes to the light of evidence, her essay made a strong case for women’s right to admission to these reformist institutions on the grounds of their intellectual and moral equality and their civic duties. She used a variety of arguments, from Feijoo’s considerations about men’s authority over women stemming from God’s will, rather than from natural superiority, to the usual arsenal of the querelle des femmes: reinterpretation of Genesis and historical examples. She did so from an unequivocal Enlightened position and skilfully exploited paradoxes in Enlightenment discourse, which shrank from ﬂatly afﬁrming the inferiority of women, but did not assume the implications of equality. Unlike many eighteenth-century advocates of women, Josefa Amar believed that full recognition of rational equality was still inexcusably lacking, even among those who deﬁned themselves as modern and enlightened (‘They are still disputing the talents and capacities of women as though it was a newly discovered natural phenomenon, or a difﬁcult problem to resolve’54). In her view, the Economic Society debate offered the opportunity to eradicate such a prejudice and to move on towards true Enlightenment. If Josefa Amar was the only Spanish woman who joined publicly in the debate, she was not the only one to argue for rational equality in order to validate her own entitlement and that of her sex to the republic of letters. In a way, all women who wrote for publication entered that debate, whether they intended it or not. Even those who did not get involved in extensive discussion of this issue had to address it in order to justify their own claim to an equal presence in the expanding literary market. They often did so by invoking a century-long tradition of learned women.55 They also frequently invoked the equality of unsexed minds in order to assert their own entitlement and to ask for effective intellectual recognition.56

404 Championing Women

Margarita Hickey, a celebrated poet and translator, used this well-known argument in the introductory verses to her Various Poems (Poesías varias), published in 1789, when she stated that ‘true wisemen’ had to accept her work if they truly believed that ‘soul, like spirit/has no sex’.57 María Laborda, an obscure playwright, explained the argument of an unpublished comedy full of resolute and energetic female characters, by arguing that ‘the soul produces ideas, without distinction of sex’.58 Inés Joyes y Blake struggled to persuade women of their intellectual capacity and moral worth in her Apology of Women (Apología de las mujeres, 1798): ‘never believe that your souls are not the equal of those of the sex that wants to tyrannise you: use the light that the Creator gave you’.59 She also tried to reveal the partiality of male opinion, obscured as it was by a deceptive gloss of scientiﬁc discourse. To accomplish this she used, among other arguments, a fable (also employed by Feijoo) about a man who, trying to persuade a lion of men’s superior strength, was made to note that humans, not lions, had made such statements.60 Like Josefa Amar, who in her 1786 plea before the Economic Society had explicitly assumed the role of advocate for her sex while noting that men played the more comfortable role of judges, Inés Joyes echoed Feijoo’s lucid recognition of the deep imbalance in the debate on gender.

Conclusion: rational equality in the European context Has mind a sex? Is thinking gender neutral? Historiography has diverged when evaluating the effects of the rationalist idea of a disembodied mind. While many scholars consider it a powerful argument with which to defend women’s equality and legitimate their writing,61 others maintain that the concept of reason as non-gendered and aseptically objective, untainted by the body or by personal circumstances, was part of a dualism which forced upon women a ‘masculine’ notion of reason.62 In an attempt to strike a balance , Erica Harth has pointed to the ambiguities which rationalism had for women: in her view, Descartes’ philosophy gave credence to the intellectual aspirations of educated women, by allowing them to abstract themselves from their gender, to consider themselves as rational beings and to present themselves as such in public; but at the same time it made it difﬁcult for them to see themselves (and to write as) both thinking beings and women.63 Discrepancies might perhaps be lessened if we consider rational equality not as a compact, uniﬁed theory, tightly framed by Cartesian dualism, but as a concept and a style of reasoning which was adapted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to various intellectual backgrounds and practical aims. Indeed, as Siep Stuurman has powerfully argued, the concept and the advocacy of gender equality were not brought about by the Enlightenment. Rather they were a product of seventeenth-century rationalism, not in any mechanical way, but as a result of Renaissance pro-woman arguments and Cartesianism (often only vaguely deﬁned), which can only be fully understood within the framework of public debate and social change that occurred around women’s participation in literary life. With a different framing and emphasis, I have tried to suggest

Rational Equality in the Spanish Enlightenment 405

that rational equality cannot be viewed in sharp dichotomy to the content and style of early modern pro-woman positions, but should be seen as a process of gradual evolution which often incorporated and reshaped these positions. At the same time, though, it implied key intellectual and social changes, including the emergence of rationalism and intellectual criticism, sometimes accompanied by a self-conscious, almost deﬁant, ‘modern’ attitude. As well, the context in which the querelle des femmes was framed was transformed – from a courtly and aristocratic milieu where ideas and models of women’s excellence were based on the social roles undertaken by royal and noble women (symbolically evoking an image of necessary and divinely-ordered hierarchies), to a broader social spectrum in which discussions took place in less formal and more open (although still elitist) salons and academies, essays were written for a wider public and, in general terms, social divisions were more ﬂuid. How can we place the advocacy of women’s equality in the context of eighteenth-century Spanish (and European) culture and society? While it might be tempting to present a picture of exceptional individuals (like Feijoo) using ideas of equality to push for change, consideration of social context helps to offer a fuller and more nuanced, if less heroic, picture. We should not forget that their arguments did not take shape in isolation, but as contributions to impassioned debates; their work was published and discussed by readers, particularly in reformist circles; their views were criticized and in some cases publicly defended; on occasion their writings were translated and discussed in other countries, thus merging into a stream of eighteenth-century discussions of gender throughout Europe. Philosophical debate was crucially related to changes in intellectual and social life, leading not only to the formation of modern ideas but also to the emergence of a more widely cultured public which included women. It was sometimes framed as an abstract exchange of ideas, but it was strongly connected (and would became more so) with issues concerning women’s education, their place and role in society and in the family, and their claim to participate in the Enlightened republic of letters. Equality was not a concept born in a particular nation, nor can it be attributed to individual authorship (although the importance of certain individuals, such as María de Zayas and Feijoo, Poulain and Marie de Gournay, must be acnowledged). It was rather a transformation which took shape at a European level, in a chronology encompassing the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Conceptual similarities betweeen authors cannot be explained as mere coincidences, nor can their ideas be said to have spread from a particular centre (be it Venice, Paris or London); rather these similarities should be seen as evidence of a common pool of intellectual references, ideas and arguments, often helped by translations of foreign works, which combined with local inﬂuences and circumstances to produce broadly similar (and at the same time signiﬁcantly differentiated) results. If this network was clearly polarised around a European centre, the role played by the ideas generated outside this centre reminds us of the ﬂow of intellectual communication, and of the similarities of European societies immersed in the process of cultural and social change.

406 Championing Women

Notes 1. I retain some reservations about ‘feminism’ as a category prior to the nineteenth or late eighteenth century. However, as far as the speciﬁcity of critical thought and attitudes towards gender in the early modern period is stressed in relation to feminism as a social movement and as a theory in modern times, I wouldn’t object to the use of labels such as ‘rational feminism’ or ‘Enlightened feminism’, although I tend not to use them in the context of early modern Spain. 2. See Siep Stuurman’s contribution to ‘Considering Feminism and Enlightenment’, Women: a Cultural Review, 12/2 (2001), 236–248, and, in particular, his essay in this volume: S. Stuurman, ‘The deconstruction of gender’. 3. J. Kelly, ‘Early Feminism and the Querelle des Femmes’, in Women, History and Theory (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984); J. Geffriaud-Rosso, Études sur la féminité au XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles (Pisa: Goliardica, 1983); F: Tariccone and S. Bucci, La condizione della donna nel XVII e XVIII secolo (Roma: Carucci, 1983); B. Rang, ‘A “learned wave”: women of letters and science from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment’, in T. Akkerman and S. Stuurman, eds, Perspectives on Feminist Political Thought in European History: From the Middle Ages to the Present (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 50–66. 4. See, among others, R. Archer, Misoginia y defensa de las mujeres: Antología de textos medievales (Madrid: Cátedra, 2001). 5. M. Rivera, ‘El cuerpo femenino y la “querella de las mujeres” (Corona de Aragón, siglo XV)’, in C. Klapisch Zuber, ed., Historia de las mujeres en Occidente. 3. La Edad Media (Madrid: Taurus, 1992), 593–605, and ‘Las prosistas del humanismo y del Renacimiento (1400–1550)’, in I. M. Zavala, ed., Breve historia feminista de la literatura española (escrita en lengua castellana). IV. La literatura escrita por mujer (de la Edad Media al siglo XVIII) (Madrid: Anthropos, 1997), 83–130. 6. Stuurman, ‘The deconstruction…’. 7. M. de Zayas y Sotomayor, Novelas amorosas y ejemplares y desengaños amorosos (Madrid: Castalia, 1989), 47–48. 8. Before falling into discredit among educated readers and critics, because their Baroque style and values did not meet Enlightenment literary and moral canons. This might explain why she was never claimed as a predecessor by Feijoo or by any other eighteenth-century advocate of women, either male or female. 9. See Zavala, Breve historia; J. Boyce and E. Olivares, eds, Tras el espejo la musa escribe. Lírica femenina de los Siglos de Oro (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1993); A. Navarro, Antología poética de escritoras de los siglos XVI y XVII (Madrid: Castalia, 1989). 10. On Feijoo and the early Spanish Enlightenment, see J. M. Maravall, ‘El primer siglo XVIII y la obra de Feijoo’, in Estudios sobre la historia del pensamiento español en el siglo XVIII (Madrid: Mondadori, 1991); II Coloquio sobre el Padre Feijoo y su siglo (Oviedo: Centro de Estudios del siglo XVIII, 1981; F. Sánchez-Blanco, La mentalidad ilustrada (Madrid: Taurus, 1999), 63–122. 11. A brief recent introduction to the Spanish Enlightenment is that of J. Fernández Sebastián, ‘Península Ibérica’, in V. Ferrone and D. Roche, Diccionario histórico de la Ilustración (Madrid: Alianza, 1998), 340–51. Also, L. M. Enciso, ‘La Ilustración en España’, in Carlos III y su siglo (Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 1988), I, 621–96; F. Sánchez-Blanco, Europa y el pensamiento español del siglo XVII (Madrid: Alianza, 1991). 12. B. J. Feijoo, Teatro crítico universal de errores comunes (Madrid: herederos de Francisco del Hierro, 1742, 7th edition), 331–400. Quotations will refer to this edition. There are several anthologies of this work, and a pocket edition of discourse XVI: Defensa de la mujer (Barcelona: Icaria, 1997), but the much needed modern critical edition has not yet been published. On Feijoo and the ﬁrst Spanish Enlightenment, see J. M. Maravall, ‘El primer siglo XVIII y la obra de Feijoo’, in Estudios sobre la historia del pensamiento español

Rational Equality in the Spanish Enlightenment 407

13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

en el siglo XVIII (Madrid: Mondadori, 1991); G. Stiffoni, ‘Intelectuales, sociedad y Estado’, in La época de los primeros Borbones. II. La cultura entre el Barroco y la Ilustración (1680–1759) (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1985), 5–148; II Coloquio sobre el Padre Feijoo y su siglo (Oviedo: Centro de Estudios del siglo XVIII, 1981); F. Sánchez-Blanco, La mentalidad ilustrada (Madrid: Taurus, 1999), ch. 2, 63–122. Apart from complete English editions of Feijoo’s essays, his ‘Defence of Women’ had two additional translations under the titles of An Essay on Woman, or Physiological and Historical Defense of the Fair Sex (1765) and An Essay on the Learning Genius and Abilities of the Fair Sex (1774). Examples of misinterpretation include P. Villota, ‘El siglo de la Ilustración y la capacidad intelectual de la mujer’, in Hombres y mujeres en la formación del pensamiento occidental. VII Jornadas de Investigación Interdisciplinar (Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 1989), II, 185–196; also J. A. González Feijoo, El pensamiento ético-político de B. J. Feijoo (Oviedo: Pentalfa, 1991). The 1997 edition does not escape anachronism. S. A. Kitts, The Debate on the Nature and Role of Women in Eighteenth Century Spain (Queenston-Lewiston-Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press,1995) includes in chs 1 and 2 a detailed study of the polemics, which, however, fails to place it in the context of early modern European debate; for a different view, see also M. Bolufer, Mujeres e Ilustración. La construcción de la feminidad en la España del siglo XVIII (Valencia: Institució Alfons el Magnànim), ch. 1. Feijoo, Defensa de las mujeres, 361–2, and additions to paragraphs 59 and 75, included in the 1997 edition, 84–7. Feijoo went to great lengths to prove that Lucrezia Marinella’s work, which he had seen at the Royal Library in Madrid, did exist and was not his invention, as some of his antagonists had suggested. Feijoo, ‘Defensa de las mujeres’, 337–42. Feijoo, ‘Defensa de las mujeres’, 334–6, 343–54, 355–76, respectively. S. Stuurman, ‘Social Cartesianism: François Poulain de la Barre and the Origins of the Enlightenment’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 58/4 (1997), 617–40. F. Poulain, De l’égalité des deux sexes (Paris: Arthème Fayard, 1984). There is a recent Catalan translation: De la igualtat dels dos sexes (València: Universitats de València-Alacant-Jaume I, 1993), while De l’éducation des femmes has been translated into Spanish, De la educación de las damas (Madrid: Cátedra, 1993). Feijoo, Defensa de la mujer, 1997 edition (addition to paragraph 75). See Stuurman’s essay in this volume. Also, C. Lougee, Le Paradis des femmes: Women, Salons, and Social Stratiﬁcation in Seventeenth-century France (Princeton: Princeton University Press); E. Harth, Cartesian Women. Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992), 135. Sánchez-Blanco, La mentalidad ilustrada. He occasionally visited the court, but often refused honours and appointments. We lack a good biography of Feijoo. See, however, the introduction to A. Millares Carló, ed., Obras escogidas del Padre Feijoo (Madrid: Atlas, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 1952–61). His successor Carlos III, to whom Feijoo dedicated one of the volumes of his Critical Theatre, would keep this favourable attitude. Feijoo, Defensa de las mujeres, p. 180. The names and deeds of learned women of the past are arranged in his essay by countries: Spanish (chapter 16), French (ch. 17), Italian (ch. 18), German (ch. 19), and Asian (ch. 20), besides a chapter on female artists (ch. 22). Quoted by G.Marañón, ‘Las ideas biológicas del Padre Feijoo’, in Obras escogidas del Padre Feijoo (Madrid: Atlas, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 1952), volume CXLI, p. CXVI, note 32. Diario histórico, erudito y comercial, no. 80, 25–VIII–1772. P. Hazard, La crisis de la conciencia europea, 1680–1715 (Madrid: Pegaso, 1988). Feijoo, Defensa de las mujeres, ch. 6 (women rulers), 7 (warriors), 8 (prudent women), 16 to 22 (women of letters and artists).

408 Championing Women 28. Feijoo, Defensa de las mujeres, 355–6. 29. Poulain, De l’égalité, p. 37. Feijoo, Defensa de las mujeres, 337, 354 and 374. The editors of the Mémoires de Trevoux considered Feijoo’s essay, after its French translation, a true piece of philosophy: ‘personne avant le P. Feijoo ne l’a fait avec plus de sagesse et avec moins de partialité.… Ce n’est point un panégyriste…mais un philosophe’. Quoted by C. Sáenz de Santamaría, ‘Feijoo y las Memorias de Trevoux’, in II Simposio, 59. It must be noted that many of Feijoo’s supporters were more conventional champions des femmes who displayed a ﬂourished language of gallantry against their migogynist opponents. 30. Feijoo, Defensa de las mujeres, 365. 31. M. Martínez, Carta defensiva que sobre el primer tomo del Teatro Crítico Universal … le escribió su más aﬁcionado amigo (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1726), 18. 32. The exact phrasing corresponds exactly to that of Pierre Bayle: ‘Women who say the Soul is neither male, nor female can be sure they are right’. Feijoo, Defensa de las mujeres, 363. 33. Feijoo, Defensa de las mujeres, 335. 34. Interest to locate in the brain a physical basis for gender inequality took place in a period when Philosophy was increasingly interested in the nature of the mind (Descartes, Locke) and at the same time Medicine granted more importance than before to the brain, considering it to be the noblest part of the body (while Aristotelic and Galenic reserved this place to the heart or the testicles, respectively). See L. Schiebinger, The Mind has no Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Harvard, Harvard University Press, 1989). 35. Feijoo, Defensa de las mujeres, 373, 375. 36. G. Barker-Benﬁeld, The Culture of Sensibility. Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain. (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press), ch. 1. 37. Feijoo, Defensa de las mujeres, 395. 38. Feijoo, Defensa de las mujeres, 345. He insisted, however, that this was positive, not natural law, and therefore implied for women subordination to men’s authority, but no natural inferiority. 39. Feijoo, Defensa de las mujeres, ch. 24. 40. Feijoo, Defensa de las mujeres, 345. 41. J. A. Santareli, Estrado crítico en defensa de las mugeres contra el Theatro Crítico Universal de Errores Comunes. (S.l., s.i., s.d.) [1727], 35. 42. Santareli, Estrado crítico, 33. 43. Feijoo, Defensa de las mujeres, 357. 44. Feijoo, Defensa de las mujeres, 356. 45. Poulain, De l’égalité, 52. 46. Bolufer, Mujeres e Ilustración, ch. 7; also ‘Escritura femenina y publicación: de la expresión personal a la república de las letras’, in M. Ortega, C. Sánchez and C. Valiente, eds, Mujeres y ciudadanía. Revisiones desde el ámbito privado (Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 1999), 197–223. 47. See Bolufer, Mujeres e Ilustración, ch. 2. 48. P. Rodríguez Campomanes, Discurso sobre la educación popular y su fomento (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Fiscales, 1975), 190. 49. V. de Foronda, Cartas sobre la Policía, in Los sueños de la razón (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1984), 525 and 563. 50. Bolufer, Mujeres e Ilustración, ch. 8; also, M. Bolufer and I. Morant, ‘On Women’s Reason, Education and Love: Women and Men of the Enlightenment in Spain and France’, Gender and History, 10/2 (1998), 183–216. 51. Texts published by O. Negrín Fajardo, Ilustración y educación. La Sociedad Económica Madrileña (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1984), edition to which I will refer for quotations. 52. Negrín, Ilustración, 177. 53. J. Amar, Discurso sobre la educación física y moral de las mujeres (Madrid: Cátedra, 1994), 69.

Rational Equality in the Spanish Enlightenment 409 54. Negrín, Ilustración, 183. 55. M. Bolufer, ‘Celebrating learned women in eighteenth-century Spain: a tradition and its meanings’. Unpublished paper discussed at Bluestockings: Women, Writing, and the Politics of Sociability, The University of York Centre for Eighteenth-century Studies, march 2001; ‘Galería de mujeres fuertes: el sinuoso camino entre la excepción y la norma cotidiana’, Hispania, 204 (2000), 181–224. 56. Writers such as the author of La Pensadora Gaditana (a ‘female spectator’ of uncertain identity) had often pointed at the contradiction between rhetorical acknowledgement of equality and dismissive attitudes towards women’s intellectual activities. La Pensadora Gaditana (Cádiz: Manuel Jiménez Carreño, 1786, reprint of the 1763 edition), I, 3. 57. M. Hickey y Pellizzoni, Poesías varias sagradas, morales y profanas o amorosas (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1789), 417–18. 58. She also justiﬁed herself as a writer blending rational equality with religious inspiration: ‘I follow the impulse of the Eternal Being who formed my soul as a rational entity, adorned by the admirable gift of the word’. M. Laborda, La dama misterio, Ms. Biblioteca Municipal de Madrid. 59. I. Joyes, Apología de las mujeres, in S. Johnson, El Príncipe de Abisinia (Madrid: Sancha, 1798), 203–04. 60. Joyes, Apología, 176. 61. R. Perry, The Celebrated Mary Astell. An Early English Feminist (Chicago-London: Chicago University Press, 1986). P. Hoffmann, La femme dans la pensées des Lumière. (Paris: Ophrys, 1977). 62. S. Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (Albany: State University of New York, 1987); G. Lloyd, The Man of Reason. ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 63. To her, this explains why seventeenth and eighteenth-century ‘Cartésiennes’ (such as Elisabeth of Bohemia, Catherine Descartes, Marie Dupré or Anne de la Vigne) were ambivalent about Cartesian dualism. Also in England, the examples of Ann Conway or Margaret Cavendish show that philosophic dualism was not the only basis from which to articulate a defence of women. See S. Hutton, ‘The Alterity of History. Towards a History of Feminist Ethics: Mary Astell and Anne Conway’, in J. Hermsen, ed., Het Denken Van de Ander (Kampen: Kok Agora, 1997).

SECTION 7 FEMINISM AND ENLIGHTENED RELIGIOUS DISCOURSES Introduction Barbara Taylor

Modern readers of Mary Wollstonecraft are often surprised by her piety. ‘In treating … of the manners of women,’ Wollstonecraft writes in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), ‘let us, disregarding sensual arguments, trace what we should endeavour to make them in order to co-operate … with the Supreme Being’:1 … for … if they be really capable of acting like rational creatures, let them not be treated like slaves; or, like the brutes who are dependent on the reason of man, when they associate with him; but cultivate their minds, give them the salutary sublime curb of principle, and let them attain conscious dignity by feeling themselves only dependent on God.2 As children of God, women’s duty and destiny lie with Him rather than with men, whatever men’s pretensions: ‘For if it be allowed that women were destined by Providence to acquire human virtues, and, by the exercise of their understandings, that stability of character which is the ﬁrmest ground to rest our future hopes upon, they must be permitted to turn to the fountain of light, and not forced to shape their course by the twinkling of a mere satellite.’3 Mary Wollstonecraft is usually regarded as a secular thinker. As an avatar of enlightened womanhood, she is assumed to share in the irreligious spirit of Enlightenment, its ‘rebellion against the Christian world’, as Peter Gay once described it.4 Her repudiation of men’s ‘arbitrary’, ‘despotic’ power over women is interpreted as extending into the sphere of gender relations the enlightened rejection of hierarchic, God-fearing traditionalism in favour of the secularised, individualist values of bourgeois modernity. For her, as for all true moderns, it is presumed, progress meant the death of faith. The narrative, as Phyllis Mack notes below, is so prevalent as to be near-hegemonic: As enlightened rationality and scepticism weakened religion’s hold over the western mind, it is argued, and human authority displaced divine, so women, liberated from church-sponsored patriarchalism, could begin to envisage themselves as equals in a new moral order. On this account, Enlightenment, secularisation, and feminism evolved in tandem, with the repudiation of religion the primum mobile of their common historical trajectory. 410

Introduction 411

Today, however, key elements in this narrative are up for reassessment. ‘In the last ten years religion has returned to the Enlightenment’, a surveyor of the ﬁeld declares, and the ﬁve chapters below all display the impact of this reversion.5 Enlightenment did of course produce some determinedly anti-religious thinkers, especially in France; but in general, a host of recent studies show, the spread of enlightened principles led to transformations in Christian belief rather than its wholesale abandonment. Far from atheistical, enlightened freethinking pushed open new spiritual doors. The repudiation of revealed religion paved the way to natural religion; assaults on dogma and superstition cleared a path to tolerance and rational religious principles. Liberty and piety united in new devotional modes. ‘Pray and be just’ the elderly Voltaire commanded: an apt injunction for an age, in Dorinda Outram’s summary formulation, of ‘powerful, multivarious religious … innovation’.6 These changes affected all believers inside the Enlightenment orbit, but for women they carried particular signiﬁcance. Throughout Christianity’s history, women’s duties and prerogatives had been religiously deﬁned. While moral rectitude in both sexes was divinely prescribed, women’s virtue was much more strictly regulated than men’s, particularly in sexual matters. Clerics of all stripes preached wifely subordination; female behaviour, outside and inside the church, was tightly circumscribed. Yet religion was also a key sphere of female action and self-assertion. ‘In a world where female freedom was carefully curbed,’ one historian writes, ‘to be free to believe was the ﬁrst step in becoming free do to what one wishes.’7 Authorised by scripture to ‘take religion seriously’, some women exploited this permission to pursue independent spiritual goals.8 This was true among both Catholics and Protestants, for while Protestantism was generally more pro-women than Catholicism (in precept if not in practice), Catholicism harboured very many female activists, zealous ‘handmaidens to the Lord’. The aspirations and frustrations of such women were a key impetus to the rise of European feminism. The Protestant side of this development – especially in Britain where the spread of Puritanism in the mid seventeenth-century was accompanied by a wave of proto-feminist preaching to be followed, later in the century, by a series of inﬂuential feminist publications by the Tory Anglican, Mary Astell – has been well documented; but it is only part of the story. Prior to the eighteenth century, Siep Stuurman reminds us, European feminism was largely a Catholic affair. In seventeenth-century Italy and France, Catholic feminists like Lucrezia Marinella, Marie de Gournay, Arcangela Tarabotti, and Gabrielle Suchon deﬁed ecclesiastical misogyny to champion sexual equality. Religion, for these women, was not a body of approved dogma but a ﬁeld of rational philosophical enquiry. Using their literary talents to ‘prob[e] the limits of Catholic discourse’, they pushed in the direction of Enlightenment by exposing and exacerbating underlying creedal tensions which were later to erupt into open conﬂict.9 Stuurman offers a fascinating account of these incipient divisions and their role in the development of a feminist mentality, particularly the ‘protestantising’ strand in early modern Catholicism which, by endorsing lay theological speculation, posed a direct challenge to hieratic authority. Placing

412 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

themselves within this oppositionist current, women like Marinella and Gournay drew on a variety of traditions – Christianised classical mythology, Mariology, neo-Platonic celebrations of beauty, biblical criticism – to argue for Égalité des hommes et des femmes (the title of Gournay’s most famous work). Above all, these writers rejected Thomist–Aristotelian misogyny, the dominant church ideology, in favour of the Augustinian-Platonic thesis of the sexless soul. ‘Christians must … admit that they [women] are capable of administering the … Sacraments,’ Gournay wrote, for ‘in the matter of the divine service the mind and faith are to be considered, not the sex.’10 ‘Man,’ Saint Augustine had famously written in The Trinity, ‘is made … in the image of God, where there is no sex, namely in the spirit of his mind.’11 But this sexlessness of spirit, he further insisted, pertained only to women as adjuncts to men: it was only in unity with her husband that a woman was ‘in God’s image’, whereas as ‘helpmate, a function which pertains to her alone’ she was ‘not the image of God’. As Adam’s rib, women were equal but not in their own right. Spiritual dignity did not translate into worldly entitlements. The dichotomy, so fundamental to Christian attitudes to women, has persisted ever since Augustine, despite regular feminist attempts to short-circuit it. But even sans its worldly correlates, the sexless soul has proven a profoundly subversive doctrine, investing women with a ‘disembodied, non-gendered authority’ erosive of male privileges, as Phyllis Mack’s chapter on eighteenth-century Quaker women shows very clearly.12 In its early stages, Quakerism sponsored many women prophets, but by the mid eighteenth century public professions of Quakerism had become a masculine prerogative. Not all Quaker women, however, accepted this exclusion. Hannah Barnard, a self-educated minister originally from Nantucket, told British Quakers in the 1790s that ‘as a moral agent’ she could countenance no restriction on her spiritual self-expression: ‘I endeavour to exercise that freedom of inquiry, and right of judging, which I believe to be the indisputable privilege, and indispensable duty, of all mankind.’13 Barnard was not a self-avowed feminist but many nineteenth century Quaker women were, founding their claims to earthly equality on equal illumination by the Inner Light. Just as piety is not a trait generally associated with Mary Wollstonecraft, so devout Catholics and Quakers are not the sort of women usually identiﬁed with militant feminism. The secularist outlook of recent feminisms has tended to obscure the religiosity of feminism’s early spokeswomen. To modern minds, a true feminist is autonomy-seeking, a rebel against entrenched power, not one who willingly, even ardently, subjects herself to external authority. The Christian goal of self-transcendence, of ﬁnding oneself by losing oneself in God, seems remote and alien. Yet prior to the mid twentieth century western feminism was strongly identiﬁed with this model of personal agency, in which ‘energy to act in the world’, in Mack’s words, was ‘generated and sustained by a prior act of personal surrender’.14 Quaker women, who were among the most fervent in their embrace of this ideal, were at the forefront of feminist militancy. For them, Enlightenment goals such as natural rights and civil liberty entailed the submergence of

Introduction 413

individual identity and aspirations into a radicalised version of the Christian mission. Mary Wollstonecraft’s religious convictions were more heterodox, but for her too female self-fulﬁlment was inseparable from divine purpose. The liberated woman was not an autarkic individual but a soul moulded in God’s image, motivated by His love of humankind. Freedom for such a woman was not the ability to do whatever she wanted, but the capacity to do what was right, as divinely ordained and rationally apprehended.15 Oppressed women, their minds and deeds controlled by men, could never be truly virtuous. The argument, powerfully articulated in the Rights of Woman, was near-universal among progressive female moralists, including the bluestocking writers examined here by Norma Clarke, for whom ‘indignation at the oppression of women’, signalled no ambition for a less morallyconstrained way of life but rather, as Clarke puts it, ‘anger at the limitations placed on women’s scope for being good’.16 Promoting feminine goodness was an aim common to all British Enlightenment writings on women, from radical-enlightened works like those of Wollstonecraft and the republican feminist Catherine Macaulay (discussed in section eight by Sarah Hutton and Karen O’Brien) through to texts emanating from enlightened Anglicans like those examined by Clarke. Male and female writers alike ploughed this moral furrow, but it was pious lady authors proffering advice to their fellow females, especially to younger women, who wielded the greatest inﬂuence. Stepping onto imaginary pulpits, women writers sermonised their women readers, condemning feminine frivolities and urging them toward the godly life. From the Rights of Woman to Hester Chapone’s Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, the coercive tone was much the same, although the larger perspectives of the writers, particularly their political allegiances, differed dramatically. John Pocock has inﬂuentially portrayed British Enlightenment as polite, pious, and fundamentally conservative, an ideological holding-operation against the forces of religious and political extremism (‘enthusiasm’ in the lexicon of the time).17 As a characterisation of the genteel authoresses discussed by Clarke – all good Establishment loyalists – this is very apt, but it excludes the most innovative sector of British Enlightenment, the radical-puritan wing known as Rational Dissent. Rational Dissent (or Unitarianism, as it became in the nineteenth century) was a reform-minded, intellectualist brand of Protestant nonconformity that became the backbone of political radicalism in the late eighteenth century. Mary Wollstonecraft’s friend and disciple, Mary Hays – discussed here by Gina Luria Walker – was a Rational Dissenter, while Wollstonecraft herself was strongly inﬂuenced by the leftwing philosopher/preacher Richard Price, one of Rational Dissent’s foremost ﬁgures. In section nine of this book, Arianne Chernock examines the strong pro-feminist current running through eighteenth-century Rational Dissent, which in the nineteenth century resulted in a strong representation of Unitarian women in the leadership of the nascent women’s movement. Yet the foremost eighteenth-century Rational Dissenting woman, Anna Barbauld, publicly opposed Wollstonecraft’s women’s-rights principles. Barbauld was a well-regarded poet and essayist who in her religious writings championed stereotypically feminine modes

414 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

of worship – affective, spontaneous, intimate – against the coolly rationalist devotional style favoured by male Unitarians: a contentious stance which, as Daniel White’s chapter shows, revealed much about enlightened Protestantism’s ambiguous legacy to women. For while Barbauld was no friend to feminism, her sophisticated exploitation of the pro-women attitudes of Rational Dissent, using them to update and reinforce populist puritan traditions, drew her into controversies whose battle-lines were clearly gendered. The complexities of her position, skilfully dissected by White, highlight the particular difﬁculties facing female religious intellectuals while reminding us that the dichotomy feminist/anti-feminist, when imposed on eighteenth-century thinkers, is rarely helpful, usually obfuscating more than it reveals. Like the bluestocking writers discussed by Norma Clarke, Anna Barbauld was a celebrated author, a ‘woman of letters’ with a reputation extending far beyond the Dissenting community. Mary Hays was a more maverick ﬁgure, yet she too garnered many plaudits for her novels and essays. For all these women, as for their earlier Catholic counterparts, religion was an intellectual launch pad as well as a credo, providing them with sympathetic male mentors, high themes to address, and a ready-made audience for their writings. Mary Wollstonecraft never embraced Unitarianism (preferring her own idiosyncratic brand of natural religion blended with a romanticised Platonism), yet for her too Rational Dissent, with its reformist politics and hospitable attitude toward clever, unorthodox women, was a crucial formative inﬂuence. Far from turning their backs on God, what these women found in enlightened Protestantism was a faith commensurate with their self-image as respected, independent-minded intellectuals who, armed with reason and propelled by conviction, could assume their rightful place in the divine scheme of things. While not, strictly speaking, a feminist self-perception – neither Barbauld nor the bluestockings could be described as feminists even on the loosest deﬁnition – it served to fuel feminist aspirations, by placing God, virtue, and right-thinking opinion ﬁrmly on the side of an empowered womanhood: a valuable legacy, as it turned out, for the equally pious women’s movement that emerged in Britain some half century later.

Notes 1. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, M Butler and J Todd, eds, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1989), vol. 5, p. 90. 2. Ibid., p. 105. 3. Ibid., p. 89. For a discussion of the religious dimension of Wollstonecraft’s feminism, see my Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2003), ch. 3 and passim. 4. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: an Interpretation; vol II: the Science of Freedom (1969; New York: W W Norton and Co, 1977), p. 1. 5. Jonathan Sheehan, ‘Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularisation’, American Historical Review, vol. 108, issue 4, Oct. 2003, p. 1062. 6. Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 35. 7. Lyle Koehler, A Search for Power: the ‘Weaker Sex’ in Seventeenth-Century New England (University of Illinois Press, 1980), p. 217, quoted in Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women:

Introduction 415

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (University of California Press, 1992), p. 88. Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720 (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 10. Siep Stuurman, ‘The Soul Has No Sex: Feminism and Catholicism in Early Modern Europe’, below, p. 429. Quoted in Stuurman, ‘The Soul Has No Sex’, below, p. 423. Ibid., p. 419. Phyllis Mack, ‘Religion, Feminism, and the Problem of Agency: Reﬂections on Eighteenth-Century Quakerism’, below, p. 450. Quoted in Mack, ‘Religion, Feminism, and the Problem of Agency’, below, p. 451. Ibid., p. 439. Taylor, Wollstonecraft and Feminist Imagination, introduction and ch. three. Norma Clarke, ‘Bluestocking Fictions: Devotional Writings, Didactic literature, and the Imperatives of Female Improvement, below, pp. 463. He has written a number of inﬂuential articles on this theme: see, inter alia, J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Post-Puritan England and the Problem of the Enlightenment’, in Perez Zagorin (ed.), Culture and Politics: From Puritanism to the Enlightenment (Berkeley, CA, 1980), pp. 91–111.

7.1 The Soul Has No Sex: Feminism and Catholicism in Early-Modern Europe Siep Stuurman

Le decret éternel de Dieu mesme, qui ne faict qu’une seule creation des deux sexes. (Marie de Gournay) Is Protestantism more conducive to feminism than Catholicism? No historian will deny that the Catholic Church has, for the most part, been a determined opponent of feminist ideas and practices. It cannot be doubted that over the long run of European history feminism has been more successful in Protestant countries than in Catholic ones.1 But is it also true that Catholic religious experiences, sensibilities and ideas are intrinsically resistant to feminism? That would be an extremely rash and dubious generalization, especially when applied to early-modern Europe, for it is well established in the historiography that earlymodern feminism began its career in Italy and was especially strong in the French Renaissance and early Enlightenment.2 Prior to the eighteenth century, a large part, perhaps the greater part, of feminist aspirations in Europe were voiced by Catholic women living in a Catholic culture. In this context, it is of crucial importance to realize that Protestantism itself originated within late medieval Catholicism. It represented an intensiﬁcation of certain trends that had long been germinating within Catholic religious culture, such as the conviction that the Church ought to be a community of believers and not a legal corporation, the idea that coercion could not produce real faith because true faith depended on spiritual liberty, and the Augustinian validation of the inner experience of the soul against the mere materiality of worldly life.3 In the seventeenth and eighteenth century, Jansenism would exemplify the enduring vitality of the Augustinian individualizing and self-reﬂexive elements in Catholic culture. The thesis that the soul has no sex represents a common thread running through the thought of all Catholic feminists. One does not need to be a Protestant to experience the religious force of the idea that God created both sexes as fully rational beings endowed with an immortal soul. Catholic discourse offered several ingredients for an egalitarian argument. Authoritative sources for it could be taken from the Bible, the Fathers of the Church, and from philosophy, mostly 416

Feminism and Catholicism in Early-Modern Europe 417

Plato and neo-Platonism, but also Stoicism and, more rarely and less easily reconciled with Christian doctrine, Epicureanism. In the great divide between Augustinian (Platonist) and Thomist (Aristotelian) theology, Catholic feminists usually came down on the Augustinian side, keeping Aristotelianism with its aggressively misogynist biology at bay. Furthermore, we must pay attention to the ambiguous status of Graeco-Roman mythology in the literary imagination of early-modern Europe. Mythology occupied an incertain space between truth and ﬁction, and between the religious and the secular. We can, I think, regard classical mythology as a component of the European religious imagination. For feminists it opened fascinating discursive possibilities, for the myths of antiquity are replete with heroic and wise women, including, of course, the ubiquitous Amazons. Moreover, some femino-centric elements of antique belief were Christianized at an early date, most notably the ﬁgure of the Sibyl announcing the coming of Christ. Generally, the higher status of female priests and prophets in the mythology and religion of Antiquity made it attractive to feminists who sought to claim a religious voice for women. Such an argument was often metonymically linked to Christianity by the assertion that the space for women’s voice and agency had been greater in the early Church. I this essay I will examine this early-modern Catholic feminism. After a discussion of Christine de Pizan’s ideas I shall look at several seventeenth-century Italian and French authors who argued for the equal dignity and capacity of women. In Pizan we shall meet with a fully Catholic feminism, or perhaps we should say: a feminist Catholicism. The seventeenth century women I will discuss present a more complex picture: their feminism induces them to borrow selectively from the Christian tradition, and their beliefs are infused with philosophical and theological tenets which frequently display afﬁnities with Platonism, Augustinianism and Jansenism. However, their criticisms of male supremacy induce them to ‘recompose’ those discourses in a feminist key. The result is often an unstable mixture: a shifting balance of religious themes with sceptical and deconstructive gender inversions.

Christine de Pizan: feminism as the highest stage of Catholicism Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies (1404–05) is often seen as the founding text of pre-Enlightenment Catholic feminism. Let us brieﬂy follow the religious themes and imagery in the construction of Pizan’s argument. The book begins with the moving picture of a despairing Christine, psychologically crushed by centuries of misogyny. She is pulled out of the dephts of her dejection by an epiphany: three allegorical ladies, Reason, Rectitude, and Justice, appear to her in a vision. The lady Reason explains that God’s providence has ordained their coming, to liberate women from the burden of male oppression and viliﬁcation. Virtuous women will henceforth enjoy God’s protection: ‘Now it is time for their just cause to be taken from Pharaoh’s hands.’4 Christine’s mission is to build the City of Ladies which is itself an allegory of the female voice in human history. Unlike earthly cities such as Troy and Thebes,

418 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

the lady further explains, Christine’s city will be ‘of perpetual duration in the world’. It will never be conquered, although ‘it will be stormed by numerous assaults.’5 Like Augustine’s Civitas Dei, to which Christine compares it in the ﬁnal pages of her work, it represents an ideal, but not an otherworldly ideal.6 Just as Augustine’s city, the Christian community, has to be built in this world, so Christine’s city will be situated in human history.7 The lady Reason indicates its location: its ramparts and towers will be raised on ‘the Field of Letters’.8 Christine’s city, then, is to be an everlasting female Republic of Letters. It is an allegorical representation of the vision that the voice of women, once raised in history, will be frequently contested but never silenced. The lady Justice announces that she will turn the completed city over to Christine, placing the keys in her hands, a symbolic reenactment of the bestowal of the ‘power of the keys’ by Christ upon Saint Peter from which the Roman Catholic Church derives its apostolic authority.9 In making her prophecy the lady Reason identiﬁes herself as ‘a true sibyl’, that is, she compares herself to the sibyl who had, according to Christian tradition, foretold the coming of Christ.10 Christine at ﬁrst questions her ability as a humble mortal to accomplish the mighty work imposed upon her, but she ﬁnally accepts it because the three ladies are divine messengers: ‘I know well that nothing is impossible for God. … Behold your handmaiden ready to serve. Command and I will obey, and may it be unto me according to your words.’11 In these formulaic words, Christine symbolically reenacts Mary’s answer to the angel announcing the birth of Christ: ‘For with God nothing shall be impossible. And Mary said: Behold the handmaiden of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word’ (St. Luke 1: 37–8). Christine’s work to save the female sex from male oppression is thus symbolically anchored in sacred history. As a work of Divine providence, it is likened to the deliverance of Israel from the Egyptian bondage, and it is allegorically linked to the coming of Christ and the foundation of the Church: ﬁrst by the lady Reason who likens herself to the Sybil, then by the lady Justice who confers the power of the keys on Christine, and, third, by Christine herself who voices her acceptance of the great work in Mary’s sacred words. Just as Mary accepted the task to give birth to Christ who was to save humanity, so Christine accepts the task to give birth to the ‘city’ that will save the female half of humanity. However, not all will be saved, ‘for the walls of the city will be closed to those women who lack virtue’.12 Just as Christ only saves those who believe in him, Christine’s city only saves women who believe in their own dignity. In true Catholic fashion the key female persona in the story is Mary. She is symbolically invoked at the beginning; Christine invokes her again to counterbalance Eve’s sin, declaring that man ‘gained more through Mary than he lost through Eve’;13 and ﬁnally she has Mary enter the completed city as ‘defender, protector, and guard’. Mary willingly accepts: [F]or I am and will always be the head of the feminine sex. This arrangement was present in the mind of God the Father from the start, revealed and ordained previously in the council of the Trinity.14

Feminism and Catholicism in Early-Modern Europe 419

In their answer the inhabitants of the City of Ladies invoke Mary’s intercession with Christ: ‘Save us, our Lady, and pray for us to your Son who refuses you nothing.’ Thus God and Christ guarantee the everlasting validity of the female voice in human history, but they do so through Mary’s mediation, and Christine is their chosen ‘handmaiden’. The City of Ladies is basically a feminist salvation story. The feminist future is retroactively inserted into sacred history, just as Christine will later do with Jeanne d’Arc.15 As Margaret Brabant and Michael Brint point out, Christine’s portrayal of Mary as the sovereign of her city has a political point as well, for the Virgin Mary, ‘[b]oth mother and queen, … embraces an ethic of caring as well as an ethic of political justice.’16 Pizan also contests the prevailing misogynist reading of Genesis: Eve was created from noble material and in the noblest of all places, namely Paradise; the rib, taken from Adam’s side, symbolizes the equal status of the two sexes: it signiﬁes that Eve ‘should stand at his side as a companion and never lie at his feet like a slave’.17 Finally, the equal status of women and men as ‘images of God’ is buttressed by a philosophical argument: Pizan explains that the true meaning of the creation story is spiritual, and therefore non-sexed: ‘But some men are foolish enough’, she asserts, ‘to think, when they hear that God made man in His image, that this refers to the material body. This was not the case, for God had not yet taken a human body. The soul is meant, the intellectual spirit which lasts eternally just like the Deity. God created the soul and placed wholly similar souls, equally good and noble in the feminine and in the masculine bodies.’18 The thesis that the soul is non-corporeal and thus receives no sex is of Platonic origin, and it is found in several of the Greek and Latin Fathers. Augustine states in The Trinity: ‘man is made … in the image of God, where there is no sex, namely in the spirit of his mind’.19 But he also asserts: ‘The woman together with her husband is the image of God. … But when she is assigned as a helpmate, a function which pertains to her alone, then she is not the image of God, just as fully and completely as when he and the woman are joined together in one.’20 Like several other Fathers of the Church, Augustine thus conﬁnes the idea of the non-sexed mind to the spiritual realm, all the while afﬁrming woman’s subordinate status in society. Christine, like later feminist authors, shortcircuits the Christian–Platonic dualism by a direct linkage of the sexless soul to an argument for equal dignity in the worldly sphere. We must realize, however, that such philosophical comments take up only a small part of the City of Ladies. Christine’s privileged and cherished mode of argumentation is the historical example. A large number of her examples are female saints and martyrs, and they ﬁt readily into her Catholic-feminist salvation story. But not all of them. Just as in one of her great literary examples, Dante’s Divina Commedia, Greek and Roman mythology and history, as well as ‘modern’ European history, provide the bulk of the examples. It is hard to determine the intellectual status of such examples with any precision: they are ‘history’ but also ‘myth’, and they seem to be invested with a self-evident moral authority.

420 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

The Amazons, the most famous and powerful of all the female ﬁgures in Greek mythology, are a case in point. Christine has two of them, Menalippe and Hyppolita, unhorse Hercules and Theseus.21 The latter two are no ordinary mortals, but heroes or demigods; so we may presume that the Amazons who equal them in valour are likewise superhuman ﬁgures. In the symbolic realm the Amazons represent the Greek model of a ‘City of Ladies’. Christine relates that the Amazonian empire lasted more than eight hundred years.22 But the ‘New Kingdom of Femininity’ represented by her City will be ‘far better than the earlier kingdom of the Amazons’.23 The Amazons are thus portrayed as a powerful historical ‘sign’ rather than as a model to be adopted. Christine’s City will be an empire of the mind, not a worldly state. Christine de Pizan’s feminism, we may conclude, is fully articulated in Catholic terms. Catholicism was predominantly patriarchal, but it was not exclusively so. The cult of the virgin Mary, the most important ﬁgure in Catholicism apart from the Trinity itself, put a feminine symbol right at the center of the faith. The august company of the Saints is also partly female. Even apart from Mary, critics of misogyny and male supremacy could thus ﬁnd arguments, stories, examples and images in many parts of the Catholic canon. However, Pizan did far more than just pick the useful bits and pieces from the vast Catholic armory. She put together something like an alternative religion: a feminized Catholicism purporting to be, in fact, a higher manifestation of the faith, not disﬁgured by the distorting lens of male self-love.24 Christine uses some of the most powerful symbols of the Christian faith as the building blocks of her feminist salvation story. She can thus position herself, in an entirely honest and credible way, as a defender of Catholic orthodoxy against the naturalistic, ‘pagan’ misogyny of Jean de Meung’s second part of the Roman de la Rose, which had occasioned her to intervene in defense of the female sex in the querelle de la Rose at the French court. In these polemics she is not in the ‘humanist camp’ but rather sides with the ‘orthodox party’ headed by Jean Gerson.25 All of this is impeccably Catholic. On the other hand, Christine’s critique of mainstream readings of the Bible assumes the legitimacy of the individual, ‘free’ interpretation of Scripture by laypersons, a practive the Church did not encourage, to put it mildly. Finally, her work demonstrates that ancient mythology can be assimilated to Catholic discourse as long as its truth-value is simply taken for granted and not theorized. Set beside the Biblical stories, mythology plays the role of a ‘second Book of Scriptures’, replete with heroic and wise women of an almost superhuman stature, some of which are deﬁnitely more assertive and warlike than the virgin Mary. The Book of the City of Ladies is, then, basically a Christian allegory. The plot is structured by the Augustinian notion of the city of refuge, and Christine’s acceptance of her task to build the City of Ladies follows in the footsteps of Mary, who represents woman’s agency at the most critical juncture of the history of the salvation of mankind in Christ. Christine’s work is thus an allegorical imitatio Christi mediated by the Holy Virgin. In human history the female voice shall henceforth complement the male voice, and contradict it whenever the need

Feminism and Catholicism in Early-Modern Europe 421

arises. Catholicism can thus ﬁnally become what it always was in name: a truly universal faith in which both sexes can ﬁnd their dignity. To put it in a slightly chargé manner: in Christine de Pizan’s vision of the future feminism represents the highest stage of Catholicism.

Seventeenth-century Catholic feminists In Pizan’s worldview a critical discourse about religion was unthinkable. This changed in the Renaissance. Fifteenth-century humanists redisovered Epicurean thought, in particular through Lucretius’ philosophical poem De Rerum Natura, brought to light in 1417 by Poggio Bracciolini and ﬁnally available in print in 1473.26 Lucretius portrays ‘religio’ as the chief source of prejudice and oppression, also of the oppression of women. The famous line Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum comes right after the story of the sacriﬁce of Iphigeneia.27 The Lucretian critique of religion was a major source of one Enlightenment understanding of religion, the demystication of belief as superstition and priestcraft.28 The other major Enlightenment theorization of religion sought to turn it into a transcendental philosophy, divesting it of its ‘irrational’ elements. Rational Christianity and the Lucretian critique might even be joined, the former providing a transcendental foundation for morality and the latter denouncing the obscurantist practices of priests and established churches. Finally, both Lucretian criticism and rational religion could, in principle, be joined to egalitarian and feminist discourses. Against this background I will now consider the religious views of some feminist authors in seventeenth-century Roman-Catholic Europe. All of them take up religious themes, afﬁrmatively as well as critically, struggling to combine sincere religious sentiments with equally heartfelt convictions about the dignity of women and the equality of the sexes. To resolve the tensions in such a project each of them fashioned her own syncretism of faith and feminism. Let us begin with Lucrezia Marinella’s La nobilità et excellenza delle donne co’ difetti et mancamenti de gli huomini (‘The Nobility and Excellence of Women, with the Defects and Faults of Men’, Venice: 1600, 1601, 1621). Marinella’s opening discourse contains a literary reference to Lucretius, so that we may assume that she had read De Rerum Natura.29 As an author, she situates herself among those who pursue ‘philosophical truths’. Marinella clearly prefers Platonism over Aristotelianism.30 ‘If we speak as philosophers’, she states, ‘we will say that man’s soul is equally noble to woman’s because both are of … the same nature and substance’.31 However, according to Marinella it is possible that some souls of the same species are ‘from birth nobler and more excellent than others.’ She then advances several arguments to prove that women are not only equal, but actually superior to men. Her ﬁrst argument concerns the names of woman. The nobility of a name, she contends, reﬂects the true, ‘inner’ nobility of the named object. Femina, for instance, comes from the Latin fetu (foetus) and the Greek phos (ﬁre): it thus denotes both procreation and the element of ﬁre. Procreation is ultimately of Divine origin, while ﬁre is the noblest of the elements: ‘Many, indeed, believe that the soul is composed of ﬁre.’32

422 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

Marinella rejects the belief that the male and the female soul are fully identical, arguing instead that the female soul is more excellent in its concrete realization. The body is an external, material expression of the soul: ‘Beauty is without doubt a ray of light from the soul that pervades the body … as the wise Plotinus writes.’33 The greater beauty of the female body, Marinella argues, therefore reﬂects the greater excellence of the female soul. In passing, she also observes that Eve was forged from Adam’s rib which is more noble material than the mud and slime Adam was made from, but this is not her main argument. As the reference to Plotinus indicates, Marinella’s principal argument is a Platonist one: ‘External beauty is the image of divine beauty’, beauty is ‘full of goodness’, and ‘all beauty is good’, she declares, quoting the famous ﬁfteenth-century Platonist Marsilio Ficino.34 God and nature are almost fused in Marinella’s reasoning: Divine beauty is … the ﬁrst and principal cause of women’s beauty, after which come the stars, heavens, nature, love, and the elements.35 Marinella’s religion is a Platonizing Christianity. She was a devout Catholic who published several lives of Christian Saints as well as a Vita di Maria Vergine Imperatrice dell’universo (‘A life of the Virgin Mary Empress of the Universe’: 1602, 1604, 1610, 1617), celebrating the historic link between the city of Venice and the Holy Virgin.36 One would perhaps expect her to portray woman saints, such as Saint Catherine of Siena, as historical examples of female achievement, but Letizia Panizza notes that she concentrates on Catherine’s ascetism and mysticism, leaving aside her merits as a woman of letters.37 In Marinella’s defense of the female sex explicit religious references are scarce. Unlike Christine de Pizan, Marinella does not draw on Biblical language nor does she enlist the Holy Virgin in the feminist ranks. The Sibyls are mentioned as examples of learned women, but their alleged prediction of the coming of Christ is passed over in silence.38 On the other hand, Marinella’s critical remarks on the creation of Eve, noted above, demonstrate that she is aware of the prevailing patriarchal and misogynist readings of Scripture. It is also noteworthy that she assumes her readers to be familiar with the feminist counter-readings of Genesis. The religious core of Marinella’s feminism is a Neoplatonist theorization of the human person which is only partly Christian. She quotes Plato more frequently than the Bible. Likewise, her historical examples of valiant and learned women are drawn indiscrminately from the Christian and the Graeco-Roman tradition. In Christine de Pizan an ascending hierarchy can be identiﬁed: the Christian heroines, the saints and martyrs, appear in the third and crowning part of the Book of the City of Ladies, immediately following the triumphal entry of Mary as the saviour-queen. In Marinella there is no such clear hierarchy. Saint Catherine of Siena, Hildegard of Bingen, the Vestal Virgin Claudia, and the Amazon Orithya are ecumenically assembled in her historical gallery of female excellence and virtue. Far more than in Christine de Pizan, Marinella’s literary imagination encompasses sacred history and pagan mythology on an almost equal footing. Furthermore her style, in which sarcasm and irony alternate with moral indignation and philosophical arguments, differs from Pizan’s grave moral discourse.

Feminism and Catholicism in Early-Modern Europe 423

To sum up: Marinella respects and venerates the Catholic tradition (mixed with Venetian patriotism), but the real core of her feminist discourse is a Christianized neo-Platonism. Plato and Christianity agree that the soul has no sex, but the Platonist theorizing of beauty as the exterior aura of the sublime enables her to prove that the feminine soul is nonetheless the more excellent. Although she certainly draws on speciﬁcally Catholic symbols to bolster her feminist case, Marinella’s feminism is deﬁnitely more philosophical and far less intimately tied to a Catholic-Christian symbolism than Pizan’s. Our second example is a famous one. Marie de Gournay’s Égalité des hommes et des femmes (Paris, 1622) is one of the best-known texts of seventeenth-century French feminism, frequently cited by contemporaries. Gournay’s great example in literature and philosophy was Michel de Montaigne, and her role as editor of the latter’s Essais made her a literary reputation.39 To situate her religious attitude it is further important to know that she had close ties with the intellectual circles of the libertinage érudit. The Catholic freethinker François de la Mothe le Vayer was one of her best friends.40 The so-called ‘libertins’ were not unbelievers, but they abhorred fanaticism while their scepticism left no room for a blind credulity.41 In the Égalité des hommes et des femmes Gournay announces that she will buttress her argument for equality with the authority of ‘Dieu mesme’ as well as the ‘pillars of his Church and the great men who have enlightened the World.’42 Gournay’s chief argument is that the soul is neither male nor female. Here, she employs the language of Scholasticism, arguing that sexual difference is only an accidental, bodily quality.43 In philosophy, she begins with Plato, ‘whom nobody has disputed the epithet divine’, and who has accorded women ‘equal rights, faculties and functions’ in his Republic.44 Gournay extols Plutarch, Seneca and Montaigne as ‘the triumvirate of human and moral wisdom’, while Aristotle is mentioned in a somewhat less enthusiastic vein.45 The core argument that the human soul has no sex is also grounded in theology. Both men and women, Gournay declares, were created in the image of God (she quotes Genesis 1:27, rather than 2:22).46 This implies spiritual equality for God has no sex. Whoever pictures God as male or female (‘imaginer masculin ou féminin en Dieu’) only demonstrates his nullity in philosophy as well as in theology.47 Gournay has further to deal with two awkward Scriptural ‘facts’: ﬁrst, St. Paul’s injunction to women to keep silent in the church, and second, the indisputable fact that Jesus Christ was a man. Concerning the ﬁrst point Gournay asserts that St. Paul’s command was not meant to degrade the female sex, but refers solely to practical morality: the grace and beauty of women surpassing those of men, their public appearance as preachers would be tantamount to temptation.48 She further recalls that in all the nations of Antiquity the priesthood was open to both sexes. In this connections she mentions the greater authority accorded to women in the early Church, in particular their role in the sacrament of baptism: [T]he Christians must at least admit that they [the women] are capable of administering the Sacrament of Baptism: but how shall the authority to administer the others be justly denied them, if that one is justly permitted to them? Even though some men say that the emergency of the death of small

424 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

children forced the ancient Fathers to establish this custom only reluctantly, it stands to reason that they would never have believed that necessity gave them a license to act wickedly to the point of violating and dishonouring a Sacrament. Given that they permitted women to administer this one, it is clear that they have only forbidden them to administer the other Sacraments to secure masculine authority ever more completely.49 Quoting Saint Jerome, Gournay concludes ‘that in the matter of the divine service the mind and the faith are to be considered, not the sex.’50 The above is not presented as a straightforward criticism of Saint Paul, but it certainly looks like one. Returning to the ﬁgure of Christ, it cannot be denied, says Gournay, that he was a man, but this is easily explained: to convert as many as possible to the true faith, Christ had to mingle among all sorts of people, by day and by night; for a woman that would not have been ﬁtting (‘bienséant’), especially in view of ‘the malevolence of the Jews’. Gournay adds that the masculinity of Christ is balanced by the feminine glory of Mary, the only human being free from the stain of original sin.51 Elsewhere she mentions the prophecy of the coming of Christ by the Sybils.52 Gournay further points to the important role of women in the Old Testament as well as in Christian sacred history. It is not so easy to determine how these arguments ﬁt into the overall philosophical and religious views of Marie de Gournay. Her explicit utterances on religion are open to different interpretations. Marjorie Ilsley saw her as a proto-Jansenist, but recently Giovanni Dotoli has pictured her as a prudent freethinker.53 The difﬁculty in pinning down her views is best illustrated by putting two of her utterances on religion side by side. In the 1595 preface to Montaigne’s Essais she seems to take a resolutely ﬁdeist stance, decrying those ‘Titans who seek to scale the Heavens, believing that they will reach God by their own means, and encompass him … within the conﬁnes of their understanding.’ Instead, Gournay declares, ‘there where all things are most incomprehensible, there certainly are the works of God.’54 But in her later writings, Gournay also upholds the Stoic-Socratic maxim that virtue is based on knowledge: ‘It should not be doubted’, she states, ‘that the great God, who has given us Reason as a touchstone and beacon in this life, has made his Laws in conformity with Reason, or Reason with them … otherwise the Free will God gives as a means of salvation would be useless to humankind’.55 The ﬁrst quotation is unmistakenly ﬁdeist, but the second seems to lead the way to some variety of ‘reasonable religion’. Dotoli portrays Gournay as a rationalistic and sceptical thinker, perhaps closer to rational religion than to ﬁdeism. He points out that the ﬁdeist utterances in the Introduction to the Essais were made to shield Montaigne against the accusation of heresy.56 Generally, Gournay’s friendships and the circles in which she moved strongly point to a sceptical, ‘libertine’ attitude; so does her lifelong commitment to the Pyrrhonist intellectual style of her beloved Montaigne. In some of het later writings, Gournay caustically criticizes hypocrisy and the ‘false piety’ of those ‘who believe in God to make sure that their neighbour believes in them;

Feminism and Catholicism in Early-Modern Europe 425

they go to the Mass and the Sermon … to be dispensed from what the Mass and the Sermon command’.57 Charity, she declares, is ‘superior to Hope and Belief’: it encompasses the faith, for it is ‘the chief principle of Salvation’. Moreover, it sustains the ties between the believer and God, as well as the bonds of human society.58 Gournay’s criticism of the too lenient and frequent absolution of sins by Catholic priests, as well as her insistence that the confessional requires an earnest repentance on the part of the laity, show some afﬁnity with Jansenism, and with Catholic Reform more generally.59 Yet, for all her insistence on the responsibility of the individual believer, she roundly dismisses the Protestant pretension that laypersons are capable to arrive at a correct interpretation of Scripture without the assistance of the ex cathedra teachings of the Roman Church.60 Interestingly, Gournay’s argumentation against Biblical objections to the equality of the sexes may clinch the argument. Instead of prostrating herself in awe before the inscrutable majesty of God’s word and the doctrinal pronouncements of the Church, as a true ﬁdeist would have done, she boldly engages in theology and Biblical criticism. She pretends to know perfectly well what is the true nature of God, namely pure mind. Likewise, she explains away Saint Paul’s commandments to women as mere ‘adaptations’ to the customs of his age, a feminist and rather audacious use of the doctrine of accomodation (which would later be radicalized and generalized by Poulain de la Barre). The Church Fathers’ exclusion of women from administering the sacraments is explained by their male prejudice and their desire to secure masculine rule ‘ever more’ (so much for the infallibility of the teachings of the Church!). This sort of reasoning does not rhyme with the picture of Gournay as a humble ﬁdeist, nor with her anti-Calvinist utterances. To sum up: Gournay’s true religion probably was a philosophical Christianity shot through with a large measure of scepticism. The discourse and tone of her feminism accords well with this hypothesis. It is measured, resigned, tenacious but not overly optimistic. In theology, the feminist argument is buttressed by the notion of a non-sexed, spiritual God. Finally, Gournay repeatedly underlines the role of women in sacred history, especially the religious-feminist symbol of the feminine glory of Mary. But this argument is not exclusively Christian, for she also mentions the importance of female priestesses in the pagan cults of antiquity. Some twenty years after Gournay, Arcangela Tarabotti published Che le donne siano della spezie degli uomini: Difesa delle donne (‘That Women Are Fully Human Beings: a Defence of Women’: Nuremberg, 1651). Letizia Panizza has unraveled the complicated background of Tarabotti’s writings.61 She was born in Venice in 1604. Her father sent her to a cloister at the age of eleven. At sixteen she took vows, probably with extreme reluctance; she was sequestered in a convent for the rest of her life. The titles of two manuscripts she never managed to get published, L’inferno monacale and La tirannia paterna, bespeak her loathing for the convent and the man who sent her there. Tarabotti was a woman of wide reading, and she was conversant with Lucrezia Marinella’s writings. Tarabotti’s 1651 treatise was conceived as a reply to Che le donne non siano della spezie degli huomini, attributed to ‘Orazio Plata’ and

426 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

printed by an Italian publisher in Lyon in 1647 (the latter, in turn, was based upon an anonymous Latin tract, published in Frankfurt in 1595.62) ‘Plata’ had packed his misogyny in a double theological paradox. He took the Anabaptists and the Socinians to task for seeking to elevate women’s status in the church: why, he asked, do they doubt the divinity of Christ because it is nowhere afﬁrmed explicitly in Scripture, while they champion women’s status as ‘men’ for which there is no explicit testimony in the Bible either? If they may afﬁrm that Christ is not divine, ‘Orazio Plata’ maliciously asks, why should I not be permitted to believe that women are not human beings? Tarabotti eagerly exploits the theological paradox of her adversary, accusing him of impiety and heresy, ‘worse than Jews and Turks’.63 What ‘Plata’ writes about women, she exclaims, amounts to a travesty of Christianity: the thesis that women are not fully human and thus have no souls is plainly heretical, and ‘Plata’’s frequent references to Sarmatia (Poland) suggest that he himself may well be a closet Socinian, if not an outright atheist.64 Just like Christine de Pizan in her polemic against Jean de Meung, Tarabotti propounds the theory of the sexless soul as the only fully orthodox Christian doctrine. She reminds her readers that it was women, not men, who gave shelter and comfort to the suffering Christ. She cites Genesis to prove that God made ‘man and woman’ in his image, that Eve was fashioned from Adam’s side to be his equal, and that God bestowed the dominion of nature on Eve and Adam alike.65 Like some of her predecessors Tarabotti points to the prophesy of the Sybils.66 She further mentions the important role of women such as Esther and Judith in the Bible.67 And of course there is the Holy Virgin: Mary was a woman, and ‘Plata’’s opinion that she was a man ‘by grace’ is the summit of raving madness!68 Like Marie de Gournay, Tarabotti explains that Saint Paul’s command to women to remain silent in the Church has to be explained by the weakness of men, and has no absolute validity.69 Tarabotti’s comment on Saint Paul is immediately followed by a sarcastic remark on the exclusion of women from politics: ‘The laws also disallow women to exercise public ofﬁce. Tell me, by Grace, who made those laws? Was it not the men, pretentious, arrogant and tyrannical as they are?’70 It is left to the reader to make the logical inference about Saint Paul’s sexism. That a straigthforward criticism of the Sacred Authors is not beyond her is demonstrated by Tarabotti’s explanation of the omission of women in Adam’s genealogy in Genesis 5: she unﬂinchingly attributes it to the ‘malignancy of the men who drafted the text.’71 Tarabotti’s La tirannia paterna, ﬁnally published posthumously in 1654, two years after her death, contained sharp criticisms of the subjection of women in Catholic matrimonial law; it was placed on the Vatican Index in 1660.72 But let there be no mistake: like the authors discussed above Tarabotti was a sincerely religious person. In her polemic against ‘Plata’ she places herself in the ‘camp of the Roman Church’ and against the ‘prodigious heresies that originate in the North.’73 Ultimately, her conviction that women and men are equal rests on her belief in Divine justice. Ginevra Conti Odorisio recounts a dream Tarabotti wrote down in one of her letters. She ﬁnds herself on the banks of the

Feminism and Catholicism in Early-Modern Europe 427

Acheron among a multitude of souls that are to be shipped to the realm of shadow. But the old helmsman tells her that no woman has ever been ferried accross: the greater part of the damned are men punished for the wrongs they committed to women, in particular to their own spouses. Tarabotti herself is then lifted up by two angels who carry her to heaven, to behold the face of the Lord. God addresses her, saying that the moment to join His presence has not yet arrived: instead, she will return to the earth to instruct, as Mozes did, the men in their true duties.74 A feminist salvation story very much in the style of Christine de Pizan. Returning to France, we meet with yet another fascinating example of feminist– Catholic syncretism, the egalitarian discourse of Gabrielle Suchon’s Traité de la morale et de la politique (1693).75 Suchon presents her opinions as impeccably Catholic: her book carries no less than four formal ‘approbations’ by doctors of theology, and it opens with an encomium of the ‘very holy and very adorable Trinity’; but we will shortly see that these public advertisements of orthodoxy are perhaps to be taken with a grain of salt. Suchon’s arguments for the equality of the sexes, notably the thesis that the mind (soul) ‘has no sex’, closely follow François Poulain de la Barre’s Cartesian treatise De l’égalité des deux sexes (1673), to which she frequently refers, but the tone and structure of the book are entirely different. The entire ﬁrst part of her treatise is devoted to the concept of liberty, demonstrating that it is a true Christian ideal. According to Suchon, liberty is ‘an interior state of the soul’ which is common to all ‘reasonable beings’ possessing the ‘natural faculties’ God has bestowed on them.76 There is, however, a second and higher stage of liberty: this is ‘transcendental liberty’ which can only exist in a ‘free heart’, a heart ‘without love, without hatred and without desire … living solely for God.’77 Suchon’s exaltation of freedom is largely explained by the story of her life. Her family had forced her to become a nun, but she soon ﬂed the Jacobin convent in Semur-en-Auxois where she was sent. Thereupon she was ordered to return by a decree of the Parliament of Dijon, but she managed to circumvent the decree by legal means.78 Her defense of spiritual liberty thus reﬂects the experience of her hard-won personal freedom. Suchon passed the rest of her days in ‘voluntary celibate’, a status she theorized as true liberty in her last book, Du célibat volontaire (1700). To Suchon, such liberty was not solely a question of spiritual detachment. She considers the celibate ‘a blessing of Divine providence which offers it to the world like those cities of refuge in olden times where everyone was safeguarded against persecution by his enemies’; it is, she writes, especially needful for the ‘relief of persons who are oppressed’.79 Suchon’ main objective is to theorize the status of the voluntary celibate as a legitimate alternative to both marriage and the cloister. To marry is to subject oneself to the whims and caprices of a potentially tyrannical husband.80 To enter a religious order, Suchon explains, is not free of hardships either: ideally the convent should be ‘the cradle of innocence and the graveyard of voluptuousness’, but in reality it is all too often far otherwise.81 Apart from that, the status of ‘neutraliste’ has the great advantage that it safeguards the liberty of conscience. The cure of the soul is only to be found in penance, Suchon explains, and it is of great

428 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

importance to be at liberty to choose a person one trusts sufﬁciently to confess honestly and without dissimulation.82 Another advantage is that the ‘neutralistes’ have a better opportunity to practice charity than married women or nuns.83 Likewise, it is easier for them to practice asceticism and mortiﬁcation than for those who pass their time under the sway of a husband.84 Finally, Suchon contends that the voluntary celibate is ‘an ornament of the Church’. She hastens to clarify what she means by ‘the Church’: One should not believe that the material temples that stand forth today which so much wealth and splendor are the true Church. They are only the locations destined for the prayers and the sacriﬁces of the Christians, which, at all times united by the same law and the same rules of conduct, constitute the veritable Church, built with living and animated stones, and not with lifeless and material stones. It is Jeruzalem militant where the just serve God in the spirit and in truth.85 The ‘true Church’ Suchon appeals to is an idealized Christian community of free, ascetic, and truly pious women and men. The voluntary celibate signally contributes to such a community: it not so holy and sanctiﬁed as the celibate of priests, monks and nuns, Suchon admits with a nod to the ofﬁcial Church, but it is superior to the matrimonial state because it entirely shuns the temptations of ‘Babylon’. By claiming ‘sanctity’ for the life of the ‘neutralistes’, likening them to the pure-hearted Christians of the early Church, Suchon in fact seeks to create a space for a spritual life outside the control of the Church hierarchy. Suchon’s spiritual, otherworldly and somewhat gloomy ideal of the perfect Christian life calls to mind the religious mentality of the Jansenists. Like them, she cultivates an individualist, ‘protestantizing’ model of Christianity, and like them, she seeks to escape the discipline of the Roman Catholic Church. Her insistence on penance and atonement likewise echoes the theology of Jansenism. However, while the Jansenist inspiration of Suchon’s religious ideas seems beyond doubt, one difference stands out: Suchon’s version of religious retreat has strong feminist overtones. Although she declares that ‘neutralistes’ can be men as well as women, it is obvious that she has mainly women in mind. And her entire apology of ‘neutralism’ is shot through with warnings to women that they should not unthinkingly submit to the authority of men. Perhaps we should call this ‘Jansenist feminism’ or ‘feminist Jansenism’.

Conclusion Let us attempt to formulate some provisional conclusions on the relationship between Catholicism, feminism and the origins of the Enlightenment in continental Europe: 1. All the authors discussed above, with the exception of Christine de Pizan, tend to ‘philosophize’ religion in one way or another. Although some of them

Feminism and Catholicism in Early-Modern Europe 429

2.

3.

4.

5.

accept the miraculous and the supernatural, none of them embraces a mystical, non-rational view of the religious. Religion is something one has to understand rationally, which makes it possible to insert the thin end of the feminist wedge in the numerous ﬁssures of the Catholic ediﬁce. Most of our authors engage in Biblical criticism. The feminist readings of Genesis, many of which went back to medieval sources, are the most common examples, but several authors also confront the Pauline masculinist commandments. They invariably invoke some form of the doctrine of accomodation (itself of Augustinian origin 86), arguing that Saint Paul was only adapting to the customs of his time. This line of thought has potentially radical implications. It can lead to the conclusion that all Bibilical prescription about gender and other social and cultural matters are historically contingent, a conclusion we encounter in feminist form in Poulain de la Barre (and, in non-feminist form, in Spinoza). Our authors make good use of the feminine symbols in the Bible and in Sacred History. Mary is, of course, the most powerful of those, but women’s agency in the Hebrew Bible and the female Christian saints are also frequently invoked. By contrast, the feminists seem to avoid extensive discussion of the person of Christ, the most obviously male presence in the Trinity (God can be theorized as pure mind, but Christ cannot). Virtually all Catholic feminists routinely employ the discursive arsenal of Graeco-Roman mythology. The epistemological and historical status of Amazons, Vestal Virgins, Sibyls and other female priests is never quite clariﬁed. In practice, mythology provides them with numerous examples of female valour, intelligence and authority, many of which are more radical than the examples available in the Christian tradition. None of the authors discussed above ever converted to Protestantism and some of them express a virulent distaste for the Protestants. Yet, a ‘protestantizing’ subtext is discernible in their writings. The logic of their feminist argument impels them to claim a space for free theological speculation by laypersons. They pursue this course with great circumspection, but the fact remains that they claim a theological voice for ordinary women. It is precisely here, however, that they had to confront the limits of what was possible within the Catholic orbit. The Church of Rome leaves no space for the development of autonomous, innovative cultic experiences. In particular, it excludes the female voice from the divine service. The famous graduation ceremony of Elena Lucrezia Cornara at the University of Padua (25 June 1678) is a case in point. At ﬁrst, she had coveted a doctorate in theology. To that end the formula conferring the doctorate was modiﬁed, leaving out the faculty of ‘interpretandi, exponendi, glossandi, declarandi, aperiendi divina mysteria’.87 She would thus obtain the permission to study theology but not to expound it in public. Eventually, the Catholic authorities in Venice and Padua considered even this limitation insufﬁcient. The doctorate in theology, they decided, should under no circumstances be awarded to a woman. Cornara had to content herself with a doctorate in philosophy.

430 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

In this as in other ﬁelds, there is a stark contrast between the discipline of the Roman Church and the freedom of the Chapel. This has probably contributed to the somewhat intellectualist and philosophizing tone of Catholic feminism, as it also explains an attempt such as Suchon’s to carve out an autonomous religious space for single women. 6. The ambiguous and potentially conﬂictual relationship between Catholicism and feminism represents an element in the making of the Enlightenment in Catholic Europe. In seventeenth-century Catholic feminism we can discern germs of two of the great religious oppositional currents of the eighteenth century: Jansenism (protestantizing Catholicism) and Deism (philosophizing Catholicism). Ultimately, the destabilization of the category of ‘gender’ and the ‘philosophizing’ of religion are closely related. In this perspective the writings of François Poulain de la Barre represent a liminal case. In his work, egalitarian feminism, Cartesianism and the construction of a rational Christianity form a single, integrated whole. Let us recall that Poulain began his career as a theology student at the Sorbonne, later converted to Calvinism, and ended up as a near-Deist in Calvinist disguise.88 Like Poulain, Lucrezia Marinella, Marie de Gournay, Arcangela Tarabotti and Gabrielle Suchon were each in her own way probing the limits of Catholic discourse. Somehow they succeeded, or were compelled, to remain within the Church. What their innermost thoughts about Catholicism were, we shall probably never know.

Notes 1. See e. g. Richard J. Evans, The Feminists: Women’s Emancipation Movements in Europe, America and Australasia, 1840–1920 (London etc.: Croom Helm, 1984), 237. 2. See Constance Jordan, Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990); Ian MacLean, Woman Triumphant: Feminism in French Literature, 1610–1652 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977); Maité Albistur and Daniel Armogathe, Histoire du féminisme français (Paris: Des Femmes, 1978); Ginevra Conti Odorisio, Donna e Società nel Seicento: Lucrezia Marinelli e Arcangela Tarabotti (Rome: Bulzoni, 1979); Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 1700–1950 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 3. See Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform, 1250–1550 (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1980), chs 1–5. 4. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, transl. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York: Persea, 1982), 10. 5. Pizan, City, 12. 6. Pizan, City, 254. 7. See Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley etc.: University of California Press, 1975), 324. 8. Pizan, City, 16. 9. Pizan, City, 14; St. Matthew 16: 18–19. 10. Pizan, City, 11; the sybils are extensively portrayed in the second part of the book, see City, 99–104; in one of her earliest works, the Epistre d’Othea (1399–1400), Christine has a Sybil predict the translatio studii to France, as well as ‘the growing role of women in shaping the New Order’, see Nadia Margolis, ‘Christine de Pizan: The Poetess as Historian’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 47 (1986), 361–75, at 363.

Feminism and Catholicism in Early-Modern Europe 431 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

Pizan, City, 15–16. Pizan, City, 11. Pizan, City, 24. Pizan, City, 218; Marina Warner, Alone Of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Picador, 1985), 104, considers the veneration of Maria Regina solely as an affirmation of the male power of Popes and Kings; she does not notice the feminist appropriation of the symbol of the Queen of Heaven by Christine de Pizan. See Earl Jeffrey Richards, ‘French Cultural Nationalism and Christian Universalism in the Works of Christine de Pizan’, in Politics, Gender, and Genre: The Political Thought of Christine de Pizan, ed. Margaret Brabant (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), 75–94, at 85–7. Margaret Brabant & Michael Brint, ‘Identity and Difference in Christine de Pizan’s Cité des Dames’, in Politics, Gender, and Genre, ed. Brabant, 207–22, at 217. Pizan, City, 23. Such arguments are found in several earlier Medieval texts, see Alcuin Blamires, The Case for Women in Medieval Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 96–7. Pizan, City, 23. Quoted from Sister Prudence Allen, R.S.M., The Concept of Woman: The Aristotelian Revolution, 750 BC–AD 1250 (Grand Rapids & Cambridge: Eerdmans, 1997), 221. Allen, Concept of Woman, 222. According to Abby Wettan Kleinbaum, The War Against the Amazons (New York etc.: New Press/McGraw-Hill, 1983), 64–8, Christine de Pizan was the first medieval author to portray the Amazons as a symbol of female strength. Pizan, City, 51. Pizan, City, 117. See also Blamires, Case for Women, 219–30. However, Pizan’s arguments are not the same as Gerson’s. The latter is almost exclusively motivated by the fight against heresy, while Christine’s main focus is on misogyny, see Pierre-Yves Badel, Le Roman de la Rose au XIVe Siècle (Geneva: Droz, 1980), 411–62. See Margaret J. Osler, ed., Atoms, Pneuma, and Tranquillity: Epicurean and Stoic Themes in European Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 5. ‘So potent was religion in persuading to evil deeds’; De Rerum Natura, line 101. Lucretius follows Aeschylus’ older version in which Iphigeneia is really killed; in the later version by Euripides she is in the nick of time replaced by a deer supplied by Artemis (rather like the story of Isaac’s ‘sacriﬁce’ in Genesis 22). In early-modern translations ‘religio’ was usually rendered as ‘superstition’, but Lucretius is clearly referring to the dominant, ‘ofﬁcial’ religion of his society. Lucrezia Marinella, The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men, ed. & transl. Anne Dunhill, intr. Letizia Panizza (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 39n1. Marinella, Nobility, 39–40; see also Conti Odorisio, Donna e Società nel Seicento, 63–9. Marinella, Nobility, 55. Marinella, Nobility, 45–9, 52. Marinella, Nobility, 57. Marinella, Nobility, 58, 68. Marinella, Nobility, 60. I take this information from Letizia Panizza’s excellent introduction to the translation: Marinella, Nobility, 9–10. Panizza, ‘Introduction to the translation’, in Marinella, Nobility, 12. Marinella, Nobility, 93. See Marjorie H. Ilsley, A Daughter of the Renaissance. Marie le Jars de Gournay: Her Life and Works (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963); Maryanne Cline Horowitz, ‘Marie de Gournay, Editor of the Essais of Michel de Montaigne: A Case-Study in Mentor-Protégée Friendship’, Sixteenth-Century Journal, 17 (1986): 271–84.

432 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses 40. See Giovanni Dotoli, ‘Montaigne et les libertins via Mlle de Gournay’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 25 (1995): 381–405. 41. See Henry Phillips, Church and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 227–33. 42. ‘Égalité des hommes et des femmes’ [1622 (separate ed.), 1626, 1627, 1634, 1641; some parts 1594, 1595, 1599], Marie de Gournay, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jean-Claude Arnauld et al., 2 vols (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2002), I, 965–88, at 967. 43. Gournay, Oeuvres, I, 978. 44. Gournay, Oeuvres, I, 967. 45. Gournay, Oeuvres, I, 972–3. 46. Gournay, Oeuvres, I, 979. 47. Gournay, Oeuvres, I, 986. 48. Gournay, Oeuvres, I, 981. 49. Gournay, Oeuvres, I, 982–3. 50. Gournay, Oeuvres, I, 983. 51. Gournay, Oeuvres, I, 986–7. 52. Gournay, Oeuvres, I, 982. 53. Ilsley, Gournay, 176; Dotoli, ‘Montaigne et les libertins via Mlle de Gournay’. 54. This is the so-called ‘Long Introduction’ [1595, 1599, 1617, 1625, 1635], Gournay, Oeuvres, I, 275–341, at 304–5, see also 282, 297. 55. ‘Si la vangeance est licite?’ [1626, 1627, 1634, 1641], Oeuvres, I, 748–774, at 752; also cited in Ilsley, Gournay, 173. 56. Dotoli. 57. ’Des fauces devotions’ [1626, 1627, 1634, 1641], Gournay, Oeuvres, I, 737–48, at 741–2. 58. Gournay, Oeuvres, I, 747–8. 59. ‘Advis à quelques gens de l’église’ [1626, 1627, 1634, 1641], Gournay, Oeuvres, I, 797–818. 60. ‘De la temerité’ [1634, 1641], Gournay. Oeuvres, II, 1226–38, at 1231. 61. See Arcangela Tarabotti, Che le Donne siano della Spezie degli Uomini: Difesa delle donne, ed. & intr. Letizia Panizza (London: Inst. of Romance Studies, 1994), vii–xxxv. 62. See Manfred P. Fleischer, ‘“Are Women Human?”: The Debate of 1595 between Valens Acidalius and Simon Gediccus’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 12 (1981): 107–120. 63. Tarabotti, Che le donne, 25. 64. Tarabotti, Che le donne, 3, 5–6, 7–8; she was right: the original tract by Acidalius was immediately condemned by the Lutheran theological faculties of Wittenberg and Leipzig; ‘Plata’’s adaptation of it was put on the Index in 1651; see Fleischer, ‘The Debate of 1595’, 108, 110. 65. Tarabotti, Che le donne, 11, 12, 26, 40. 66. Tarabotti, Che le donne, 12, 14, 44. 67. Tarabotti, Che le donne, 44. 68. Tarabotti, Che le donne, 65. 69. Tarabotti, Che le donne, 84. 70. Tarabotti, Che le donne, 85. 71. ‘Nascerebbe della malignità degl’uomini che hanno scritto’: Tarabotti, Che le Donne, 48. 72. Tarabotti, Che le Donne, x (Panizza’s introductory essay). 73. Tarabotti, Che le donne, 7. 74. Conti Odorisio, Donna e Società nel Seicento, 110–11. 75. [Gabrielle Suchon], Traité de la morale et de la politique divisé en trois parties, sçavoir la liberté, la science et l’authorité. Ou l’on voit que les personnes du Sexe pour en être privées, ne laissent pas d’avoir une capacité naturelle, qui les en peut rendre participantes, pas G. S. Aristophile (Lyon: Impr. aux dépens de l’Autheur chez B. Vignieu, 1693). 76. I quote from Gabrielle Suchon, Traité de la morale et de la politique, 1693: La Liberté, ed. Séverine Auffret (Paris: Des Femmes, 1988), 34; this edition contains the first part of Suchon’s 1693 treatise.

Feminism and Catholicism in Early-Modern Europe 433 77. Suchon, Traité, 35. 78. See Aufret’s introduction in: Gabrielle Suchon, Du célibat volontaire, ou La vie sans engagement (1700), ed. Séverine Auffret (Paris: Indigo & Coté-Femmes, 1994); Aufret’s account is based on Philibert Papillon, Bibliothèque des auteurs de Bourgogne (Dijon, 1742). 79. Suchon, Célibat, 22, 47. 80. Suchon, Célibat, 157, 161–3. 81. Suchon, Célibat, 148. 82. Suchon, Célibat, 149. 83. Suchon, Célibat, 155–6. 84. Suchon, Célibat, 80. 85. Suchon, Célibat, 54–5. 86. There is an excellent discussion of the doctrine of accomodation in Ernan McMullin, ‘Galileo on Science and Scripture’, The Cambridge Companion to Galileo, ed. Peter Machamer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 271–347. 87. See Bruno Neveu, ‘Doctrix et magistra’, Femmes Savantes, Savoirs des Femmes. Du Crépuscule de la Renaissance à l’Aube des Lumières, ed. Colette Nativel (Geneva: Droz, 1999), 27–37, at 29; see also Patricia H. Labalme, ‘Women’s Roles in Early Modern Venice: An Exceptional Case’, in Beyond their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, ed. Labalme (New York & London: N. Y. University Press, 1980), 129–52; Cornara’s graduation attracted a lot of attention in France. It was reported by the Mercure Galant (September 1678, 150–1) and the Journal des Sçavans (12 September 1678). 88. See Siep Stuurman, François Poulain de la Barre and the Invention of Modern Equality (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), ch. 7.

7.2 Religion, Feminism, and the Problem of Agency: Reﬂections on Eighteenth-Century Quakerism* Phyllis Mack

I will keep on obeying your law forever and ever. I will walk in freedom, for I have devoted myself to your commandments. Psalm 119:44–5 A feminist is a woman who does not allow anyone to think in her place. Miche`le Le Doeuff1 A few years ago I attended a workshop on Jewish spirituality in which the leader, a hip New Age rabbi, discussed the ﬁrst stages of mystical experience. He talked about pushing the envelope, which he deﬁned as willing oneself to exceed one’s normal human desires and capacities; riding a motorcycle too fast along a cliff road was his example. Someone in the group cited the experience of childbirth as another example, but this was immediately rejected by the rabbi because, as he said, enduring something that you can’t get out of doesn’t involve agency, and agency, the choice to live dangerously, is the precondition for pushing the envelope. The women in the audience who were mothers rose up in protest. The women who were academics – mothers or not – were less certain how to react. It’s curious that the rabbi used a secular, liberal concept of agency – the free exercise of self-willed behavior – as a means of understanding mystical experience. It’s also indicative of how persistently intellectuals – even religious intellectuals – have relied on a concept of agency as autonomy in their discussions of modern identity. These writers are happy to appropriate those aspects of religion that can be translated into secular terms, but they dismiss the religious person’s desire for self-transcendence – for ‘unity with the creation’ as the Quaker George Fox said – as an outmoded artifact or as a form of neurosis or delusion. So the philosopher Charles Taylor, describing the emergence of the modern self, emphasizes Methodist feeling, Augustinian reﬂexivity, and John Locke’s reasonable Christianity, a religion in which ‘the place of mystery shrinks to the vanishing point.’2 The historian Margaret Jacob sees a new, stripped-down religiosity in the 18th century, distinguished by its cerebral 434

Religion, Feminism, and the Problem of Agency 435

quality, its appreciation for the unity and beauty of nature, and its disdain for the piety of the masses. ‘Gradually, highly educated Protestants and Catholics thought more about God’s work as revealed by science than about his biblical Word. … Religion in general was becoming more private than public, more individual than collective, and thoughts rather than ornate ceremonies came to deﬁne the believer.’3 The psychologist Paul Baltes, director of a project on wisdom at a Max Planck Institute in Berlin, deﬁnes wisdom as the expression of individual autonomy and as a high level of competence, an ‘expert knowledge system.’ He and his colleagues use phrases like ‘high levels of human performance,’ ‘successful aging,’ and ‘a possible end state of human knowledge and development.’4 In Baltes’ view, religion became irrelevant when people gave up believing in absolute truth and began relying on their own independent judgment. Religion can still take you part way toward wisdom because it teaches virtue and instills fear of punishment, but it can never take you all the way there.5 Indeed, because religion posits an authority higher than the individual, the phrase ‘religious wisdom’ is an oxymoron. This negativity about religion is also implied by the almost total silence of feminist theorists on the subject of religion and agency. Since the 1980s, many feminist writers have reﬂected on agency in untraditional ways, but no theorist I know of has broadened the concept so far as to imagine the agentive individual as a being with a soul. In a recent collection of essays by feminist philosophers, Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self, the authors discuss the idea of agency in a variety of contexts – intersectional identity, post-traumatic recovery, social and political oppression, moral responsibility, feminist bioethics – but the word ‘religion’ isn’t even in the index.6 In another recent collection, Provoking Agents: Gender and Agency in Theory and Practice, the writers discuss the social uses of agency in relation to maternal surrogacy, conscious-raising, performance art, pornography, and AIDS activism; the word ‘religion’ appears in this index once, as a reference to characteristics of male dominance in Kenya.7 Still another study cites the religious person’s voluntary commitment to an authoritarian religious order as an example of the wrong use of agency or autonomy.8 In these and other works, mainstream and feminist writers have radically revised our traditional notions of agency.9 The free agent is no longer assumed to be an independent (read male) individual: ‘atomistic, asocial, ahistorical, emotionally detached, thoroughly and transparently self-conscious, coherent, uniﬁed, rational, and universalistic in its reasonings.’10 Indeed, the relationship between subjection and subjectivity – between submission to power and the creation of an agentive self – has become an axiom among scholars inﬂuenced by Foucault, Judith Butler, and others.11 Other scholars have explored the relationship between autonomy and dependency, notably in studies of motherhood and caring social relationships.12 But individual autonomy remains the centerpiece of these new theories of identity, so much so that in the collection of essays, Feminists Rethink the Self, edited by Diana Tientjens Meyers, the reference following the term ‘agency’ in the index reads simply, ‘see autonomy.’

436 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

According to theories of what the philosophers Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar call ‘relational autonomy,’ a person needs certain qualities in order to achieve ‘autonomy competency:’ a sense of self-worth, the capacity for moral judgment, the ability to be understood.13 All of these require a condition of social connectedness, and they may be impaired by conditions of social oppression. But autonomy itself remains an individual matter, involving the exercise of choice, the satisfaction of individual preferences, and the capacity for rational self-government.14 Likewise, a person’s capacity to be a free agent may be generated in the context of relationships, of conditions of dependency, or out of the individual’s subjection to an external power, but agency itself is deﬁned as the individual’s ability to act according to her own best interests and to resist oppressive power relationships. The traumatized victim of rape may only be able to achieve a sense of restored selfhood with the help and sympathy of others, supported by an audience willing to hear and validate her story. Still, her subsequent agentive acts – joining a martial arts class, getting lights installed in a dark parking lot, daring to bring a child into a dangerous world – are expressions of her own conscious choices and decisions.15 We might say that, while the conditions for achieving agency have been of intense interest to feminist scholars, there has been much less discussion of the deﬁnition of agency itself. Rather than view agency as the central subject of analysis, feminist theorists discuss how agency is produced or fails to develop, or develops in the context of social constraints, asking, with bell hooks, ‘why we see the struggle to assert agency, that is, the ability to act in one’s best interests, as a male thing.’16 They also focus on the implications for women’s agency of the Marxist and poststructuralist critique of the concept of individual identity, asking, with Judith Butler, what happens to women’s agency or to feminism itself ‘if we fail to recuperate the subject in feminist terms.’17 Personal and sexual identity may indeed be an endangered concept for these writers, but agency as the consciously willed action of an individual or group of individuals is alive and well.18 Thus Judith Kegan Gardiner retains a sense of individual selfinterest while denying the reality of an essential individual self. Paraphrasing Catharine MacKinnon, she suggests that ‘the conviction that agency is or should be ‘most one’s own’ is not the result of a natural essence but is a feminist belief about human fulﬁllment and is potentially available to all people …’.19 For feminists – and for scholars in general – agency may be deﬁned as the exercise of free will (Davidson), as individual (Taylor) or social (Giddens), and as conditioned by discourses (Foucault), by structures or structuration (Giddens), or by habitus (Bourdieu). It can be a form of resistance to discourses or modes of performance (Butler) or it can be empowered by them, varying in its effects according to the structural support enjoyed by the particular agent (Sewell).20 But except where agency is attributed to non-human entities like corporations or machines, the agent remains a subject acting according to his or her conscious will or intention: self-expression, not self-transcendence. These scholars’ preoccupation with autonomy and their corresponding indifference to religion stem from the near-hegemonic inﬂuence of the meta-narrative

Religion, Feminism, and the Problem of Agency 437

of secularization in discussions of the history of modern identity. Like many other post-Enlightenment intellectuals, they assume that those who are inspired by religious enthusiasm or fanaticism, or who live under the inﬂuence of a religious institution or discipline, have no agency or limited agency, whereas secular society, which locates religious authority and practice outside the spheres of politics or the marketplace, allows for domains of free, autonomous behavior. Indeed, for the vast majority of intellectuals who view modernity as synonymous with secularization, religion is perceived chieﬂy as a form of self-estrangement. These writers analyse the search for spiritual enlightenment as a secondary phenomenon, one derived from more fundamental, often unconscious human needs. Words like ‘sacriﬁce,’ ‘redemption,’ ‘conversion,’ ‘repentance,’ or ‘ecstasy’ are not understood in terms of their stated meaning or their meaning for historical actors, but as pointers to other, more profound meanings: poverty, social marginality, sexual desire, political ambition: terms which have come to deﬁne both the core elements of human nature and the categories of modern social science.21 The rabbi’s insistence on characterizing childbirth as passive (and therefore as uncreative and unheroic) suggests a related, ethical aspect of the problem of religion for secular feminist scholars: the problem of validating religious women’s efforts to achieve self-realization and enlightenment through pain. Devout Christian women believe in the doctrine of the atonement – the efﬁcacy of Christ’s suffering on the cross – as the condition of their salvation and as the model or touchstone of their own spiritual growth. Medieval mystics imitated Christ’s suffering in their own practices of self-mutilation and self-starvation. Eighteenth-century Quakers and Methodists believed that illness might be sent by God to encourage self-reﬂection; they engaged in self-fashioning through sickness. The twentieth century home birth movement attracts Christian women and others who believe that pain is an avenue of spiritual enhancement and personal development. Few secular scholars would dissent from the Enlightenment’s valorization of physical health and its denial of the moral or spiritual efﬁcacy of pain. How then are we to understand the Quaker Mary Peisley’s diary entry, in which she reﬂected that her stomachaches might be a signal that she was putting herself forward too much in public, or the Methodist Sara Ryan’s advice to a friend that she should embrace the illness that brought her closer to Jesus’ pain on the cross?22 To the modern reader, agency seems absent in a double sense here: the stomachache and illness were endured, not chosen, and they were perceived as lessons in the importance of self-effacement and passivity. For many feminist scholars, the only morally responsible way to interpret these women’s behavior is as evidence of their failure to practice real agency by resisting male domination and the social convention that ladies should be passive in private and modest in public. Secular feminists are not the only ones troubled by the Christian doctrines of sanctiﬁcation through pain and redemptive self-sacriﬁce. Indeed, the concept of kenosis (self-emptying) as either descriptive of Christ’s sacriﬁce or as normative

438 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

for ordinary Christian practice has become a subject of debate among Christian feminist theologians. While Rosemary Ruether embraces the concept of kenosis as a critique of patriarchy and an afﬁrmation of the equality and vulnerability of all humanity, Daphne Hampson rejects kenosis as a concept that is meaningful or empowering for women: Clearly kenosis is indeed a critique of patriarchy. That it should have featured prominently in Christian thought is perhaps an indication of the fact that men have understood what the male problem, in thinking in terms of hierarchy and domination, has been. It may well be a model which men need to appropriate and which may helpfully be built into the male understanding of God. But … the theme of self-emptying and self-abnegation is far from helpful as a paradigm. Kenosis is a counter-theme within male thought. It does not build what might be said to be speciﬁcally feminist values into our understanding of God.23 Given the negative perception of the ideas of subjection and sacriﬁce in the minds of most modern intellectuals – including religious intellectuals – it isn’t surprising that among mainstream, highly educated Christians, the Church is generally portrayed in anodyne terms as an institution promoting community development, good works, and the inculcation of moral values, not as the setting for a transcendent spiritual experience. At a recent workshop on women and Quakerism held at an elite private college, I listened to a description of what happens in the worshipper’s mind during Quaker silent meetings. The speaker described a range of possibilities, from suddenly remembering that you’ve forgotten to pick your clothes up at the cleaner’s, to sensing the immediate presence of God. ‘But when that happens,’ she added, ‘we never talk about it.’

Agency without autonomy The preoccupation of feminist theorists with the issue of autonomy is understandable in the context of the discourse of secularization and the categories of modern philosophy and social science. I want to suggest that there are still important reasons to consider the experience of religious women in relation to theories of women’s agency. First, ignoring religion as a category of analysis leads us to ignore many interesting and potentially signiﬁcant historical facts: for example, the fact that the largest single cohort who read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique were church-going Methodist women.24 It also leads us to ignore the indisputably signiﬁcant fact that in the history of western culture, it was devout Christian women who demonstrated the greatest degree of agency, or that element of agency that involves activity in the public sphere. Outside of queens and some aristocratic women, it’s the thousands of Catholic nuns and mystics, Puritan goodwives, sectarian prophets, writers of religious tracts and sermons, and social reformers whose assertive voices are most clearly audible to the historian; as the literary critic Margaret Ezell reminds us, the largest single

Religion, Feminism, and the Problem of Agency 439

body of printed texts by women during the Restoration were texts written by Quaker women.25 Current theories of agency, however broadly conceived, cannot do justice to the reality of these women’s behavior; and if theory cannot explain behavior, then the theory itself needs to be revised. The scholar of American religion Robert Orsi used the example of a congregation of snake handlers to urge readers to confront the ‘otherness’ of religion (the otherness he referred to was not the snakes but the aggressive dogmatism of the preacher).26 I would argue that for secular scholars trying to understand the relationship between religion and agency, the otherness of religion we need to confront is not so much dogmatism as a conception of agency in which autonomy is less important than self-transcendence and in which the energy to act in the world is generated and sustained by a prior act of personal surrender. The 18th century Quaker women I currently study had considerable agency in terms of a capacity for action in the world and an ability to challenge and displace social norms from their own subordinate social position: this is the concept of agency advanced by Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and others. Yet these Quaker women invariably insisted that their actions were done not as acts of will but as acts of obedience, that they acted as instruments of divine authority as well as the authority of the community. If we think of agency as comprising both the capacity for effective action and the free choice to act, we might say that Quaker women’s actions were effective but not intentional (or, more accurately, that they saw their intentions as inspired by and identical with God’s.) Quaker women and others deﬁned agency not as the freedom to do what one wants but as the freedom to do what is right.27 Since ‘what is right’ was determined by absolute truth or God as well as by individual conscience, agency implied obedience as well as the freedom to make choices and act on them. And since doing what is right inevitably means subduing at least some of one’s own habits, desires, and impulses, agency implied self-negation as well as selfexpression. The goal of the individual’s religious discipline was to shape her personal desires and narrow self-interest until they became identical with God’s desire, with absolute goodness. The sanctiﬁed Christian wants what God wants; she is God’s agent in the world. For many feminists, this deﬁnition of agency must seem to combine the worst elements of women’s oppression: a lack of self-worth, the internalization of (often oppressive) social norms, and an absence of personal responsibility alongside an assumption of personal guilt.28 As Quaker women understood it, submission to God and the religious community enhanced personal integrity and public credibility. Quaker theology teaches that God (also called the inner light, or the seed) is inside every human being. By afﬁrming her own nullity, the effacement of her personal will, the individual felt her superﬁcial desire for selfgratiﬁcation overcome by her deeper love of universal truth. This made her worthy to act rightly and authoritatively, and in ways that were intelligible to her audience. To dismiss her gestures of surrender and self-denial as a rhetoric of self-abnegation, as false consciousness, or as a covert expression of resistance to the dominant male order is not only an over-simpliﬁcation of her psychology;

440 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

it is an avoidance of our responsibility, not merely to search for examples of female strategies of self-assertion under patriarchy, but to look steadily at women’s own ideas about ethics, autonomy, and spirituality. We need to think about what Robert Orsi, writing about the devotional lives of American Catholic women, called ‘in-betweenness:’ the way that self-abnegation and surrender become the ground of choice, action, and healing.29 It’s relatively easy – at least in principle – to assent to the idea that a secular, liberal concept of agency is inapplicable to those outside the dominant culture, whether at home or in non-western societies. Beside the overwhelming evidence of our daily newspapers, we have the work of psychologists like Hazel Markus and Shinobu Kitayama that relativize this concept of agency as a speciﬁcally western phenomenon. Markus and Kitayama contrast the western assumption that individual autonomy is both the norm and the ideal, with interdependent cultures like Japan, where choices are made on the basis of relationships rather than individual will and where the insistence on expressing one’s true inner feelings – sincerity – is considered immature.30 But how can the secular scholar convey the tonality of a speciﬁc religious tradition to a secular academic reader when both may be largely tone-deaf to religious sensibilities? How can she describe the religious person’s complex experience of agency, the ‘inbetweenness’ that Robert Orsi wants us to appreciate? Two anthropologists have recently attempted to do this by reference to nonreligious experience. In an essay called ‘Agency and Pain: An Exploration,’ Talal Asad criticizes the prevailing perception of the body as an instrument of the mind’s intentions and desires. He analyzes the experience of pain, ‘in order to think about agency in other than triumphalist terms … (and to) understand how different traditions articulate the idea of living sanely in a world that is inevitably painful.’31 In order to conceptualize pain as a kind of action, Asad analyses other forms of behavior which involve both action and passivity, among them the mentality of the stage actor: … the professional actor tries to set her (own) self aside and inhabit the somatic world of her character – her gestures, passions, and desires. The actor’s agency consists not in the action of the role she performs but in her ability to disempower one self for the sake of another. Her action is at once her own, that of the dramatist who has written the script, and of the director who mediates between script and performance through a tradition of acting. In an important sense, the actor is a part subject; her actions are not fully her own. That she is not the author of the story doesn’t mean that she is therefore its passive object.32 In another recent essay on the women’s mosque movement in Egypt, Saba Mahmood analyzes the conceptions of self and of moral agency that lead contemporary Muslim women to wear the veil and cultivate the virtue of modesty: In trying to move beyond the teleology of emancipation underwriting many accounts of women’s agency, I have found insights offered by post-structuralist

Religion, Feminism, and the Problem of Agency 441

theorists into power and the constitution of the subject useful. … (This) encourages us to understand agency not simply as a synonym for resistance to relations of domination, but as a capacity for action that speciﬁc relations of subordination create and enable … we might consider the example of a virtuoso pianist who submits herself to the, at times painful, regime of disciplinary practice, as well as hierarchical structures of apprenticeship, in order to acquire the ability – the requisite agency – to play the instrument with mastery … her agency is predicated upon her ability to be taught, a condition classically referred to as ‘docility.’33 These everyday analogies may be as close as the secular scholar can get to an understanding of a religious person’s experience of agency – and it may in fact be a good enough ﬁrst step; at least it is one that the 18th century Methodist leader John Wesley would have applauded. Explaining the doctrine of justiﬁcation – the realization that one’s sins have been effaced by Christ’s sacriﬁce – to ordinary lay readers, he used the language of romantic love: the lover of Christ feels swept away, wildly happy, happy even in afﬂiction, capable of heroic action, a total reformation of character.34 These depictions of agency are profound but not obscure. They remind us that in ordinary life, agency is rarely experienced as an entirely free series of movements or choices. They also remind us that renouncing agency does not necessarily compromise or diminish self-expression: the pianist, the actor, the lover exceed their own physical and emotional capacities – their own sense of who they are and of what is possible for them – through submitting to and identifying with a teacher, a tradition, or an object of passion. Indeed, I would argue that, however imperfect our understanding of a religious sensibility may be, we can understand it better by reference to everyday experience than by reference to a hypothetical and largely ﬁctional free subject. Put another way, to the extent that we, as academics, bracket our own everyday experience – like learning to play an instrument – from our formal discussions of agency, we resemble The Great Roe, a mythical beast invented by Woody Allen with the head of a lion and the body of a lion, but not the same lion.35 *** Earlier historical writing on religious women has often been written from a secular viewpoint, subsuming accounts of women’s religious experience within narratives of social oppression, personal ambition, or the search for self-expression, (for example, viewing religious meetings as a training ground for women’s public speaking). More recently, a number of historians and anthropologists have published empirical studies that place women’s religious values at the center of their analyses. Catherine Brekus has written on female evangelical preaching in 18th and 19th century America, Caroline Walker Bynum on medieval women ascetics, R. Marie Grifﬁth on the evangelical Women’s Aglow Fellowship International, Evelyn Brooks Higgenbotham on black Baptist women in the late 19th century,

442 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

Pamela Klassen on the contemporary home birth movement, Robert J. Orsi on Catholic women’s devotion to St. Jude, Jone Salomonsen on the reclaiming witches of San Francisco.36 These and other writers have encouraged us to rethink our ideas about the psychology of female religiosity, the public/private model of women’s history, the political signiﬁcance of women’s charismatic preaching, and the social meaning of prayer. Two studies with particular relevance for this discussion are R. Marie Grifﬁth’s God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission, and Robert Orsi’s Thank You St. Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes. Grifﬁth presents a cogent discussion of theories of agency, focusing on the dynamics of power and practice and the subversion of gender roles in evangelical Christianity. She also introduces the concept of ‘a capacity for ritualization: a learned ability to experience healing and transformation through ritual enactments of prayer.’37 Robert Orsi discusses Catholic women’s devotional practices in terms of a psychoanalytic theory of ‘devotional unwholesomeness,’ in which prayer is understood as a form of infantilization and apparent loss of agency. He then ampliﬁes this theory to consider the ﬁgure of the saint (seen as both a spiritual being and a literal ﬁgure that is kept on bureaus, in cars, and in desk drawers at work) as occupying an ‘inbetween’ space between women’s interior lives and their domestic and work responsibilities. Catholic women’s religious devotion turns out to be not merely a withdrawal into a search for childish satisfaction, but a source of individual strength and practical agency.38 Until now, these empirical studies have had little inﬂuence on theoretical discussions of agency, perhaps because the women analyzed in these works speak from the margins of the dominant culture. Those who choose home birth are rejecting the technology of modern medicine and the social power of (usually male) physicians. The charismatic Christians of the Women Aglow International Fellowship reject the values of modern consumer culture, especially its ideal of feminine beauty. Contemporary followers of witchcraft or wicca hold that modern western culture is diseased, and that the cure involves the cultivation of reverence toward the cycles of nature and a rejection of the mentality of the scientist and technocrat. The evangelical preachers of the 19th century were religious populists who shunned the social radicalism of groups like the Quakers and were fundamentally at odds with an evolving culture of individualism and materialism. Taken together, their stories demonstrate women’s energy and effectiveness as critics of modernity, and they may convince us of the inadequacy of modern western values, but they don’t challenge the concept of modernity itself or the meta-narrative of secularization that is the basis of the modern concept of autonomy. In my own research on 18th century British Quakers and other religious dissenters, I want to contribute to a growing body of work on women and religion in which religious values are seen as fundamental to their psychology and achievements. I am not arguing that agency meant the same thing to 18th century Quakers as it did to American Catholics or Egyptian Muslims, or that the Enlightenment concept of the autonomous subject was absent as an element of either the Quakers’ mentality or their commitment to social reform

Religion, Feminism, and the Problem of Agency 443

movements. I am arguing that the history of secularization was a story, not about the marginalization of religion, but about the interaction of religious and Enlightenment values. I also believe that the result of that interaction, including ideas about agency, autonomy, and selfhood, was a culture in which religious values remained fundamental. Eighteenth-century Quakers felt themselves to be both denizens of the Enlightenment and seekers of the supernatural. They were in the vanguard of movements we view as modern, including the industrial revolution, the crusade for the abolition of slavery, reforms in education, prisons, and mental health, and feminism; they were also in the vanguard of the religious revival that began in the early 18th century and continued into the 19th century missionary movement. Like the women of the home birth movement or female Baptist preachers, Quaker women (and men) were a minority, but they were a minority with an inordinate inﬂuence on the dynamic of mainstream culture. Their religious experience, far from being a precursor of or a reaction to modernity, was part of the process of modernization itself. Their stories therefore do more than increase our knowledge of and sympathy for women’s experience; they also call into question the traditional narrative of modernity in which religion is viewed as an interesting but anachronistic phenomenon that is essentially marginal to the main story.

Quaker women’s spirituality and femininity By the 1730s Quakerism had evolved from a movement of radical visionaries into a community of respectable citizens. Although the ﬁrst Friends continued to be revered as heroes of the movement, the new generation of leaders no longer countenanced the traumatic physical and emotional violence of the early, ecstatic, quaking Friends, who preached naked and in sackcloth, and whose words evoked the convulsive, apocalyptic language of ancient Hebrew prophets.39 For Friends, as for other denizens of the English Enlightenment, reason and emotional balance were privileged over passion and enthusiasm, humanitarianism and social stability over contentious politics, family and Meeting over public prophecy and missionary work. Salvation was achieved and demonstrated not through asceticism, mystical insight, or visions, but through the attainment of wisdom and right action: the quality of one’s bearing in the world. On the surface, the respectable 18th century Quaker woman seems weak and conventional compared to the radical visionaries of a hundred years earlier. Far from chastising magistrates and monarchs in the public arena, her rare observations on national politics were conservative in tone, and her criticism of social misbehavior rarely challenged the existing class structure. Quaker women also lost power within the movement: London male Friends refused to let women have their own Yearly Meeting for nearly the whole 18th century, and they refused to let women attend the London Meeting for Sufferings (which dealt with Friends’ relationship to the government) until the late 19th century. Increasing prosperity also circumscribed women’s public activities; indeed

444 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

the Quaker mother in Israel seems to have been launched on a familiar trajectory from productive worker to domestic parasite. Certainly she had no conception of the transformative sexual asceticism or celebration of cosmic motherhood invoked by working-class visionaries like the Shaker Ann Lee or Joanna Southcott. Yet if we look for the origins of the social reform movements of the 19th century – women’s suffrage, abolition of slavery, peace activism – we ﬁnd Quaker women speaking out on matters of economics, education, slavery, the rights of women to attend business meetings, and paciﬁsm, and they did this not only as instruments of divine authority but also as women. Thus the new strictures on women’s authority and women’s own changing self-deﬁnition worked both to limit their conception of appropriate public behavior and to enhance their capacity for public authority both as prophets or agents of God and in their own voices. The traditional explanation for this transformation, and the one adopted by many historians, is derived from a meta-narrative of secularization, whereby more retrograde Quakers lapsed into a contemplative spirituality called ‘quietism,’ while more progressive Quakers became capitalists and activists who were largely indifferent to religion. The secularization argument is a powerful one. Quaker beliefs and practices seem, on the surface, to be easily comprehensible in terms of modern liberal notions of selfhood. The abstract theology of the Inner Light and the Quakers’ propensity to conﬂate the words ‘God’ and ‘Wisdom’ resonate with Enlightenment ideas about a distant, benevolent deity and the essential goodness of humanity. The decorum of Quaker silent meetings seems harmless – if a bit boring – compared with the frenzy of early Methodist revival meetings or Moravian hymns in which the believer exults over the heat and juiciness of Jesus’ side wound. The Quaker egalitarian tradition of a female ministry and women’s meetings and their dedication to social reform sit comfortably with the Enlightenment ideals of progress and human rights. Indeed, the women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, where the great majority of delegates were Quaker, seems like a direct and natural outgrowth of both the Enlightenment and the enlightened bourgeois Quakerism of the 18th century. On this reading, it makes sense to argue that the history of Quaker involvement in social and political reform was a function, not of women’s religious principles, but of the progress of secularization and a nascent feminist consciousness. This is in fact how some historians of early Quaker women have proceeded, celebrating the feistiness and courage of female itinerant preachers and discussing even their dreams as evidence of women’s desire for public authority and personal recognition.40 The problem with the secularization narrative is that the most ‘modern’ or ‘progressive’ Quakers – individuals like the abolitionist John Woolman or the proto-feminist Catherine Payton Phillips – were also the ones most deeply engaged in the quest for spiritual enlightenment. Those women who were most ardent in advocating educational reform and campaigning for independent women’s meetings were also those who sought a stricter religious discipline and a greater reliance on the Bible. Moreover the most progressive collectivities were

Religion, Feminism, and the Problem of Agency 445

not those of prosperous and worldly London and Bristol Friends but the more spiritually active communities of northern England and Ireland. And whereas 17th century Friends professed a theology of the Inner Light (the light of God in every person) and early 18th century Friends conﬂated God with wisdom, later activist Friends placed new emphasis on humanity’s sinful nature and Christ’s suffering and atonement. In my view, the apparent quiescence of 18th century Quakers masked an internal struggle to integrate their Puritan and mystical religious heritage with their own Enlightenment values. This struggle heightened a tension that had always existed in Christian thought, between the desire for passivity and selfannihilation on the one hand, and the urge toward self-transformation and world-transformation, on the other. This tension induced a crisis in the spiritual lives of many women and men, a crisis that they themselves articulated as a problem of agency. Quakers worried about whether they spoke with God’s voice or their own voices. They worried about their inability to renounce self, as they put it, in order to become instruments of divine will. They worried that their worldly competence and material prosperity would distract them from spiritual matters and impede their spiritual progress. Quakers also linked this problem of agency to the issues of social respectability and appropriate gender roles. Women were urged to present themselves as ladies – restrained, competent, and self possessed – but their claim to public authority was predicated on their capacity for self-transcendence as prophets ‘in the light,’ speaking not with their own modest voices but with God’s. By the late 18th century, this combustion of values and discourses had begun to generate a new kind of psychic energy; a spiritual agency in which liberal notions of free will and human rights were joined to religious notions of individual perfectibility, group discipline and selftranscendence, and in which energy was focused not on the individual’s interior state but on the condition of other deprived groups. *** In the new religious and social climate of 18th century Quaker society, the home assumed equal importance with the meeting as a social utopia and as a school for character. The busy trader, teacher, or capitalist was elevated to a higher spiritual plane when he retired into his family, divested his mind of all aggression and greed, and transcended class differences by treating his workers, servants, and children as his moral apprentices. And to the extent that Quakers found serenity and salvation in domesticity and in the meeting for worship, women were central to the community’s well being and spiritual development. Family government was in large part women’s domain of authority, where mothers (and fathers) civilized the families that formed Friends’ business and religious networks. Women ministers also acted as wisdom ﬁgures, monitoring the consciences of their men, summoning them from excessive concern for personal wealth to a purer spiritual life. ‘It is beautiful to see,’ wrote the Irish physician John Rutty, ‘how minutely these women descend into the particulars of the

446 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

Christian life … quite outshining the men, who are too generally swallowed up in the cares of the world.’41 Indeed, the persona of the ideal female Quaker conveyed a gravitas that impressed many non-Quaker contemporaries. ‘Their authority,’ wrote one observer, imparts to them … a considerable knowledge of human nature. It produces in them thought, and foresight, and judgment. It creates in them a care and concern for the distressed. It elevates their ideas. It raises in them a sense of their own dignity and importance as human beings … their pursuits are rational, useful, and digniﬁed.’42 Rational, yet sensitive; chaste (even glacial), yet maternal; competent, yet delicate; this was the stock ﬁgure of the virtuous Quaker woman found in contemporary plays and magazines. ‘I think,’ observed a writer in the Monthly Magazine, that the distinguishing attribute of the sect – Equanimity – is now become not a second but an original nature, and is discoverable in that undisturbed regularity of features, particularly among the females – the placidity of countenance … an infelt serenity of soul – a deeply charactered composure.’43 The Quaker woman was symbolic of Quaker values in their undiluted state because the values of Quakerism itself were feminine values. Restraint, benevolence, privacy, domestic order, passivity; all of these, familiar enough to observers of Victorian womanhood, evolved in the early 18th century as attributes not only of women, but of the saintly Quaker man. Love, humility, passivity, ‘gentle, peaceable wisdom,’ were everywhere the marks of a true Friend. ‘But what shall we say of the Lord Almighty,’ wrote the minister Samuel Fothergill, ‘but just and true are all his ways? And what of ourselves, but unto us belong blushing and confusion of face?’44 The image of women’s placid faces and simple (but well made) Quaker clothes, unsoiled by the grime of politics or industry, was clearly essential to the larger image of Quakerism as both high-minded and of high reputation (and, one suspects, to their husbands’ own peace of mind). But women not only contributed to this new social and spiritual identity; they also exposed its inherent contradictions. Eighteenth-century Friends were striving for a synthesis of masculine and feminine values in a world where ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ were coming to denote two increasingly rigid categories of biology and behavior.45 Quakers were also formulating a new conception of the right way to discern and express spiritual authenticity. Friends had always believed that salvation – being ‘in the light’ – was expressed through the ordinary gestures of daily life; the earliest Friends were noted for honesty and sincerity as well as their ﬂamboyant public prophecy. For later Friends, who believed that salvation was expressed through calmness, moral clarity, and personal restraint, social behavior had to be both authentic and respectable – a model of public behavior rather than a challenge to it. So James Jenkins admired the minister Mary Ridgeway, ‘in whom were united the seriousness of the minister, and the courtesy of the gentlewoman.’46 The addition of the Victorian pedestal to the Quaker woman’s persona did not imply any diminution of respect for women as ministers or helpmeets. Hundreds of women received certiﬁcates to preach, which entitled them to hospitality from the meetings they visited as well as support for the families they

Religion, Feminism, and the Problem of Agency 447

left behind. Many other hundreds of women were elders, overseeing the pastoral care of their home meetings, and every woman who married participated in a ceremony that was more egalitarian than any comparable Christian rite. What the pedestal did imply was a prohibition against ecstatic behavior or overt political activity, whether activity in the wider political arena or within the Quaker meeting system. Unlike the ecstatic political prophets of the seventeenth century, a woman could not act like a man in the public spaces now reserved for men alone. Clearly, the ideal of human wisdom as an element of the inner light, and of wisdom and self-possession as elements of the minister’s charisma, had different implications for women and for men. When the ﬁrst female prophets preached in public during the 1650s, their language and affect expressed a state of complete self-transcendence, a dissociation not only from their individuality and intelligence but from their womanhood. So Margaret Fell harangued a magistrate in 1653, accusing him of being a woman because he had (negative) female characteristics, while her womanhood was merely physical or external to her true self: Thou said that I was puffed up with malice and pride and that the people saw so, and that I did not see myself so, thy sight and the peoples is all one, you could but see me … with a carnal eye, which is the eye that offends the Lord, and must be put out before ever thou can see me or what condition I was in … thou art the woman that goes abroad and dost not abide in thy own house.47 The 18th century preacher was no less wedded to an ideal of self-transcendence, but the quality of her charisma – a combination of feminine dignity, intuitive wisdom, and divine revelation – made it more difﬁcult to determine the source of her agency. Seventeenth-century audiences had to decide whether the prophet spoke with the voice of God or the Devil. Eighteenth-century audiences had to decide whether she spoke with God’s voice or with the voice of an ordinary woman using ordinary intelligence to tell men what was wrong with them and what they should do about it. As paragons of both Enlightenment wisdom and spiritual piety, and as welleducated and competent workers and householders, middle-class female ministers had to walk a very ﬁne line. Not surprisingly, their public writing sometimes showed the ﬁssures and inconsistencies that resulted from the effort to present themselves as both visionaries and rational beings. ‘I hate, I despise your feastdays,’ wrote Sophia Hume in her ‘Address to Magistrates’ against the celebration of holidays. ‘I will not smell your solemn assemblies; your new moons, and your appointed feasts, my soul hateth: your solemn meetings are iniquity.’ A few pages later her prophetic voice abruptly became rational and deferential: ‘I hope no reasonable person will take any offence at this plainness of speech to my superiors … though it drop from a female pen … and were people to lay aside all religious considerations, and only view these evils in a political light, they would

448 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

see the great disadvantages arising from the observations of Days and Times.’ In a single paragraph she argued like an Enlightenment philosophe, (‘as reasonable, social and benevolent creatures, there is a reciprocal service and joint assistance necessary among men, without which societies or bodies of people could not subsist’) and a quietist (‘mere men … (their) faculty of reason unenlighten’d and unassisted by a divine power … are ignorant and weak.’)48 Other prominent female ministers were equally conﬂicted about their own authority, as their private writings reveal, but they also felt both impelled and entitled to exercise agency in the wider political arena. One reason they were able to do this was that the contradictory discourses of women’s authority not only inhibited their behavior; it also left a space in which they could maneuver.49 When Catherine Payton visited Philadelphia in 1755, the Quakers who were still members of the Pennsylvania Assembly were attempting to reach a compromise whereby they might raise needed funds for the French and Indian wars and still retain their seats. The ministers of Philadelphia Yearly Meeting took the position that Friends should resign from government rather than be involved in raising war taxes. ‘I think it not improper brieﬂy to give some account of the share I had in concerns of this nature,’ wrote Catherine Payton in her journal. She proposed that weighty Friends arrange an opportunity for her to preach to Assembly members; she was invited to attend and duly testiﬁed against war.50 This was certainly a religious and political act, but it was not obviously a visionary or oracular one, done spontaneously under immediate divine commandment. Payton was defensive but intransigent about her behavior, arguing that she spoke in a ministerial or prophetic capacity only: This was no more than consistent with my ofﬁce as a minister, and my commission to that country, which was to preach Truth and Righteousness, and strengthen the hands of my brethren, against their opposers. Both myself and companion were so clear of improperly intermeddling with the affairs of government, that we sometimes checked the torrent of conversation on that subject, either by silent or verbal reproof; and but seldom so much as read their newspapers.51 The minister Mary Peisley, an itinerant minister and member of a group of ardent young Friends in Ireland, also urged Friends in Pennsylvania not to pay a war tax, writing to one male Friend who requested her advice, ‘I am of the judgment, that if thou stand single and upright in thy mind from all the false biases of nature and interest … thou wilt ﬁnd it more safe to suffer with the people of God, then to enter on, or undertake doubtful things, especially when thou considers the use which has been, or may be made of that tax.’ Peisley insisted that she did not intend ‘to lessen parental authority or ﬁlial obedience so long as they are either lawful or expedient,’ but afﬁrmed that revelation was continuing even in her own time: ‘I am not afraid to say and give it under my hand that … people in future ages should make an improvement on (early Friends’) labor and carry on the reformation even farther than they did.’52 Some months later,

Religion, Feminism, and the Problem of Agency 449

Peisley received a letter from a female friend who wrote that she had lain awake at night, worrying that Peisley’s stomachaches were a sign from God that she had gone too far in her public actions. Peisley responded that she too had agonized over this question, (‘Thy letter … made me ready to fear that thou had discovered some danger about me which might be concealed from myself, I mean in regard to the state of my mind,’) but concluded that her behavior was justiﬁed and appropriate: ‘I cannot ﬁnd myself out of my place.’53 *** What made female ministers dangerous was that their preaching and writing threatened to upset the gender order, and by implication, the tenuous security that Quakers had only recently achieved. What made them intolerable to some male Friends was that this female authority was turned inward, against leading Friends’ own failures and transgressions. So Mary Peisley wrote that the greatest threat to the community was no longer coming from the outside world, but from other Friends, ‘those under the same profession, clothed with the disguised spirit of the world, and that amongst some of the foremost rank … Society.’ Catherine Payton was even more direct, criticizing a prominent male Friend for marrying a much younger woman and taking on the responsibilities of raising a new family. Seventeenth-century Quakers had had no difﬁculty in supporting women’s aggressive prophecy when it was directed outward, especially since it often culminated in imprisonment or martyrdom. Indeed, no one seemed upset by the ministry of the 18th century preacher Abiah Darby, who prophesied in the streets in the manner that Friends must have found utterly anachronistic. But turning that authority against Friends was another matter; even in the mid-17th century, Martha Simmonds was called a witch by Quakers when she attacked male authority ﬁgures within the movement.54 The presence of women in the public arena and as disciplinarians in their own meetings made Friends ponder not only the scandal of women in politics, but the larger issue of women’s spiritual leadership. But while women worried about being ‘scattered’ in their minds or about the divine origin of their impulse to speak, men worried about female ambition and public embarrassment. So Samuel Fothergill wrote a letter of advice to his protégé, the minister Catherine Payton: And, dear Kitty, bear thy testimony against haughtiness and luxury, by a humble, watchful conduct: be not led by them out of the leadings of truth, in the appointment of large meetings in court houses … for in this respect, I am sensible there is some danger, unless, really, the very burden of the word be upon thee … God keep us both chaste in our mind … (whom we) ought to serve with the spirit of our minds.55 Payton became a minister and missionary of some eminence, but her forceful manner – what one male Friend called a ‘thirst for meddlement’ – made the men cower before a bossy woman and criticize her behind her back as a tyrant. Payton

450 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

herself insisted in her journal that her authority was solely a function of her ministry ‘in the light,’ and indeed, male Friends welcomed her advice when they saw it as a prophetic message. But that did not mean that those same Friends, whose own masculine roles were somewhat problematic, would happily tolerate advice from mere females. Thus James Jenkins criticized Payton for criticizing a male Friend’s proposed marriage ‘from a prudential point of view’ rather than one based on ‘her feelings on the subject:’ Now here was moral, if not religious logic, opposed to substantial, but human judgment. The answer did not meet the question upon its own grounds. In consulting, his appeal was to the high priestess, supposed to possess oracular powers, and therefore frequently under the inﬂuence of prophecy, and inspiration. But, she only answered him as a woman, exerciz(ing) her judgment on the expedience, and policy of such a union.56

Evangelicalism and agency When Samuel Fothergill urged Catherine Payton to serve God ‘with the spirit of (her) mind,’ he expressed a concept that was also a tension at the heart of Enlightenment Quakerism. Quakers afﬁrmed the sanctity of human intelligence infused by universal light or truth, regardless of the individual’s class or gender. They also afﬁrmed the obligation of every Friend to bear witness to that truth both within the community and toward the outside world, in a mode that was both authentic and non-subversive. This was a far more complex set of principles than the ideals of total self-transcendence and ecstatic prophecy that had empowered 17th century Friends. As workers and heads of families, Quaker women had agency in the modern, liberal sense: an embodied authority to act based on their own free choice and intelligence. They also had a strong sense of their own individuality, based as much on the religious practices of individual meditation and diary keeping as on Enlightenment values. But this new agency was limited by increasingly rigid standards of bourgeois femininity. Quaker women also had agency in a spiritual sense, a disembodied, non-gendered authority based on the presence of the Inner Light in every soul; but the expression of this spiritual agency was limited by new inhibitions about openly ecstatic behavior. It’s important to understand that these inhibitions were internal as well as external. Seventeenth-century Quakers knew that they were ‘in the light’ because they perceived it in their bodies, by quaking, weeping, moaning, compulsively shouting, or appearing naked in the marketplace. Eighteenth-century Quakers rarely had access to that kind of intense physical experience. As modern enlightened individuals, they subscribed to a theory of sense perception that precluded any idea of spiritual forces entering the soul through the body. Their desire was for a religious epiphany as their grandparents had experienced it, but their psychology was that of a citizen of the Enlightenment, where discourses of the body derived from the materialist philosophy of John Locke and the middle class

Religion, Feminism, and the Problem of Agency 451

mores of an industrializing culture. Educated, rational people simply did not – could not – disrupt the commercial rhythm of the marketplace or make loud noises in church. The questions of how to recognize a divine message apart from one’s own individual voice, and of how to express a divine message in a manner that was both authentic and socially appropriate, were of deep concern to both men and women. Samuel Fothergill gave a series of sermons in which he referred to his mind as ‘in turmoil,’ and as a ‘ﬂoating island;’ ‘I freely confess my own fears, that I am not in a state of perfect (spiritual) health and sound mind.’57 Other Friends reported a sense of paralysis in meetings, an inability to decide whether they were genuinely moved to speak by God or by mere self will.58 Still, men could pronounce on matters of social import or group discipline without transgressing social norms; women in public risked behaving scandalously – having an unchaste mind – whether they spoke in a state of religious ecstasy or in a posture of reasoned and digniﬁed authority. The tensions generated by the contradiction between Friends’ radical theology and their conservative politics were resolved differently, sometimes traumatically, in individual cases. A group in Ireland known as the ‘New Lights’ reembraced the original undogmatic theology of a universal Inner Light (now seen as the light of reason), as against those who were beginning to insist on a biblical, Christ-centered religion; they were accused of both deism and mysticism and condemned by the main body of Friends. Their most notorious fellow traveler was Hannah Barnard, a self-educated minister from Nantucket, who came to England and Ireland to preach in the 1790s. In an unprecedented action, she led a delegation of women in an appeal to the London Meeting to allow Quaker meetinghouses to be used by ministers of other societies. Barnard was censured and then expelled by the London Meeting for being too rationalistic; this was done over the objections of British women Friends, who claimed the right to judge her conduct for themselves. Traveling to Ireland, she then joined the New Lights in questioning the veracity of biblical passages that urged the Hebrews to wage war. ‘I do not look up,’ she wrote, To any visible gathered church, or to any book, or books in the world, as being absolutely endowed with divine infallibility; but, as a moral agent, I endeavour to exercise that freedom of inquiry, and right of judging, which I believe to be the indisputable privilege, and indispensable duty, of all mankind … having no desire … to command the implicit faith and blind obedience of any, not even my own children.59 Other Friends became extreme quietists, rejecting all forms of expression, including language, that were not immediately received from God; they were criticized as reactionary by mainstream Quakers. The resolution embraced by the main body of Friends in England, both wealthy, conservative capitalists in London and Bristol and spiritual reformers in Yorkshire and Lancashire, was a form of evangelicalism which afﬁrmed both the

452 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

authority of the Bible and the practical humanitarianism of the Enlightenment. These Friends did not abandon their conviction of an Inner Light present in every individual, but they viewed that light through the prism of Biblical injunction, rationalist religious discussion, and the ‘natural’ hierarchies of gender, class, and family. The transformation of Quaker ideology arose out of a campaign to revitalize Quaker discipline by regularizing the meeting system, which functioned sporadically and inconsistently. It also aimed to increase family visits to monitor Friends’ morality and behavior, require stricter adherence to strictures against marrying outside the Quaker community, and improve Quaker education. These efforts have often been perceived as symptomatic of a period of decline in the Society of Friends, a substitution of rule for spirit.60 From the perspective of the eminent Quaker men who dominated the meetings of London and Bristol, this was at least partly true. For these prosperous and sophisticated citizens, disciplinary reform had as much to do with worldly values as with spiritual striving. Their reputation for integrity as Friends was indissolubly linked to their reputation for fairness and dependability in business, which in turn was linked to their impeccable (and conventional) social behavior. They thus understood the campaign for greater discipline as a further separation and stratiﬁcation of men’s and women’s powers, which they rationalized as a more just and efﬁcient system of jurisdiction. If some men’s understanding of the new discipline was a strengthening of Quaker order in harmony with the social order (implying the further subjection of women), women’s understanding was radically different. They also wanted greater surveillance over Friends’ activities, but their ultimate purpose was to provide greater scope for women’s spiritual growth, collective agency, and social action. In 1756 the London Box Meeting recorded an epistle of Margaret Bell to the Quarterly Meeting in Yorkshire: Our women seem wholly engrossed in themselves and their families, and with the pleasures … of a very vain world which intoxicates and stupeﬁes all the faculties of the soul that … with a long time of prosperity, too many are grown so indolent, so supine, that the very ass exceeds them in sensibility. … A considerate mind … would know … an enlargement toward fellow beings.’61 These women saw a need for autonomous women’s meetings at the highest level in order to disseminate epistles from American and London to the meanest Quaker communities, to galvanize and pass judgment on their lazy or delinquent sisters, and to act as moral helpmeets to the men, even advising them on their own marriages. Women accepted the difference between the sexes, but they saw that difference not in terms of a hierarchy which privileged public men over private women, but as a balance of authority in which men and women acted in parallel, if not entirely equal roles. This was more than a return to the practice of a hundred years earlier, for, like Catherine Payton, 18th century women wanted to speak not only as prophets, but ‘prudentially.’

Religion, Feminism, and the Problem of Agency 453

The women who spearheaded the movement for a revitalized discipline were of two types. Many belonged to the northern meetings in Lancashire and Yorkshire, where women’s meetings and religious activism had always been strong, and where there was a long tradition of civil disobedience in the matter of paying church taxes and refusing to swear oaths. They were guided and energized by the wealthy merchant family of Esther and William Tuke of York Meeting. Esther Tuke and three of her daughters were all leading ministers, and it was these women who, along with other leading female Friends, initiated the reforms in discipline and education that revitalized the ministry.62 Other leading reformers, like Catherine Payton and Sophia Hume, were part of the more sophisticated and sexist world of London and Bristol Friends, who had also traveled in Ireland and America and observed a more egalitarian order. Payton gave women Friends in Cornwall advice on establishing and running a meeting, but was well aware of the difﬁculty southern women would have acting independently: ‘I am afraid the low and still seemingly declining state of our Society is a discouragement to some honest minds to exert themselves for its help, there are yet some living strong members remaining … let them arise and shake themselves and prepare for the battle.’63 We can observe the development of increased discipline and surveillance alongside women’s greater agency in the campaign for a Women’s Yearly Meeting that occupied the last forty years of the century. Since the 1660s, Quaker women had met alone in small ‘preparatory meetings’ near their homes, in larger quarterly meetings, and – in Ireland and America – in an autonomous yearly meeting. There they prayed, found apprenticeships for poor Quaker children, collected and dispensed charity, visited the sick, set down their testimonies against the payment of church taxes, and composed epistles to sustain their sisters in England, Ireland, and America. Women also assisted male Friends in disciplining and advising wayward members. The campaign for a restored Women’s Yearly Meeting began in 1746 and lasted for over thirty years. Six women ministers from different counties submitted a paper on the value of a women’s Yearly Meeting to halt the decline of Quakerism and set an example to youth, assuring the men that they would seek no further authority and might meet only every other year. The proposal was tabled. Then a group of American male ministers proposed a Yearly Meeting to the York Women’s Meeting, and a delegation was eventually empowered to carry the minute to London in 1753. It was tabled. (Samuel Fothergill was reported to have said, ‘I see it, but not now; I behold it, but not nigh!’) Thirty years later, again with the encouragement of American male Friends, the women of the Lancaster Meeting sent a minute to London requesting that epistles from America be sent to all women’s meetings. In London, a number of American women urged on the Englishwomen, and the Men’s Meeting ﬁnally approved a meeting to distribute epistles, but not to make rules or present queries without the approval of the men. A male Friend commented, ‘The women Friends held long meetings and appear very willing to be invested with greater power, but it was somewhat limited by the prudence of the men.’ A female Friend commented, ‘Painful is the jealousy of men Friends’.64

454 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

Conclusion: agency and freedom It is plausible to interpret the reform of Quaker discipline as the triumph of the entrenched power of wealthy, socially conservative Friends and as an example of what Michel Foucault called ‘governmentality:’ the techniques of controlling individuals and of creating a disciplinary society that became a key element of European sovereignty in the 18th century.65 It is also plausible to interpret the Quaker reform movement as evidence of secularization, a dilution of Friends’ original prophetic spirit. These negative interpretations ignore the fact that Friends never abandoned their belief in a central tenet of Quakerism, the importance of witnessing for truth. Indeed, the initiative for revitalizing the meeting system and increasing Friends’ activism came not from worldly, prosperous, and conservative London and Bristol Friends, but from those on the geographic and cultural margins, most of them women: Rachel Wilson from Lancashire, Mary Peisley and Mary Birkett from Ireland, the Tuke family from Yorkshire.66 These were areas with a long tradition of ethical prophecy and of standing up against authority, both the authority of a repressive government that had jailed them for non-payment of church taxes, and the authority of Quakerism’s own vested interests. For women, evangelical Christianity meant a transmutation of their original prophetic authority, an acceptance of a more circumscribed self-deﬁnition and spiritual ambition. It also meant a renewed energy to evangelize and educate, and a vastly increased scope for the use of their own spiritual education and worldly position in careers of philanthropy and social activism. The contradiction between the ideal of self-transcendence and the cultivation of a competent self was resolved by turning the energies of the individual outward, in charitable impulses toward others; the ecstatic prophecy of the 17th century was transmuted into the aggressive altruism of the 19th century. So the minister Esther Tuke wrote to her daughter, the minister Sarah Grubb, encouraging her as an old soldier encourages a new recruit: I believe all your exercises of visiting the seed hungry, naked, sick and in prison, will be recorded in that book of remembrance which the natural eye can neither read nor erase. My mind daily travels with you, and tho’ at times I pity yet I feel often more disposed to envy, or at least to say, how much better is the lot to be out in actual service … than like a poor worn out or disabled soldier in a hospital, whose shield is gone, and his armour laid aside, who has to live on a little pittance, brood over his wounds and inﬁrmities, and contemplate battles lost.67 The movement for the abolition of slavery that was begun by quietest Friends like John Woolman was now directed by evangelicals like Hannah Gurney, the mother of Elizabeth Fry. Their new arguments against slavery were based not only on their spiritual mission as witnesses for truth, but on maternal sentiment and the assertion of women’s collective consciousness.68 Quakerism’s

Religion, Feminism, and the Problem of Agency 455

new religious discipline was thus a precondition, not for women’s incarceration inside the domestic space, but for an expanded public agency. This new agency would be generated, not by the principle of individual free will, but by the freedom to do what reason, the Bible, the Meeting, and Friends’ own Victorian consciences, said was right. I argued earlier that a secular liberal model of agency is of only limited use in tracking the public activities of religious women or the religious origins of feminism. The example of 18th century Quakerism shows how complicated the experience of agency was for religious women who were also activists. Some aspects of the Quakers’ religious mentality, like their belief in the possibility of universal redemption and the equality of souls before God, are easy for modern feminists to appreciate; others, like the belief that pain and illness are avenues of spiritual insight, or the desire to be controlled by an authority external to oneself, are clearly not. The fact remains that, while the rationale for the Quakers’ belief in universal human rights derived from their commitment to both Enlightenment values and Christian tradition, the energy that empowered these women as they moved into a life of social activism was generated by a transformation in the quality of their religious life. By helping to effect a change of direction in the history of their religious community, and by expanding the community’s activities in the world at large, they inﬂuenced the nature and importance of religion as an element of the modern psyche.

Notes *

Thanks to audiences and colleagues at the University of Chicago, UCLA, Rutgers University, The Women and Enlightenment Project (directed by Barbara Taylor), the University of Michigan, and the University of Minnesota. Thanks also to Paul Baltes and Shu-Chen Li, of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (Berlin), for their generosity to me during the spring of 2001, and especially to Katherine Verdery. 1. Miche`le Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice (Oxford and Cambridge Mass., Basil Blackwell, 1991), back cover, quoted in Daphne Hampson, ‘On Autonomy and Heteronomy,’ in Hampson, ed., Swallowing a Fishbone: Feminist Theologians Debate Christianity (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1996), 1. 2. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press, 1989), 245, 302. 3. Margaret Jacob, The Enlightenment: A Brief History with Documents (Boston & New York: Bedford/St.Martin’s, 2001), 18. 4. Paul B. Baltes and Jacqui Smith, ‘Toward an Ontology of Wisdom and its Ontogenesis,’ in Robert J. Sternberg, Wisdom: Its Nature, Origins, and Development (Cambridge, Eng: Cambridge U. Press, 1990), 87–120. 5. Paul Baltes, personal communication. 6. Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar, eds, Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self (New York & Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 2000). 7. Judith Kegan Gardiner, ed., Provoking Agents: Gender and Agency in Theory and Practice (Urbana & Chicago: U. of Illinois Press, 1995), Introduction and p. 77. 8. Marilyn Friedman, ‘Autonomy and Social Relationships: Rethinking the Feminist Critique,’ in Diana Tietjens Meyers, Feminists Rethink the Self, (Boulder & Oxford: Westview Press, 1997), 53. In her study of women and agency, Diana Tietjens Meyers

456 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

discusses religion at several points in order to show how Christian culture has purveyed images of beauty, vanity, heteronormativity and pro-natalist arguments on motherhood that are counterproductive for women’s agency. (Gender in the Mirror: Cultural Imagery and Women’s Agency (New York: Oxford U. Press, 2002), 48, 107, 112.) For an excellent summary of recent feminist writing on agency, see Friedman, ‘Autonomy and Social Relationships,’ 40–61. See also Saba Mahmood, Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reﬂections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival,’ Cultural Anthropology, xvi, no. 2 (2001), 202–36. Friedman, ‘Autonomy and Social Relationships,’ 42. On the general accepta nce of the idea that agency emerges from constraint, see Lois McNay, Gender and Agency: Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminist and Social Theory (Cambridge, Eng: Polity Press, 2000), 2–3. Eva Kittay, Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency (NY & London: Routledge, 1999); Sara Ruddick, ‘Thinking Mothers/Conceiving Birth,’ Newcomb College Center for Research on Women, No. 1, 1991. Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar, Relational Autonomy, Introduction, 3–31. esp. 17. Daphne Hampson cites the etymology of ‘autonomy’ from the Greek as ‘self-law,’ which does not necessarily imply being either independent or competitive. (‘On Autonomy and Heteronomy,’ 1). Susan J. Brison, ‘Outliving Oneself: Trauma, Memory, and Personal Identity,’ in Meyers, ed., Feminists Rethink the Self, 12–39. There is disagreement on this issue among mainstream and feminist theorists. ‘Are social relationships merely causal conditions that are necessary to bring autonomy about but are external to autonomy proper, rather like sunshine causing plants to grow? Or are they somehow partly ‘constitutive’of autonomy? … This unresolved point … is a major philosophical concern that continues to divine feminists. (Friedman, ‘Autonomy and Social Relationships,’ 57.) bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 206, quoted in Gardner, Provoking Agents, 6. Judith Butler, ‘Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory, and Psychoanalytic Discourse,’ in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990), 327, quoted in Gardiner, ed., Provoking Agents, 8. And see the discussion of Judith Butler in Mahmood, ‘Feminist Theory:’ ‘While the transcendental liberal subject undergirding … notions of freedom … is clearly questioned in Butler’s analysis (as is the notion of the autonomous will), what remains intact is the natural status accorded to the desire for resistance to social norms …’ The introduction to Provoking Agents states, ‘the essays explore gender, agency, and oppression at many levels, including the social denial of women’s ability to act, the inhibition of women’s inclination to act, the deflection of women’s ability to act from self-interest, and the contrary premises required for more satisfactory female agencies …’ (14) In an article on agency in a recent feminist reference work, the author writes, ‘Both in accounts of individual autonomy and in accounts of collective oppositional moral agency, feminists are primarily concerned with analyzing how insights into the forms and mechanisms of women’s subordination can be gained, how acts of feminist resistance are possible, and how women can lead lives that are fulﬁlling to them as individuals.’ (Diana Tietjens Meyers, ‘Agency,’ in Alison M. Jaggar and Iris Marion Young, eds, A Companion to Feminist Philosophy, (Malden, Mass. & Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 372–82, esp. 382. The focus on resistance is discussed and criticized by Lois McNay, Gender and Agency, 2–4.) Gardiner, Provoking Agents, Introduction, 13. For summaries of theories on agency, see William H. Sewell, Jr., ‘A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation,’ American Journal of Sociology, vol. 98, no. 1, July 1992, 1–29 and Laura M. Ahearn, ‘Language and Agency,’ Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 30, 2001, 109–37. On the problems of doing historical analysis, particularly the history of religion and politics, outside the categories of the Enlightenment and modern social science, see

Religion, Feminism, and the Problem of Agency 457

22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29. 30.

Dipesh Chakrabarty Provincializing Europe:Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 2000), 3–23, 102–106. See below, 22–23. Daphne Hampson, Theology and Feminism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 155. In a review of Edith Wysogrod’s Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy, Marsha Hewitt argues that Wysogrod’s emphasis on radical alterity – the totally, saintlike focus on the needs of the Other, destroys agency. It also fails to take account of the concrete conditions of oppression in the world. ‘… to ask people to erase whatever sense of subjectivity they possess for the sake of the Other is to insist that they abandon the only possible locus of resistance left to them in the struggle against injustice.’ (‘Alterity and Ethics,’ Religion, Vol. 27, 1997, 103.) In arguing for the possibility of active weakness and creative suffering, the theologian Sarah Coakley implies that the revulsion of many Christian feminists toward the doctrine of kenosis stems from their own privileged and insulated situation, noting that it is chiefly white western women who are troubled by the concept of vulnerability. ‘It is striking, indeed, how much less coy is Black womanist theology about naming the ‘difference’ between abusive ‘suffering’ on the one hand, and a productive or empowering form of ‘pain’ on the other; for Black theology has necessarily never evaded the theological problems of undeserved suffering.’ (‘Kenosis and Subversion: On the Repression of ‘Vulnerability’ in Christian Feminist Writing,’ in Daphne Hampson, ed., Swallowing a Fishbone? Feminist Theologians Debate Christianity (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1996) 82–111.) Ann D. Braude, ‘Christianity, Feminism, and Women’s History,’ Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, June, 2002. Margaret J. M. Ezell, Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1993), 124. Robert A. Orsi, ‘Snakes Alive: Resituating the Moral in the Study of Religion,’ in Elizabeth A. Castelli, ed., Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader (N.Y. & Houndmills, Eng.: Palgrave, 2001), 98–118. I am not implying that feminist theorists are indifferent to questions of ethics. But to my knowledge, most view moral behavior in the context of self-knowledge and individual choice, rather than obedience to a higher authority or universal truth. ‘Again, intersectional self-knowledge is indispensable to autonomous moral judgment and autonomous political agency.’ (Diana Tietjens Meyers, ‘Intersectional Identity and the Authentic Self?: Opposites Attract!’ in Mackenzie and Stoljar, Relational Autonomy, 151–80, esp. 162.) On the relationship between self-worth and moral responsibility in feminist theory, see the essay by Paul Benson, ‘Feeling Crazy: Self-Worth and the Social Character of Responsibility,’ in Mackenzie and Stoljar, Relational Autonomy, 72–93. See also Susan E.Babbitt, Impossible Dreams: Rationality, Integrity, and Moral Imagination (Boulder & Oxford: Westview Press, 1996). Robert A. Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude: Women’s Devotion to the Patron Saint of Lost Causes (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1996), 197ff. Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama, ‘Culture and the Self: Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation,’ Psychological Review, Vol. 98, No. 2, 1992, 224–53. The authors distinguish between an independent view of the self, common to American and many western European cultures, and an interdependent view, common in Asian, African, and Latin American cultures. They argue that attentiveness to one’s own feelings and attitudes is prevalent in cultures that are independent, while social responsiveness is a characteristic of interdependent cultures. ‘… for those with independent selves, agency will be experienced as an effort to express one’s internal needs, rights, and capacities and to withstand undue social pressure, whereas among those with interdependent selves, agency will be experienced as an effort to be receptive to others, to adjust to their needs and demands, and to restrain one’s own inner needs or desires. … From an interdependent view, modest responses may be experienced quite positively and engender the pleasant, other-focused feelings that are associated with connecting and maintaining interdependence.’ (240, 244)

458 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses 31. Asad, ‘Agency and Pain: An Exploration,’ Culture and Religion, Vol. 1, No. 1, May 2000, 40. 32. Talal Asad, ‘Agency and Pain,’ 35 (italics in original). 33. Mahmood, ‘Feminist Theory, 34. John Wesley, ‘The Character of a Methodist,’ in The Works of John Wesley (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), Vol. 9, 35–38. 35. Woody Allen, Without Feathers (New York: Warner Books, 1975), 193. 36. Catherine A. Brekus, Strangers & Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America 1740–1845, (Chapel Hill & London: U. of North Carolina Press, 1998); Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Signiﬁcance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: U. of California, 1987); R. Marie Grifﬁth, God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1997); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard U. Press, 1993); Pamela E. Klassen, Blessed Events: Religion and Home Birth in America (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 2001); Jone Salomonsen, Enchanted Feminism: The Reclaiming Witches of San Francisco (London & New York: Routledge, 2002). See also Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Preaching in 17thCentury England, (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1992). 37. Grifﬁth, God’s Daughters, 13–23, esp. 17. 38. Orsi, Thank You St. Jude, Chapter 7, ‘“There’s Miracles, and Miracles, and Miracles” The Cult of Hopeless Causes,’ 185–211. 39. On 17th century Quakers, see Mack, Visionary Women. 40. See, for example, Rebecca Larson, Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preaching and Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad, 1700–1775 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999) and Carla Gerona, ‘Mapping Ann Moore’s Secrets: Dream Production in LateEighteenth-Century Quaker Culture,’ Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Vol. 16, No. 2, Fall, 2000, 43–70. 41. John Rutty, A Spiritual Diary and Soliloquies (London: by James Phillips, 1776), 260. 42. John Bevington to M. Ellington, Eatington 6/10th mo/1748, ‘Fruits of Leisure,’ Mss. Vol. S 52, 4–5, Friends Historical Library, Friends House, London. 43. Monthly Magazine, 12 (1804) 14, quoted in Patricia Howell Michaelson, ‘Religious Bases of Eighteenth-Century Feminism: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Quakers,’ Women’s Studies, vol. 22, 1993, 286. 44. Samuel Fothergill to Catherine Payton, Warrington, 6th mo. 1762, Memoirs, 419. 45. On gender categories in the 18th century, see Dror Wahrman, ‘Percy’s Prologue: From Gender Play to Gender Panic in Eighteenth-Century England,’ Past and Present, No. 159, May, 1998, 113–60. 46. James Jenkins, The Records and Recollections of James Jenkins, ed. J. William Frost, Texts and Studies in Religion, Vol. 18 (New York & Toronto, 1984), (1776), 85. 47. Margaret Fell to Judge Sawrey, 1653, Spence Mss. 3/146, Friends Historical Library, London. 48. Sophia Hume, A Caution to such as observe Days and Times: To which is added, An Address to Magistrates, Parents, Masters of Families, etc., 5th ed., (London, 1766), 5, 15, 23. 49. See Ahearn’s discussion of Sherry Ortner and Raymond Williams on the inherent structural contradictions that prevent a simple reproduction of the hegemonic social order. (Ahearn, ‘Language and Agency,’ 120). 50. Catherine Phillips, Memoirs of the Life of Catherine Phillips: to which are added some of her Epistles (Philadelphia, 1798), 133, 141f. Payton was Catherine Phillips’ maiden name. 51. Phillips, Memoirs, 142. 52. Mary Peisley to F. Parvin, 1755, ‘Letters Dreams Visions,’ Mss. S.78, 253, Friends Historical Library, Friends House, London. 53. Mary Peisley to Ellin Evans, Philadelphia, 3rd month/10th day, 1756, Milcah Martha Moore Notebook, MSS. Howland Collection, Haverford Library Quaker Collection. 54. Mack, Visionary Women, 197–206.

Religion, Feminism, and the Problem of Agency 459 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68.

Samuel Fothergill, Memoirs, 124. Jenkins, Records and Recollections, 120–21, 461–62. Samuel Fothergill, Memoirs, 18. Rufus Jones, The Later Periods of Quakerism, 2 vols,. (London, Macmillan & Co.,Ltd., 1921), ch. 3, ‘Quietism in the Society of Friends,’ 57–103. Some Tracts relating to the Controversy between Hannah Barnard and the Society of Friends, wherein the Primitive Christian Principles of the said Society are Presented to the Public (London, 1802), 17. Jones, Later Periods of Quakerism, I, 293–98, 299–307. Barnard ﬁnally returned to America and was expelled from her home meeting, but continued to attend both Quaker and Unitarian services. For a discussion of the historiography of the campaign for greater discipline, see Nicholas Morgan, Lancashire Quakers and the Establishment, 1760–1830, (Krumlin, Halifax, 1993), ch. 7, ‘Discipline, Decline, and Mission.’ London Box Meeting Mss. (1759), Friends Historical Library, Friends House, London. Sheila Wright, Friends in York: The Dynamics of Quaker Revival (Keele, 1995), 31–67. Catherine Payton to a Friend, n.d., John Thompson Mss. 348 no. 417, Friends Historical Library, London. Joseph Woods to William Matthews, 1787, quoted in Margaret Hope Bacon, ‘The Establishment of London Women’s Yearly Meeting: A Transatlantic Connection,’ Journal of the Friends Historical Society, Vol. 57, No. 2 (1995), 151–65. Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality,’ in Graham Burdell et al., eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, (Chicago, 1991), 100–102. On the reform of Quakerism in the north and the leadership of women, see Wright, Friends in York, 31–67. E(sther) T(uke) to S(arah) G(rubb), 6th mo, 1782, Letters of William and Esther Tuke, Mss T 3/2, 88–89, Friends Historical Library. Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834, (N.Y. & London: Routledge, 1992), 147, 168–69, 178.

7.3 Bluestocking Fictions: Devotional Writings, Didactic Literature and the Imperative of Female Improvement Norma Clarke

In 1750, Catherine Talbot contributed an essay to Samuel Johnson’s periodical, The Rambler.1 Johnson wrote most of the 208 ‘ramblers’ himself, but he gave space on a few occasions to others: Elizabeth Carter, Samuel Richardson and Hester Mulso (later Chapone) as well as Talbot. Talbot’s piece was written in the persona of a day of the week – Sunday – and it was in the form of a letter to Mr Rambler from his ‘faithful friend and servant, Sunday’, writing in ‘his’ own defence and speaking his own praises. ‘Sunday’ outlined a history which included a long lost perfect time ‘when I lived according to my heart’s desire’, being looked upon ‘in every country parish as a kind of social bond between the squire, the parson, and the tenants’. The present was different. People had forgotten how to treat Sunday; they played cards and dice, or stayed in bed when Sunday came round, or went to the other extreme and would allow no gaiety on that day, only drear and melancholy sermons. Sunday explained what he wanted when he arrived: to be welcomed reasonably early by cheerful people who were neatly dressed, to have some quiet one-to-one talk, and then ‘pleasant walks and airings among sets of agreeable people’, followed by general conversation and well chosen books. There were ‘numberless books that are dedicated to me and go by my name’, as Sunday put it, which people would be the better for reading, but alas, ‘as the world stands at present’ Sunday’s very name made them ‘oftener thrown aside than taken up’. Talbot’s personiﬁcation of Sunday was a convenient ﬁction, amusingly shared with readers of The Rambler, some of whom played cards on Sundays, many of whom perhaps worried about what this said about the states of their souls. Her version of the ideal Sunday was designed to reassure. It approximated to the values of polite society: social, pleasant, bent on improvement, not specially earnest, and bookish in a relaxed sort of way. At about the same time that she wrote ‘Sunday’, Talbot was writing in a similar vein a number of short pieces that were published after her death as Reﬂections on the Seven Days of the Week (1770). This series of homilies were enormously popular: according to one estimate, 25,000 copies were sold in edition after edition well into the nineteenth century.2 They were among the ‘numberless’ books that aided devotion in cottage and country house, parlour and drawing room up and down the land. Like her 460

Bluestocking Fictions 461

contribution to The Rambler, Reﬂections revealed Talbot’s sensitivity to ‘the world’ as it stood at present, and her concern, as an elite woman, to fulﬁl what she saw as the duties of her station. Those duties included helping to conserve the established order (maintaining the social bond between squire, parson and tenants), a role in which polite literature could play a part. Talbot was the adoptive daughter of Bishop Secker, Dean of St Paul’s, later Archbishop of Canterbury; she grew up in the heart of the Anglican establishment, living for much of her adult life at Lambeth Palace. She could not go into the pulpit on Sunday and preach to a congregation any more than Samuel Johnson could do, but just as Johnson’s writings in The Rambler and elsewhere gave him moral authority, so too a woman’s reﬂections and ﬁctions, offered in a form which drew attention to spiritual matters, provided opportunities for leadership. Talbot’s Rambler essay and her Reﬂections addressed readers in the way sermons often did. Apparently introspective and autobiographical, the ‘I’ who featured – ‘Should I allow myself in any little froward Humours? Should I not be ashamed to appear peevish and ill-natured? – was the exemplary ‘I’ of the sermon or morality tale, abstractly human without being personal. The message offered in confessional mode was a message about innate human folly, vice, and wickedness and the ever present need of religious improvement to control their likely expression. Elizabeth Carter, seeing these texts into print, said they helped a reader like herself ‘acquire the temper and practise the duties of a Christian life’. They did so by making the narrator’s inner struggles available in order to voice injunctions to others from a position of assurance. In the mid-eighteenth century, distinctions between genres such as the periodical essay, the published sermon, devotional writings, moral tales and realistic and fanciful ﬁctions were ﬂuid, especially in the sense that the same people were often trying their hand at all these and other forms.3 Women sometimes wrote actual sermons – for the sake of the exercise or to help out clergymen less gifted than themselves; and considering the number of sermons the average eighteenth-century woman sat through it is hardly surprising. Mary Deverell raised subscriptions in Bristol for her Sermons on the Following Subjects in 1774. (Hannah More or one of her sisters subscribed: a ‘Mrs More of Bristol’ is listed.) Meanwhile, what Brian Young has described as the ‘interpenetration of the ﬁctional and the religious [which] informed much literary engagement in this period’, has implications for any consideration of the bluestockings, some of whom, like Talbot, published devotional writing and others, like Hester Chapone, didactic literature addressed speciﬁcally to women. Living, as many did, in clergy households, accustomed to ﬁnd that their appetite for intellectual and moral debate was most often fed by clergymen friends and relations, they had little difﬁculty adopting the ﬁctive voice of the preacher which gave them authority to address imaginary congregations in print.4 Pointing out that theology of every kind was written with ‘a strong sense of the competing attractions offered by novels, poems and plays’, Young goes so far as to say: ‘it is often difﬁcult to make any ready separation between the world of ﬁction and that of theological books.’ Young applied his observation to male

462 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

writers like Daniel Waterland, William Warburton and Richard Hurd, polemical divines whose learning extended into literature: Hurd, an enthusiast for Spenser, wrote on romance and chivalry; Warburton edited Pope and Shakespeare. Both were avid readers of Richardson, recommending him to their correspondents and, in Warburton’s case, providing a preface to Clarissa. Richard Graves, whose The Spiritual Quixote (1773) was a ‘comic romance’ which consciously evoked in its title Charlotte Lennox’s comic romance, The Female Quixote (1752), praised Bishop Warburton as ‘one of the ﬁrst writers of the age for genius and learning’. Graves defended his own ﬁctions, and those of other clergymen like Laurence Sterne whose Sermons of Parson Yorick (1760) had been considered frivolous by some, on the grounds that ﬁction and moral theology served the same ends: Don Quixote or Gil Blas, Clarissa or Sir Charles Grandison, will furnish more hints for correcting the morals of young persons, and impress them more forcibly on their minds, than volumes of severe precepts seriously delivered and dogmatically inforced.5 Theology, ‘seriously delivered’, was less effective than ﬁction in delivering ‘hints for correcting the morals of young persons’; and ‘hints’ were preferable to dogmatic enforcements, a view which ﬁction – especially Clarissa, in which a moral young woman is destroyed by an immoral young man because of the dogmatic enforcement of parental precept – had helped bring about. Not all ﬁction, of course. Learned clergymen did not edit the works of Eliza Haywood whose Love in Excess of 1719 launched a career that was so proliﬁc and so successful that her name and style deﬁned female-authored ﬁction for many decades afterwards. Fiction-writing women, until they demonstrated otherwise, were assumed to be writing of love and the body and to be leading women readers astray. Henry Fielding might create a Parson Adams and write Joseph Andrews in a style that could be described as ‘a species of secular sermon’, but any woman who wrote ﬁction after the 1730s wrote in the shadow of Fielding’s friend Haywood, dubbed by him: ‘Mrs Novel’. Those who ventured instead onto religious ground might ﬁnd their contributions welcomed – so long as they took care to emphasise what was agreeable and polite – as a corrective to the divisively controversial tendencies of theological men. Leadership, and the ﬁtness of certain women to be examples and guides to women in general, was the rationale for many kinds of writing.6 John Duncombe, in The Feminiad (1754), attacked ‘lordly man’, that ‘tyrant of verse and arbiter of wit’ for having disregarded female genius for so long. Duncombe’s poem eulogised ‘the blooming, studious band’ of female authors such as Elizabeth Rowe, Catharine Cockburn, Elizabeth Carter and others whose writings demonstrated that women had minds as well as souls and in whom heavenly virtue displayed itself as female beauty: Tell how, adorn’d with every charm they shine, In mind and person equally divine,

Bluestocking Fictions 463

Till man, no more to female merit blind, Admire the person, but adore the mind. Studious women – especially those who, like the Countess of Hertford, united ‘The Peeress, Poetess and Christian’ – set an example of virtuous living by displaying their ability to combine piety and domesticity with mental improvement. Elite women were specially urged to contribute to the improvement of ‘the sex’. Wishing for mental improvement was in itself a sign of virtue, for in the rhetoric of clever women and progressive men like Duncombe the lack of education was identiﬁed as a major source of female folly and vice. Indignation at the oppression of women – ‘those restraints which have our sex conﬁn’d’ as the philosopher Catharine Cockburn put it in her ‘Poem occasioned by the busts set up in the Queen’s hermitage’ (1732) – signalled not licentious desires but anger at the limitations put on women’s scope for being good. Cockburn explained that women were corrupted because they were denied access to science and knowledge. They needed guidance to ‘reform their taste’, and give up ‘triﬂing pleasures’. With the right kind of help they would turn from quadrille and cards, and spend their hitherto ‘vacant hours’ purposefully reading philosophy.7 If the studious were virtue’s ‘friends’, the supposedly non-studious, those servants of ‘tuneful’ but ‘wanton’ muses, were virtue’s ‘female foes’. George Ballard explained that he had not included any women of ‘gay imagination’ such as the well-known playwrights Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley and Susannah Centlivre, in his Memoirs of British Ladies who have been celebrated for their writings or skill in the learned languages, arts and sciences (1752) because ‘none of that slight sisterhood were ever thought women of learning, or had any pretence to be called women of knowledge’.8 They carried ‘more sail than ballast’. Carrying sail rather than ballast was the intellectual equivalent of wearing make up and jewellery to cover ravage and disease – it was morally suspect. John Duncombe followed Ballard, adding autobiographers Laetitia Pilkington, Constantia Phillips and Lady Frances Vane, to the list of ‘Vice’s friends and virtue’s female foes’ who were named in order to be cast out of The Feminiad’s ‘studious band’. A note explained that they could not expect ‘impartial praise’ for their ‘genuine wit’ and harmonious verse because they had ‘endeavoured to immortalize their shame, by writing and publishing their own memoirs’. Such an exercise was not necessarily considered bad in itself: Catherine Talbot, her mother and the Archbishop enjoyed Laetitia Pilkington’s Memoirs when it was read aloud in the family circle at Lambeth Palace; and Elizabeth Montagu was no less avid a reader. The problem lay beyond, in the damage that might be done to weaker minds, those unprotected by rank and education. The bluestocking ideal was of self-realisation through intellectual cultivation. There was also a bluestocking agenda which concerned itself with reform of the female sex. The leading mid-century bluestockings did not write novels: Elizabeth Carter was a poet and Greek scholar, Elizabeth Montagu a literary critic, Catherine Talbot an essayist, and Hester Chapone wrote conduct literature. They did much to reinforce an antithesis between the supposedly morally deleterious

464 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

ﬁctions of writers like Behn, Haywood and Manley, and safely ‘improving’ devotional or didactic works. This antithesis depended on ﬁctions of its own, chieﬂy that women needed to be improved and that the female tendency towards novels – as writers and as readers – was a cause for concern. There was an obligation on those who had knowledge and position both to write and promote. Catherine Talbot read Catharine Cockburn, whose Life and a selection of works were posthumously published in 1752. Cockburn’s major work was a defence of John Locke (1702) but she had also put her much-admired powers of reasoning to work on theological questions. The message Talbot took from her reading was that Cockburn had been ‘a remarkable genius’, and that ‘those who knew such merit did not do their duty in letting it remain so obscure’.9 Talbot’s own secular sermons built on a tradition of female piety which had its origins in the Puritan emphasis on introspection and self examination. The pious provided examples to others of how a godly life might be lived, either through their deeds or by writing their own works, or, most commonly, by furnishing the materials – diaries, letters, spiritual autobiographies – for an exemplary Life, assembled and put out into the world by grieving friends. Piety could not puff itself; the fact that much active goodness remained private was itself praiseworthy, as John Mayer’s funeral sermon for Mrs Lucy Thornton in 1639, in which he explained that the ‘singular, pious and charitable acts done by her in so great closenes, were hidden from my knowledge’, made clear.10 When Elizabeth Carter saw Talbot’s Reﬂections on the Seven Days of the Week into print soon after her death it was in a similar spirit. Talbot’s concern for privacy had demonstrated her piety; Carter had every conﬁdence that much of her friend’s life was hidden from her knowledge, and that it contained more pious and charitable acts than she happened to know about. She had no less conﬁdence, however, about Talbot’s desire that her writings should reach a public – especially women – for this, too, was a manifestation of Talbot’s worth: much had been given to her and it was appropriate that she should seek to give something back that would be of help to others. The Puritan tradition included female visionaries and preachers – an element in the history of female piety with which the bluestockings did not wish to be associated; for crowds might easily become mobs and threaten property, while inﬂamed feelings rooted in religious conviction evoked the religious controversies and political upheaval of the seventeenth century. More signiﬁcant still were the implications of social levelling: the spiritual fervour of poor men highlighted the indolence and prerogatives of ordained clergy; inspired women telling men what God wanted them to do upset the hierarchy of genders. Although the bluestockings joked about men being the ‘lords of creation’, and while Elizabeth Carter admitted to ‘a bias’ in favour of the female sex, they did not challenge the biblically ordained subordination of women. They argued, instead, for exceptionality. Some women (they themselves being cases in point) were superior to many men; but women in general were properly to be considered and consider themselves inferior. It followed

Bluestocking Fictions 465

that all women needed to learn appropriate skills to manage what might sometimes be awkward situations: a clever woman in company with less clever men; a right-minded woman required to obey wrong-minded men. These were challenging demands which called upon reservoirs of self control. Self control was neither naturally occurring nor ever assured: it was a goal always to be striven for. At the level of religious belief, this was the logic that maintained the bluestocking drive towards self-improvement and made it legitimate to preach to others through books and social activism. Talbot’s Reﬂections on the Seven Days of the Week were designed, in Carter’s words, to help a reader practise the duties of a Christian life but only after the ‘temper’ had been sufﬁciently adjusted. The management of temper was speciﬁcally addressed by Talbot as her central concern: ‘Let me then ask myself, as in his Sight, what is the general Turn of my Temper, and Disposition of my Mind?’ Under the all-seeing eye of God, the implied answer to this rhetorical question was likely to include the need for improvement: the general turn of anyone’s temper would be not quite good enough. Talbot reﬂects: ‘Among other Works, that of reforming my Temper is surely a most necessary one.’ The hunger and thirst after righteousness, which Talbot took as her text for Monday’s reﬂections (‘Blessed are they that do hunger and thirst after righteousness’) would be nourished by ‘pious Books and Thoughts’. Once nourished, it needed to act: ‘if I am always shut up in my Closet, and spend my Time in nothing but Exercises of Devotion, I shall be looked upon as morose and hypocritical, and be disregarded as useless in the World.’ One of the ways of being useful in the world was to help reform and improve the temper of others.11 Among the duties of a Christian life were sociability and amiability – prerequisites for service to our fellow creatures. Pious books were part of the package but even they participated in the ‘idleness’ which in Tuesday’s reﬂections Talbot warned would assault all readers, leading to the sort of inwardness in which the mind would ‘prey too much’ on itself. The thinking mind featured in Reﬂections as a source of anxiety, producing anxious thoughts and occasioning anxious thinking. The self constituted on the page was one whose motives were endlessly called into question. Talbot worried at her own behaviour, splitting off performed actions from imagined ideals, inviting a like response from the reader. Readers could not judge if Talbot’s persona had behaved well or badly in the life lived beyond the page, but they could scrutinise their own motivations and actions. That is, they could perform the activity Talbot demonstrated in relation to their own lives. They could emulate her, asking: Am I good enough? Have I done enough? In responding in this way they responded as readers of pious exemplary Lives were imagined to respond, resolving always to do better; although unlike the subjects of exemplary Lives, what Talbot offered for emulation was a character seeking to be good in contradictory ways, at once sociable and retired, active and passive, assertive and difﬁdent. The Reﬂections pointedly served, or serviced, states of mind that were expected to recur. That state of mind – that ‘temper’ – in Talbot’s version of the genre would seem to be at best a worried one; at worst, fraught with the effort to resolve contradictions.

466 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

Talbot often expressed despair at what she considered her own failure to manage time, temper, and the demands of a busy life. In a correspondence extending over more than twenty years, Carter repeatedly responded to Talbot’s apparent desire for a solution by encouraging her to be less introspective (to avoid being ‘so scrupulously cautious … not to misemploy the least moment’) and think instead how she could contribute to the improvement of others. Carter suggested Talbot undertake a literary task very dear to her own heart. This was, to edit the letters and other papers of Elizabeth Rowe which were in the possession of the Duchess of Somerset at whose country home Talbot made lengthy visits. Although Reﬂections on the Seven Days of the Week was not published until after her death, Talbot had in fact been an active ﬁgure on the literary scene for all of her adult life. From early note as a brilliant young woman she had progressed to becoming one of Samuel Richardson’s trusted advisors. Editing work was her forte: Richardson gave her the task of correcting the manuscript of Sir Charles Grandison for the press, all seven long volumes, making the winter that she spent in London working on this gruelling task the most ‘agreeable’ one she had ever spent in town. In Carter’s view, Rowe’s work was as improving for women as the writings of Samuel Richardson (or, indeed, more so: Carter admitted to yawning over Richardson’s ‘prolixity’). Carter was always urging her friends to read ‘the pious Mrs Rowe’ who died in 1737and whose Friendship in Death, or, Letters from the Dead to the Living (1728), Letters Moral and Entertaining (1729–32) and Devout Exercises of the Heart (1737) were very well known. (And much reprinted: the British Library catalogue has over 60 entries for Devout Exercises.) Carter contributed a commendatory poem, ‘On the Death of Mrs Rowe’, to the Life and Works of Elizabeth Rowe which was published in 1739 and, as a young editor, she oversaw the serialisation of the Life in the Gentleman’s Magazine. Rowe had been an important precursor for Carter whose early moves into public attention as a ﬂedgling writer seem to have taken strength from Rowe’s example: like Mrs Rowe (nee Singer) Carter began by sending poems to the principal literary magazine of the day and had been made much of for being young, female, precocious and good. The Life of Mrs Rowe, often printed in its own right as an exemplary Life, was among the earliest biographies of a woman who was fully received and celebrated as an author. Rowe’s career, beginning in the 1690s, had extended across ﬁve decades. She was so famous, especially for her devotion to solitude and a private life, that John Duncombe, in a note to The Feminiad, explained that the character of Mrs Rowe and her writings was ‘too well known to be dwelt on here’. Rowe’s piety, and her reputation for piety, made her the acceptable face of female authorship. She paraphrased the Bible, wrote poems and songs praising God in fervid strains, and dwelt at length on the afterlife. Much of her theology was delivered by means of ﬁction. Friendship in Death and Letters Moral and Entertaining, short prose narratives in the epistolary mode that Richardson was later to develop to such a high degree of sophistication in Pamela and Clarissa, taught the value of living virtuously on earth in order to reap reward in Heaven.

Bluestocking Fictions 467

John Richetti dubbed her ‘aggressively didactic’ and put her in a chapter called ‘The Novel as Pious Polemic’ in his early study, Popular Fiction before Richardson. There is no denying that Rowe’s narratives all preached the same message. However, they preached it by appealing to the imagination and the senses rather than the intellect. Mrs Rowe made no special claims about her mental gifts. Friendship in Death and Letters Moral and Entertaining are simply written and have melodramatic story lines involving pirates, lost lovers, repentant rakes, faraway lands, nuns and so on. The romance elements are pronounced. Or, to put that another way, the same readers who read Eliza Haywood might ﬁnd plenty to enjoy in Mrs Rowe.12 For Elizabeth Carter, hoping to persuade Talbot to assemble Rowe’s disparate writings and shape them into a book so that readers of her own time and the future would have access to them, Rowe ﬁtted comfortably within bluestocking ideology. Carter was, like all the bluestockings, an eager reader of ﬁction and seems to have valued its capacity to present human life in morally complex ways – she defended the novels of Henry Fielding, for example, against those who objected to his earthy humour. Far from being ‘aggressively didactic’, Rowe offered standard novelistic fare: life stories, individual narrative voices, drama, conﬂict, and recognisable social spaces in which passions played themselves out. Carter’s own father, the Rev Nicholas Carter, worried that Rowe was ‘too enthusiastic’, but his theological concerns were not shared by his daughter. She put some pressure on Talbot, writing to her when she was staying with the Duchess of Somerset in 1753: ‘I hope a few of your leisure hours will be bestowed on that most excellent green book which I so sincerely wish to have the world better for’. The world would be ‘better’ for it and so would Talbot herself: the task would serve her much as the editing of Sir Charles Grandison had done. Talbot replied: ‘I have read it carefully, but can ﬁnd no order no connection in it. It wants an introduction – so it is returned to the considering drawer, with many of its ancestors.’ The ‘ancestors’ were other literary projects Talbot had begun and left unﬁnished. Her rhetoric about herself customarily suggested self-blame, either for idleness or incapacity of one sort or another. Meanwhile, her days were ﬁlled with the social, managerial and practical duties of a bishop’s household, conscientiously performed. Did the duties of her station, or timidity about her abilities, inhibit her writing? The standard modern response, drawn mostly from Talbot’s exchanges with Carter, offers some combination of difﬁdence and drudgery, depicting Talbot as a nervous and inward thinker in need of stronger minds to encourage her into the world, and fatally hampered by domestic chores. In this explanatory framework, Carter’s urgings served the cause of female improvement and self-realisation, tending to liberate Talbot into selfbelief and autonomous action; meanwhile, her deference to Bishop Secker held her back. But the evidence of the ‘ancestors’ and ‘the considering drawer’, combined with the signiﬁcant quantity of writing Talbot actually accomplished – including the regular long letters to other bluestockings about her inability to be as productive as she wished to be – make other interpretations possible.

468 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

Talbot’s ‘idleness’ with regard to literary work was very relative. Reading her version of herself less as a mirror of social and subjective reality and more as a product of bluestocking rhetoric, it can be argued that she produced a ﬁction of the times that reﬂected the equivocal position of women with literary ambitions whose stories, if they did not resemble sermons, might be mistakenly aligned with the stories of those of ‘gay imagination’ like Behn, Manley and the early Eliza Haywood. (In the 1750s Haywood changed her image and became ‘moral’ as well as ‘entertaining’.) Generically speaking, the sermon provided the template. This had not been a pressure Elizabeth Rowe had had to take into account, for the signiﬁcant change took place in the 1740s after her death. The key ﬁgure was Samuel Richardson, whose Pamela was the original ‘secular sermon’ that Fielding parodied in Joseph Andrews. This development is even clearer in the writings of Hester Chapone, whose 1773 Letters on the Improvement of the Mind disseminated the bluestocking ideal more comprehensively than any other single production of the era. Chapone’s response to Carter’s ‘reproach’ for ‘not remembering’ the works of Mrs Rowe was to read them in 1761 and send Carter some censorious comments on the earlier writer: I am extremely charmed with the ﬁrst, [Letters from the Dead to the Living] where her luxuriant imagination has so ﬁne a ﬁeld to display itself in. But the other set of letters, [Letters Moral and Entertaining] which treat of matters we are more acquainted with, seem to me much too romantic and unnatural. Her descriptions of the state of the blessed are after my own heart, and exactly suit the rovings of my own fancy. She treats us too with some pretty poetry, here and there, on that subject. But her devotion is too poetical for me, and savours too much of the extravagancies of the mystics. When I hear persons addressing the Supreme Being in the language of the most sensual and extravagant human love, I cannot help fancying they went mad on a disappointment of that passion, when it was placed more naturally. This, however, was not Mrs Rowe’s case, for I think she was remarkably happy in marriage. I am the more surprised that her affections broke out into such wild torrents, since they had a free course in their natural channel. I know she is a great favourite of yours, and, perhaps, you will hardly forgive this censure.13 For Chapone, Rowe’s writings were ‘too romantic’, ‘unnatural’ and suspiciously sensual. Rowe apparently failed to control her sexual feelings. Reading Rowe would not guide a woman towards self control. It may be that part of Talbot’s reluctance or inability to work on Rowe’s papers had its origin in similar responses, marking not only temperamental differences but also shifts in ideology. As a pious writer, Rowe took her place on the bookshelves of those like the father of Eliza Fletcher, whose small library held, ‘the Spectator, Milton’s Works, Shakespeare’s Plays, Pope’s and Dryden’s Poems, Hervey’s Meditations, Mrs Rowe’s Letters, Shenstone’s Poems, Sherlock’s Sermons, with some abridgements of history and geography’. Eliza Fletcher’s father was not

Bluestocking Fictions 469

troubled by any ‘too romantic’ strain: devotional writing of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century characteristically featured the ecstatic communion of the soul with God amid images of bodies melting in pure harmony. Rowe offered readers something more akin to the mixed ingredients of communal worship than the introspection and self scrutiny that Talbot provided. With a mix of narrative, song, celebration, and shared visualising of the pleasures of the afterlife, her books suggest sociable exchange rather than private communion. They projected comfort and reassurance, they did not exhort. Rowe’s persona appeared comfortable with herself and the conditions of her life, whether spending time alone in her room, or roaming the ﬁelds, or as a candidate for an even more comfortable afterlife. Such comfort was shown as being rooted in the contingencies of daily life. It was not an abstract ideal to be reached or missed, but a lived reality. It could not be taught; it could only be discovered and lived by each individual. She did not yearn to be improved nor complain that being female had limited her aspirations. Towards improvement, however, readers were now directed by those who convincingly insisted upon the need. The young girl had been popularised as a subject to be moralised upon in print by Richardson’s Pamela. Talbot was not the only woman for whom friendship with Richardson served as a training ground in critical thinking for the purposes of leadership. Hester Chapone was an active member of Richardson’s inner circle. Chapone (then Mulso) used her relationship with Richardson to very good effect, taking up issues to do with ﬁlial obedience in his novels and engaging in epistolary debate with him. Her essays were later published, but even before they were published the fact that she was writing in this way gave her some celebrity. The subject, ‘ﬁlial obedience’, was obviously one close to her heart since she was a young woman herself at the time of writing but it also deﬁned an audience or readership that she herself could address. She was spokeswoman and representative, speaking on behalf of young women and also speaking out to them. Both Chapone and Talbot saw their own writings as a part of the Richardsonian project, not as oppositional to it. They seemed to see little distinction between his ﬁctions and their devotional or didactic writing so far as the imagined reader, and their relationship as writers to that reader, was concerned. It was in the interests of all writers to produce obedient and rather docile readers, the model being some idealised young person listening to a sermon on a Sunday morning and dutifully rehearsing the main points with Father afterwards. A deferential reader is the ﬁrst requirement for successful didactic literature. Didactic literature depends on a community willing to be instructed, and young girls were obvious targets for older women to address. This was not new. It was in the tradition established by writers like Lord Halifax (Advice to a Daughter, 1688) James Fordyce (Sermons to Young Women, 1766) and Dr John Gregory (A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters, 1774). The full title of Chapone’s major work – reprinted 57 times between 1773 and 1851 – was: Letters on the Improvement of the Mind addressed to a young lady. Just as there were many books published ‘by a lady’ or ‘by a young lady’ so there were many books

470 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

addressed to this same ﬁgure (or ﬁgment), who was present, too, in the ﬁerce attacks on novel reading that issued from pulpits and in print. Mrs Chapone addressed her Letters to a niece: ‘I, who love you so tenderly, cannot help fondly wishing to contribute something, if possible, to your improvement and welfare’. That ‘something’ was no small matter but ‘Truths of the highest importance’. At ﬁfteen, it was time for her niece to grow up and enter the adult world where the choice between virtue and vice was an absolute requirement. God, Mrs Chapone declared, ‘has annexed happiness to virtue, and misery to vice, by the unchangeable nature of things.’ If the nature of things was unchangeable, the nature of humans, at ﬁfteen and female, was not. Virtue and happiness lay along one path and vice and misery along the other. This divide was also a divide between mind and body. Although Mrs Chapone was more inclined than other bluestockings to allow for the claims of sexual love in marriage, in her writings she shared with them a nervousness about the likely effects of love on women. Letter 5, ‘On the regulation of the Heart and Affections’ treated brieﬂy of conjugal love, as a sub-division of same-sex friendship; the discussion was preceded by an extended passage on the advantages to a very young woman of having an older woman friend. Everything was to be subordinated to the control of mind, including the most important decision in a girl’s life: the irrevocable choice of a husband. Passion was represented as an over-riding danger, for passion could get ‘possession of the heart, and silence both reason and principle’. All improvement of the mind was directed towards this its main task in life: the control of passion, the regulation of feeling, the need to be obedient to parents. This was the ‘truth of the highest importance’.14 Obedience to parents had been the issue Chapone raised with Richardson. In 1750 she argued on the side of the young and against absolute obedience to parents. Perhaps as she aged so her views altered, but what we also witness here is the inﬂuence of bluestocking ideology. Chapone was well integrated into bluestocking circles, having mounted via her friendship with Carter into a client/ friend relation with her patron Elizabeth Montagu. (Montagu supervised the writing and publication of Letters on the Improvement of the Mind.) Montagu and Carter were both thoroughly Establishment ﬁgures, supporting Church and State, God and King. They were well respected, afﬂuent, and had found ways of living intellectual lives that were satisfying to them, either as a wife (Montagu) or a spinster (Carter). Montagu had published her Essay on the Genius of Shakespeare; Carter her translation of All the Works of Epictetus. Freedom for women, in their view, lay in the cultivation of mind at the expense of cultivation of the passions. Obedience was a cardinal rule for both. Obedience involved regulation of feeling (Talbot’s ‘temper of a christian’). Mind, as regulator of feeling, was key. Mind could ﬁnd ways of being obedient and still being free, as Montagu had managed to do in her marriage, as Carter did in her life, so long as passion didn’t prevail. Widowed early in adult life and ﬁnancially insecure, Chapone’s drive to improve herself and help improve the minds of others had urgent material application. Chapone’s writings, ﬁnding their way into almost every girl’s schoolroom in the land, came to symbolise constraint. (Mrs Chapone is among the authors

Bluestocking Fictions 471

thrown out of the carriage by Becky Sharp as she escapes school in the opening pages of Vanity Fair.) They were of course used by older women in exactly that sense, as aids to external control of the young; her writings appealed to teachers also because they offered an idealised view of the life of the mind, one which resembled religious practice, especially the nun-like version which put obedience at the centre. The relationship was deferential; authority lay in the printed word. Histories of publishing and studies of women’s reading make clear that religious and devotional writings made up by far the largest category of printed materials in the eighteenth century. Didactic or prescriptive literature directed towards young women was to be the genre of writing most strongly associated with the bluestockings, and it built on this ready-made readership. A devotional attitude towards reading in general was encouraged, stemming from religious practice and the prevalence of devotional books but universalised as the appropriate mode for all reading. Clearly not all books allowed themselves to be read in devotional fashion; there was, nevertheless, a desire amongst serious-minded readers to bring the posture of the devout – supplicant, obedient, expectant – to the act of reading, a posture carried over from the reading of Bible, sermons and prayers (and from the previous scarcity and expense of books). Such a desire in effect sought to make all books approximate to the Book, the Bible, and to make reading practice approximate in some ways to prayer. The ﬁrst three letters in Letters on the Improvement of the Mind were on the principles of religion and the study of the holy scriptures. Devotional and didactic reading and writing was as much engaged in delineating and deﬁning subjectivities as any eighteenth century novel. But whereas the uncertain boundary between truth and ﬁction was a commonplace of the eighteenth century novel, in religious and devotional writing truth had a home: the Bible was the word of God, and the task of the reader was to ﬁt herself to receive that truth. The posture was deferential, the struggle was to feel oneself to be worthy. The real freedom was to move from being a reader to being a writer – this was the shift from deference to authority. The woman who regulated her feelings could gain the freedoms that were available to a properly improved mind. But the freedom of being the writer rather than the reader was never explicitly spoken and it was certainly never recommended to others as such. Individually driven and hidden, it reveals itself when we follow the logic of the ideology of exceptionality and the duties of rank. Introspection and self-scrutiny licensed a certain kind of writing which was itself licensed by the expectation that elite women had a duty to lead lesser women. For this reason it is as well to treat with some scepticism the notion of ‘a buried talent’ or ‘a reclusive and constrained life’ – phrases used to describe Catherine Talbot whose writings were so widely read, and whose days were spent in the ‘hurry’ of high-ranking sociability and Christian responsibility. What have been interpreted as Talbot’s ‘agonies of self-doubt’ were not necessarily anything to do with self-conﬁdence about leadership and public life, and if it is true that she was a victim of ‘self loathing’ it may not have been because she was worried about wishing to write. Rather, we should see what has been called her ‘unhappy resignation to her role of modestly

472 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

but variously occupied lady’, as a ﬁction.15 Talbot (and those who wrote about her) produced a ﬁction of the writing self which suited the mid-century, as Elizabeth Rowe served the early eighteenth century and Hester Chapone the later. Taken together, the three offer us a continuity in modes of ﬁguring the woman writer as a ﬁtting example to others. Leadership, and the freedom of the writer (the exceptional woman) required and rested on the unfreedom of the reader (the unexceptional woman), a view which ﬁtted well with the bluestocking acceptance of social hierarchy. Mrs Chapone warned her niece not to mix with the lower orders: ‘Above all things avoid intimacy with those of low birth and education.’ The injunction serves equally as a metaphor for generic choices: the bluestockings wanted above all things to avoid being associated with ‘low’ genres of writing – especially female-authored commercial ﬁction. Their own writings, however, were appropriated in unexpected ways. William Hayley, for example, achieved a spectacular success with his poem, The Triumphs of Temper (1781) which depicted a woman regulating her feelings. He was undoubtedly the beneﬁciary of a readership primed by writings of a much more earnest sort. Emma Hamilton read The Triumphs of Temper in devout fashion and was painted by Romney as the Serena of that poem (looking very earnest and devout as she read). She claimed to have learnt from her reading how to get and keep her man – Sir William Hamilton in this case, not Nelson (yet). These weren’t the improvements the bluestockings intended, nor the duties of a Christian life Elizabeth Carter had in mind. But Hayley’s vulgarisation of the ideal may help us see how the emphasis on obedience, deference to authority, reverence for order and hierarchy (including the gender hierarchy) produced rewards, both for those who were in a position to instruct others and for those who could show – by the reverential postures associated with reading, by the display of difﬁdence and self-doubt – that they were in need of being instructed.

Notes 1. Reprinted in Bluestocking Feminism. Writings of the Bluestocking Circle, 1738–1785, vol. 3, Hester Chapone and Catherine Talbot, ed. Rhoda Zuk (Pickering & Chatto, 1999) pp. 37–42. 2. Ibid., p. 43. Montagu Pennington, nephew of Elizabeth Carter, who edited and published the letters between Carter and Talbot, made this estimate in 1809. There were thirty-ﬁve separate editions and reprints of Reﬂections between 1777–1861, and it was also published in the ﬁve editions of Talbot’s Essays, and the ﬁve editions of her Works. For Talbot see Sylvia Harcstark Myers, The Bluestocking Circle. Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1990), Chapter 8, ‘“A Buried Talent”: the Writings of Catherine Talbot’, pp. 207–28. 3. Brian Young makes this point in, ‘Theological Books from The Naked Gospel to Nemesis of Faith’ in Isabel Rivers (ed.) Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays (Leicester University Press, 2001) pp. 79–104. 4. Ibid., p. 84. Talbot lived with the bishop; Carter’s father and brothers were clergymen; Chapone often stayed with her uncle the Bishop of Peterborough. It would be easy to multiply examples. 5. Quoted in Young, p. 86.

Bluestocking Fictions 473 6. This argument is developed at greater length in Norma Clarke, The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters (Pimlico Original, 2004). 7. For Cockburn (nee Trotter) see, Anne Kelley, Catharine Trotter, an Early Modern Writer in the Vanguard of Feminism (Ashgate, 2002). 8. George Ballard, Memoirs of British Ladies, (ed.) Ruth Perry, (Wayne State University Press, 1985). 9. Myers, Bluestocking Circle, p. 164. 10. Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720 (Routledge, 1993) p. 79. 11. Reﬂections on the Seven Days of the Week, in Bluestocking Feminism, pp. 43–67. 12. Sarah Prescott, Women, Authorship and Literary Culture, 1690–1740 (Palgrave, 2003) gives a good account of Rowe. See also, Clarke, The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters. 13. The Works of Mrs Chapone (1807), vol. 1, pp. 123–4. 14. Letters on the Improvement of the Mind is reprinted in Bluestocking Feminism, vol. 3, pp. 257–356. 15. Rhoda Zuk, Introduction to Catherine Talbot, Bluestocking Feminism, vol. 3.

7.4 ‘With Mrs Barbauld it is different’: Dissenting Heritage and the Devotional Taste Daniel E. White

In a letter of August 1804, Anna Barbauld responded to Maria Edgeworth’s announcement that her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, had proposed a plan for a ‘periodical paper, to be written entirely by ladies’.1 In her response, Barbauld foresaw the problem of division between different groups of women writers: ‘There is no bond of union among literary women, any more than among literary men; different sentiments and different connections separate them much more than the joint interest of their sex would unite them. Mrs. Hannah More would not write along with you or me, and we should probably hesitate at joining Miss Hays, or if she were living, Mrs. Godwin.’2 The current reevaluation of Barbauld’s career has led critics to place her among the foremost poets of a revised late-eighteenth-century canon, but Barbauld’s refusal to see gender as the primary determinant of literary or political afﬁnity, as well as her rejection in 1774 of a proposal that she become principal of a Ladies’ College, has conﬁrmed her in the eyes of some as an anti-feminist.3 William McCarthy, on the other hand, has analyzed the ways in which feminist ‘desire takes the form of compensatory fantasy’ in her poetry, thus helpfully critiquing the ‘cardboard antifeminist image of Barbauld’.4 By the same token, we need to be careful not to go to the opposite extreme and create a cardboard feminist image of Barbauld. Enlightenment feminism, in fact, in the sense of an active and conscious effort to theorize and realize educational, social, economic, and (to a lesser extent) political equality for women in the modes of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and later Harriet Martineau, was not a central element of Barbauld’s literary work. As an agile thinker and a consistently commanding prose stylist, Barbauld did produce in her religious writings a noteworthy analysis and manipulation of eighteenth-century devotional theory and denominational cultures, elements of which at times involved deep-seated gendered associations.5 In this essay, then, I will bracket the question of her feminism and address instead the relations between Barbauld’s devotional thought and her Dissenting heritage, attending, when possible, to the gendered terms of Enlightenment religious history. In the letter with which I began, Barbauld places herself and Edgeworth between female radicals and conservatives. Her letter continues: ‘There is a great 474

Dissenting Heritage and the Devotional Taste 475

difference between a paper written by a lady, and as a lady. To write professedly as a female junto seems in some measure to suggest a certain cast of sentiment, and you would write in trammels. If a number of clergymen were to join in writing a paper, I think they should not call it “The Clergymen’s Paper”, except they meant to make it chieﬂy theological.’6 Barbauld’s simultaneous resistance to participating in a ‘female junto’ and her acute awareness of gender politics indicate that the binary terms of feminist/anti-feminist may not be sufﬁcient to a contemporary understanding of her literary, political, and religious writings. The best recent work on Barbauld, by Anne Janowitz, Lucy Newlyn, Jon Mee, and Deirdre Coleman, has consistently emphasized the extent to which Barbauld reﬂected on and dialectically critiqued her own positions over the course of her career.7 Janowitz thus sees a transition from the amiability of Warrington conversation and friendship to the ardour of Barbauld’s poetry and pamphlets produced in Hampstead and London: ‘In her urban poetry of the late 1780s and early 1790s, Barbauld concretized and dialectically criticized the abstractions of Warrington values and manners.’8 Along with her reﬂections upon her own positions came a general impetus to criticize and manipulate identities usually seen as natural and innate, or at least as ﬁxed and established. This impetus has led Newlyn and others to focus on the ‘ambiguity’ and ‘androgyny’ of her negotiations: Barbauld’s ‘aesthetic of sensibility’, Newlyn proposes, ‘mediated between masculinity and femininity… . Positioning herself ambiguously in relation to gender-oppositions, Barbauld demands from her own readers a response that is similarly androgynous and empathetic’.9 And writing of Barbauld’s conﬂicts with Priestley, Mee suggests that ‘Understanding their relationship only in terms of feminine-gendered sensibility versus masculine-gendered reason obscures both the nuances and vicissitudes of their exchanges.’10 In keeping with these approaches, I here propose that an important strain of Barbauld’s religious thought is produced by a daring analysis and reconﬁguration of powerful associations between denominational cultures and devotional practices, associations that were inextricable from the complexly gendered movement away from cold abstraction and rationalism and toward a morality of the senses and passions during the mid- to late-eighteenth-century Enlightenment. As Coleman rightly points out, ‘Barbauld’s experience and understanding of knowledge as a gendered issue’ and her expressions of ‘longing for equal participation in the world of knowledge and learning’ at times produced a strong critique of ‘public/private distinctions’.11 Knowledge and learning, like religious devotion itself, were indeed gendered issues, and Barbauld’s ‘dexterous negotiations’ (Coleman’s apt phrase) should neither be tamed nor obscured by a reading sensitive to her articulations of religious moderation.12 Especially during the 1770s and 80s, such negotiations were a direct consequence of her strategic attempts to domesticate and concretize Dissenting values and cultural deﬁnitions. For in late-eighteenth-century religious terms, Barbauld’s was a controversial yet still essentially a moderate position, tempering the heat of Puritan devotion and Calvinist rigorism in order to produce an open and warm religion that would be more endearing and personal than Socinian Dissent and both

476 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

more demanding and less indifferent than the Church.13 One further consequence of Barbauld’s analogy is thus worth noting: just as ‘different sentiments and different connections separate [women] much more than the joint interest of their sex would unite them’, so would the different sentiments and connections of clergymen separate them more than the joint interests of their theological profession would unite them. Women have sentiments and connections beyond their gender, and clergymen have sentiments and connections beyond their vocation; the analogy alerts us to the need not to reduce the thought of a female religionist such as Barbauld either to questions of gender or religious belief. Nor, of course, can we ignore them. One way to understand Barbauld’s contribution to the Enlightenment discourse of devotion without either reducing it to or ignoring the nexus of gender and religion is to attend to the speciﬁc sentiments and connections – or, more broadly, the ‘habitus’ – that Barbauld inherited as a late-eighteenth-century English Presbyterian, a complex identity and consciousness on which it will be necessary to elaborate.

The daughter of a Presbyterian clergyman Although Barbauld is frequently, and with some truth, labeled a Unitarian, her sectarian afﬁliations are more complex. As I will discuss below, she may be considered a liberal (i.e. Arminian) Presbyterian and a Unitarian, but she was descended from perhaps the single-most inﬂuential family of eighteenth-century Calvinist Independents and Presbyterians, including her maternal grandfather John Jennings (1687–1723) and his brother David Jennings (1691–1762).14 Among their students were Philip Doddridge (in turn the tutor of John Aikin, Barbauld’s father), Joshua Toulmin, Abraham Rees, and many others; her heritage was thus a powerful one, for both directly and indirectly her forebears were responsible for educating an astonishing proportion of the Dissenting elite. Too often references to Barbauld’s Unitarianism, or to her Dissenting background more generally understood, fail to grasp the nuances of her particular position within late-eighteenth-century nonconformity.15 In order to understand her Dissenting heritage, we will need brieﬂy to consider the history and historiography of Unitarianism.16 Whereas the Socinian doctrine survives from the sixteenth century, the English sect in its Enlightenment form becomes recognizable only in the 1770s, with Priestley’s defenses of Socinianism in pamphlets and sermons and with the foundation of the Essex Street congregation by Theophilus Lindsey in 1774. Although late-eighteenth-century Unitarianism represents a discrete phenomenon, it has often been indiscriminately described along with the other branches of Dissent. Part of the reason for this slippage is that until roughly the turn of the nineteenth century no adults existed who had been born ‘Unitarians’ in a denominational sense. And even after 1774, one could either worship in a Unitarian meeting-house or simultaneously be a member of an old Dissenting congregation (usually Presbyterian or General Baptist) as well as a Unitarian. Richard Price, for instance, ministered to a Presbyterian meeting while Joshua Toulmin ministered to a General Baptist

Dissenting Heritage and the Devotional Taste 477

meeting, though both of their congregations were also Unitarian. Converts to Unitarianism in the late eighteenth century generally either descended or ascended, depending on one’s perspective, from Calvinist Dissent (usually Presbyterian) through the Arian and Arminian heresies to Unitarianism, or they came directly from the Church of England.17 Many, like Price and Priestley, were born and raised as Calvinists but were acculturated by the Arminian communities of middle-class Dissent and the nonconformist academies, such as Warrington in the North or Hoxton in London, through which they passed to Arianism and, in the case of Priestley and others, Socinianism. Some members of the Church of England, such as John Prior Estlin and Gilbert Wakeﬁeld, became Unitarians after a similarly long process of afﬁliation with one of the academies.18 Others, like Theophilus Lindsey, John Disney, and William Frend – as well as Coleridge and Southey in the 1790s – left the Church of England directly for the more rational and politically appealing religion of Unitarian Dissent. In Russell Richey’s important essay ‘Did the English Presbyterians Become Unitarian?’ (1973), Richey contrasts ‘the orthodox analysis’ with the ‘Unitarian self-understanding’ of how Unitarianism emerged from English Presbyterianism over the course of the eighteenth century. According to the former, ‘The evolution from Presbyterianism to Unitarianism is typiﬁed as a process of decline, decay or dry rot.’19 Unitarians themselves, on the other hand, embrace a Whiggish progressive reﬁnement of liberty ‘from Calvinism, through Arminianism, through Arianism, to Unitarianism in gradual acceptance of humanitarian principles and the freedom of conscience’.20 Richey proposes a third interpretation, an alternative to the two models by which Presbyterianism devolved or evolved, respectively, into Unitarianism – that the ‘middle-way’ of Baxterians or ‘Middle Way Men’, such as Edmund Calamy, Isaac Watts, and Philip Doddridge, who dominated Dissenting culture and theology during the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth century, successfully transformed the sectarian factionalism of Dissent’s Puritan inheritance into a uniﬁed ‘community of Dissent’.21 It is out of this community, Richey argues, that Unitarianism emerged. Dissenting families such as the Aikins and the Belshams, the direct inheritors of the tradition of Watts, Doddridge, and Jennings, typify the identiﬁcation with the community of Dissent that superceded Presbyterian afﬁliation during the middle years of the century. But here it is necessary to pose an important question: was Anna Barbauld a Unitarian, even accepting Richey’s premise? Theologically she was an Arian, not a Socinian, and although there were still Arians among the Unitarians, such as Richard Price, Barbauld was deeply suspicious of the Socinianism that dominated Unitarian thought, allegedly calling it ‘Christianity in the Frigid Zone’.22 She necessarily would have considered herself a Presbyterian, not a Unitarian, during her 20s and 30s (in the 1760s and 1770s), and when William Woodfall reviewed her Poems (1773) in the Monthly Review, he informed his readers simply that ‘Miss Aikin is the daughter of a Presbyterian clergyman’.23 From 1787 to 1802 her husband was the Presbyterian minister of the old chapel on Red Lion Hill in Hampstead, where Barbauld herself of course worshipped. (Joanna Baillie

478 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

worshipped there too, as Barbauld put it ‘with as innocent a face as if she had never written a line’.24) On the other hand, after 1802 Rochemont held the ministry at Newington Green, where the Unitarian Price himself had formerly presided, and Barbauld, like other Arminian Presbyterians, General Baptists, and, to a lesser extent, heterodox members of the Established Church, could thus move ﬂuidly between the home denomination and Unitarianism. The Warrington Academy itself, although ofﬁcially Presbyterian, was essentially non-denominational; of the 53 students educated there speciﬁcally for divinity, 17 ultimately entered the Church, and the remainder would be divided between the Presbyterian, Baptist, and Independent ministries.25 Barbauld thus did come out of that side of Presbyterianism which had retained the name, but had divided from the Calvinist Presbyterians (many of whom became Independents) and developed into the ‘rational’ or ‘free’ community of Dissent. Richey’s argument is then carried out by the ease with which the Barbaulds and other Dissenters, especially ministers, thought of their denominational identities and could move between denominations within the Arian and Arminian side of nonconformity. Nonetheless, in this essay I want to propose that even in the case of a free Dissenter such as Barbauld, we can trace the very real ideological and cultural inheritance of the various threads – from Puritan Calvinism to liberal and heterodox Unitarianism – that had become woven into the community of Dissent by the late eighteenth century. And perhaps nowhere can these threads be followed more clearly than in the question of moral sensibility in Barbauld’s religious thought, particularly in how she understood and responded to the roles of particularity (as opposed to abstraction) and spontaneity in the cultivation of devotional feelings. I will thus work through some of the more signiﬁcant aspects of nonconformist devotion in order to describe the consequences of Barbauld’s particular denominational identity for the revisionary elements of her devotional theory.

Sermons and sensibility Barbara Taylor has written of ‘underlying shifts of attitude in the late eighteenth century, as religious belief became increasingly aligned with the feminine and as both came under the rule of sentiment’.26 As Taylor proposes elsewhere, ‘From the mid-century on preachers of all stripes could be heard arguing that female religious feeling was intrinsically more powerful than that of men.’27 A wide range of related cultural forces – especially Christian Platonism, Rousseauism, and the cult of sensibility – combined to strengthen the alignment of religious experience with feminized qualities and characteristics. In Platonic terms, the private language of love and the affections, of unity between individual human beings, could lead to love for and unity with God, and in the second preface to Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloïse Rousseau famously suggested that ‘comme l’enthousiasme de la dévotion emprunte le langage de l’amour, l’enthousiasme de l’amour emprunte aussi le langage de la dévotion’.28 Passionate enthusiasm, however, posed a problem for middle-class Dissenters such as Barbauld.

Dissenting Heritage and the Devotional Taste 479

Concerned to distance their religious experience from what they perceived as the vulgar zealotry of Methodism – Barbauld memorably describes a Methodist preacher as a ‘ﬂorid declaimer who professes to work on the passions of the lower class’29 – many rational Dissenters nonetheless sought ways simultaneously to regulate and invigorate devotion.30 For although their present religious taste may have tended to the ‘philosophical’ and ‘abstract’, their Puritan past embodied a very different devotional spirit. As an Arminian and Arian Presbyterian, at the center yet also critical of the Unitarian culture presided over by Priestley, Barbauld appropriated and revised two chief elements of her Calvinist inheritance: the enthusiastic devotional methods of particularity and spontaneity, which were theorized by eighteenth-century religious writers as ‘particular and experimental’ and ‘extempore’ methods of preaching. These methods, however, were ﬁrmly associated with a violent, sectarian religious history and were thus both alien and alienating to middle-class Dissenters in the late eighteenth century, who sought to represent themselves as embodying and sustaining the spirit of 1688–89 rather than 1649. An important part of Barbauld’s attempts to describe and popularize an affective form of Dissent, I suggest, involved a strategic, revisionary, and regulatory association of these two elements of Puritan devotion with sensibility, that essence of humanity inherent in idealized social (especially familial) relationships and carefully modulated emotional responses to aesthetic experiences. Before turning to Barbauld’s devotional theory in her important essay ‘Thoughts on the Devotional Taste, on Sects, and on Establishments’ (1775; republished 1792) and her later Remarks on Mr. Gilbert Wakeﬁeld’s Enquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of Public or Social Worship (1792), I will offer brief accounts of extempore and ‘particular and experimental’ preaching, especially in their relation to the sublime. Two questions dominated discussions of sermon composition and preaching style throughout the eighteenth century. First, devotional writers debated whether or not sermons should be preached entirely extempore, whether they should be unwritten and preached from notes, written and preached from memory, written and read, or even read from a printed text by another hand. The other issue concerned what was called ‘particular’ and ‘experimental’ preaching, which involved the relation both of the preacher to his audience and the sermon to its scriptural text. All sermons required explication as well as application – the preacher would both attempt to ‘remove the difﬁculties, and elucidate the obscurities of the Scriptures’31 and to offer an ‘application of the doctrine to the conscience’.32 But against the seemingly abstract morality of the Church and the reputedly tedious, scholarly disquisitions of rational Dissent, Calvinist Dissenters hearkened back to Puritan preaching in order to propose a different style. ‘Particular’ and ‘experimental’ preaching would apply doctrine not to a general audience of Christians but to the particular members of the congregation, basing the application not on abstract morality but on the concrete experiences (thus ‘experimental’) of individual congregants. Whereas on the Continent sermons were seldom read, the practice was, with a few exceptions, more or less the rule in England both in the established Church

480 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

and the heterodox ‘rational’ Dissenting sects of Arminian Presbyterians, General Baptists, and Unitarians. Orthodox Dissenters – Independents, Particular Baptists, some Presbyterians – Quakers, and ‘new’ Dissenters, Methodists, however, often did practice extempore preaching, and for that reason they were frequently assaulted as zealous enthusiasts. James Glazebrook, an Anglican minister in the rational Dissenting stronghold of Warrington and one of the few voices from within the Church to endorse the practice, afﬁrms these divisions. In What is called Extempore Preaching Recommended (1794), Glazebrook begins, ‘I enter with fear and trembling upon the support of an opinion so very unpopular’: outside ‘the orthodox dissenters in this nation’ (and ‘those few of our own church who follow that method of preaching’), in England ‘An extempore preacher … is by most looked upon as a kind of monster.’33 Extempore preaching could mean a number of things, but most commonly it meant that a minister would memorize the subject heads for each part of the sermon and then preach without notes. As Glazebrook puts it, ‘the question is, … whether [the message] should be read from a written preparation, or whether it should be delivered in, what is improperly called, the extempore way? I say improperly … because the term, as it is generally understood … is only applicable to the random, rhapsodical effusions … of the wild enthusiast’.34 The preacher, then, should speak spontaneously from the heart, but whereas the Calvinistic Methodists and many of the rural Independent congregations favored a more heated, sublime style, middle-class and more educated orthodox Dissenters, let alone a liberal Church of England clergyman such as Glazebrook, did not see ‘the extempore way’ as precluding enlightened and rational discourse. For these groups, preaching from the heart was not incompatible with preaching from the head, and thus another churchman who advocated the practice, John Byrom, included among his Miscellaneous Poems (1773) ‘Advice to the Rev.[s] … H— and H— … on Preaching Extempore’, in which the poet suggests that the stores of a rational, ‘thoughtful mind’ can be revealed ‘without the help of pen and ink’: ‘Speak from within, not from without’, Byrom’s advice concludes, ‘And Heart to Heart will turn about.’ 35 But throughout the eighteenth century, the sublime style of extempore preaching was viewed by all sides as the legacy of the Puritans, and it is thus the Calvinist Dissenters, and foremost among them the Particular Baptist Robert Robinson, who led the way in calling for the practice. Probably the most important late-eighteenth-century work on sermon composition in England – indeed, the closest thing that English preachers had to a text book – was written in the seventeenth century by a French Protestant, The Reverend Jean Claude. By the end of the eighteenth century, Claude’s An Essay on the Composition of a Sermon (1688) had taken on new life in two competing translations, one Dissenting, by Robinson (1778–79), and one Church of England, by Charles Simeon (1796).36 Robinson, raised to the Church in Norfolk but drawn by the preaching of Whiteﬁeld to the Calvinistic Methodists in 1752, seceded from Methodism in the late 1750s and would spend most of his career as an orthodox Baptist minister in Cambridge.37 As Simeon complained, Robinson’s notes ‘are at least four times as large as the original work’38, and it is in these notes that Robinson carries out his

Dissenting Heritage and the Devotional Taste 481

argument for extempore preaching. Having lamented the ‘dry lifeless way of preaching’ from memory that ‘brought on the reading of sermons’,39 Robinson asks, ‘Would you affect your auditors? be affected yourself. Would you excite their grief? weep yourself… . These emotions must not be acted, they must be free and natural.’40 The ‘best method’ of ‘the most popular and pious preachers’ is thus: ‘They study till they thoroughly understand the subject. They habitually feel it. They retire ten minutes before preaching, and in fervent prayer to God, possess their souls with a full idea of the importance of the matter… .They go from prayer to the pulpit, as Moses went down from the mount from God to speak to the people.’41 As Moses bears not just the words but the sublime voice of God, so should the preacher spontaneously and immediately communicate the fervor of religious inspiration. Like other devotional writers who describe the preacher’s communicable inspiration in terms of the sublime, Robinson emphasizes the effect the preacher should have on the physical senses as well as the intellect: ‘the preacher should address the eyes, and ears of his auditors, as well as their reason’.42 Along with these arguments for spontaneity went a movement among orthodox Dissenters to make preaching ‘particular’ or ‘experimental’, as in the title of John Jennings’ inﬂuential Two Discourses: The First, Of Preaching Christ; the Second, Of Particular and Experimental Preaching (1723). As Isaac Watts succinctly puts it in his preface to Jennings’ work, experimental preaching involves ‘distinguishing the Characters of our Hearers’.43 In other words, the experimental preacher does not simply offer an abstract or philosophical explication of the text, but rather attunes his discourse to the individual hearts, to the speciﬁc sins, hopes, and fears, of the particular auditors he addresses. In the mid eighteenth century, experimental preaching was thought of by Dissenters themselves as the peculiar strength of their seventeenth-century Puritan forebears. Thus Jennings asserts, ‘if you peruse the Writings of the most powerful and successful Preachers, particularly the Puritan Divines, you’ll see that they … suit[ed] their Discourses to all the Variety of the Hearts of Men. … In this Way they found their own Hearts warmed, and thus they reached the Hearts of their Hearers; whilst many were imagining the Minister had been told of their Case, and made the Sermon for them’.44 Philip Doddridge, Jennings’ student and in turn the tutor of John Aikin, Barbauld’s father, elaborated on the following instruction in his Lectures on Preaching, transcribed around 1740: ‘make your sermons addresses to your hearers, rather than general essays or speculative harangues’.45 And looking back to ‘the old puritan mode’ of experimental preaching, the Independent ministers David Bogue and James Bennett describe it as ‘like an arrow shot at the heart, and piercing it to the core. … The general way of preaching used by the ablest divines in the establishment, at the time, was in comparison as to effects, but like a pointless arrow’.46 I have presented this brief overview in order to give a sense of how spontaneity and particularity in preaching corresponded to denominational divides and to show how orthodox nonconformists, especially, who sought to reinstill immediacy and spontaneity in religious devotion used the language of the sublime to

482 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

refer to Puritan preaching, a language we have heard in the passages I’ve quoted, in their fervency and power – Moses coming down from the mount, the arrow that pierces the heart to the core. 47 In the words of an anonymous pamphlet, The Fashionable Preacher: or, Modern Pulpit Eloquence Displayed (1773), which inveighs against both ‘elaborate, abstract discourses from the pulpit’ and the ‘absurdity … that is the reading of sermons’, ‘A sublime eloquence is the offspring of nature, not of art.’48 Because of the denominational divisions and cultural associations with which Barbauld lived as a liberal Presbyterian, she was able to appropriate and domesticate Puritan elements of her Dissenting heritage for a revisionary devotional theory. Unitarians, famously (and not wholly accurately) stereotyped for their rational, scholarly sermons and cold preaching style – a sermon, indeed, was often called a ‘discourse’, and preaching was often called ‘instruction’ – shunned extempore preaching, though they were more sympathetic to extempore prayer.49 Although Priestley himself had claimed in his Warrington lectures that ‘the perfection of speaking is, certainly, to speak extempore’, attributing the success of the ‘primitive christians’ and ‘the founders of our modern sects, such as the Independants, Quakers, and Methodists’, to ‘the talent of haranguing extempore’, he held that ‘the reﬁnement of modern times requires that we speak, upon all occasions, with more temper, and use more address in raising the passions’: ‘The English pulpit, the English bar, and the English senate, require an eloquence more addressed to the reason, and less directly to the passions.’50 It was not until the early nineteenth century that extempore preaching would be found in Unitarian congregations, following the establishment of the Unitarian Fund in 1806 to reverse declining numbers by fostering a more popular preaching ministry and expanding Unitarianism into the less educated classes.51 But when we turn to Barbauld’s devotional theory, we ﬁnd that in the 1770s through 90s she is writing from a perspective that does not easily reside within ‘rational’ Dissent in general or Unitarianism in particular. Although Barbauld’s single-most coherent theological position was Arminian – or more properly antiCalvinist, for, like many Arminians, she tended to write against Calvinism – her devotional theory bears witness to a strong and enduring Puritan inheritance, with an important distinction. I have argued elsewhere that Barbauld’s religious writings valorize a kind of Puritan austerity, but at the same time both her poetry and prose represent a determined and sustained attempt to domesticate the rigorous character of rational Dissent, to color its austere religious and civil values with social and domestic hues that would endear virtue, piety, conscience, and integrity to the affections. Reason, science, free enquiry, abstract philosophical speculation, theological disputation, religious liberty, personal self-denial, and a middle-class commercialist ethos would be tempered, made warmer and more beautiful through familial collaboration and poetic techniques of sensibility that would together associate these predominantly masculinist features of nonconformity with the intimate plenitude of the home and the domestic relationships inside its walls.52 In a similar manner, then, Barbauld dialectically reclaims but tempers both the spontaneity and particularity of Puritan devotion, and then

Dissenting Heritage and the Devotional Taste 483

sets up this revised inheritance – the legacy of John Jennings, Barbauld’s maternal grandfather, of his student Philip Doddridge, and of Doddridge’s student and Barbauld’s father, John Aikin – as the oppositional counterweight to ‘rational’ (or as she often calls it, ‘philosophical’) Dissent.

The devotional taste In ‘Thoughts on the Devotional Taste’, ﬁrst published in Devotional Pieces (1775) and republished in Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose (1792), we ﬁnd Barbauld’s application of religious sensibility to be the basis of her controversial program to reform the character of Dissent itself. ‘Thoughts’ begins by considering religion in three different aspects: one, ‘as a system of opinions’, for which the correspondent faculty is ‘Reason, exerted in the freest and most dispassionate enquiry;’ two, ‘as a habit’ that ‘regulate[s] our conduct’, strengthened ‘by repeated exertions’; and three, ‘as a taste … and in this sense it may properly be called Devotion’.53 The ﬁrst part of ‘Thoughts’ is dedicated to analyzing this taste, after which the essay moves on to a historical survey of sects and establishments and concludes with a call for a kind of reinvigorated sectarianism that will simultaneously stem the ﬂow of religious indifference and exert a purifying inﬂuence upon the nonsectarian majority. She draws an analogy between the material and immaterial worlds: ‘As … the process of vegetation restores and puriﬁes vitiated air; so does that moral and political ferment which accompanies the growth of new sects, communicate a kind of spirit and elasticity necessary to the vigour and health of the soul.’54 If sensibility was projected by the new bourgeois culture of the late eighteenth century out from the home as a civilizing force of sympathy that would reform the corrupt, masculine world of public power, then Barbauld saw a similar role for religious sects. Yet in order to theorize and popularize this role, she needed to domesticate the extremely virile and austere set of values associated with both rational Dissent and its Puritan past. This was no small task, but the two areas of orthodox Dissenting preaching that I have been discussing offered her an opportunity. Although she writes that ‘prayer and praise’ are ‘the more genuine and indispensible parts of public worship’, she is consistently concerned with the different forms of preaching that distinguish sects (in their different phases) and establishments.55 Thus ‘In an infant sect … A strain of eloquence, often coarse, but strong and persuasive, works like leaven in the heart of the people’, whereas among mature sects ‘pulpit discourses are studied and judicious’, while establishments ‘aim at elegance and show in … the appearance of their preachers’.56 Barbauld’s striking innovation is to vitalize devotional experience by taking a strong component of her Puritan inheritance – the particular, spontaneous, and affective direct appeal to the individual heart typical of devotion in the ‘infant sect’ – and aligning it with the warmth of communal or familial life in the more settled denomination. She accomplishes this alignment by revising the sublimity inherited from Puritan devotion in one of two ways, either by coding devotional experience instead according to the aesthetic category of the beautiful or, in her later response to Gilbert Wakeﬁeld, by regulating the sublime through association with sensibility.

484 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

In her analysis of religion in its third aspect, she writes that devotion may be ‘considered as a taste, an affair of sentiment and feeling’; the ‘seat’ of this devotional taste ‘is in the imagination and the passions, and it has its source in that relish for the sublime … and the beautiful, by which we taste the charms of poetry and other compositions, that address our ﬁner feelings’.57 Yet as the essay continues, the devotional tastes for the ‘sublime’ and the ‘beautiful’ become not just distinct but opposed. Whereas the enthusiasm of Puritan devotion was consistently coded as sublime, for Barbauld the terms are reversed: the sublime in this essay is the province of abstract philosophy, which, because it opens out to such vast prospects of speculation, exceeds the capacities of the common mind and thus fails to pierce the individual heart: ‘Philosophy does indeed enlarge our conceptions of the Deity, and gives us the sublimest ideas of his power and extent of dominion; but it raises him too high for our imaginations to take hold of, and in a great measure destroys that affectionate regard which is felt by the common class of pious Christians.’58 This common class requires ‘some common nature … on which to build our intercourse.’59 Philosophy, Barbauld writes, ‘represents the Deity in too abstracted a manner to engage our affections’, and philosophers dwell too much in generals. Accustomed to reduce every thing to the operation of general laws, they … attempt to grasp the whole order of the universe, and in the zeal of a systematic spirit seldom leave room for those particular and personal mercies which are the food of gratitude. They trace the great outline of nature, but neglect the colouring which gives warmth and beauty to the piece.60 Philosophical and rational preaching is sublime, and thus excessive. Where we expect the emotional sublime of Puritan zeal we are given the rational sublime of Socinian reason, and because the rational Christian dedicates his spiritual energies to expounding ‘general laws’ of human, physical, and divine nature, his devotional compositions remain abstract, neither ‘particular and personal’ nor warm and beautiful. Barbauld’s position here does participate in the culture of sensibility, but she is participating in that culture by reworking her religious heritage in complex and powerful ways. As a liberal Presbyterian with Unitarian ties, as a rational Dissenter, she rejects Calvinism and distances herself from its ‘gloomy perplexities’, but as a devotional writer seeking to critique the very form of rational Dissent that she inhabits, she ﬁnds elements of her heritage potentially useful and necessary.61 The potential becomes realized when the extempore, particular, and experimental methods can be described not as sublime but as ‘more personal and affecting’: As in poetry it is not vague and general description, but a few striking circumstances clearly related and strongly worked up – as in a landscape it is not such a vast extensive range of country as pains the eye to stretch to its limits, but a beautiful, well-deﬁned prospect, which gives the most pleasure – so

Dissenting Heritage and the Devotional Taste 485

neither are those unbounded views in which philosophy delights, so much calculated to touch the heart as home views and nearer objects. The philosopher offers up general praises on the altar of universal nature; the devout man, on the altar of his heart, presents his own sighs, his own thanksgivings, his own earnest desires: the former worship is more sublime, the latter more personal and affecting.62 As William Godwin would later distinguish in ‘Of History and Romance’ between the writers of the two genres, privileging the writer of romance, Barbauld here opposes ‘the philosopher’ to ‘the devout man’, bringing devotion home to a local, inhabitable landscape looked upon not as a set of abstract relations that cohere into an ultimately ungraspable magnitude but rather as the picturesque, ‘well-deﬁned prospect’ whose ‘few striking circumstances clearly related and strongly worked up’ produce an aesthetic and devotional experience accommodated to the individual and common eye and heart.63 As opposed to the philosopher’s carefully premeditated, and presumably written, ‘general praises on the altar of universal nature’, the devout man’s sighs, thanksgivings, and desires emerge spontaneously as devotion, almost as corporeal emanations without the intervention of reason, and the repetition of ‘his own’ emphasizes the particularity of these individual feelings. ‘A wise preacher’ understands that a good sermon or prayer, like the accompanying devotional taste, proceeds not from the sublime and philosophical reason that ‘dwell[s] too much in generals’ and ‘attempt[s] to grasp the whole order of the universe’, but from the extempore responses of sensibility to the particulars of human nature and divine creation. And always associated with social life, ‘home views and nearer objects’, the domestic language of the beautiful replaces that of the sublime even as the terms of spontaneity and particularity remain constant. ‘A wise preacher’, therefore, will not be so ‘ignoran[t] of the human heart [as to] … neglect taking advantage of the impression which particular circumstances, times and seasons, naturally make upon the mind.’64 Barbauld’s resistance to abstraction and ‘the zeal of a systematic spirit’ may seem reminiscent of Burke’s, but its origins and ends are rather different: for Barbauld, particularity in religious devotion could produce a contemporary, tempered form of that ‘wholesome severity’ with which ‘the Puritans in the reign of Charles the Second seasoned … the proﬂigacy of public manners’.65 A different response to the Puritan sublime emerges in Barbauld’s contribution to the Wakeﬁeldian controversy, her Remarks on Mr. Gilbert Wakeﬁeld’s Enquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of Public or Social Worship.66 Here she incorporates Hume’s model of the communicability or ‘contagion’ of passions in an attempt to defend public worship as ‘a means of invigorating faith’.67 ‘None of our feelings’, she writes, ‘are of a more communicable nature than our religious ones. If devotion really exists in the heart of each individual, it is morally impossible it should exist there apart and single. So many separate tapers, burning so near each other, in the very nature of things must catch, and spread into one common ﬂame.’68 If some few individuals can accept truth through reason and, in isolation, stir religious feelings in their own individual hearts, most ‘minds are not capable of that

486 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

ﬁrmness of decision which embraces truth upon a bare preponderancy of argument. … These, when they enter a place of worship, amidst all the animating accompaniments of social homage, are seized with a happy contagion’.69 The ‘contagion’ that spreads the ﬁres of ‘separate tapers … into one common ﬂame’, of course, evokes the risk of enthusiastic conﬂagration. Whereas in ‘Thoughts on the Devotional Taste’, the language of spontaneity and particularity allowed Barbauld to recode the sublimity of devotional experience according to the beautiful, here the same set of terms lead her to retain the enthusiastic sublime: ‘The devout heart … bursts into loud and vocal expressions of praise and adoration; and, from a full and overﬂowing sensibility, seeks to expand itself to the utmost limits of creation.’70 But sensibility does not just facilitate the sublime; its inherently social nature also serves a regulatory function. Just as in ‘Thoughts’ Barbauld reversed the associations of the sublime, mapping it onto abstract philosophy rather than zealous enthusiasm, here she reverses the associations of enthusiasm itself, attributing its origin to the morbid solipsism of isolated individuals rather than to the collective passions of the crowd: Enthusiasm is indeed most dangerous in a crowd, but it seldom originates there. The mind, heated with intense thinking, adopts illusions to which it is not exposed when its devotion is guided and bounded by addresses which are intended to meet the common sentiments of a numerous assembly. Religion then appears with the most benignant aspect, is then least likely to be mistaken, when the presence of our fellow-creatures points out its connexion with the businesses of life and duties of society.71 Contemporary, public worship should reinvigorate devotional feelings, leading to spontaneous and sublime religious experiences dangerously close to enthusiasm yet regulated, ‘guided and bounded’, by the social foundation of sensibility. And it is the preacher’s obligation, in turn, to make this social foundation felt by uniting individuals, in their particular natures and characters, into a common community. To do this, in Barbauld’s Remarks, is to imitate Christ: ‘His great business in the world was instruction; and this he dispensed, not in a systematic, but a popular manner; nor yet in a vague and declamatory style, but in a pointed and appropriate one. … Almost all his discourses … were delivered as occasion prompted, and therefore it was that they came so home to men’s business and bosoms.’72 Once again Barbauld’s populism (‘Every time Social Worship is celebrated, it includes a virtual declaration of the rights of man’73) resists system and champions instead spontaneity and particularity, in this case in order simultaneously to retain the ‘fervour’ and ‘animation’ associated with the sublime while containing enthusiasm within the bounds of social connections and benevolence. Aware that Dissenting devotional ‘practices are founded upon a prevalence of religious fervour, an animation and warmth of piety, which, if it no longer exists, it is vain to simulate’,74 Barbauld calls instead for reform: Christ himself was ‘the great reformer, the innovator of his day’,75 and if the devotional taste among contemporary Dissenting ministers ‘wants animation, as perhaps it does,

Dissenting Heritage and the Devotional Taste 487

the silent pews will be deserted one by one, and they will be obliged to seek some other mode of engaging the attention of their audience’.76 Barbauld’s mode of animating devotion and engaging attention resonated. It represented, in part, an attempt to revise some of the most deep-seated elements of rational Dissenters’ self-understanding not by simulating their past but by incorporating enthusiastic elements of their heritage into a contemporary affective form of Dissent. Witness the Later response of Harriet Martineau in the Monthly Repository, comparing Barbauld to Hannah More: ‘Mrs More awakens and impresses us, and we listen to her warnings with an awe which would make us believe that we are on no equality with her. … But with Mrs Barbauld it is different. She meets our ideas, and seems to express what had passed through our own minds. … We have a fellow-feeling with her in all that she says … [S]he paints our passions and emotions [with justice], and touches every chord of feeling in our bosoms.’77 For Martineau, as for Barbauld’s more ardent readers both male and female, her appeal is that of the experimental preacher in the guise of the woman writer of sensibility. The tempered enthusiasm of Barbauld’s devotional discourse, however, left her in a difﬁcult position. Within Dissent Barbauld met with opposition – Priestley of course balked at her ‘Thoughts on the Devotional Taste’, as did the Monthly Repository review to which I have just referred: ‘though it professes to treat of devotional taste & not religious principle, it is still too imaginative’.78 The piece indeed provoked hostile reactions from various camps, but none was more telling than Priestley’s, who responded to her in ‘a very long and very serious letter’, dated 20 December 1775, ‘on the subject of her late essay, disapproving totally of all the sentiment of it’.79 Long and serious, the letter was semi-public as well; four days later Priestley wrote to William Turner that ‘Dr. Price, and all my serious and judicious acquaintance in London, think as I do on the subject, and approved of my letter to her.’80 In this letter, Priestley informs Barbauld that his ‘ideas with respect to devotion, “sects, and establishments”, are … in almost every respect the very reverse of those in your essay’.81 He goes out of his way, furthermore, to emphasize what he views as Barbauld’s betrayal of Dissent itself; several times he suggests that his remarks on the essay speak for the larger Dissenting community: ‘And really, Mrs. Barbauld, all my more serious and judicious acquaintance, who are among your best friends, are, without exception, of the same opinion, and declared themselves to be so without having had any communication with one another upon the subject.’82 As if to emphasize the weight of this ‘serious and judicious acquaintance’, he twice echoes the phrase: ‘it appears to some of my most judicious acquaintance …’ and ‘Many serious persons are more especially offended …’.83 Clearly, then, the disagreement was not just about Barbauld’s appeal to ‘the language of the affections’, her passages against ‘cold-hearted philosophy’ and its ‘disputatious spirit’, or her inappropriate Rousseauian comparison between the language of devotion and the ‘strain … the lover uses to the object of his attachment’; rather, it was about the consequences of all of these positions for the deﬁnition and reformation of Dissent itself.84 When Priestley admits that his ‘notions on the subjects of your essay

488 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

were always what are called old-fashioned’ and laments, ‘I used to ﬂatter myself that yours were nearly the same with mine’, he associates himself with a form of Dissent that has kept itself separate from the Church by insisting on its own rational integrity.85 Barbauld’s essay, for Priestley, implies a kind of new-fangled Dissent that comes dangerously close to blurring the line between nonconformity and the establishment. There was a good deal of truth to Priestley’s accusations, and Barbauld’s essay did pose a challenge to rational Dissent in general and Unitarianism in particular. But at the same time it presented as much of a threat to the Established Church by calling for a devotional culture which, if anything, revived and updated an earlier affective and populist brand of nonconformity. In spite of Priestley’s assertion that it was his devotional taste which was ‘old-fashioned’, it was in fact Barbauld’s which, I hope to have shown, could be understood as by-passing the ‘new Dissent’ of Methodism for a still older civic populism. Rather than turn to the enthusiastic Methodist preacher, Barbauld poses her challenge to both rational Dissent and the Church by combining the old heat of Presbyterian devotion with the new warmth of sensibility. The novelty of Barbauld’s religious thought which seemed so threatening to Priestley and his ‘serious and judicious acquaintance’ lay in its innovative negotiation of deeply-rooted denominational, aesthetic, and gendered associations within the eighteenth-century discourse of devotion. By calling for a new, affective religion that would incorporate spontaneity and particularity in a regulated form of enthusiasm, Barbauld accused rational Dissenting reason or ‘philosophy’ of failing to touch the common heart even as she hearkened back to, domesticated, and revised the aesthetic terms of an older Dissenting mode.

Notes I would like to thank Barbara Taylor, Gina Luria Walker, Anne Janowitz, and Jon Mee for their comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. 1. Anna Letitia Le Breton, Memoir of Mrs. Barbauld, Including Letters and Notices of Her Family and Friends (London: George Bell and Sons, 1874), p. 84. 2. Ibid., 86–7. 3. Work on Barbauld has been impelled by her recent anthologization and by the appearance of the following editions: William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft, eds, The Poems of Anna Letitia Barbauld (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994); McCarthy and Kraft, eds, Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose (Peterborough: Broadview, 2002). On her rejection of the offer, see McCarthy, ‘Why Anna Letitia Barbauld Refused to Head a Women’s College: New Facts, New Story’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 23.3 (2001): 349–79. Discussions of this incident usually rely on Lucy Aikin’s selective reprinting of the letter in which Barbauld rejects the proposal. The Works of Anna Laetitia Barbauld. With a Memoir by Lucy Aikin, 2 vols (London, 1825), I, pp. xvi–xxiv. McCarthy reprints and discusses in its extant entirety Barbauld’s letter to Rochemont Barbauld in which she justiﬁes her refusal, and McCarthy’s analysis of her motives – ‘her case against schools for girls is more rhetorical than theoretical: she is throwing cold water on a scheme she wants to evade, not on the principle that women should be educated’ (p. 357) – leads him to conclude, justly, that ‘it should no longer be permissible to cite this letter as adequate evidence of Barbauld’s supposed antifeminism’ (p. 363).

Dissenting Heritage and the Devotional Taste 489 4. William McCarthy, ‘“We Hoped the Woman Was Going to Appear”: Repression, Desire, and Gender in Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Early Poems’, in Romantic Women Writers: Voices and Countervoices, eds Paula R. Feldman and Theresa M. Kelley (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1995), pp. 125–30. Barbara Taylor has recently discussed Barbauld’s anti-feminism in relation to female jacobinism, in Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 182–7. 5. For an excellent overview of devotional writing and publishing, see Isabel Rivers, ‘Dissenting and Methodist Books of Practical Divinity’, in Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Isabel Rivers (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), pp. 127–64. 6. Le Breton, p. 87. 7. Anne Janowitz, ‘Amiable and radical sociability: Anna Barbauld’s “free familiar conversation”’, in Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770–1840, ed. Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite (Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 62–81; Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 134–69; Deirdre Coleman, ‘Firebrands, letters and flowers: Mrs Barbauld and the Priestleys’, in Romantic Sociability, pp. 82–103; Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 173–213. 8. Janowitz, p. 63. 9. Newlyn, pp. 156–7. Pamela Plimpton, to whom I am indebted for conversation about Barbauld, used the term ‘androgyny’ in discussing her authorial persona, in ‘The Canonizing of Anna Letitia Barbauld: Agency in the Act of Editing – History, Theory, and Practice’, Special Session, MLA Convention, Chicago, 28 December 1995. 10. Mee, p. 174. 11. Coleman, pp. 83–4. In this passage Coleman is responding to my article, ‘The “Joineriana”: Anna Barbauld’s Prose, the Aikin Family Circle, and the Collaborative Production of the Dissenting Public Sphere’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 32.4 (1999): 511–33. 12. Coleman, p. 83. 13. Socinianism, the Unitarian theology of which Joseph Priestley became the philosophical champion during the early 1780s, stressed the complete humanity of Christ; Socinians believed in his divine mission but not in his divine nature, holding Christ to have been a man chosen by God to be His revelation. 14. Arminianism opposed or qualiﬁed each of the ﬁve points of Calvinist doctrine (predestination, particular redemption, original sin, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints). 15. The three major denominations of ‘old Dissent’ were the Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists. Most late-eighteenth-century Dissenters thought of their religious communities in denominational rather than sectarian terms. Broadly defined, sects are more rigorous and exclusive religious communities than denominations; for more specific definitions of these labels, see Bryan Wilson, Patterns of Sectarianism: Organisation and Ideology in Social and Religious Movements (London: Heineman, 1967), pp. 23–5. Other key discussions of distinctions between denominations and sects include Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, ed. Talcott Parsons, trans. A. M. Henderson and Talcott Parsons (New York: Free Press, 1947), pp. 156–7; The Sociology of Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1922), p. 100; H. Richard Niebuhr, The Social Sources of Denominationalism (New York: Holt, 1929), p. 19; Peter L. Berger, ‘The Sociological Study of Sectarianism’, Social Research 21 (Winter 1954): 467–85. 16. See Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), especially on the evolution of ‘rational Dissent’, pp. 445–90. 17. The core of Arianism was the belief in Christ’s pre-existence as a divine but subordinate and created being. High and Low Arians differed on the degree of dignity assigned to Christ.

490 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses 18. Wakeﬁeld’s situation was, as Barbauld described it, ‘peculiar and insulated’: ‘Separating through the purest motives from one church, he has not found another with which he is inclined to associate … he worships alone because he stands alone.’ Remarks on Mr. Gilbert Wakeﬁeld’s Enquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of Public or Social Worship (London, 1792), p. 57. 19. Russell E. Richey, ‘Did the English Presbyterians Become Unitarian?’, Church History 42 (1973): 58. 20. Ibid., 61. 21. Ibid., 69. 22. Andrew Fuller, The Calvinistic and Socinian Systems Examined and Compared, as to their Moral Tendency (Market-Harborough, 1793), p. 42. 23. William Woodfall, ‘Poems. By Miss Aikin’, Monthly Review 48 (January 1773): 57. 24. Le Breton, p. 66. 25. David L. Wykes, ‘The Contribution of the Dissenting Academy to the Emergence of Rational Dissent’, in Enlightenment and Religion, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 135. 26. Barbara Taylor, ‘For the Love of God: Religion and the Erotic Imagination in Wollstonecraft’s Feminism’, in Mary Wollstonecraft and 200 Years of Feminisms, ed. Eileen Janes Yeo (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1997), p. 18. 27. Taylor, ‘The Religious Foundations of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Feminism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Claudia L. Johnson (Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 104. See as well Taylor’s Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, pp. 95–142. 28. Jean Jacques Rousseau, Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloïse, ed. Michel Launay (Paris: GF-Flammarion, 1967), p. 575. ‘As the enthusiasm of devotion borrows the language of love, the enthusiasm of love also borrows the language of devotion.’ 29. Barbauld, ‘Thoughts on the Devotional Taste, on Sects, and on Establishments’, in McCarthy and Kraft, eds, Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose, p. 212. 30. Throughout this essay my uses of the term ‘regulation’ and its cognates are indebted to Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation, pp. 37–49. Mee describes regulation as the means by which eighteenth-century religious and philosophical discourses sought to recuperate enthusiasm and reclaim it from association with disorder and fanaticism: ‘regulation offered a way of confirming the fundamental importance of sociability without abandoning society to the crowd’ (p. 41). At the same time, ‘the discourse of regulation produced a supplement, an anxiety that regulated enthusiasm could always transmute back into its vulgar alter ego … the unruliness of the crowd’ (pp. 48–9). 31. George Gregory, ‘Thoughts on the Composition and Delivery of a Sermon’, in Sermons (London, 1787), p. xi. 32. David Bogue and James Bennett, History of Dissenters, from the Revolution in 1688, to the Year 1808, 4 vols (London, 1808–12), II, pp. 166–7. 33. James Glazebrook, What is called Extempore Preaching Recommended (Warrington, 1794), pp. iii, 4. 34. Ibid., 2. 35. John Byrom, Miscellaneous Poems (Manchester, 1773), pp. 125–6. 36. Robert Robinson, An Essay on the Composition of a Sermon. Translated from the original French of The Revd. John Claude, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1778–79); Charles Simeon, Claude’s Essay on the Composition of a Sermon: with Alterations and Improvements, 2nd edn (1796; Cambridge, 1801). 37. For a brief account of Robinson’s life which corrects several errors originating in George Dyer’s Memoirs of the Life and Writings of R. Robinson (London, 1796), especially the claim that Robinson converted to Unitarianism shortly before his death in 1790, see Len Addicott, ‘Introduction’, Church Book: St Andrew’s Street Baptist Church, Cambridge 1720–1832 (London: Baptist Historical Society, 1991), pp. viii–xviii. See as well Gina Luria Walker’s discussion of Robinson in ‘Mary Hays (1759–1843): An

Dissenting Heritage and the Devotional Taste 491

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63.

64. 65. 66.

Enlightened Quest’, in Women and Enlightenment: A Comparative History, ed. Barbara Taylor and Sarah Knott (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Simeon, Preface. Robinson, I, p. 84. Ibid., II, 466. Ibid., II, 466–7. Ibid., II, 334. Isaac Watts, ‘Preface’, in John Jennings, Two Discourses: The First, Of Preaching Christ; the Second, Of Particular and Experimental Preaching … With a Preface by the Reverend Dr. Isaac Watts, 3rd edn (1723; London, 1736), p. x. Jennings, pp. 65–6. Philip Doddridge, Lectures on Preaching, and the Several Branches of the Ministerial Office (London, 1821), p. 44. Bogue and Bennett, II, pp. 166–7. Hereafter I will for the most part use the term ‘particularity’ as shorthand for the two related methods of ‘particular and experimental’ preaching. The Fashionable Preacher: or, Modern Pulpit Eloquence Displayed (London, 1792), pp. 8–14. The pamphlet was first published as The Fashionable Preacher: An Essay (Glasgow, 1773). For suggestions that have guided my research on Unitarian sermons, I am indebted to correspondence with R. K. Webb. Priestley, A Course of Lectures on Oratory and Criticism (London, 1777), pp. 112–14. Wykes, ‘“A good discourse, well explained in 35 minutes”: Unitarians and Preaching in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society 16.3 (1997): 181. See White, ‘The “Joineriana”,’ p. 515. Barbauld, ‘Thoughts’, p. 211. Ibid., 231. Ibid., 224. Ibid., 223–5. Ibid., 211. Ibid., 215. Ibid., 216. Ibid., 216–17. Barbauld’s Remarks on Mr. Gilbert Wakeﬁeld’s Enquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of Public or Social Worship concludes, ‘The age which has demolished dungeons, rejected torture, and given so fair a prospect of abolishing the iniquity of the slave trade, cannot long retain among its articles of belief the gloomy perplexities of Calvinism, and the heart-withering perspective of cruel and never-ending punishments’ (pp. 75–6). ‘Thoughts’, p. 217. William Godwin, ‘Of History and Romance’, in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 7 vols (London: William Pickering, 1993), V, pp. 290–301. ‘Thoughts’, pp. 219–21. Ibid., 230. In Remarks, Barbauld is answering Gilbert Wakefield’s An Enquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of Public or Social Worship (London, 1791), in which he argued against communal worship on scriptural grounds and because Christians had progressed or matured beyond their Hebraic infancy, when ‘Material impressions and manual services were expedient and necessary to occupy the attention and engage the senses’ (p. 4). In this volume see Gina Luria Walker’s ‘Mary Hays (1759–1843): An Enlightened Quest’, in which Walker discusses the controversy in general as well as Mary Hays’ response, Cursory Remarks on an Enquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of Public or Social Worship (London, 1792). Wakefield answered Hays in the second edition of his

492 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

Enquiry (London, 1792), and his other critics in A General Reply to the Arguments against the Enquiry into Public Worship (London, 1792). Hays elaborated on her response in ‘Letter to Mr. – on the Meliorating and Beneficial Effects of Pulpit Elocution’, in Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous (London, 1793), pp. 1–10. Barbauld, ‘Remarks’, p. 41. As described by Hume in Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), ‘The passions are so contagious, that they pass with the greatest facility from one person to another, and produce correspondent movements in all human breasts.’ Qtd. in John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 23–4. ‘Remarks’, p. 8. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 18–19. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 31–2. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 59. Qtd. in Betsy Rodgers, Georgian Chronicle: Mrs Barbauld and Her Family (London: Methuen, 1958), p. 66. Qtd. in Rodgers, p. 66. Priestley, Life and Correspondence, in The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley, ed. J. T. Rutt, 25 vols. (London, 1818–31), I, p. 288. For an insightful discussion of Barbauld’s relationship with the Priestleys, see Coleman, ‘Firebrands, letters and ﬂowers: Mrs Barbauld and the Priestleys’, in Romantic Sociability, pp. 82–103. Priestley, I, p. 288. Ibid., I, 279. Ibid., I, 279–80. Ibid., I, 280. Barbauld, ‘Thoughts’, pp. 218, 212–13, 222. Priestley, I, p. 279.

7.5 Mary Hays (1759–1843): An Enlightened Quest Gina Luria Walker

To the Being who gave them, I bequeath my life and my mind, in the humble hope that I may not have lived wholly in vain, or ‘folded in a napkin’ the talent entrusted them. Mary Hays, undated letter to ‘a favourite niece’, c. 18431 Mary Hays was the most purposefully intellectual woman within the tiny community of English Jacobins in the 1790s. Her experiences reveal much about the aspirations, opportunities and difﬁculties of women intellectuals in this period. Like her intimate friend Mary Wollstonecraft, she bootstrapped her way into masculine preserves of knowledge. Unlike Wollstonecraft, she possessed neither physical nor social grace, nor the self-conﬁdence born of such qualities.2 Like Anna Barbauld, Hays probed the connections between religious, domestic, and political life. Unlike Barbauld, she had neither familial nor academic structures to advance her education or to provide collaborators and critical readers.3 She was encouraged by some of her contemporaries and repudiated by others, and she often undermined her own authority by retreating from the controversies she provoked. Conservatives, unsurprisingly, found Hays outrageous, but even her radical associates differed about her standing as a femme philosophe. Southey was convinced that she had ‘genius’ (although he dismissed her interest in Helvétius as ‘nonsense’4). Coleridge, on the other hand, detested her, declaring that he would not stand ‘to hear a thing, ugly and petticoated, ex-syllogize a God with coldblooded Precision, & attempt to run Religion thro’ the body with an Icicle … from a Scotch hog-trough—!’5 Wollstonecraft condescended to her, expressing hope, early in their friendship, that she would ‘learn to think with more clearness, and consequently avoid the errours naturally produced by confusion of thought.’6 Writing to William Godwin in 1805, the radical reformer Capel Lofft puzzled over her status. ‘I have been reading two Productions of a female Pen,’ Lofft wrote, ‘of which I know not how to speak as highly as they deserve. The Victim of Prejudice and Emma Courtney. Both are emanations of a transcendentally powerful Mind. I have heard you speak of Miss Hays,’ he continued, ‘And I am [astonished] that so admirable a Woman … has remained in comparative 493

494 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

obscurity or has been insulted by … malicious cavillings under the name of Criticism.’7 Hays played an important part in the ‘visionary world’ of Franco-British revolutionary politics, when ‘old things [were] passing away, and nothing was dreamt of but the regeneration of the human race.’8 In Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (2003), Barbara Taylor describes Hays as ‘easy to ridicule,’ but also as ‘the boldest of the Jacobin women’ for her ‘intellectual adventurousness.’9 Her passion for knowledge, and the responses of the men with whom she studied, stoked her ambition to create a signiﬁcant role for herself in the dissident Republic of Letters. As an educationalist she broke new ground for female autodidacts, particularly by interpreting Enlightenment concepts to them. A dissenting historiographer, she reinvented ‘female biography’, while as a novelist she produced highly experimental ﬁction. She was a staunch believer in the concurrent powers of divine mystery and human reason. She saw herself as Enlightenment personiﬁed, as well as, along with Wollstonecraft, one of Enlightenment’s chief feminist critics.10 This chapter describes Hays’s self-identiﬁcation as an apostle of Enlightenment. Over her lifetime, Hays explored a wide variety of philosophical positions, including those elements of Radical Enlightenment thought that ‘rejected all compromise with the past.’11 She never, however, abjured Christianity; in that sense, she probably belongs to what has been called the ‘Christian Enlightenment.’12 Having sought personal enlightenment in her adolescence, as a young adult she gained access to the public sphere of religious discourse through informal study with ‘generous men.’13 Unitarianism, with its emphasis on the individual’s uncensored search for knowledge as the means of developing moral, religious, and political awareness, both encouraged and frustrated her.14 A great letter writer, she maintained an archive of correspondence for posterity. These letters, in combination with her published works, reveal her continuing engagement with enlightened religious discourse from a proto-feminist perspective.15 Religion was Hays’s initial point of contact and enduring connection with Enlightenment, as it was for many other eighteenth-century women.16 She grew up in a large family of middle class Dissenters, headed by her widowed mother. As a prim adolescent, Hays shivered at the spectacle of the ‘gay, unthinking world’ in nearby London, yet the otherwise insular Nonconformist enclave in Southwark where the Hayses lived gave her proximity to important sites of Dissent. She regularly attended meeting-house services where men argued about momentous issues: the nature of God, separation of church and state, citizenship, rebellion in the colonies, free inquiry, and above all the continuing educational and civil ‘disabilities’ of Nonconformists like themselves. Sometimes, the discourse was closer to home: in 1779 the unwed Hays noted a debate at Coachmaker’s Hall over ‘whether considering the badness of the time in a political view, a married or a single life is most conducive to happiness?’17 The term ‘Dissenter’ referred to a Protestant who refused to accede to the Thirty-Nine Articles of fealty to British King, Church, and State. Increasingly after the mid eighteenth century, Dissenters functioned as a vocal minority in

Mary Hays: An Enlightened Quest 495

opposition to British Establishment culture. Rational Dissent was a strongly liberal, intellectualist brand of Dissent. Rational Dissenters held a materialist view of human knowledge (derived from the empiricism of Newton, Locke, Collins, and Hartley) and argued for nurture rather than nature as determinant of human character. They advocated unfettered inquiry and ‘toleration’ of differing points of view; education as a liberating force; and, most revolutionary, the idea of ‘an equal representation of the people in the great council of the nation, annual elections, and the universal right of suffrage’ as ‘the birthright of englishmen [sic], their best inheritance.’18 Spiritual nonconformity for male Dissenters, at least, often led to reformist politics, skepticism, heterodoxy, and personal, if not collective, liberty. Even the most radical male Dissenters, however, did not usually include women’s claim to natural rights in their activist agenda.19 Male faculty at Dissenting academies experimented with original pedagogy for their students, but women still studied outside such classrooms, and were at obvious disadvantage. They were not taught Greek or Latin, languages that continued to separate men’s education from women’s. They could not participate in the masculine cultures of teaching and learning at institutions that specialized in the production of knowledge, nor use their libraries.20 But within enlightened circles, individual men made space for particular women to participate in an exchange of ideas. This was done out of generosity, personal attachment, a sense of fair play, even commitment to the idea, if not the wider social practice, of universal egalitarianism. These men treated aspiring women seriously; they shared their texts and libraries with them; read, commented on, and edited their manuscripts; discussed and recommended speciﬁc books and publishers; and, singly or in clusters, pointed the way for women who desired to become public intellectuals. The fundamental belief that Hays derived from her early inculcation in Dissent was the God-given ‘right of private judgment’21 in all aspects of human experience. This tenet was the foundation of her convictions. No matter how extreme the positions she espoused, Hays never ceased to revere her God or to doubt that the human mind should seek to discover His wonders. Hays acted on the Dissenting mandate to inquire; she took as prescriptive the central tenet of radical Dissent, as articulated by Theophilus Lindsey, the minister of the ﬁrst avowedly Unitarian chapel in Britain, that God commanded all his people to ‘search for wisdom. – Prov. (2 Peter 1.5.) to add knowledge to all other christian [sic] virtues; and by no means to lock up our mind and reasonable powers at any time, and shut out further information and improvement.’22 Hays applied this principle to every facet of female life, representing rational inquiry – even into such apparently non-rational areas as love and sex – as a manifestation of her wish to comprehend the divine. Hays’s ﬁfty-year career as a thinker and writer may be divided into three phases. The ﬁrst phase can be tracked through the extant love letters she exchanged with John Eccles, a young Dissenter, in 1779–80. These earliest surviving manuscripts reveal that Hays was ambitious to learn and curious about the mental processes of learning. From the correspondence, we know that what

496 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

Eccles admired as Hays’s ‘polished education’ consisted of extensive reading of poetry and novels. She had the key to her older friend Mrs. Collier’s library, where she explored works by the same authors her ﬁctional heroines later read. Even in the midst of her ardent – and illicit – romance with Eccles, she criticized the chasm between men’s freedom to learn and the constraints on women’s education, noting the ‘stillness and privacy’ of female life.23 She envied Eccles his classical training, and proposed that he be her tutor instead of her lover. With the precedent of Rousseau’s Héloïse before her, she urged him to teach her what he knew as a man without hurting her as a woman.24 After Eccles’s premature death, Hays believed her affective life was over. The life of the mind was to be her passion. The ‘awakener of [her] Mind’25 in this next phase of her career was Robert Robinson (1735–90), a self-taught Baptist preacher who was mentor to a number of younger Cambridge radicals, including George Dyer and William Frend.26 Robinson was unusual among his Nonconformist contemporaries because he refused to identify himself with any party or clique.27 As a result, he was constantly mired in controversy. Hays aspired to such impartiality but she recoiled, as Robinson never did, from public scrutiny. The texts from this period of Hays’s life attest to her ambition to become enlightened like the erudite men she sought out, beginning with Robinson. Through her personal contacts, she positioned herself as close as possible to the center of radical teaching and learning. All her mentors, except Wollstonecraft, were men. There were precedents for this: Marjorie Reeves has described how in a provincial group of families in the southwest of England through the eighteenth century, ‘the real education of intellectual young women was fostered by the men in their social environment.’28 In this volume, Elizabeth Eger, Clarissa Campbell Orr, Jane Rendall, and Daniel White document the ways in which determined women acquired learning through the agency of conservative, as well as radical, men.29 Elsewhere, Barbara Taylor has explored Richard Price’s inﬂuence on Wollstonecraft,30 and Helen Plant has shown the tutelary effects Unitarian men had on the career of Catharine Cappe.31 In the third phase of her career, beginning in her thirties, Hays was proliﬁc as an experimental novelist, professional reviewer, contributor to radical periodicals and as a biographer. Human passions were her chief intellectual interest. In this she was inﬂuenced by Rousseau, the French materialist Helvétius and – most productively – by William Godwin. Hays’s relationship with Godwin, the leading radical British philosopher of the day, is generally seen as the high point in her intellectual development. In fact, she was already an experienced thinker by the time she approached Godwin in the autumn of 1794, with a sense of authority derived from her relationship with Robert Robinson, and her subsequent engagement in circles of Enlightened Dissent and political radicalism. Robinson was the ﬁrst scholar to take Hays’s autodidactic determination seriously, providing her with his own writings which exposed her to religious pluralism and heterodox skepticism.32 No doubt she read with particular attention his translation of Jacques Saurin’s ‘Sermon on the Repentance of the Unchaste

Mary Hays: An Enlightened Quest 497

Woman,’ in which even a fallen woman is shown to be worthy of humane treatment because she is endowed with God’s grace. Saurin, in Robinson’s translation, thinks through the Unchaste Woman’s consciousness, asking, ‘What idea must a woman form of herself, if she have committed this crime; and considers it in its true point of light?’33 This was a crucial question for Hays, allowing her to connect the moral struggle against prejudice with the constraints men impose on women. In the 1790s, Hays joined Wollstonecraft in developing alternatives to conventional assumptions about female nature and behavior. In their correspondence during the last eight years of Robinson’s life, Robinson addressed Hays’s concern over apparent theological paradoxes in his thought, including his faith in both ‘the divine decrees and man’s free agency.’ ‘In my opinion,’ he explained, ‘it is extremely difﬁcult to deny either, and there is no difﬁculty in believing that the reconciling of them is possible to God, though far above our comprehension.’34 Hays welcomed woman’s free agency within the context of belief. She embraced Robinson’s Necessitarian views on causation and the importance of anatomizing events to reveal God’s benevolent designs. She studied his Spinozist theory of human potential as an evolutionary process in which individual spiritual and intellectual autonomy, and its political analogue – separation of church and state – were mutually reinforcing.35 She adapted the fundamentals of Robinson’s theology: God is nature, and, therefore, explicable, ‘in both, invisible things, even the eternal power and Godhead are to be seen and UNDERSTOOD by the things that are made,’36 that is, the co-existence of the materiality of God’s immanence with the mystery of His intentions. Robinson refused to sanction any social hierarchies: in a ‘state of nature,’ all are equal. ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, Prince nor subject. The right of one argued from his nature is the right of all.’37 Hays extended the argument to include gender: neither man nor woman is a priori superior. Robinson also corroborated her views on the interdependence of affect and reason. ‘The doctrines and the ceremonies of christianity attack injustice and cruelty in their strong holds,’ Robinson preached. ‘Consequently, if a slavetrade be the effect of such passions, our religion goes to subvert the whole system of slavery. Feel its inﬂuence, and the work is done.’38 The theories of Helvétius that Hays later read reinforced this doctrine. Robinson supported Hays’s resistance to conventional femininity. When one of his daughters married and moved to London, Robinson wrote that he hoped Hays would protect ‘a child of liberty’ from sinking into ‘the sheepish tameness of a London believer.’ Robinson valued his daughter as a ‘christian [sic] communicative friend,’ and feared she would be transformed into a ‘lady’s maid, whose whole science is to courtesy, and her whole discourse, yes my lady, and no my lady.’39 Hays was stirred by Robinson’s expectation that a woman might elude gendered constraints. She extrapolated from his egalitarian principles a revaluation of women’s minds, souls and experience, and determined to extend this to other women to dispel the traditional prejudice that ‘nature has given judgment to man, and to women imagination.’40 She excoriated misogyny, and was emphatic that ‘sexual distinctions in intellect and virtue, have

498 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

depraved and weakened the human species.’ 41 Robinson’s advice to Hays just before his death was ‘take nothing for granted.’ 42 If she ever had before, she never did afterwards. Robinson died in Birmingham in June 1790, on a preaching trip to Joseph Priestley’s congregation. Priestley presided at the funeral and delivered a sermon in which he famously praised Robinson for educating his daughters equally with his sons. Robinson, Priestley explained, refused to perpetuate the prejudice against women’s mental competence, tutoring his daughters in learned and modern languages, and having others instruct them in mathematics and philosophy. ‘Certainly,’ Priestley declared, ‘the minds of women are capable of the same improvement, and the same furniture as that of men and it is of importance that, when they have leisure, they should have the same resources in reading, and the same power of instructing the world by writing, that men have.’43 Priestley’s praise for Robinson’s pro-women position emboldened Hays to seek him out after his 1791 move to the New College at Hackney in London. 44 From 1786 to 1796 the New College was the most advanced of the Dissenting academies, employing many eminent ﬁgures such as Richard Price, William Enﬁeld, Thomas Belsham, Hugh Worthington, Andrew Kippis, and Gilbert Wakeﬁeld.45 Here, Hays found herself on the periphery of the ﬁnal ﬂowering of Unitarian pedagogy as tutors produced new textbooks, incorporated the literature of living languages and modern history into traditional academic curricula, and encouraged free inquiry into topical controversies, in deliberate contrast to Cambridge and Oxford.46 In this enlightened setting, Hays beneﬁted from continuity with the academic cultures at Warrington and Daventry to which the Hackney tutors and their friends were connected.47 Hays’s adherence to Robinson’s controversial teachings and her growing sense of authority as she learned from her new mentors were quickly tested. In 1791, Gilbert Wakeﬁeld, a former New College Tutor in Classics, published ‘An Inquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of Public or Social Worship ‘, a work which presumed its readers’ conversance with scriptural sources in Greek and Latin. This scholarly blast was directed at the religious rituals of Wakeﬁeld’s colleagues at New College and offended many within the Dissenting community with its peremptory betrayal of Nonconformist solidarity. Several prominent Dissenters responded. Hays, writing as ‘Eusebia,’ or the pious woman,48 published ‘Cursory Remarks … Inscribed to Gilbert Wakeﬁeld, B. A.,’ which drew on her own experiences to defend the practice of communal worship which made intellectual life accessible to women. ‘Eusebia’ begins by apologizing for her lack of erudition, describing herself as ‘a woman, young, unlearned, unacquainted with any other language but her own; possessing no other merit than a love of truth and virtue, [and] an ardent desire of knowledge.’49 With even more deference, she notes that she is using Wakeﬁeld’s recent translation of the New Testament.50 She emphasizes the emotional and domestic aspects of communal worship, offering a lyrical portrait of the family that prays together. She expresses her commitment to unfettered inquiry and toleration, ‘endeavoring to divest

Mary Hays: An Enlightened Quest 499

herself of every improper bias … with a full determination of preserving her mind free and open to conviction, and pursuing and embracing truth … wherever it may be found.’ She enumerates speciﬁc criticisms of Wakeﬁeld’s method, but, particularly, his dismissal of all ministers as ‘one man taking charge of another man’s soul,’ alluding to Robinson. She remonstrates on affective, as well as scriptural and experiential grounds, quoting from ‘The Creed of a Savoyard Priest’ in Rousseau’s Émile.51 She describes Rousseau, although a deist, as ‘a fascinating, though skeptical writer.’ There was almost unanimous praise for the feminine piety expressed in ‘Cursory Remarks,’ even from conservative reviewers, with one signiﬁcant exception. Wakeﬁeld, classically trained and mercurial, shot back a second edition that addressed his several challengers in turn. He assumed that ‘Eusebia’ was a man hiding behind the identity of a woman. Answering Hays’s text, he turns the intellectual battle with ‘her’ into a sexual encounter, expressing mock terror at confronting ‘so mysterious an adversary,’ then quoting the Book of Proverbs: ‘three things, which are too wonderful for me; yea four, which I know not. The way of an eagle in the air, the way of a serpent upon a rock, the way of a ship in the midst of the sea, and THE WAY OF A MAN WITH A MAID [his emphasis].’52 Wakeﬁeld’s riposte galvanized several readers. Hays replied to him in her second edition, admitting that his ‘ludicrous sally’ had offended her and pointing out that he had not addressed the substance of her comments. She noted that learned friends supported her analysis. Nonetheless, ‘abashed and wounded,’ she left the ﬁeld of ‘polemic controversy,’ acknowledging herself ‘unequal’ to Wakeﬁeld’s specious display of ‘wit and talents’ and ill-equipped for the demands of public debate.53 At this stage in her career she was evidently still willing to display rufﬂed feminine sensibilities. As a last jab, she mentioned the commanding reply to Wakeﬁeld by Dr. John Disney, Assistant Minister at Essex Street Chapel, who, it is claimed, subsequently preached sermons written by Hays.54 New evidence suggests that, unbeknownst to Hays, the Cambridge reformer William Frend wrote to Wakeﬁeld to castigate him for his dirty joke at Hays’s expense. Frend, like Wakeﬁeld, was afﬁliated with Jesus College. He knew of ‘Eusebia’s’ identity from mutual associates, including Dyer, Priestley, and, particularly, Robert Robinson, for whom Frend functioned as translator in Robinson’s last work on the history of Baptism. Frend’s letter doesn’t survive, but Wakeﬁeld’s answer does. ‘You must lower your opinion of me,’ Wakeﬁeld wrote Frend in self-defense, ‘for you seem to suppose, that I have the gift of Prophecy: otherwise how was it possible for me to know, without any Means of knowing, that the Author of that Pamphlet was a Lady?’ Taking the offensive, he went on, ‘There is no Artiﬁce more common [and] so often complained of by Reviewers, as that of assuming a female Name to escape the Lash of Criticism. Had I known who it was, I certainly wd by no Means have thought of such a Piece of Levity.’ Wakeﬁeld promised to ‘omit the Clause’ from any subsequent edition.55 Chivalrous, sympathetic, conciliatory, Frend wrote to ‘Eusebia’ soon after hearing from Wakeﬁeld. In his letter, Frend introduced himself, praised her pamphlet, and

500 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

appealed to her to continue as peacemaker between sectarian men, for ‘the aid of the fair sex may in future be often called in to soften the animosity and fervor of disputation.’56 Following Robinson’s lead, Frend welcomed Hays’s presence in Unitarianism, which he had only recently embraced, costing him his Tutorship at Jesus College (although not the stipend of £150 that went with it).57 Frend judged that as a studious, plain woman already known to many of his radical associates, Hays would expect only a collegial relationship with him. This, however, proved to be a serious misjudgment, and so the unhappy drama behind Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney was set in motion. After Frend’s admonition, Wakeﬁeld issued a General Reply to all his critics,58 paying special attention to ‘the cohort of Amazonian auxiliaries’ – Mrs. Barbauld had joined ‘Eusebia’ in the fray.59 He quoted a Greek epigram, frequently translated by schoolboys, in which Pallas, armed, meeting Venus, unarmed, challenges her to ﬁght. ‘What occasion have I,’ asks Venus, ‘for the shield or spear? If I could vanquish you with my native unadorned beauty, how much more, if I put on armour [sic]?’ Joining the twin classical ﬁgures of Venus Amatoris and Venus Imperatoris,60 Wakeﬁeld implied that women’s real, indeed only weapon is their naked sexual allure. Women are ill equipped in mental contests with men because they are unlettered, that is, without cognitive training or armor, and, therefore, should not attempt to engage.61 Wakeﬁeld’s display of classical erudition had the effect of trivializing his female critics, as well as camouﬂaging his resistance to their criticism. Hays knew she was no Venus, and that she couldn’t match Wakeﬁeld’s scholarly assurance. But she could learn. At New College the faculty was closely allied with the Essex Street Chapel in London, founded by the Unitarian, Theophilus Lindsey. Unitarianism was a rigorous creed, adhering to the belief that, as Lindsey declared in his inaugural sermon, ‘in their religious capacity, mankind are subject only to the authority of God, and of their own consciences.’ 62 Lindsey spelled out the ways in which, for freethinkers, Locke’s epistemology ‘led inevitably to Unitarianism.’63 Free inquiry was the ethos of New College, and there Hays sought her share in it by studying informally, attending sermons, and reading tutors’ lectures in faculty publications. The publication of William Enﬁeld’s translation from the Latin of Brucker’s magisterial History of Philosophy in 1791 meant that Hays too could now study in English the history of ideas from the Ancients to the moderns. 64 She deepened her understanding of British freethought by reading Priestley’s edition of Anthony Collins’s A Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty (1790) and his abridgement of David Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind, on the Principles of the Association of Ideas (1749, 1791). Hays was profoundly inﬂuenced by Hartley, and included some of his text in hers.65 She found support for her intellectual efforts in Priestley’s Essay on a course of liberal education for civil and active life. With plans of lectures (1765, 1788), in which he added history, government, and economics to the traditional curricula in order to provide ‘better furniture of mind … [for] the business of life.’66 Women, Priestley quoted Hume, might learn from the study of history that ‘love is not the only passion that governs the male world’.67

Mary Hays: An Enlightened Quest 501

The social connections Hays formed at meeting-house services advanced her public ambitions. She invited her Dissenting mentors to her home, creating a chaste demi-salon under the watchful eyes of her mother. Hugh Worthington, Tutor in Classics and Logic until he left Hackney to take up his position at Salter’s Hall, which Hays and her sister now attended, encouraged Hays’s study of Euclid,68 Lavater’s theories of physiognomy,69 and French, and responded to her ongoing theological concerns.70 When Worthington and his wife came to tea, he urged Hays to ‘teach and instruct others’ on the basis of her performance in ‘Cursory Remarks.’ Here was the opportunity for which she had been preparing. Hays wrote to ask if he were in earnest. She explained demurely that whatever learning he credited to ‘Eusebia’ was originally garnered in the hopes that she would be equipped to ‘fulﬁll the duties of a wife and mother.’ These hopes, she explained, were tragically cut short. When she began to study and write, she never imagined assuming the public title of ‘authoress,’ while quickly adding she did not ‘denigrate’ it. If Worthington were serious in his suggestion, she proposed to show him some short pieces. She even had a title ready, ‘Letters and Essays, moral and miscellaneous.’71 Her only stipulation was that he read her manuscript as she wrote – her willingness to proceed would rest on his continuing estimation of her talent.72 How much of this was rhetorical dependence, how much real, is unclear. But Hays certainly seized the moment.73 Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous, published in 1793, was Hays’s alternative to conventional conduct books. It broke new ground by providing instructional curricula for women modeled on the New College program. In it, Hays translated abstruse, but politically-charged Enlightenment concepts into terms she regarded suitable for women. As ‘religionist,’ ‘materialist,’ and feminist, she assessed every aspect of female experience as it obstructed or empowered ‘the emancipated mind … impatient of imposition.’74 Hays’s criteria for true knowledge were ‘universal toleration,’ the insights about gender she shared with Wollstonecraft, and the mechanics of human development she studied at New College. She combined the psycho-perceptual dynamics described by Locke and Hartley with Rousseau’s ethical pedagogy to convince women that their ﬁrst responsibility was to educate themselves and their daughters. Hays prefaced a recommended course of reading with a feminist appeal emphasizing the radical potential of the Christian doctrine that the mind had no sex. ‘Remember you were born for immortality,’ she counseled, ‘not merely for the solace of man, but for those regions where there will be neither marrying, nor giving in marriage.’75 She raised the specter of women’s complicity in their own mental subordination by quoting Christina, Queen of Sweden: ‘I would become a man, but it is not that I love men because they are men, but merely that they are not women.’76 Hays’s reference to Christina attested to her advocacy of feminine authority and enlightened skepticism. Mothers and daughters might be intrigued: this was hardly a boring dead man from a musty History.77 As she learned and taught, Hays emphasized the potential for women’s minds to grow through reading and reﬂection.78 Tracing the intellectual history of individual women in her subsequent texts, Hays drew on the female Bildungsroman as

502 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

a staple of her ﬁctional and factual representations, beginning with Letters and Essays.79 The narrative voice throughout Letters and Essays is strikingly more assured than in ‘Cursory Remarks.’ This was partly the result of Hays’s introduction to Wollstonecraft by George Dyer in June 1792. She read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman intently and immediately recognized Wollstonecraft as the ﬁrst woman, and the ﬁrst feminist, in the lineage of free-thinkers she inherited from Robinson.80 As importantly, Hays was invigorated by what she was learning and doing on her own. Letters and Essays includes a utopian American fantasy,81 set in New York State, in which a worldly Anglican Briton (likely modeled on Frend) is awakened to the truths of Unitarianism, the sweetness of agrarian community life, the moral leadership of a minister (clearly modeled on Robinson), and the ‘intellectual beauty’ of his niece, who is neither young nor alluring. Though by common conventions Hays was too mature and too plain, in this utopian tale she was metamorphosed into the appropriate helpmate for Frend, partners united in carrying forward Robinson’s teachings. Here was a fantasy for the future. Letters and Essays also included four letters to ‘Amasia’ (a biblical name that suggested feminine erudition based on the sharing of knowledge between two women82). Here Hays treated major philosophical and theological concepts – Materialism and Necessity, Authority and Hierarchy, separation of church and state, the next world, theory of dreams, the presence of evil – in a meditative manner, with reference to various sources: Enﬁeld, Price, Priestley, George Walker’s Discourse on the Character of Judas, Hartley, poetry, the Scriptures, Wollstonecraft and her own experience. She insisted that her understanding was acquired, for ‘I do not pretend to intuitive genius, or knowledge by inspiration; my ideas are the result of having had leisure for reading and inquiry.’ The feminine mind could reason as well as intuit and enthuse. Hays demystiﬁed learning, showing how she developed an idea – the mental twists and turns by which understanding was achieved – and thus demonstrating that the female mind could function equally well as the male. She was an object lesson for other informally-trained women, who might be encouraged to learn how to learn. Hays subverted the classical epistle form, written from man to man about weighty subjects, by appropriating it to educate women in philosophy and theology. She found philosophical justiﬁcation for enlightened feminism in Priestley’s version of ‘philosophic necessity’ that rejected Cartesian duality, advocating, as Newton had demonstrated for natural phenomena, that objective causal relations must obtain for mental experience, too. A male correspondent, perhaps Worthington, judged that Hays taxed her female reader with such abstruse subjects; she admonished him that God was critical of those who ‘wrap their talents in a napkin.’ Women too had a sacramental duty to expand their minds. William Frend edited Letters and Essays in manuscript.83 Wollstonecraft read it on Hays’s request before publication, and was provoked to send Hays a stern letter, cautioning that, despite Hays’s effusive acknowledgement of the help she had received from her mentors, ‘your male friends will still treat you like a woman’, and that even Dr. Priestley might have paid compliments in private

Mary Hays: An Enlightened Quest 503

which he wouldn’t necessarily want to repeat in public. More to the point, Wollstonecraft admonished Hays for dependence on the ‘shouldering up of Dr this or that.’84 Wollstonecraft’s advice was crucial to Hays’s development as a professional woman writer,85 but she, too, failed to understand the complexity of Hays’s project in becoming learned. The ultra liberal Analytical Review applauded Hays’s linking of Dissenting and feminist perspectives,86 while Hays’s male associates were silent on the subject.87 More resonant were the comments Hays’s friend Mr. Evans88 sent her from the English Review, in which the book was attacked as ‘an abortion.’ The review described Hays as ‘the baldest disciple of Mrs. Wollstonecraft;’89 it belittled the ‘conceit of an half-educated female’ and skewered the writer with her work. The reviewer concluded that ‘soon to be a skillful housewife [will] just as well [accord] with the female character as to be a quibbling necessarian.’90 This ad feminam attack heralded the representation of Hays as chief public emblem of the ‘half-educated’ or ‘uneducated’ Learned Woman, which obtained well into the twentieth century. Hays wrote to Godwin in October 1794, asking to borrow the volumes of his new publication, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. William Frend had continued to mentor her, and after he moved to London in 1794 he had written to her urging her to read Political Justice. Hays acted immediately, introducing herself to Godwin and presenting her bona ﬁdes. When he replied encouragingly, she requested his support in her continuing project of ‘mental improvement’ by ‘intrepidly follow[ing] truth wherever it … may lead.’91 Now Hays’s took the great step of moving out of her mother’s house in Islington to live on her own. She expressed uncertain hopes to Godwin from her new rooms in Hatton Garden: ‘It has been asked me, & I have put the question to myself, what beneﬁts I propose to reap from this eccentric step? Shall I reply, a kind of, I know not what, satisfaction in the idea of being free … a desire of strengthening my mind by standing alone.’92 Hays looked forward to ‘the feast of reason and the ﬂow of souls’ – and, no doubt, bodies – with Frend,93 and serious conversation with Godwin, Holcroft, and Dyer, for she admitted ‘no relish for … wit and humour [sic].’94 But she quickly exercised the freedoms of Jacobin sociability, attending evening parties, and entertaining at home, most famously reintroducing Wollstonecraft and Godwin.95 In close contact with Wollstonecraft on her return to London that fall, Hays studied the realities of the ‘unchaste’ woman’s reputation. Hays was captivated by Wollstonecraft’s ﬁrsthand accounts of sexual rapture, betrayal, and maternity. Relations between the two women were altered: Hays comforted Wollstonecraft, defending her illicit relationship with Gilbert Imlay to their censorious mutual female friends although, even in such enlightened company, Hays was quickly tainted with her friend’s guilt. Within the tiny, self-protective networks of English Jacobinism, Hays kept abreast of Wollstonecraft’s movements, and, in turn, let Godwin in on her friend’s depressed state, explaining it in terms of her own experiences.96 Godwin offered Hays theoretical formulations of ‘things as they are’ that allowed her to voice private unhappiness and political pessimism. Hays wished

504 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

to embrace Godwin’s advanced notions but found them overly rational, without appreciation of the part played by feelings in human behavior. Hays argued that rather than dismiss emotions, Godwin must recognize that ‘the being who is constituted of sense & intellect may feel the voice of nature too strongly to be silenced by artiﬁcial precepts.’ She acknowledged that as man and woman, ‘This is a subject which we certainly cannot feel with an equal degree of force, because society has, in these respects, made most unjust, tyrannical, & barbarous, sexual distinctions.’ She threatened to cast a spell, wishing the innocent Godwin to be ‘most desperately & hopelessly in love.’97 Hays encountered a real disparity between the sort of freedom available to her and that which men enjoyed. She took full advantage of the discursive space Godwin offered her in their correspondence and conversations to report from the personal war zones of a solitary woman, deploying the lessons she had taught herself to criticize his views and reﬁne her own. She read and made detailed references to Godwin’s works, as she had to Robinson’s and the New College faculties,’ no longer as novice or supplicant, though she softened her responses with heavy-handed ﬂattery and deference.98 In her letters to Godwin, Hays criticized, countered, challenged, complained; she gave as good as she got, even sending unexpurgated streams of consciousness, written while feverish.99 Godwin spoke his mind out of adherence to the Nonconformist principle of ‘perfect sincerity.’100 He was rarely fazed by Hays’s rage at disparities between the sexes, though she accused him of incipient misogyny – ‘I perceive,’ she wrote him angrily, ‘men are all tyrants.’101 Godwin responded to Hays’s accounts of her unhappiness in her letters and conversation by suggesting that she shape her thoughts for publication. She agreed, as she had when Worthington had made the same suggestion three years before, on the condition that he read her work in progress. The result was Memoirs of Emma Courtney, published in late 1796, a hybrid text, heavily indebted to Rousseau and Samuel Richardson, that revealed Hays’s equivocal attitude to Enlightenment. The novel uses the story of a clever heroine’s disappointment in love to expose the deﬁciencies of Enlightenment with regard to women who, unless they are lovely and compliant, are condemned to be ‘comfortless, solitary, shivering wanderer[s], in the dreary wilderness of human society.’102 Hays functions as both narrator and subject, attesting to the passion and sexual frustration of a woman scorned. Hays’s public ‘ﬁction’ exploited conﬁdential letters that, as Rebecca Earle suggests, do not ‘reside comfortably in the realm of the private.’103 Hays moved beyond Richardson and other ‘masters’ of the novel of letters by incorporating the distinctive epistolary style of several real correspondents – that is, Frend, Godwin, and Hays herself. In contrast to Richardson’s idealized character of Clarissa, Hays’s heroine is revealed in all her imperfections.104 The novel experiments with actuality and idealism, conjoining female grievance with the detached analysis of a femme philosophe who sees clearly into the gendered heart of Enlightenment. Frend is represented in the Augustus Harley character; Godwin as Mr. Francis, the philosopher, who advises the heroine. The name

Mary Hays: An Enlightened Quest 505

‘Emma’ is likely taken from Matthew Prior’s popular poem in defense of female constancy, Henry and Emma, a Poem, Upon the Model of the Nut-brown Maid (1709). Memoirs of Emma Courtney scandalized readers of every political persuasion because of its almost clinical candor – ‘We are all creatures of education’, Hays urges – and exploration of new female freedoms. 105 Emma/Hays goes one better than Héloïse by taking the offensive, offering herself to the reluctant Harley/Frend outside the bonds of marriage. Emma’s passion for Harley, she writes him, ‘would triumph, not over my principles, (for the individuality of an affection constitutes its chastity) but over my prudence. I repeat, I am willing to sacriﬁce every inferior consideration – retain your legacy … retain your present situation, and I will retain mine. This proposition, though not a violation of modesty, certainly involves in it very serious hazards – It is, wholly, the triumph of affection! … My friend – I would give myself to you – the gift is not worthless.’ 106 Wollstonecraft reported to Hays that at dinner with the Reverend Rochemont Barbauld, Mrs. Barbauld’s husband, she felt called upon to defend the novel, its heroine, and its author – ‘that is your character … you are stigmatized as a Philosophess – a Godwinian – I assured him that your nove[l] would not undermine religion, &c.’107 Frend, the model for the character of Augustus Harley, met Hays’s gold standard for a hero, at least before his rejection of her. He combined good looks, serious scholarship, and courageous adherence to religious and political principles; he was by all accounts a superb teacher who demonstrated that he could treat a competent, ambitious woman as a serious thinker, on the model of Robinson. In fact, Hays saw Frend as a younger version of Robinson, unencumbered by a wife and twelve children.108 Wollstonecraft spoke of having ‘a peep behind the curtain’ of romance with which Hays cloaked her novel;109 to Godwin, Hays insisted on the reality of her ﬁction.110 Emma cries to Mr. Francis, the Godwin ﬁgure, ‘it is not on the altars of love, but of gold, that men now come to pay their offerings.’111 In the real letter to Godwin, Hays adds, ‘The man who has sacriﬁced me, if I am not much mistaken, is a votary at the shrine of Plutus, & has had some struggles to ice his heart & stiﬂe his humanity.’112 She refers to Frend’s dogged celibacy, the price of retaining his ‘emolument’ of £150 from his Fellowship (at least this was the irrefutable excuse he tendered). Emma/Hays rages because Harley/Frend is free to teach privately, to continue his political activism, to be independent, even if depriving himself – and, more to the point, her – of love.113 Emma Courtney is an ‘uncommon book,’ as Hays intended, ‘much praised and much abused.’114 It is formally experimental: Hays interleaves actual correspondence with Frend and Godwin with new text, a technique she had seen Robinson use in his commentary on the Huguenot texts.115 It is thematically bold: the narrator identiﬁes ‘the magic circle’ of heterosexual causality, representing Harley/Frend’s failure to act on the implications of the radiant ideas he and Emma/Hays share.116 Emma/Hays hopes those transcendent ideas might irradiate her, too, so that Harley/Frend would desire her, even though (perhaps because) her corporeal frame is unalluring. Love my mind, love me, Emma/Hays demands.

506 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

In an enlightened sphere, appearances shouldn’t matter. Hays plays with multiple identities of Emma and Augustus and their imagined progeny, invoking the values she and Frend inherited from Robinson, and the children they would never have.117 When Emma/Hays cries, ‘mine … is almost a solitary madness in the eighteenth century,’118 she makes claim to knowledge only she has of Harley/Frend’s responsiveness in the intercourse of their minds, on the model of Abelard and St. Preux. Hays depicts male inaccessibility through machinations of the plot: accidents, rescues, absences, silences; these mirror Frend’s advances and retreats, beginning with his defense of her as ‘Eusebia’ to Wakeﬁeld. Wollstonecraft tried to inure Hays to the realities of being a professional woman writer. Nevertheless, when Emma Courtney was published, Hays smarted at the savage reactions in the anti-Jacobin press. Despite this, she continued to do battle in print. Her articles in the Analytical Review on theories of the novel, and her defenses in The Monthly Magazine of Helvetian arguments for nurture over nature,119 women’s intellectual capabilities, and her friend Dr. Reid’s analysis of psychological mania, all attest to her deepening sense of authority and embattlement, as she explored new ways to use her training.120 Hays took a phrase from Rousseau’s The New Héloïse for her second novel; The Victim of Prejudice, begun in 1797, but not published until 1799, detailed the myriad intolerances – familial, intellectual, economic, vocational, and, in the kidnapping and rape of the heroine, sexual abuse – to which women as a class were vulnerable. Hays was an integral, if demanding, member of the circle that gathered around Wollstonecraft and Godwin, until it was destroyed by Wollstonecraft’s agonizing death. She was among the intimate friends who kept the deathwatch with Godwin, or so both Godwin and Hays later represented. In fact, on 5 September 1797, Godwin denied Hays admission to the death chamber. In late October, they were still arguing over who had done wrong to whom; Godwin refused to return her letters to him as she requested. Their relationship never recovered from this crisis.121 As both Godwin and Hays grieved, a tug of war between them ensued over who would inherit the idea of Wollstonecraft, now that they could not share her living presence. After Wollstonecraft’s death, Hays determined to advance the feminist project she had shared with Wollstonecraft, publishing anonymously An Appeal to the Men of Great Britain on Behalf of Women (1798) ‘at the height of the [French] invasion scare.’122 In the Appeal, Hays addresses women’s ‘slavery’ within marriage, where, as God’s creation too, they ‘so nearly resemble man in their desire after happiness;’ she maintains that without the ennobling force of education women will exercise ‘low cunning … The WEAK HAVE NO OTHER ARMS AGAINST THE STRONG!–NECESSITY ACKNOWLEDGES NO LAW, BUT HER OWN!’123 Some present-day readers see the ‘Memoirs’ of Wollstonecraft that Hays produced for Richard Phillips in 1801 as a faltering of her feminist convictions; others complain about the exclusion of Wollstonecraft from Hays’s six volume Female Biography; or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women in All Ages and Countries (1803). The ‘Memoirs,’ structured on Godwin’s notorious Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), was, like the Appeal, a

Mary Hays: An Enlightened Quest 507

restatement of Hays’s feminism, albeit in a more sober version, appropriate to the repressive climate at the turn of the century. It may have been intended as the ﬁrst entry for Female Biography,124 her major work, 125 in which Hays argues for a deeper understanding of ‘toleration,’ modeled on Bayle’s concept of religious pluralism.126 In Female Biography she attempts to balance the history of Great Men promoted by male Dissenters127 by displaying a rich, variegated feminine past in which women struggled against men’s intolerance, and sometimes against men themselves. Hays made novel use of private and published works to construct some of the ‘memoirs.’ In these, she furthers ideas about education, faith, revolution, rebellion, schism, heroinism, and her own role as arbiter of ‘impartial posterity’ 128 for each of the women. In the ‘memoir’ of Anne Askew, sixteenthcentury Protestant martyr, she evokes a history of gender prejudice. ‘The sex and age of the heretic,’ she writes, ‘aggravated, rather than softened, the malice of her adversaries, who could not pardon in a woman the presumption of opposing arguments and reason to their assertions and dogmas.’ 129 But history was also progressive. Following Bayle, Hays applauded Marguerite of Navarre, heroine of the early French Reformation, for sustaining the ‘exercise of her own judgment on subjects held important and sacred … despite … the censures she incurred, and the dangers which threatened her.’ 130 In her ‘life’ of Wollstonecraft, Hays vindicated her own quest, too. ‘In the intellectual advancement of women, and their consequent privileges in society, is to be traced the progress of civilization, or knowledge gradually superseding the dominion of brute-force.’131 In Memoirs of Queens, Illustrious and Celebrated (1821), her ﬁnal published text, Hays identiﬁed a unique historical moment in which British women of all classes coalesced as a political force. Female advocacy aroused overwhelming public support for the uncrowned Queen Caroline of Brunswick during the spectacular ‘Queen’s Trial,’ the culmination of George IV’s attempts to discredit and divorce her. ‘Woman,’ Hays reports, ‘considered [defending Caroline] as a common cause against the despotism and tyranny of man. Morals are of no sex, duties are reciprocal between being and being, or they are abrogated by nature and reason. … With the feudal institutions fell the childish privileges and degrading homage paid to the [female] sex; and to equity not gallantry do they now prefer their claim.’ Hays augured the future promise of women’s civic participation: ‘Oppression and proscription, it is true, still linger, but old things appear to be passing away; and, in another century probably, should the progress of knowledge bear any proportion to its accelerated march during the latter half of the past, all things will become new.’132 ‘I sought and made to myself an extraordinary destiny,’133 Hays wrote to Henry Crabb Robinson in 1806, identifying herself with freethinking women of the past, her female contemporaries on the cusp of enlightenment, and the emancipated women yet to come. Like the women she valorized, Hays never swerved in her intellectual and moral passions, or in her continuous ambitions for an enlightened life.

508 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

Notes I would like to thank Barbara Taylor, G. M. Ditchfield, Laura J. Corwin, and Fiore Sireci for their comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. 1. ‘Memoir of Mary Hays: With Some Unpublished Letters addressed to Her by Robert Robinson, of Cambridge, and Others,’ The Christian Reformer, V. XI, No. CXXIX (September 1844), p. 814. 2. Hays was acutely aware of how unattractive she was, as were others. She is the one English Jacobin woman of whom no image exists. 3. See Daniel E. White, ‘The “Joineriana”: Anna Barbauld’s Prose, the Aikin Family Circle, and the Collaborative Production of the Dissenting Public Sphere,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 32.4 (1999): 511–33. 4. Robert Southey, letter to Joseph Cottle, 13 March 1797, Life and Correspondence, ed. Rev. C. C. Southey (New York: Harper and Bros., 1851) pp. 95–6. See also Penelope Deutscher’s discussion of the historical marginalization of female ‘commentators,’ in ‘“Imperfect Discretion”: Intervention into the history of philosophy by twentiethcentury French women philosophers,’ Hypatia 15, 2 (Spring 2000), pp. 160–80. 5. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Selected Letters, ed. E. L. Griggs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), I, p. 563. 6. Mary Wollstonecraft to Mary Hays, [12 November ?] 1792, Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Ralph M. Wardle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 223. 7. Capel Lofft to William Godwin, undated letter [1805?], Abinger MSS, Dep. C. 527. 8. The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles, ed. Edmund Dowden, LL.D. (London: Hodges, Tigges & Co., 1881), pp. 51–2. 9. Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 188–9. 10. Wendy Gunther-Canada argues that Wollstonecraft interrupted the ‘fraternal conversation of political thought’ among the men she herself described as ‘canonized forefathers’ in Rebel Writer: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment Politics (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001), p. 42. 11. Jonathan Israel, ‘Introduction,’ Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 11. 12. Helena Rosenblatt, ’The Christian Enlightenment,’ in The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol VII: Enlightenment, Revolution and Reawakening (1660–1815), eds Timothy Tackett and Stewart Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 13. ‘Generous man’ is a phrase used by John Eccles, Hays’s young lover. See Gina Luria Walker, ‘Mary Hays’s “Love Letters,”’ Keats-Shelley Journal, LI (2002), pp. 94–115. Michèle Le Doeuff also invokes the phrase in The Sex of Knowing, trans. Kathryn Hamer and Lorraine Code (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. xvi. 14. Kathryn Gleadle remarks that ‘the relationship between Unitarianism and early feminism is far more complex than has traditionally been assumed … there existed no natural corollary between Unitarian liberalism and a commitment to feminist principles’ in The Early Feminists: Radical Unitarians and the Emergence of the Women’s Rights Movement, 1831–51 (London: Macmillan Press, 1995), p. 31. 15. As part of my doctoral research under the direction of Kenneth Neill Cameron, and with the help of Donald H. Reiman, I located 115 letters in private hands in London that Hays carefully preserved for posterity, and her family handed down to succeeding generations. The Carl H. and Lily Pforzheimer Library purchased the archive in 1971. These letters and other documents are now part of The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley & His Circle, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. See Marilyn L. Brooks, The Correspondence (1779–1843) of Mary Hays, British Novelist (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004). 16. All biographical information about Hays is drawn from Gina M. Luria, ‘Mary Hays: A Critical Biography’ (unpublished dissertation, NYU, 1972), unless otherwise noted.

Mary Hays: An Enlightened Quest 509 17. A. F. Wedd, ed., The Love-Letters of Mary Hays (1779–1780) (London: Methuen, 1925), p. 164. 18. John Jebb, ‘Report of the Sub-Committee of Westminster …,’ 27 May 1780, reprinted in S. Maccoby, ed., The English Radical Tradition 1763–1914 (New York: New York University Press, 1957), pp. 35–6. 19. Arianne Chernock, ‘Extending the “Right of Election”: Men’s Arguments for Women’s Political Representation in Late-Eighteenth-Century Britain,’ Gender and Enlightenment Colloquium 8: Gender and Enlightened Utopias, 7 June 2003, York University. 20. Irene Tayler and Gina Luria discuss this phenomenon in ‘Gender and Genre: Women in British Romantic Literature,’ in What Manner of Woman: Essays in British and American Literature, ed. Marlene Springer (New York University, 1978). 21. Robert Robinson, Arcana, or the Principles of the Late Petitioners to Parliament (Cambridge: Fletcher and Hodson, 1774), p. 33. 22. Theophilus Lindsey, ‘A SERMON preached at the Opening of the Chapel in Essex House, Essex-Street … April 17, 1774,’ Conversations on Christian Idolatry (London, 1791), unpaginated. 23. Anne F. Wedd, Hays’s collateral descendant and first twentieth century editor, reported that Mrs. Hays disapproved of John because of his uncertain financial status, while the senior Mr. Eccles withheld support because John refused to continue in the family business. See A. F. Wedd, ‘The Story of Mary Hays,’ The Love-Letters of Mary Hays (1779–1780) (London: Methuen, 1925), pp. 1–14. 24. For a reading of Hays’s earliest extant correspondence, see ‘Mary Hays’s “Love Letters.”’ 25. Mary Hays to Henry Crabb Robinson, April 1842, MS Dr. Williams’s Library, uncatalogued. 26. Robinson was active in Cambridge politics in the ﬁght to repeal the onerous Test and Corporation Acts, and untiring on behalf of parliamentary reform. He gave Hays copies of his provocative polemics, including A Political Catechism (1782), which Hays later noted ‘was taken to the House of Commons, and read by a member there, as a proof of the disaffected spirit of the Dissenters.’ Edmund Burke in 1790 denounced Robinson’s publication to Parliament as ‘full of the most audacious libels on the national establishment … and invectives on Kings and Bishops,’ The Parliamentary Register; or, History of the Proceedings and Debates of the House of Commons, Vol. XXVII (London: J. Debrett, 1790), pp. 179–88. For Robinson’s role in Cambridge politics, see James E. Bradley, ‘Religion and Reform at the Polls: Nonconformity in Cambridge Politics, 1774–1784,’ Journal of British Studies, vol. 23 (Spring 1984), pp. 55–78. Among those who discuss Robinson as thinker and activist are Anthony Lincoln, Some Political and Social Ideas of English Dissent, 1763–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938); Graham W. Hughes, With Freedom Fired: The Story of Robert Robinson, Cambridge Nonconformist (London: Carey Kingsgate Press, 1955); Ben Ross Schneider, Wordsworth’s Cambridge Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957); Frida Knight, University Rebel: The Life of William Frend (1757–1841) (London: Victor Gollancz, 1971); Nicholas Roe, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); James E. Bradley, Religion, Revolution, and English Radicalism: Nonconformity in Eighteenth-Century Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution 1790–1827 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) in the chapters on Hays; R. K. Webb, ‘The Emergence of Rational Dissent,’ Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 14–21. 27. Len Addicott, ‘Introduction,’ Church Book: St Andrew’s Street Baptist Church, Cambridge 1720–1832, (London: Baptist Historical Society, 1991), pp. i–xxxii. See also Robinson’s letter to Hays in which he addresses her concerns about the sectarian disputes then roiling English Dissenters. ‘Disputants here [in Cambridge] want me to take a side,’

510 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

28.

29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44.

he wrote, ‘and because I refuse to do so they represent me as a man void of all principles, to whom truth and error are alike indifferent.’ Robinson to Hays, 4 March 1789, Pforzheimer MS RR60. ‘Eighteenth-century young women: How were they educated?’ Pursuing the Muses: Female Education and Nonconformist Culture, 1700–1900 (London: Leicester University Press, 1997), pp. 18–29. Elizabeth Eger, ‘“The noblest commerce of mankind”: Conversation and Community in the Bluestocking Circle’; Jane Rendall, ‘“Women that would plague me with rational conversation”: Aspiring Women and Scottish Whigs, c. 1790–1830’; Clarissa Campbell Orr, ‘Aristocratic Feminism, The Learned Governess, and the Republic of Letters’; Daniel White, ‘“With Mrs. Barbauld it is different”: Dissenting Feminism and the Devotional Taste’, this volume. Taylor, pp. 103, 110, 149–50, and passim. Helen Plant, Unitarianism, Philanthropy and feminism in York, 1782–1821: the career of Catharine Cappe (York: Borthwick Paper No. 103, 2003). Sally L. Jenkinson, ‘The Context of Heresy,’ Histories of Heresy in Early Modern Europe: For, Against, and Beyond Persecution and Toleration, ed. John Christian Laursen (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 119–38. Saurin, Jacques. ‘SERMON IV. The Repentance of the Unchaste Woman.’ Sermons Translated from the original FRENCH of The late Revd. James Saurin … Volume II. On the Truth of Revelation, trans. Robert Robinson, (Cambridge: Fletcher & Hodson, 1775. Rpt: Lepard, 1784), pp. 91–124. Robert Robinson, letter to Mary Hays, 26 March 1785, Pf. MS RR2157, Mary Hays Letters and Manuscripts. Robinson refers to his translation of Jean Claude, ‘An Essay on the Composition of a Sermon,’ Posthumous Works, trans. Robert Robinson, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (London: T. Scollick, 1788), pp. 152–8. Robert Robinson, ‘Memoirs of the Reformation in France, and of the Life of the Rev. James Saurin, The Preface to the First Volume of a Translation of Saurin’s Sermons,’ Miscellaneous Works of Robert Robinson, [ed. Benjamin Flower] (Harlow: B. Flower, 1807), I, pp. 1–63. Ibid., 35. Israel writes, ‘Spinoza’s conception of freedom … is integrally linked to his advocacy of democracy and radical theory of toleration,’ ‘Philosophy, Politics, and the Liberation of Man,’ p. 259. Robinson, ‘Letter III. On the RIGHT of PRIVATE JUDGMENT,’ Arcana, p. 35. Robinson, Slavery Inconsistent with the Spirit of Christianity (1786; reprinted Baltimore: Abner Neal, 1819), p. 10, emphasis mine. Robert Robinson to Mary Hays, 4 March 1789, Pf. MS RR2160. Letters and Essays, p. 120. Ibid., 121. For a discussion of Robinson’s influence on Hays, see Gina Luria Walker, ‘“Sewing in the Next World”: Mary Hays as Dissenting Autodidact,’ Romanticism on the Net (25 [February 2002]), special issue, ‘Religion and Romantic ReVision, 1780–1830.’ Joseph Priestley, ‘Reflections on Death. A Sermon, on Occasion of the Death of The Rev. Robert Robinson, of Cambridge, Delivered at the New Meeting in Birmingham, 13 June 1790, and published at the Request of those who heard it, and of Mr. Robinson’s Family’ (Birmingham: J. Belcher, 1790), p. 419. Hays was not at the funeral in Birmingham but read the published version some months later. Priestley came to the Hackney area and New College in 1791, seeking asylum after the ‘Birmingham’ or ‘Priestley’ riots when a mob burned his home, library, manuscripts, and laboratory, as well as the property of other Dissenters. See Ana M. Acosta, ‘Spaces of Dissent and the Public Sphere in Hackney, Stoke Newington, and Newington Green’ Eighteenth-Century Life 27.1 (2003), 16–20; see also Alan R. Ruston, ‘The Revolutionary Period: Price, Priestley and Belsham,’ Unitarianism and Early Presbyterianism in Hackney (Oxhey Watford: A. R. Ruston, 1980), pp. 16–18.

Mary Hays: An Enlightened Quest 511 45. Hackney New College Sermons and Reports (London, 1786–91), unpaginated. Among the financial supporters and advisors of New College were Theophilus Lindsey, Dr. R. Alderson, Reverend Rochemont Barbauld, Joseph Johnson, Josiah Wedgewood, John Disney, and John Aikin. 46. J. W. Ashley Smith, The Birth of Modern Education: The Contribution of the Dissenting Academies 1660–1800 (London: Independent Press Ltd., 1954), pp. 154 ff. 47. Smith, ‘Tutors Constructing their own Curricula,’ pp. 129–87; Ruth Watts, ‘Ideals into Practice: Unitarians in Education,’ Gender, Power and the Unitarians in England 1760–1860 (London: Longman, 1998), pp. 56–63; For a trenchant history of pedagogy at the academies, see David L. Wykes, ‘The contribution of the Dissenting Academy to the Emergence of Rational Dissent,’ Enlightenment and Religion, pp. 99–139. 48. Hays takes the name that means ‘piety’ in Greek. She may also refer to the ‘good Eusebia’ in William Law’s popular The Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728). Cf. M. Phillips and W. S. Tompkinson, English Women in Life and Letters (Oxford, 1926), pp. 180–1. I appreciate Miriam Wallace’s observations that ‘Eusebia’ was the second wife of the Roman Emperor Constantius II who was associated with the ‘Arian controversy’ or the roots of Unitarianism. Personal communication, July 2003. 49. ‘Cursory Remarks on an Enquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of Public or Social Worship: Inscribed to Gilbert Wakefield, B.A … by Eusebia,’ 2nd ed. (London, 1792), p. 3. 50. Gilbert Wakeﬁeld, A new Translation of those Parts only of the New Testament, which are wrongly translated in our common Version (London: J. Deighton, 1789). 51. Barbara Taylor notes, ‘the proto-feminist dimension of leftwing protestantism makes [the] connection [between Rational Dissent and the jacobin women] unsurprising, but even here, as Barbauld’s example shows, attitudes were divided. In fact of the radical literatae … only Mary Hays combined Dissenting activism with zealous women’s rights advocacy – which makes the contrast between her position and that of Anna Barbauld particularly interesting …’ ‘Gallic Philosophesses,’ pp. 11–12. 52. Gilbert Wakefield published An Enquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of public, or social, Worship in 1791 (London: J. Deighton). A second edition, subtitled ‘A New Edition,’ was published after 29 February in 1792, also by Deighton. Wakefield’s response to ‘Eusebia’ is from the ‘Appendix,’ p. 59. 53. ‘Cursory Remarks,’ p. 24. 54. In ‘The Story of Mary Hays,’ A. F. Wedd, Hays’s collateral descendant, alleged that in the early 1790s, Hays composed sermons that were preached by Dr. Disney of Essex Street Chapel. Wedd referred to autobiographical texts that are no longer extant. Wedd’s comment remains suggestive, if enigmatic. 55. Gilbert Wakefield to William Frend, undated [1792?], MS, Dr. Williams’s Library, uncatalogued. I appreciate permission to quote from this unpublished letter. Wakefield is an intriguing figure in the context of educated women. Watts generalizes that he ‘obviously delighted in the intellectual companionship of women,’ citing Wakefield’s care in teaching his daughters himself, and his concern about the interruption when he was imprisoned for sedition in 1799. Watts also refers to the attention Frend and John Aikin paid to their daughters’ education (Watts, p. 45, p. 79, p. 87, pp. 77–96). The biographies of these Unitarians suggest tension between the historical misogyny inscribed in some of the classical texts used to train males in translation and other cognitive skills, and their individual responses to being the fathers of competent daughters. At play here, too, is the more fraught issue of women as public intellectuals, rather than private students. 56. William Frend to ‘Eusebia,’ 16 April 1792, MS, Dr. Williams’s Library, uncatalogued. 57. Frend’s ‘amotion’ from the college was based on grounds that his judges knew were without precedent. See Arthur Gray, M. A. and Frederick Brittain, Litt. D., ‘The

512 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses

58.

59.

60. 61.

Jesus Unitarians,’ A History of Jesus College Cambridge (London: Heinemann, 1960), pp. 123–31. Wakefield, A General Reply to the Arguments Against the Enquiry into Public Worship, published after 19 June 1792. Wakefield replies to his critics including Dr. Disney, Mr. Wilson, Mrs. Barbauld, Dr. Priestley, Mr. Simpson, Mr. Bruckner, and Mr. Pope, as well as to ‘Eusebia.’ Mrs. Barbauld published Remarks on Mr. Wakeﬁeld’s Enquiry … . (London: J. Johnson, 1792). Barbauld’s response was more assured and hortatory than Hays’s. Speaking for ‘The Dissenters,’ she wrote, they ‘do not make it their boast that they have nothing to reform,’ especially in the present time when ‘a keen spirit of research is now abroad, and demands reform,’ p. 74. I appreciate Amy Weldon’s generous donation of a facsimile copy of this text. Patricia J. Johnson, ‘Constructions of Venus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses V,’ Arethusa, 29.1 (1996), pp. 125–49. General Reply, p. 3. Hays would have known Matthew Prior’s rendition of the Greek original in his ‘Pallas and Venus’ (1708), in which Pallas advises Venus that, ‘Thou to be strong must put off every Dress:/ Thy only Armour is thy Nakedness.’ Matthew Prior, ‘Pallas and Venus,’ The Penn State Archive of Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, ed. Kathleen Nulton Kemmerer, 4 July 2002, http://www.hn.psu.edu/faculty/kkemmerer/poets/prior/pallas.htm. Coleridge, too, translated the epigram from the Greek Anthology as a schoolboy or student at Cambridge. His version reads: On the peaks of Ida, Cytherean Aphrodite was exulting over Athena: “Now, naked, I am victorious. How, when I take up arms?” But Athena answered her, laughing: “Ha! Naked, Cyprian, you have your body fully armed.”

‘Greek Epigram on Aphrodite and Athena’ (1786–91?), The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Poetical Works I, Poems (Reading Text): Part 1, ed. J. C. C. Mays (Princeton: Bollinger Series LXXV, Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 8. 62. Theophilus Lindsey, ‘A SERMON preached at the opening of the Chapel in EssexHouse, Essex Street … April 17, 1774,’ Conversations on Christian Idolatry (London, 1791), unpaginated. Hays’s contact with the evolving Unitarianism of Lindsey, Disney, Priestley, Worthington, and, especially, Frend, was crucial to her understanding. G. M. Ditchfield characterizes Unitarianism’s ‘distinguishing positions’ as ‘the denial of the atonement and of original sin, with the consequent optimistic implications for human nature and material and moral improvement, leading to active involvement in campaigns for such improvement.’ Unitarian beliefs provided the theological imperative for Hays’s radicalism and feminism. In Letters and Essays (1793), she was emphatic that the ‘gross Calvinistic notion of original sin...[is] shocking to reason.’ Nevertheless, for Hays, as for others of the women among her cohort, the Dissenting insistence on the ‘right to private judgment’ did not translate into self-conﬁdent ambition or productivity. 63. Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England 1660–1780, II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 329. For an illuminating discussion of Lindsey’s career, see G. M. Ditchfield, ‘Theophilus Lindsey: From Anglican to Unitarian,’ (London: Friends of Dr. Williams’s Library Fifty-First Lecture, 1998). 64. William Enfield, The History of Philosophy: from the earliest times to the beginning of the present century: drawn up from Brucker’s Historia Critica Philosophiae, 2 vols (London: J. Johnson, 1791). For a publication history and commentary on Enfield’s polemical interpretations, see John Christian Laursen, ‘Brucker in English and the Uses of the History of Philosophy in the Revolutionary Era,’ paper presented at Construction of the Past in Modern Political Philosophy, The Conference for the Study of Political

Mary Hays: An Enlightened Quest 513

65.

66.

67. 68.

69.

70.

71.

72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77.

78.

79.

Thought, Colorado Springs, 9–11 November, 2001. I appreciate Professor Laursen allowing me to read his essay in manuscript. In a letter to Hays from Hugh Worthington dated 3 September 1792, he advised that she ‘take another draught of Enfield’s excellent Philosophy’ to calm her from the effects of her encounters with Wollstonecraft, and the attentions paid to ‘Cursory Remarks.’ See Isaac Kramnick’s comments about Harley’s inﬂuence on Dissent, ‘EighteenthCentury Science and Rational Social Theory: The Case of Joseph Priestley’s Scientiﬁc Liberalism,’ Motion Towards Perfection: The Achievement of Joseph Priestley, eds A. Truman Schwartz and John G. McEvoy (Boston: Skinner House Books, 1990), pp. 70–3. Joseph Priestley, ‘An Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life,’ Joseph Priestley: Selections from His Writings, ed. Ira V. Brown (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962), pp. 79–100. Joseph Priestley, ‘Lectures on History and General Policy,’ Selections from His Writings, 111, p. 102. The study of mathematics was important to Hays as a way to share Frend’s academic interests, and as an enlightened exercise of Kant’s prescription in ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ to use ‘one’s intelligence without the guidance of another.’ For discussion of Lavater’s significance, see Lucy Hartley, Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Hugh Worthington to Mary Hays, 4 November 1791, MS, Dr. Williams’s Library, uncatalogued. Worthington, like Robinson, argued for the benefits of multiple religious perspectives: ‘I resemble Dr. Price in one thing (would I did in 100 more) in being free from ye rage of Proseltetism; I wish all to think for themselves, & esteem ye circumstance of making them my Disciples, a very small matter compared with their being ye Disciples of Goodness.’ Hays also mentioned that if Worthington judged she didn’t have sufﬁcient text for a book, her sister, Elizabeth Hays, could contribute some pieces. When Letters and Essays was published, two moral tales by ‘E. H.’ were included. Mary Hays to Hugh Worthington, 3 July 1792, MS, in private hands. Worthington wrote soon to confirm that he had received her ‘valuable pages,’ including an introduction, which particularly pleased him, Hugh Worthington to Mary Hays, 17 August 1792, MS, Dr. Williams’s Library, uncatalogued. Letters and Essays, p. 16. Hays echoes Wollstonecraft’s invocation of this phrase from Luke at the end of Wollstonecraft’s ﬁrst novel, Mary; A Fiction (1788). Letters and Essays, p. 92. Hays later included Christina in Female Biography where she represented that, as queen, Christina was renowned for being tough but fair, encouraging learning and the arts, and intervening for good and ill in the careers of learned men and women. She abdicated the throne to be free herself, quit Sweden, dressed, walked, and cursed like a man, converted from Lutheranism to Catholicism, and possessed wit, learning, courage, ambition, and vindictiveness. Female Biography, III, pp. 288–314. See also Susanna Akerman, Queen Christina of Sweden and Her Circle: The Transformation of a Seventeenth-Century Philosophical Libertine (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991). See D. R. Woolf’s intriguing essay on women’s relationship to history, ‘A Feminine Past? Gender, Genre, and Historical Knowledge in England, 1500–1800,’ American Historical Review (June 1997), pp. 667–77. See also Philip Hicks, ‘Catharine Macaulay’s Civil War: Gender, History and Republicanism in Georgian Britain,’ Journal of British Studies, Vol. 41, No. 2 (April, 2002), pp. 170–98. Roy Porter used the term to describe Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) as ‘a Bildungsroman … in its portrait of late Enlightenment selfhood in all its deliciously dangerous ambiguities,’ Enlightenment: Britain and the creation of the modern world (London: Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 2000), p. 292.

514 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses 80. For a discussion of Hays’s life-writing of Wollstonecraft, see Gina Luria Walker, ‘The Two Marys: Hays Writes Wollstonecraft,’ Romantic Circles (www.rc.umd.edu), University of Maryland, 2002, http://www.rc.umd.edu/features/features/chambermusic/. 81. Hays’s personal connection with ‘America’ seems to have been through her cousin, Benjamin Seymour, who wrote to her as ‘Eusebia’ from the ship ‘Charleston’ on his voyage across the Atlantic in December, 1794, and from Boston in December, 1795. Pf. MS 2211–12. 82. Perhaps derived from ‘Amasa, sparing the people,’ or ‘Amasai, strong.’ 83. George Dyer to Mary Hays, 2 December 1792, Pf. MS 2164. 84. Mary Wollstonecraft to Mary Hays, 25 November 1792, Pf. MS MW35. 85. For discussion of Wollstonecraft’s influence in Letters and Essays, see ‘“Sewing in the Next World.”’ See also Mary A. Waters’ suggestive essay, ‘“The first of a new genus”: Mary Wollstonecraft as a Literary Critic and Mentor to Mary Hays,’ EighteenthCentury Studies, Spring 2004, Vol 37:3. 86. ‘Article LXIL,’ The Analytical Review, XVI (May 1793), pp. 464–5. 87. Theophilus Lindsey to Mary Hays, 15 April 1793, MS, Dr. Williams’s Library, uncatalogued. 88. Probably the Reverend John Evans, a Dissenting minister, whom J. E. Cookson identifies as ‘a Friend of Peace,’ The Friends of Peace: Anti-war Liberalism in England, 1793–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 179. 89. The English Review critic may well have been making a physical reference that his readers may have read as such. Hays’s hair – or lack of it – was commented on by a number of her contemporaries. Cf. Claire Grogan, ‘Introduction,’ Elizabeth Hamilton, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800), reprinted Broadview Press, 2000, pp. 18–26; Taylor, ‘Gallic Philosophesses,’ p.12. Amelia Alderson (later Opie) reported a mutual friend’s unfavorable comparison of Hays’s appearance with Wollstonecraft’s to Wollstonecraft, 28 August [1796], Abinger MSS, Dep. 210/6. 90. (?John) Evans to Mary Hays [1793?], Pf. MS 2202. 91. Hays to Godwin, 7 December 1794, Pf. MS MH 2. 92. Hays to Godwin, 13 October 1795, Pf. MS MH8. 93. Hays several times in her works repeats this phrase from Alexander Pope’s ‘The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated,’ l. 128. 94. Hays to Godwin, n.d., [January 1796?], Pf. MS MH24. 95. Hays to Godwin, 23 March 1796, Pf. MS MH18. 96. Hays provided running commentary in her letters to Godwin on Wollstonecraft’s unhappy situation and her attempts to be supportive. On 20 November 1795, Hays described ‘a conversation that recently took place in a company where I was present. The connexion [sic] of Mrs Woolstonecraft [sic] with Mr Imlay (which, it is said, has not received a legal sanction) was the subject of discussion. Some ladies present, most amiable, sensible, & worthy women, expressed their concern on a variety of accounts, & especially lamented that it would no longer be proper for them to visit Mrs W. I started at what I conceived to be bigotry, frankly declaring that it would have no effect upon my conduct, that I had visited her since, & shou’d receive much pleasure in having an opportunity of doing so again. – That, whatever might be the principles that occasioned, or the consequences which might ensue from, the step she had taken, it was herself, only, who must be accountable for, or must suffer them, & that I did not conceive a matter so purely personal to be my concern. Everyone was liable to be led into mistakes by the illusions of the imagination, or the erring conclusions of the judgement [sic] that we must not expect to find perfection, & while the balance of excellence preponderated we shou’d regulate our esteem in due proportion – that, at present, I only saw in Mrs W’s conduct a breach of civil institution which, no doubt, would bring with it, notwithstanding her superior fortitude & resources, civil inconveniences. My friends mildly observed, that however

Mary Hays: An Enlightened Quest 515

97. 98. 99. 100.

101.

102. 103.

104.

105. 106. 107. 108. 109.

110.

just might be my reasoning in the abstract, certain situations & circumstances, required certain observances, which I was only, not aware of from having but little mix’d with society.... I have since been told that the reflection has been suggested (not by any of the party alluded to) “That as Miss Hays is so professed an admirer of Mrs W, it is to be hoped that she does not mean to imitate her conduct.”’ Hays to Godwin, 20 November 1795, Pf. MS MH9. On 6 February 1796, she wrote, ‘Lately, a strong sympathy of feeling, & similarity, in some respects, of situation, has produced an unreserved communication of friendship & confidence between Mrs Woolstonecraft & myself’, Pf. MS MH13; again, on [14–20?] February 1796, ‘I can do little towards mending the world, & for that little shall meet with reproach & malignity, instead of respect & esteem. (This had already been the case with a beloved friend of mine, women labour under peculiar & appropriate disadvantages),’ Pf. MS MH14; and on 4 April 1796, ‘Mrs Imlay is … return’d, & at [the Christies’] house – I am sorry to add, her health appears in a still more declining state. It does not signify what is the cause, but her heart, I think, is broken,’ Pf. MS MH19. Hays to Godwin, 3 May 1796, Pf. MS MH20. I appreciate Pamela Clemit’s useful suggestion to compare Hays’s epistolary tone with that of Godwin’s other female correspondents. Hays to Godwin, 29 April 1796, Pf. MS MH20. See ‘Introduction,’ William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Pamela Clemit and Gina Luria Walker (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2001), pp. 11–36. Hays to Godwin, 1 March 1796, Pf. MS MH15: ‘I suspect … that you do not treat fairly either Mrs Woolstonecraft’s [romantic] disappointments or my own, you select, merely, the object, calculate its worth abstractedly, & say it is not deserving a regret … but you shou’d take into consideration all the associations, habits, & plans, connected with this object … . With women, the connection of [love] with other sentiments is … more wide & complicated than with men … their establishment, all their importance in society, yes, their very social existence, is close-twisted with it, it is then necessarily made, with them, a primary pursuit, their whole education has this tendency, & unless you cou’d make them wholly independent of circumstances, you cannot cure the effects which these trains of thinking & acting produce.’ Emma Courtney, p. 148; Hays to Godwin, 11 January 1796, Pf. MS MH11. Rebecca Earle, ‘Introduction: letters, writers and the historian,’ Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter writers, 1600–1945 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), p. 7. See also James How, Epistolary Spaces: English Letter Writing from the Foundation of the Post Office to Richardson’s Clarissa (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). Hays describes reading Clarissa ‘repeatedly in very early life’, her mind always ‘more pure, more chastened, more elevated after the perusal of it’ because the heroine’s character possessed ‘something like the fine ideal beauty of the ancients’, Letters and Essays, pp. 95–6. See Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 96. Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796); reprinted with an introduction by Gina Luria, (New York: Garland Publishing, 1974), pp. 65–8. Mary Wollstonecraft to Mary Hays, [c. early 1797], Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Ralph M. Wardle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 382. See the fable of Hortensius in Letters and Essays for a composite of Hays’s ideal man, ‘No. IX, To Amasia,’ pp. 116–22. Mary Wollstonecraft to Mary Hays, c. January 1797, Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, p. 376. Gray and Brittain note that beginning with a statute of 1559, the Fellows of the College ‘are to be unmarried,’ a practice that continued for the next 280 years, Jesus College, pp. 48–9. Hays to Godwin, 11 May 1796, Pf. MS MH21.

516 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses 111. Emma Courtney, p. 73. 112. Hays to Godwin 6 February 1796, Pf. MS MH12. 113. Hays had reason to be skeptical of Frend’s protestations about money: Several of the Unitarian couples she knew or knew of – including the Disneys, the Jebbs, the Lindseys, the Priestleys, the Wakefields – eschewed financial security for the claims of conscience. Frend married in 1808. His wife was Sara Blackburne, from a distinguished liberal clerical family, who was related to the wives of John Disney and Theophilus Lindsey. In 1806, Frend became a fully employed Actuary at the recently formed Rock Life Assurance Company, after years of supporting himself by freelance tutoring. See Frida Knight, University Rebel: The Life of William Frend, pp. 241–2. 114. Robert Southey to Joseph Cottle, Ibid. Southey acknowledged in the same breath that he hadn’t read her novel. Barbara Taylor describes the book as ‘a rather alarming read,’that, as a gloss on Wollstonecraft’s Short Residence, ‘makes scandalously explicit the valorization of women’s eroticism implicit in Wollstonecraft’s later works.’ Taylor notes that, ‘Hays’s novel is also important … as the only Jacobin text to begin to explore the limitations of 1790s radicalism when applied to women’s lives and interests.’ Mary Jacobus points to the novel’s critique of the ideal of Enlightenment rationality that purported to be ‘both ungendered and disembodied, not to say classless and affectless.’ In her critique, ‘Hays’s feminist philosophy allows her to level an accusation at the idealization of the Enlightenment subject, no longer portrayed as the subject of Godwinian reason, but as the subject of social constraints and incomprehensible passions,’ ‘Traces of an Accusing Spirit: Mary Hays and the Vehicular State,’ Psychoanalysis and the Scene of Reading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 206. Tilottama Rajan argues that in Emma Courtney ‘the constant crossings between life and text are represented in the novel by the way characters and functions cross over between the extradiegetic and intradiegetic worlds,’ ‘Autonarration and Genotext in Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney, Studies in Romanticism, V. 32, No. 2 (Summer 1993), p. 175. Miriam L. Wallace points to Hays’s ‘explicitly feminist strategy’ in implying that ‘feeling is part of historical location and knowledge,’ ‘Mary Hays’s “Female Philosopher,”’ Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution, ed. Adriana Craciun and Kari E. Lokki, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), pp. 236–7. 115. See Gina Luria Walker, ‘“The Emancipated Mind”: Robinson’s History of the Reformation in France and Mary Hays’s View of Censorship and Persecution,’ Understandings of Censorship and Persecution in the Eighteenth-Century, International Society for Eighteenth Century Studies Congress, The Clark Library, UCLA, 7 August 2003. 116. It is unclear who borrowed the phrase from whom. Mary Wollstonecraft was first to use the phrase in print in 1796, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, 7 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1989), vol. 6, ‘Letter 10,’ p. 294; Hays invoked the ‘magic circle’ in an earlier letter to Godwin. See also Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney, ed. Marilyn Brooks (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2000), p. 66, p. 116, based on Hays’s letter to Godwin, 28 July 1795, Pf. MS MH6. 117. Hays intimated from his tutelage of her the kind of father Frend would likely be. Events proved her right: Frend was particularly devoted to his daughter, suggestively named Sophia, to whom he taught mathematics and Greek. He was also an attentive tutor to the young Lady Annabella Milbanke, later Lady Byron. See Knight, p. 215, pp. 238–9; Watts, p. 72. 118. Emma Courtney, p. 173; Hays to Godwin, dated November, but postmarked 6 February 1796, Pf. MS MH13. 119. Hays’s enthusiasm for Helvétius anticipated modern assessments of his influence. See David Wooten, ‘Helvetius: From Radical Enlightenment to Revolution,’ Political Theory 28.3 (2000), pp. 307–336.

Mary Hays: An Enlightened Quest 517 120. See Gina Luria Walker, ‘Benevolent Misogyny: Mary Hays in The Monthly Magazine,’ paper presented at Places of Exchange: Magazines, Journals and Newspapers in British and Irish Culture, 1688–1945, University of Glasgow, 25–27 July 2002. For a clear statement that ‘Woman is far more amiable in a domestic than a public Station,’ see ‘Letter 25,’ Thomas Amyot to William Pattisson, 18 February 1795, Youth and Revolution in the 1790s: Letters of William Pattisson, Thomas Amyot and Henry Crabb Robinson, Penelope J. Corfield and Chris Evans, eds (Phoenix Mill: Alan Sutton, 1996), p. 120. 121. Judith Barbour proposes a reading of this correspondence from Godwin’s perspective, concluding that ‘Mary Hays is dropped out of the account and her letters [that Godwin refused in his lifetime to return] are not going to be missed,’ in ‘“Obliged to make this sort of deposit of our minds”: William Godwin and the sociable contract of writing,’ Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 173. 122. J. E. Cookson, pp. 100–3. 123. [Mary Hays], ‘What Women Are,’ Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (1798; reprt. Garland Publishing, 1974, with an introduction by Gina Luria), p. 91. 124. See the intriguing suggestion in Gary Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution. If Wollstonecraft was intentionally omitted from Female Biography, it is likely because Phillips, always interested in proﬁt, would have refused to publish it otherwise, given the witch hunt against the radicals, in which Wollstonecraft was the main ‘unsex’d female’ and Hays her living stand-in. The Pforzheimer Collection of Mary Hays Manuscripts includes papers attesting to a lawsuit against Phillips in which Hays was defended by John Aikin. On Phillips’s reputation as ‘an entrepreneur scallywag,’ see John Issitt, ‘Introducing Sir Richard Phillips,’ Paradigm, No. 26 (October, 1998), pp. 4–5. 125. This is the work for which Hays continued to be known during the nineteenth century. It has received much less attention among modern critics than her novels; for example, Alison Booth’s study of nineteenth-century female biographies, How to Make It as a Woman (University of Chicago Press, 2004) mentions Hays only in passing. More thoughtful, if brief, is Mary Spongberg’s assessment that, ‘By representing fragmented subjectivity in her biographical sketches Hays pre-empted Lytton Strachey’s “modernization” of the genre by over a century,’ ‘“Heroines of Domestic Life”: Women’s History and Female Biography,’ Writing Women’s History Since the Renaissance (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 118. Hays realized sufficient royalties from Female Biography to purchase a small house of her own. 126. Discussed in Sally L. Jenkinson, ‘The Context of Heresy,’ Histories of Heresy in Early Modern Europe: For, Against, and Beyond Persecution and Toleration, ed. John Christian Laursen (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 133–5. 127. Including Andrew Kippis, John Aikin, Enﬁeld, Dyer, Godwin, and Priestley. 128. Hays, like other radicals, was deeply impressed by the English translation of An Appeal to Impartial Posterity, by Citizenness Roland, Wife of the Minister of the Home Department; or, A Collection of Pieces Written by her during her Conﬁnement in the Prisons of the Abbey, and St. Pélagie. Translated from the French, 2 vols (London: J. Johnson, 1795). 129. Mary Hays, ‘Anne Askew,’ Female Biography, I, p. 202. 130. Mary Hays, ‘Margaret de Valois,’ Female Biography, V, pp. 472–3. Sally Jenkinson notes that in his article that ‘pays homage’ to Navarre, can be ‘observed in microcosm the range of Bayle’s public concerns,’ from ‘Navarre,’ Bayle: Political Writings, ed. Sally L. Jenkinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 192. 131. Mary Hays, ‘Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft,’ The Annual Necrology for 1797–8, (London: R. Phillips, 1800), pp. 422–3.

518 Feminism and Enlightened Religious Discourses 132. Mary Hays, ‘Queen Carolina, wife of George IV’, Memoirs of Queens, Illustrious and Celebrated (London: T. & J. Allman (1821), pp. 127–8. Clarissa Campbell Orr describes the climate of opinion as the conjoining of ‘feminism and popular radicalism … a discourse of natural rights with neo-chivalry,’ ‘Introduction,’ Queenship in Britain 1660–1837, ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 41. See also See Anna Clark, ‘Queen Caroline and the Sexual Politics of Popular Culture in London, 1820,’ Representations, No. 31, Special Issue: The Margins of Identity in Nineteenth-Century England (Summer, 1990), pp. 47–68; Dror Wahrman, ‘“Middle Clas” Domesticity Goes Public: Gender, Class, and Politics from Queen Caroline to Queen Victoria,’ The Journal of British Studies, Vol. 32, No. 4, Making the English Middle Class, ca. 1700–1850 (October, 1993), pp. 396–432; T. W. Laqueur, ‘The Queen Caroline Affair: Politics as Art in the Reign of George IV,’ Journal of Modern History 54 (1982): pp. 417–66. 133. Mary Hays to Henry Crabb Robinson, 14 February 1806, MS, Dr. Williams’s Library, uncatalogued.

SECTION 8 WOMEN, LIBERTY AND THE NATION Introduction Harriet Guest

Women’s relationship to national politics in late eighteenth-century Britain has been a subject of lively debate in recent years. Amanda Vickery has argued that ‘cultural consumption on an unprecedented scale’ implied, at least for polite women, access to a world extending well beyond the conﬁnes of the private domestic sphere.1 Although the political cultures of the period were based in ‘stridently gendered and variously exclusionary conceptions of political subjectivity’, new forms of cultural consumption and participation also meant, as Kathleen Wilson has argued, that private men and women could imagine themselves as citizens – citizens who had a right, or even a duty, to comment critically on the decisions of their political leaders.2 So, for example, Anna Laetitia Barbauld was able to argue in her inﬂuential discourse Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation (1793) that although private individuals are usually ‘bound to acquiesce’ in national decisions, it can also be ‘incumbent on us to remonstrate’ with government ‘against a ruinous war, an unequal tax, or an edict of persecution’, as ‘this is the only way reformations can ever be brought about, or that government can enjoy the advantage of general opinion.’3 The women writers discussed in the three chapters below were all explicitly concerned with issues central to national politics, and used their writing as an opportunity to explore and deﬁne their role, or the role of women, in that context. Karen O’Brien and Sarah Hutton’s chapters examine the work of Catharine Macaulay, whose most extraordinary and celebrated achievement was her eightvolume History of England from the Accession of James I (1763–83). The two chapters complement each other neatly, as O’Brien focuses on Macaulay’s histories, whereas Hutton is principally concerned with Macaulay’s Letters on Education (1790) and Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth (1783). O’Brien reads Macaulay’s eightvolume History as well as her History of England from the Revolution to the Present Time in a Series of Letters to a Friend (1778) in the context of contemporary historiography, and particularly of Hume’s History of England (1754–62), in order to reveal the modernity of Macaulay’s account, in its emphasis on the value of experience and the moral and political responsibilities of individuals. O’Brien suggests that this emphasis deﬁnes a possible role for educated men and women as ‘protocitizens’, keeping an attentive and disinterested watch over the nation’s affairs, and 519

520 Women, Liberty and the Nation

ready to spring to action if required – a role similar to that accorded to private individuals in Barbauld’s later discourse. Macaulay herself, as historian and political theorist, exempliﬁed the possibilities of this role in the vigilant energy and independence of judgement that characterised her work. Sarah Hutton’s analysis of the religious roots of Macaulay’s feminism traces the links between Macaulay’s commitment to the political principles of liberty and equality and her insistence on rational belief in a benevolent deity. Her chapter pays careful attention to Macaulay’s seventeenth and eighteenth-century sources, and to her criticisms of the writings of William King and Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, in order to clarify the basis in liberal theology of her Treatise and Letters on Education. Hutton emphasises the importance to Macaulay’s argument of the anti-voluntarist conception of God that insists on individual responsibility regardless of gender. The essay complements and supports O’Brien’s account of the centrality of the individual in Macaulay’s writing. The relation between Macaulay’s presentation of herself as a historian and her idea of the nation is difﬁcult, in ways that these thoughtful essays illuminate. Macaulay claimed that in comparison with ‘Governments formed on principles which promise the equal distribution of power and liberty’, which ‘attach to their service every generous inclination which subsists in the human character’, monarchy must appear ‘odious’. The appeal of principled government is irresistible because ‘[f]ond and stubborn as are the prejudices of vulgar minds to precedent and custom, whatever is sublime in nature or in art is no sooner known than venerated.’4 Following their ‘long subjection to monarchical tyranny’, the commonwealth should have been irresistibly attractive to Englishmen because it promised ‘a fuller measure of happiness, than had ever been the portion of human society’. But their acquiescence in ‘the ﬁrst step to the usurpation of Cromwell’ – the dissolution of parliament – ‘ﬁxes an indelible stain on the character of the English, as a people basely and incorrigibly attached to the sovereignty of individuals, and of natures too ignoble to endure an empire of equal laws.’ Macaulay’s conclusion was stern: ‘That this has been the character of the generality of the nation, the History of the country too fatally evinces.’5 This theme of the inadequacy or corruption of the English people, and their failure to seize the liberty within their grasp, is a repeated refrain of the History, and it hardly suggests that Macaulay deﬁned her patriotism through identiﬁcation with the people whose history she recorded. The historian spoke for a public virtue that her countrymen were too base or ignoble to grasp. Kate Davies has suggested that Macaulay was distinguished by private virtues associated with ‘both learning and women … in the discursive register of republicanism’, which conﬁrmed her exclusion from public life in the 1770s, and placed her ‘beyond the threat of effeminacy or the suspicion of corruptibility’.6 The historian was set apart from the people she berated by her unassailable attachment to what Davies argues was perceived as an anachronistic but admirable notion of public virtue. Her dedication to the public good was the basis for her independence of judgement – the independence which, in the essays of O’Brien and Hutton, also appears as the key characteristic of Macaulay’s modern conception of the role of the individual. But the relation

Introduction 521

between the independence of mind characterises the historian and proto-citizen and the role of the individual is not a matter of straightforward identiﬁcation. The independence of the historian enables or even obliges her to resist and reject attachment to the ‘sovereignty of individuals’, and Macaulay’s history frequently casts individual desires and interests, and the national attachment to these, as the causes of moral degeneracy. The historian’s capacity for independent and critical judgement is oppositional, and marks her distance from the baseness of the national character in thrall of powerful and persuasive individuals. Macaulay’s patriotism is deﬁned, in her Observations on the Reﬂections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (1790), in antagonism to Burke’s advocacy of local and familial ties as the seedbed of public and national affections. She writes that I hope we shall not be so much blinded with the splendour of dazzling images, as to confound those narrow affections which bind small bodies together by the mutual ties of personal interest, to that liberal benevolence, which, disdaining the consideration of every selﬁsh good, chearfully sacriﬁces a personal interest to the welfare of the community.7 The contrast between a Burkean sentimental patriotism based in personal interest and the public virtue of universal benevolence is the starting point for Caroline Franklin’s chapter on ‘Romantic patriotism as feminist critique of empire’, which discusses Helen Maria Williams’s published letters written from France in the early 1800s, and moves on to focus on Germaine de Stael’s Corinne, or Italy (1807) and Sydney Owenson’s The Wild Irish Girl (1806). Franklin argues that following the invasion fears in Britain in 1798, and the revelations of Godwin’s Memoirs of Wollstonecraft, liberal women writers found themselves excluded from political debate, and turned to genres which were not obviously political, such as travel writing and the national tale, to offer oblique criticisms of imperialism and colonialism. She suggests that these genres afforded women writers the opportunity to build on their oppositional role as outsiders, excluded from citizenship – a role that resonates with the independent stance so important to Macaulay’s conception of the historian. But for these later writers, republican politics do not provide the critical vantage point that Macaulay took up, for, as Stael remarks, ‘[i]n monarchies, women have ridicule to fear; in republics, hatred.’8 The political exclusion which had allowed Macaulay to claim independence of mind had become open hostility, which threatened to silence critical judgement. Franklin ﬁnds that the texts she considers interweave notions of a Burkean and sentimental attachment to local customs and landscapes with an appeal to concepts of common weal as the basis for reform. From this emerges a ‘hybrid genre’, capable of reaching and inﬂuencing a mass readership resistant to more explicitly political texts. But in subtle readings of the two novels she also shows how the identiﬁcation of their heroines with a sentimental nationalism implies links between the feminine, the arts and the colonised that reinforce rather than challenge the subordinate status of each of those three categories.9

522 Women, Liberty and the Nation

Notes 1. Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale U. P., 1998) 9. 2. Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, culture and imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge: CUP, 1998) 20. 3. [Barbauld], Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation: Or, A Discourse for the fast, appointed on April 19, 1793. By a Volunteer (this 4th ed., London: J. Johnson, 1793) 36–7. 4. Catharine Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James I to the Elevation of the House of Hanover. Vol. V. From the Death of Charles I to the Restoration of Charles II (London: E. and C. Dilly, 1772) 18. 5. Macaulay, History, V. 92, 107–8. 6. Kate Davies, Chap 1, Republican Sensibilities: Catharine Macaulay, Mercy Otis Warren and Atlantic Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2005). 7. [Catharine Macaulay], Observations on the Reﬂections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, on the Revolution in France, In a Letter to the Right Hon. the Earl of Stanhope (London: C. Dilly, 1790) 38–9. 8. Cited in Franklin’s essay, below. 9. See Claire Connolly’s perceptive analysis of the implications of Owenson’s use of the discourse of romantic love in her introduction to Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale, ed., with intro and notes by Claire Connolly and Stephen Copley, with a foreword by Kevin Whelan (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000).

8.1 Catharine Macaulay’s Histories of England: A Female Perspective on the History of Liberty Karen O’Brien

From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, historical writing emerged as the most important written medium for rehearsing and contesting ideas about nature and social role of women. By the turn of the next century, women writers themselves started to play a shaping role in a historical literature which had moved beyond its traditional preoccupation with high politics, and was increasingly engaged with questions of gender, society and culture.1 This growing involvement of women writers in British historical culture was, in large part, the outcome of the thematic enlargement of history, and the new interest which male historians took in their female readers.2 Yet it was certainly facilitated and conditioned by the spectacular success of the radical historian Catharine Macaulay. Her historical writings were, and remain, incontestably a major contribution to the radical reinterpretation of the English political past. Their place in the feminist debates of the Enlightenment has been less apparent, and more difﬁcult to assess. They are not works that overtly purvey a view of history from a woman’s point of view, nor do they pay great attention to the role of particular women in history. More signiﬁcantly, they do not address directly contemporary bodies of thought about the historical ‘progress of women’, the feminisation of manners, or the economic and intellectual advantages of a mixed-gender public culture. Yet, I shall argue that Macaulay’s histories did make a signiﬁcant contribution to feminist ideas, and not merely by their near uniqueness, in their time, as the work of a female historian. In her histories, she modernised and refashioned classical republican ideas in such a way as to set before her readers an ideal of individual rationality, responsibility and action; this, she states, sometimes explicitly, more often implicitly, is applicable to women as well as men. Her refashioning of the classical idea of the active citizen occurred within the context of her innovative and far-reaching reworking of republicanism generally, and derived from the political reform movements in which she played a key intellectual role. Her ideal of the politically responsible individual – an ideal potentially applicable to either sex – lies at the heart of her politics and her vision of history. J. G. A. Pocock, in an essay entitled ‘Catharine Macaulay: patriot historian’ has suggested that Macaulay was ‘primarily a woman who crashed her way into the writing of 523

524 Women, Liberty and the Nation

history, normally deﬁned as a speciﬁcally masculine activity’, but whose history did not have ‘anything speciﬁcally female about it’.3 My case will be the opposite: that Macaulay’s histories embody an ideal, a fantasy almost, of meaningful personal responsibility, and a yearning to stand up and be counted which could only have issued from a woman writer never expected to have or do either. This clearly resonated with readers, among them unenfranchised English reformers, dissatisﬁed American colonists and French Revolutionaries, who sought responsibility over their own political destinies. And it resonated with women writers – Mary Wollstonecraft most prominent among them – who saw the intellectual shock value of a female voice offered boldly, apparently, even, unreﬂectively, as the voice of self-evident reason. Catharine Macaulay (née Sawbridge) came to national prominence in her thirties on the publication of the ﬁrst volume of her History of England (1763), which covered the history of the early seventeenth century. Seven more volumes followed at intervals over the next twenty years during which time she also wrote pamphlets on the subjects of electoral reform, copyright, constitutional theory and, in 1775, the crisis in America. In 1778, she took a break from her seventeenth-century history to ﬁnish and publish the ﬁrst and only volume of her History of England from the Revolution to the Present Time, a work presented as a series of letters to her friend the Reverend Doctor Wilson. Before the public sensation of her marriage, at the age of forty seven, to a young man of twenty one, she enjoyed an unassailable position as the leading female radical Whig and salonnière of her day. Her acquaintance with leading radical intellectuals in Britain, France and America was wide, and her intimate social circle, as her biographer Bridget Hill has described them, included activists for constitutional reform, such as John Wilkes, members of the Society for the Support of the Bill of Rights, and republican political theorists.4 Although herself an Anglican, Macaulay had strong ideological ties to non-conformist intellectual circles, and their inﬂuence helped her to produce a ground-breaking and independent work of history. A deﬁning feature of Macaulay’s main eight-volume History of England is its long time span of composition (from 1763 to 1783). Obliquely, and sometimes overtly, engaged with contemporary affairs, it constitutes a kind of intellectual record of the period from the end of the Seven Years’ War (there are references to her hopes for and disillusionment with the leadership of William Pitt), to the crisis which followed Wilkes’ election for a Middlesex Parliamentary seat [Macaulay never wrote a pamphlet on the subject, but volumes IV and V amount to a very full consideration of the rights of parliament], and the events leading up to and including the American Revolutionary War. There was a long interval between volume V (1771) and volume VI (1781) during which she was pamphleteering and writing the 1778 history. The ﬁnal three volumes are particularly well written, and far less dependent than the earlier ones on over-long quotations from primary sources. Their tone is alternately embattled and contemplative, reﬂecting a double sense of England’s and her own personal setbacks. All of the volumes are in some way competitively engaged with the work of Macaulay’s great predecessor in the ﬁeld

Catharine Macaulay’s Histories of England 525

of seventeenth-century British history, David Hume, author of the History of England (1754–62). Macaulay set out to surpass Hume in point of scholarship, carrying out pioneering research into forgotten tracts, pamphlets and diaries of republican writers.5 She covered the same chronological terrain as Hume, but where he had explored England’s descent into and gradual emergence from dangerous religious fanaticism, she told the story of how the English brieﬂy institutionalised (in the Commonwealth of 1649–53) and then lost their liberty. More generally, Macaulay’s History mounted a powerful case against the cosmopolitanism, religious ecumenicalism, and political detachment of Hume’s work.6 Yet, despite these substantial differences, one must be wary of overdrawing the contrasts between Hume and Macaulay’s histories. Both are Enlightenment histories of liberty as it was accidentally acquired by the English, and then progressively understood and implemented. Both set out to broaden the remit of traditional political history, by paying attention to the economic and social origins of political ideas and movements, as well as to more general questions about the customs and culture (‘manners’) of the people. Such general discussions, in Hume’s work, are usually ﬂeshed out in appendices, and Macaulay follows suit by including a number of summary chapters. For example, she concludes her account of events up to the Stuart Restoration with a ‘Dissertation’ in which she reviews the economic and social changes, from Tudor times to 1660, that brought about the momentous events of the mid-seventeenth century. She explores the economic changes which permitted commoners to enrich themselves, often at the expense of the nobility. This shifting economic balance in England, which gave the commons an ‘appetite for Liberty’ under James I, precipitated ‘an entire change … in their manners, from the immediate commencement of Charles’s government’.7 Thus far, Macaulay borrows heavily from Hume’s account, but she develops this idea of an abrupt change in the ‘manners’ of the English political class as a partial explanation of their failure to foist their puritan republicanism on the population as a whole: ‘as the true love of Liberty is founded in virtue, the Parliament were indefatigable in their endeavors to reform to a state of possible perfection the manners of the people’. A mistake, of course, and one for which there were ‘ridiculed’, since manners cannot be transformed without economic change or redistribution.8 Moreover, in spite of her overriding commitment to retrieving moral and political certainties from history, Macaulay retained a sophisticated and distinctively Humean sense of history as a process of accident, coincidence and unintended outcomes. She acknowledged that the very values for which she claimed historical transcendence – liberty, natural rights, the right of resistance to tyranny – had been stumbled upon by chance during the course of history. For Macaulay, as for Hume, liberty was an instinct, and a reaction to provocation (not based ‘on any enlarged notions of government’), long before it could be politically theorised: ‘Liberty, in an enlarged sense, was never a general principle of action among the English’.9 In the summary chapter on the ‘State of civil and ecclesiastical government of England at the accession of the Stewart Family’, at the end of the ﬁrst book, Macaulay explains how liberty was the outgrowth of

526 Women, Liberty and the Nation

the broader intellectual transformations of the English Renaissance: ‘noble principles had taken deep root in the minds of the English people, that the progress of more enlightened reason would bring … to perfection’.10 This rediscovery of the idea of liberty was part of an ongoing historical process, far, far from complete in Macaulay’s own more enlightened age. She writes as though from a modern, enlightened vanguard, better able than her less insightful contemporaries to recognise the real merits of seventeenth-century advocates of liberty: ‘the praise due to the illustrious champions of the public cause … is a theme of delight among the few enlightened citizens [of her time]’.11 For her, the origins of the modern notion of liberty among ‘enlightened citizens’, lay in the early seventeenth century. This was a point in history when the Commons refashioned classical ideas of liberty in the image of their own political, social and religious aspirations, and this set them on a collision course with, ﬁrst, James I, then Charles I, kings hopelessly committed to inherited notions of royal prerogative: ‘the short-sighted James was unable to account for the inconsistence he found between the theoretical and practical government of England’.12 Here, again, there is a considerable debt to Hume who gives a similar, though much more sympathetic account of James I and Charles I’s stubborn, misguided adherence to their notions of royal prerogative. The moral conclusions Macaulay extrapolates from her analysis of the political deadlock of the early seventeenth century have none of Hume’s ﬁne balance. Her directness is refreshing: James I was so ‘surrounded by ﬂatterers [that] he snuffed up continually the incense of his own praise’.13 She praises the heroes and excoriates the enemies of liberty: Cromwell’s coup d’état ‘ﬁxes an indelible stain on the character of the English, as a people basely and incorrigibly attached to the sovereignty of individuals, and of natures too ignoble to endure an empire of equal laws’.14 Not for her the alternately sentimental and satirical registers used by Hume to direct his readers’ sympathies towards the Stuart kings and away from religious and political enthusiasm. Macaulay demonstrates throughout a radical republican’s wariness of sentiment and irony. She ignores the contemporary trend, among both Tory and Whig historians, to sentimentalise the story of Charles I as the sacrilegious judicial murder of a good father and husband. Instead, she tells the story of his trial with clinical brevity, and reserves the emotive vocabulary of sacrilege, not for the king, but for her idol Liberty: Charles is the desecrator of Liberty and she is horriﬁed, ‘that he [Charles I] should be able to persuade men to lift their impious hands against the altars of Liberty, and drench their country in blood, to support him in a power he had abused’.15 Public pressure on the point of Charles’s martyrdom was such that she had to climb down, and put on a sentimental authorial costume: returning to the History after a ten year interval, she opened Volume VI with the claim that she had, in fact, ‘shed many tears’ over Charles’s fate.16 Bridget Hill has discussed Hume’s touchy reaction to the (initially very stiff) competition to his History presented by Macaulay’s work.17 Macaulay had covered the same chronological ground, adopted a similar methodology, taken a similarly historicized view of liberty, and yet had come to diametrically opposite conclusions about the legitimacy of the English monarchy in the past and in the

Catharine Macaulay’s Histories of England 527

present. Her exchange of letters with Hume on the writing of history, later published in the The European Magazine, reveals both the ideological differences and the methological similarities. Both saw history as the servant of (what Hume called) the ‘science’ (ie. philosophy) of politics. Hume’s observation that ‘I look upon all kinds of subdivision of power … to be equally legal if established by custom and authority’, drew from her the response that ‘Every kind of government may be legal, but sure all are not equally expedient’.18 Macaulay’s science of politics is, like Hume’s, historical in character, but this, as Hume hints in his remark above, is not to say that she thought that the historical origins and longevity of particular political arrangements made them any more viable (‘expedient’), even if it made them, from some points of view, ‘legal’ and legitimate. There is a practical, historically evolutionary side to Macaulay’s political thinking with which she is not often credited. Most commentators (including Caroline Robbins and J. G. A. Pocock, but not including Hume) have tended to see Macaulay’s political philosophy as a peculiarly abstract, ahistorical and pure form of republicanism.19 Others, notably Lynne Withey, have emphasised the basis of her political thinking in the idea of an ancient, liberal Saxon English Constitution, although this, in itself, was quite compatible with relatively abstract republican thinking in this period.20 Neither of these characterisations fully capture the modern and evolutionary cast of her political thought. Traditional classical politics posit a tension between republicanism and commerce, and more particularly between the qualities of self-denial and public dutifulness needed for the state to protect and maintain itself, and the acquisitive, peace-loving and self-interested qualities encouraged by commercial activity. Yet Macaulay was more positive about the beneﬁts of commerce to the state than most of her radical associates. She highlighted, throughout both her histories, the social beneﬁts of the growth of trade. She absorbed and put to good use the new approach to questions of luxury and trade developed by Mandeville, Hume and other writers, notably the distinction which Hume made, in his essay ‘Of Reﬁnement in the Arts’, between ‘vicious’ and ‘innocent’ or ‘beneﬁcial’ luxury.21 Her History of England from the Revolution to the Present Time (1778) draws clear distinctions between properly managed, beneﬁcial commerce (the ‘improvement of commerce, my friend, may undoubtedly be reckoned among the arts of peace’), and the kind of self-indulgent, ruinous luxury (‘vicious luxury’) which results from corrupt schemes such as the sale of South Sea stock (when ‘the increase of vice and luxury kept more than equal pace with the imaginary increase of riches’).22 She berates some ministries for their neglect of Britain’s imperial interests, and welcomes the steady progress of commerce stimulated by the ﬁnancial revolution of the 1690s. Although strongly opposed to slavery, she supports the notion of a British sea empire, and even praises James II for his efforts in this arena: ‘he cherished and extended the maritime power of the empire, and his encouragement of trade was attended with … success.’23 Macaulay’s notion of an ancient English constitution was similarly modernised and handled with the same practical, evolutionary historical insight. It is true, as Withey argues, that Macaulay makes a number of references to a

528 Women, Liberty and the Nation

Saxon constitution, destroyed by the Norman Conquest, but surfacing, at least discursively, at key points in English history. There was (and still is) a bust of King Alfred suspended outside her house in Alfred Street in Bath, and both of her histories feature phrases like ‘constitutional rectitude’. Yet, to a degree unusual among her radical Whig contemporaries, Macaulay treats the hypothetical existence of an ancient, free constitution merely as a moral buttress for her case for a much more modern reformulation of the ideological underpinnings of English politics. The central question which she poses herself (with the parliamentary revolt against Charles I at the front of her mind, but the case of the American colonists never far behind) is: to which set of rights and principles should a people appeal when they are no longer being governed in their own best interest? Her answer is a sophisticated one, without reference to the Saxon constitution, and it emerges from her long and intense reﬂections on the justice of Charles I’s execution: ‘The parliament, on the principles of self-defence, on the principles of equity and reason, without respect to constitutional forms, had a right to oppose the tyrant to the utmost’ (my italics). The case for the execution of (‘utmost’ opposition to) the king could not, and cannot, be made on ancient constitutional grounds (or, as she says earlier, ‘on the narrow bottom of constitutional forms’).24 Rather, it seems that the regicides enunciated, almost involuntarily through their actions, the true principles of natural rights and legitimate government which ought, if properly adduced from the laws of God and nature, to have normative force in all states. Paraphrasing (and considerably embellishing) the case made by the regicides, she spells out her own political creed: That government is the ordinance of man; that, being the mere creature of human invention, it may be changed or altered according to the dictates of experience, and the better judgement of men; that is was instituted for the protection of the people, for the end of securing not overthrowing the rights of nature; that it is a trust either formally admitted, or supposed; and that magistracy is consequently accountable …25 The telling phrase here is ‘dictates of experience’. The ‘rights of nature’ may exist in the abstract, but they become intelligible and enforceable only in the light of historical experience. Far from being entirely abstract or centred on an unchanging model of the ancient English constitution, Macaulay’s politics are part of a continuous, open-ended practice of historical interpretation, one which certainly allows for the modernisation of republican politics in her own age. In the long quotation above, as elsewhere in her work, Macaulay is substantially and openly indebted to the second of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689) for her idea of government as a contract made by the people with their rulers, designed to preserve their security and natural (i.e. inherent) rights. Her work came towards the beginning of a major revival of interest in Locke’s work, which would deeply inform subsequent best-selling works by radical associates, such as Richard Price’s Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (1776) and Major John Cartwright’s Take Your Choice! (1776). Yet, in important respects, Macaulay tried to transform Locke’s idea of the social contract, and, in particular, of the

Catharine Macaulay’s Histories of England 529

right of resistance which, for Locke, was something which the people may exercise only in extremis. At her hands the idea of resistance becomes an active principle requiring the citizen continually to monitor and extend the bounds of civil liberty. Sometimes this might involve a complete change of government, as under the English Commonwealth, but at others, it necessitates a transformation of the constitution from within. The originality and radicalism of Macaulay’s take on Locke lies, not so much in abstract political theory, as in her application of these ideas to the historical experience of one political event, the Revolution of 1688–9. By the later eighteenth century, nearly all commentators agreed (Jacobites excepted) that the foundation of English liberties lay in the Glorious Revolution, and that the expulsion of James II in favour of William III and Mary II had amounted to a reassertion of the principles of the ancient constitution against tyrannical abuses of power. Yet Macaulay was adamant that this event was neither Glorious nor a Revolution; worse than a missed opportunity, it had actually made an oligarchic and oppressive constitution more difﬁcult than ever to resist. Macaulay’s view of the events of 1688–89 evolved slowly during her writing career. In her 1778 History of England from the Revolution to the Present Time, she voiced her scepticism about the value of this venerated moment in British history. She conceded that the accession of William III introduced the idea of a social contract (‘the people, instead of being considered as beasts of burden, and live stock on a farm […] were now looked up to as the only legal source of sovereign authority’), but nevertheless insisted that the Revolution settlement was a botched affair which was quickly betrayed or forgotten, even by the Whigs, and which had actually increased the powers of the king.26 The Glorious Revolution served to demonstrate that the political lessons of the Commonwealth had never been properly learned or applied since it failed to ‘admit of any of those reﬁnements and improvements, which the experience of mankind had enabled [its authors] to make in the science of political security’.27 Most commentators cited the events of 1688–89 as a cardinal instance of Britain salvaging positive lessons from the mistakes of the past, but for Macaulay, it represented a failure to bring ‘the experience of mankind’ to bear on the science of politics. Bridget Hill, in a valuable article on Macaulay’s attitude to the Glorious Revolution, records how even John Wilkes was a little scandalised by all this, and how, like others, he worried that she would cut too much ground from under radical Whig feet.28 In the eighth, and ﬁnal, volume of The History of England from the Accession of James I she revisited the subject, this time with more radical results, supported by a more deeply considered theory of government. The volume was published in the year 1783, at a point when Macaulay’s popularity had waned considerably, yet it has a good claim to be the most accomplished and original of all the volumes. Macaulay covers the period from the reign of James II to 1689, and her writing is strongly coloured by the end of the American War, marking the success of one major act of resistance to the British government. James II was usually portrayed as the villain of the Revolution story, even in accounts, such as Hume’s, which took a sceptical approach to Whig history, so Macaulay

530 Women, Liberty and the Nation

confounded expectations when she presented him with sympathy and insisted upon his place as the nation’s then rightful monarch. If James entertained an ‘exalted idea … of the royal ofﬁce’, it was because parliament, ‘by an unprecedented servility, helped to conﬁrm’ him in it. 29 If he ﬂed the country and turned to the French King, rather than stay and face his enemies, he was no worse than ‘the generality of mankind [who] would, in James’s situation, have sought shelter in the proferred generosity of a trusted friend [Louis XIV], from personal insult, personal danger’. 30 His religious bigotry had unintentionally beneﬁcial consequences, in that it made it impossible for him to consolidate royal power to the extent that he desired.31 In view of his legitimacy and relative political impotence, Macaulay argues, with palpable relish of the unconventional revisionism of her position, that William and Mary should never have been called in. A better, and far more radical, solution would have been to force James into a new constitutional settlement. The route taken in 1688 – a simple change of royal dynasty – could never have amounted a real advance for freedom: because the extinction of power in a particular reigning family, has often been effected by the impatience of slaves; whereas the asserting the authority of the people over the power of the reigning sovereign, has never been effected but by free nations, and is the highest triumph of popular liberty.32 Most modern-minded Whigs of the eighteenth century, including Hume, emphasised the innovative character of the constitutional settlement of 1688–89.33 Macaulay replied that it was, in fact, a highly conservative solution to the ageold problem of royal tyranny, and one which was largely motivated by greed on the part of ‘those who expected favours from William’.34 The settlement had no commercial beneﬁts for the country since its consequence was ‘to involve [Britain], contrary to the interest of a commercial maritime power, in expensive land armaments’ as part of William’s continental war against Louis XIV.35 It was, in essence an aristocratic coup, masquerading as a restoration of popular liberty, which subjected the people to a mercantile Whig oligarchy: ‘under the specious appearance of democratical privilege, the people are really and truly enslaved to a small part of the community’.36 The most pernicious aspect of the whole process was that the framers of 1688–89, unlike the earlier parliamentary opponents of Charles I, had at their disposal , a body of political experience and thought (greatly enhanced by James Harrington, Algernon Sidney, and other republican intellectual heroes) which should have enabled them to implement the fundamentals of liberty and popular sovereignty. The settlement was made, ‘without adding any new trophies to the altar of liberty, or even of renovating those sound principles in the constitution, which, in the length of time, had fallen a sacriﬁce to the lusts and the opportunities of power’.37 We can conclude from Macaulay’s bold reinterpretation of the Glorious Revolution that she did not consider mere constitutional change, even though it were progressive in some respects, as an end in itself. The processes and motivations of

Catharine Macaulay’s Histories of England 531

liberty are, for her, as important as the result. She had no theory of the ‘general will’ of the people, no clear idea as to how the sovereign people could convey their will to greater freedom except via limited political representation. Yet she communicates a strong sense that, in order to survive and improve, political communities must engage in a constant process of self-renovation at both the intellectual and practical levels. Occasional and drastic resort to their Lockean right of resistance is not enough; the striving must take place within, and as an integral part of, any constitutional arrangement. Of course, this insistence upon the need for an active, vigilant political culture is, in its contours, classically republican, but it shades into a more liberal notion of the need for individuals to assert their natural rights. Macaulay had a relatively narrow notion of what the political, voting community should be, and it is worth emphasising here that she never proposed a universal franchise or any kind of franchise for women. But natural rights are possessed by all, even those outside the political community , and it is important for the good of the whole that individuals constantly stand up for and defend them. Macaulay’s thinking thus synthesises the republican idea of active citizenship with broader conception of the role of assertive individuals, endowed with rights, outside the formal political process. By formulating this synthesis in these terms, we are able to see where she, like any other unenfranchised woman, might ﬁt into her model of the political nation. We can also see the orientation of her political thought around the idea of the individual. Both methodologically and ethically, this is her main concern. Macaulay’s histories are intensely preoccupied with the moral conduct of individuals, and the ways in which their moral choices could affect the fate of liberty. As Lynne Withey pointed out, ‘individual morality lay at the heart of Macaulay’s writing of history’.38 Macaulay’s idea of the political priority of the individual was shared with, and no doubt considerably inﬂuenced, the reforming and radical political circles in which she moved. Much is known about her connections with such groups as the Club of Honest Whigs (comprising such ﬁgures as James Burgh, Richard Price, John Cartwright and Granville Sharp), and the Society of Supporters of the Bill of Rights (including her brother John Sawbridge, Horne Tooke, and other friends of Wilkes).39 The extent to which these groups, and other like-minded reformers and dissenters, articulated a radically new theory of government has been compellingly argued by Peter N. Miller in his study, Deﬁning the Common Good. Miller argues that, particularly after the American Declaration of Independence shattered public consensus about the nature and purpose of the British imperial state, reformers redeﬁned the relationship between the subject and the state in ways which rendered the individual philosophically and morally paramount: ‘Individuals, deﬁned by their possession of certain natural rights, were to be sovereign within their political communities’.40 Natural rights, in this context, encompassed the idea, derived from Locke and Samuel Clarke, of freedom of thought, as well as self-preservation; political communities ought to be arranged so as to accommodate the demands of truth and justice placed upon them by rational individuals. Miller pays far less attention to Macaulay than to her acquaintances Burgh, Sharp, Cartwright and Price, but his argument greatly

532 Women, Liberty and the Nation

illuminates her thought, especially when it comes to the relationship between liberalism, republicanism, ethics and metaphysics. Like her contemporaries, she was a moral realist, believing that a standard of truth existed independent of men, which all political agents needed to recognise and act upon. Like Cartwright who, according to Miller, posited the ‘axiomatic quality of metaphysical liberty as a prerequisite for moral agency’, she believed that all political and moral responsibility emanated from the divine gift of free will.41 The moral autonomy and responsibility of the individual, for women as well as men, is thus, not a function of citizenship, but a theological given no matter what the political circumstances in which one ﬁnds oneself. We can see from this how Macaulay’s apparently simplistic historical judgements – a person either does or does not do the right thing – are based in a complex theology. This theology, as Sarah Hutton explains in section VIII of this collection, is most clearly set out in her Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth (1783). It is anti-voluntarist, in the sense that Macaulay believed that human morality derives from God’s moral perfection, not simply from his commandments. Individuals are free to act either in accordance with or in deviation from God’s goodness. It follows from this that, in historical contexts, individuals are not bound by customs and traditions (for example, allegiance to a bad sovereign) to act against the requirements of divine goodness. In Macaulay’s History of England, this idea of moral autonomy is embodied in only a very few individuals: one important instance is the republican martyr Algernon Sidney and he dominates virtually the whole of volume VII; John Hampden, despite some reservations on Macaulay’s part, is another. Both exhibited what she praises as ‘the only characteristic of a real gentleman […] love of independency’.42 It is clear from the outset of the History that Macaulay is also presenting her authorial self as another such embodiment of autonomy or ‘independency’, in the ethical sense in which she uses the word. Macaulay’s writing style is unique among eighteenth-century historians: wittily forthright to the point of colloquialism, she could also handle the language of political theory with sustained control, and yet despatch an opposing viewpoint in a single epigrammatic sentence. Unlike Hume before or Gibbon after her, irony was not her medium, and she was suspicious of the kind of rococo stylistic elaboration which Gibbon, in particular, later made his own (as she observed, ‘the ﬂights of poetic fancy are too wild for the exercise of subjects bound within the limits of rationality, ﬁtness, convenience, and use’).43 No other historian could match her assertive daring, the panache with which she dismisses whole sets of ideas and tranches of history. Reviewing the eighteenth century, towards the end of her epistolary history, she delivers one of her customary dismissive ﬂourishes: Indeed, my friend, the history of England is at this period so little entertaining, that it puzzles me how to arrange the annual revolution of the same unavailing arguments on one side, and the same proﬂigate venality on the other, in a manner as shall not render the detail of the abuses in our government as irksome in the reading as it is painful in the reﬂection.44

Catharine Macaulay’s Histories of England 533

The conﬁdence in her voice derives partly from her sense of her own exemplary rational independence, partly from the knowledge that she is aligned with the truth: her liberal creed will, she asserts, ‘meet with little contradiction in a country enlightened with the unobstructed rays of rational learning’.45 Since ‘rational learning’ is still obstructed by ignorance, she is content to appear as a living embodiment of a rationality ahead of her time. The fact that her embodiment is inescapably female does not stand in her way: The invidious censures which may ensue from striking into a path of literature rarely trodden by my sex, will not permit a selﬁsh consideration to keep me mute in the cause of liberty.46 Commentators on the complicated relationship between Macaulay’s sex and her seemingly gender-neutral notions of rationality, liberty and republican virtue, have puzzled over remarks like that above. In one of the best essays on Macaulay, Susan Wiseman made the general case that, ‘In Macaulay’s own writing, republican commitment takes priority over gender’.47 It is not a puzzle which is easily resolved, but another way to look at the question of the gender implications of republican history is through the lens of the republican idea of qualiﬁcation. In republican political theory, not all are citizens; some are excluded from citizenship, others are proto-citizens in the sense that they may qualify (through property ownership, public service etc.) for full, active membership of the polis at a point in the future. Macaulay’s histories are directly and indirectly engaged with this republican notion of qualiﬁcation, and she ponders the virtues of independence, rational self-control, and ﬁnancial autonomy which might qualify some individuals as a potential British citizens. Propertied independence is, certainly, one qualiﬁcation for citizenship, but intellectual and moral qualities are also very important. One inference from her reﬂections on the personal conditions for citizenship that seems warranted is that there are women – herself included – who exhibit qualities of proto-citizenship under the present arrangements. One example she supplies of this idea of qualiﬁcation and potential public leadership is that of Mary II, wife of William III. Macaulay makes it clear that, from the point of view of intelligence and abilities, Mary was qualiﬁed to assume, on the abdication of her father James II, a role in government equal to, or greater than, her husband. Yet Mary fails to assume the leadership for which she is qualiﬁed, deterred by an exaggerated respect for the authority of husbands: Had Mary always exerted that independence of conduct which reason authorises, and principle exacts, her virtues would have been sullied with as small an alloy of frailty as is perhaps compatible with the human character; but as the whole tenor of her conduct seems to have been directed by the blind rule of an indiscriminate obedience, she cannot be classed among the illustrious characters which have done the highest honour to the human race, except by those who imagine that passive obedience to husbands stands the foremost in the list of female duties, and is the highest virtue to which any woman can aspire.48

534 Women, Liberty and the Nation

Mary is censured for her reluctance to push herself forward, when, in all likelihood, ‘She would have ﬁlled the throne with an equal degree of dignity … as any one of the most boasted successors to the Norman Conqueror’.49 In Macaulay’s modernised version of republicanism, women should assume the responsibilities for which they are qualiﬁed at the point when their country makes a call upon their active service. There is an implicit contrast here between Mary’s failure to act for her country, and Macaulay’s own refusal to keep mute in the cause of liberty. The notion of qualiﬁcation deﬁnes the borderline between Macaulay’s idea of universal natural rights and her republican idea of selective citizenship. It makes sense in the context of her ideal of a vigilant, constantly resistant political culture, and of her individualism. Any male or female individual, qualiﬁed by intellect and rational independence, may ﬁnd themselves in a time and place where their country needs their active participation. At that point, it is for them to determine what course of action God mandates for them, and to act for the public good. Her authorial persona seeks to exemplify the political vigilance, the independence from vested interests, parties and elites prerequisite to citizenship. Yet her claim to speak in the public service has nothing to do with any idea of a special relationship between femininity and history, or of women as guardians of the nation’s history and pride. Such ideas were gaining wider circulation in the period when Macaulay was writing the later volumes of her history. The progressive feminisation of patriotism in this period formed the basis of many women’s claims to write authoritatively of history and the nation, yet there is no trace of the idea of a speciﬁcally female patriotism in her work.50 Her own, unequivocal sense of her qualiﬁcation to speak, and cajole, on behalf of national liberties comes from her education, scholarship, and independence of mind, with independence of fortune playing some part in all of these. What is also clear, from her histories and from the overt intellectual egalitarianism of her Letters on Education, is that greater inﬂuence for women was not to come about as a biproduct of the progress of reﬁnement. By the time of the later volumes of her history and of the Letters, it was commonplace that social and economic progress brought higher status and greater informal power for women. If such reﬁnement and politeness created a space for women to address more authoritatively domestic, moral and social matters, Macaulay chose not to speak out of it. She was familiar with, and cited, Scottish Enlightenment and other contemporary histories, but makes no mention of a revolution in manners, the mutual polishing of the sexes, the revival of chivalrous gallantry, or the greater visibility of women in public life. Not for her the kind of ‘progress’ which only served to intensify notions of gender difference, and to isolate woman as a sociological and cultural rather than a political category of analysis. Macaulay does not merely assert her right to speak on an equal footing with men, but, rather, to discursive equality with a select band of men who have properly understood God’s truth, their natural rights and the best principles of government. Her histories breathe the atmosphere of this elite, enlightened virtual coterie, the historical counterpart of her own, mixed radical circle with its self-consciously, neoclassical radical style. Harriet Guest has written of Macaulay’s status as a ﬁgure of

Catharine Macaulay’s Histories of England 535

fashion, noting how commentators such as Samuel Johnson and Horace Walpole suggested that ‘Macaulay’s reputation as a fashionable woman and as a republican historian may be interchangeable’.51 Her reputation for preposterous fashionableness was certainly the downside of her self-conscious attempts to modernise the republican political tradition, to free it from images of aggressive, ascetic masculinity and self-lacerating, heroically loyal femininity. She writes, neither as a female patriot nor as a matronly Roman spur to male patriotism, but as one whose higher obligation to herself as a rational being naturally and inevitably coincides with political right-thinking. Such right thinking is, as I have argued, not simply the product of her reading of classical republican and early liberal texts; it derives from her insight that historical experience must constantly inform and transform both the practice and the ideals of politics. There is room here for the contemporary commercial world of Macaulay’s family and friends, and there is room for a politically inﬂuential role for suitably qualiﬁed women. No reader can reach the end of Macaulay’s histories without sensing how deeply held an aspiration the latter point really was for her. Macaulay writes history with the intensity of engagement and judgemental directness of who feels that, had she been there and able to act, things might have turned out for the better. All the more intense, perhaps, because of the knowledge that, under any historical circumstances, her sex would have excluded her. All the more judgemental because the failed avatars of national liberty had power and opportunities which someone of her own calibre might have been far better qualiﬁed to use. Contemporary historians such as Hume and Gibbon wrote with a coolness and scepticism which proceeded, in part, from a sense of what their own fallibility might have been if faced with the dilemmas and choices confronted by others in the past. Macaulay’s histories could only have come from the pen of a woman who made her own political exclusion an imaginative source of strength, judgemental infallibility and superior historical insight.

Notes 1. See chapter 6, ‘The History Women’ of my Feminist Debates in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), and ‘The History Market’ in Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England : New Essays, ed. Isabel Rivers (Cassell, 2000). 2. See Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment, Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton, 2000), ch. 6. 3. J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Catharine Macaulay: Patriot Historian’ in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Hilda L. Smith (Cambridge, 1998), p. 243. 4. Bridget Hill, The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford, 1992), p. 16. and Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (Ithaca, NY, 1990). See also Susan Staves, ‘“The Liberty of a She-Subject of England”: Rights, Rhetoric and the Female Thucydides’, Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature, 1 (1989), pp. 161–83. 5. On Macaulay’s extensive research for her history, see Hill, The Republican Virago, ch. 2, and Bridget and Christopher Hill, ‘Catharine Macaulay’s History and Her Catalogue of Tracts’, The Seventeenth Century, 8 (1993), pp. 269–85. 6. See Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge, 1997), ch. 3.

536 Women, Liberty and the Nation 7. The History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line (8 vols; London, 1763–83), V (1771), p. 383. 8. Ibid., V (1771), p. 378. 9. Ibid., IV (1768), p. 159 and p. 160n. 10. Ibid., I (1763), pp. 274–5. 11. Ibid., V (1771), pp. 382–3. 12. Ibid., I (1763), p. 274. 13. Ibid., I (1763), p. 8. 14. Ibid., V (1771), p. 112. 15. Ibid., III (1767), pp. 331–2. 16. Ibid, VI (1781), p. xii. 17. The Republican Virago, pp. 41–4. 18. The European Magazine, 4 (1783), p. 331. 19. Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstances of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge, MA, 1959); Pocock, ‘Catharine Macaulay: Patriot Historian’. 20. Lynne E. Withey, ‘Catharine Macaulay and the Uses of History: Ancient Rights, Perfectionism and Propaganda’, The Journal of British Studies, 16 (1976), pp. 59–83 and Hill, The Republican Virago, pp. 31–2. 21. ‘Of Reﬁnement in the Arts’, earlier entitled ‘Of Luxury’ (1754) in Essays, Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, 1985), p. 269. 22. The History of England from the Revolution to the Present Time in a Series of Letters to a Friend (Bath, 1778), p. 314, p. 308. 23. Ibid., p. 125. 24. The History of England from the Accession of James I, IV (1768), p. 435, p. 433; VIII (1783), p. 278. 25. Ibid., IV (1768), pp. 430–1. 26. The History of England from the Revolution to the Present Time, p. 72. 27. Ibid., p. 5. 28. Bridget Hill, ‘Reinterpreting the “Glorious Revolution”: Catharine Macaulay and the Radical Response’ in Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration, ed. Gerald Maclean (Cambridge, 1995), p. 279. 29. The History of England from the Accession of James I, VIII (1783), p. 276. 30. Ibid., VIII (1783), p. 275. 31. Ibid., VIII (1783), p. 277. 32. Ibid., VIII (1783), p. 293. 33. See Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Chicago, 1972). 34. The History of England from the Accession of James I, VIII (1783), p. 293. 35. Ibid., VIII, p. 334. 36. Ibid., VIII, p. 330. 37. Ibid., VIII, pp. 329–20. 38. Withey, ‘Catharine Macaulay and the Uses of History’, p. 72. 39. Hill, The Republican Virago, ch. 3; John Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976), p. 204, 261. 40. Peter M. Miller, Deﬁning the Common Good (Cambridge, 1996), p. 352. 41. Ibid., p. 369. In the History, she is careful to disentangle belief in free will or Arminianism from the ‘high-church or monarchical principles’ with which it became associated in the seventeenth century (History of England, I, p. 297). 42. Ibid., I (1763), p. xiii; III (1767), p. 450; VII (1781), pp. 493–6. 43. Ibid., IV, p. 8 n. 44. The History of England from the Revolution to the Present Time, p. 367. 45. The History of England from the Accession of James I, IV (1768), p. 431.

Catharine Macaulay’s Histories of England 537 46. Ibid., I (1763), p. x. 47. Susan Wiseman, ‘Catharine Macaulay: history, republicanism and the public sphere’ in Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830, eds Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Cliona o Gallchoir and Penny Warburton (Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 192. 48. The History of England from the Accession of James I, VIII (1783), p. 319. 49. Ibid., VIII (1783), p. 318. 50. In general, Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago University Press, 2000). 51. Ibid., p. 205.

8.2 Liberty, Equality and God: The Religious Roots of Catherine Macaulay’s Feminism Sarah Hutton

Catherine Sawbridge Macaulay Graham (or Catherine Macaulay, as she is most generally called) is well known as an historian and as a feminist. Her credentials as both political radical and feminist rest on her championship of liberty and equality in writings which span the two revolutions of the eighteenth century, the American and the French. The work for which she is most famous, her History of England was published between 1763 and 1791 and therefore coincides with this revolutionary period. Her A Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth (1783) appeared in the year that marked the end of the American War of Independence. Her Letters on Education (1790) appeared shortly after the French Revolution. In addition to these, she intervened directly in the political debates of the time, most prominently in her attacks on Edmund Burke whom she criticised in 1770 in her Observations on a Pamphlet entitled Thoughts On The Cause of the Present Discontents published in the same year. She also defended the French Revolution against Burke in her Observations on the Reﬂections of the Right Honourable Mr Edmund Burke on the Revolution in France (1790). This last is just one of several famous responses to Burke written in defence of the nonconformist preacher, Richard Price, already notorious for his defence of the American revolution.1 It was Price’s positive assessment of the French Revolution in his sermon, A Discourse on the Love of our Country (1789), which occasioned Burke’s anti-revolutionary Reﬂections on the Revolution in France (1790). Macaulay’s Observations were followed by two other well-known defences of Price against Burke: Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man (1791) and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Man (1792). Macaulay’s feminism is most apparent in her Letters on Education (1790) in which she argues for the equality of the sexes, and for equality in the education of boys and girls.2 Letters on Education recapitulates ethical themes from her least read book, A Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth (1783). Macaulay’s championship of liberty and equality is consistent with her support for the revolutions of her day and the ‘Old Whig’ political values of her background. The optimistic rationalism of her writings marks her as a woman of the Enlightenment in the old-fashioned sense of that term as an age of reason. In all her writings, Catherine Macaulay associates reason with political radicalism, and 538

Religious Roots of Catherine Macaulay’s Feminism 539

right with rational virtue. However, in spite of her support for the revolutions in France and America, she makes little use of the discourse of rights across her writings. More prominent is her employment of the discourse of religion. Her understanding of rational virtue is informed by a profound sense of religious principle, which cannot be dissolved into mere deism. The importance of religion for Catherine Macaulay has been recognised for some time, thanks to the groundbreaking studies by Lynne Wythey and Bridget Hill, who have analysed the religious afﬁliations of her circle. As they show,3 the tenor of her religious views is imbued with the Protestant convictions of the ‘good old cause’, and the radical non-conformity of her close associates. Although a life-long Anglican, Macaulay was closely associated with dissenters, most notably those associated with Richard Price.4 Her defence of the Enlightenment ideals of liberty and equality is, therefore, every bit as much religious as political. In her attack on Burke no less than in her History, she speaks as a patriot and a Protestant. Proper grasp of the fundamentals of religious belief is a theme in her Letters on Education. Lynne Wythey argues that Macaulay’s Christian faith distinguishes her from other historians of the period, while Bridget Hill argues that religion became more important for Macaulay, as she got older. Lynne Wythey has argued persuasively that Macaulay’s religious views link her to the non-conformist radicals of her acquaintance.5 She nevertheless sees the role of religion in Macaulay’s formation as cultural, hers being an ‘essentially secular political philosophy’.6 Hill treats Macaulay’s religious views as essentially a matter of personal faith, albeit one which she shared with her dissenting friends – superadded rather than essential to her political philosophy. In this chapter, I want to go further down the path that Wythey and Hill opened up, to argue that Macaulay’s religious views are not just the badge of her politics and class, but they are integral to her politics and, especially, her feminism. I shall argue that the theological position implied by her writings contains important clues to her feminism. Furthermore, it is, arguably, through religion that she introduces an overtly feminist perspective on the issues of liberty and equality. For, although we can trace a lifelong preoccupation with liberty and equality in her writings, it is only in her later writings, her Treatise (1783) and her Letters on Education (1790), that she extends this discussion to women. And while her Protestant sympathies are plain to see in her History, it is only in her later writings that she discusses the fundamentals of religious belief. Her inclusion of religious topics with arguments for the education of women is not co-incidental: on the contrary, as I shall argue, the argument for educating women have theological premises. To establish this it is necessary to give primary focus to the texts, albeit with due regard for their wider social, political and textual context.

Liberty and history Catherine Macaulay’s History of England from the Accession of James I to the Present, relates the events of recent English history as an account of the struggle for political liberty in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. The History was

540 Women, Liberty and the Nation

written with an educational purpose – and a political one at that – to rectify the deﬁciencies of contemporary education, which fails to cultivate ‘independency’ as a gentlemanly value. In the Preface, Macaulay criticises contemporary historywriting for failing to show that ‘the liberty of the subject is as absolutely instituted as the dignity of the sovereign’.7 ‘Animated with the love of liberty, and an enthusiastic regard to English patriotism’, she aims to make good these deﬁciencies in her History by giving due coverage to the ‘generous patriots who had ventured life and fortune in the vindication of the rights of nature and the liberties of the land … who had undergone such hardships and dangers for the attainment of freedom, who had dethroned a sovereign … for having encroached on their native rights’.8 Foremost among Macaulay’s heroes is Sir Henry Vane. Chief among the villains is Cromwell, whose coup d’état trampled down the hard-won liberties of the English Republic. But the main theme is the contestation between sovereign and citizen in point of liberty. Macaulay’s political sympathies are clearly on the side of the citizen against monarchy and other forms of minority government (oligarchies, cabals, aristocracy). Given her Protestant sympathies, her assessment of the Catholic James II and his successor/usurper, the Protestant champion, William III, is surprising, but instructive. Although she condemns James as a religious bigot, she commends his attempt to stand up to interest groups, like the senior clergy and aristocracy, the very groups whom William III appeased in order to secure himself in power. In Macaulay’s analysis, William’s politics of self-interest betrayed the cause of liberty and laid the foundations of the oligarchical corruption of her own day. Equality as such is not discussed in her History, but the premises of Macaulay’s conception of liberty, and her counter-posing of subject and ruler, indicate that the issue of equality is foundational in her thinking. She links the liberties of the subject with legality in respect of English law, natural law and the law of reason, so linking patriotism, liberty and enlightenment. Those who try to remove the ‘limitations necessary to render monarchy consistent with liberty’, she declares, are ‘rebels against the laws of their country, the law of nature, the law of reason’.9 The counter-claims of ‘Hereditary right’ contain the seed of ‘despotic monarchy’. The political message of Macaulay’s History was not lost on her contemporaries. She soon found herself obliged to defend herself from the charge of partisanship. On the other hand, the parallels between her account of the English revolution and events unfolding in France were not lost on prominent French revolutionaries. Mirabeau draws attention to the common cause of civil and political liberty in his Preface to the French translation Histore de l’Angleterre depuis l’avenement de Jacques 1. jusqu’à nos jours (Paris, 1791–92).

Observations on politics The stand Catherine Macaulay takes with regard to liberty, rights and equality in her three ventures into public political debate is of a piece with the line she takes in her History, the difference being that she was writing about contemporary affairs. In her pamphlet Address to the People of England (1775), she adduces the

Religious Roots of Catherine Macaulay’s Feminism 541

‘principle of justice and rights of nature’ to argue against the despotic imposition of taxes on the Americans.10 Her radical Whig sympathies are unmistakable from her extended quotation from the Political Disquisitions of that ‘excellent author’, the radical James Burgh. Her other two pamphlets, Observations on a Pamphlet entitled Thoughts On The Cause of the Present Discontents (1770) and Observations on the Reﬂections of the Right Honourable Mr Edmund Burke on the Revolution in France (1790), are speciﬁcally aimed at Edmund Burke, whom she attacks for putting self-interest before the public good, and putting party and faction before nation. She charges him with defending the privileges of the few, rather than arguing for parity among the many. Burke’s arguments, she writes, are based on precedent and practice rather than equity and principle. She accuses him of using unfair means of persuasion and inconsistent arguments: she repeatedly claims that Burke set out to sway his readers by manipulating their emotions rather than engaging their reason. She notes his ‘great eloquence, acuteness and art’11 and ‘the delusive power of subtle sophistry’. She is particularly withering about his attempt to pour scorn on his opponents’ use of abstract reason (‘speculative reasoners in policy’) by dubbing it ‘metaphysical foolery’,12 and she attacks his attempt to undermine their positions by claiming they are based on ‘a falsemistaken notion of a non-existing virtue in mankind’.13 Defending the reforms enacted by the French National Assembly as based on ‘the rights of men in the strictest sense, even as they exist in their abstract perfection in a state of nature’, she dismisses Burke’s appeal to practical politics, saying it is the justiﬁcation of tyranny.14 Likewise, attacking Burke’s appeal to precedent as the basis of right, through the example of Magna Carta, Macaulay draws a contrast between ‘abstract rights’ founded in nature and customary rights granted by human powers. To base claims on right of birth (as every aristocrat, presumably, must) is ‘an arrogant pretention built on a beggarly foundation’ – ‘arrogant’ because it arrogates right to one individual, excluding the rest, and ‘beggarly’ because the freedom it confers is conferred by the sovereign, and therefore entails slavish obedience. In other words, all rights of human institution – rights of inheritance, that are not founded on equity – have no more force or legitimacy than the power of political authority to enforce them. They are, therefore, bogus rights. By contrast, true rights are based on ‘Principles of Truth’, founded in nature, ‘in the very constitution of things’.15 Macaulay’s discussion of rights in these pamphlets is neither extensive, nor particularly religious: the law of nature to which she appeals was, of course, understood to be of divine institution. The themes of liberty and equality, addressed in the pamphlets are discussed more fully in her writings on education, where, as we shall see the theological foundations of Macaulay’s conception of rights, especially is made explicit.

Education for equality By taking up her pen to write about educational reform, and by publishing her thoughts in epistolary form, Macaulay sets herself ﬁrmly within the domain of Enlightenment moral advice literature for women, which stressed beneﬁts of

542 Women, Liberty and the Nation

female education aimed at improvement of the mind and manners. The most famous case is, of course, Mary Astell’s Serious Proposal to the Ladies(1694–97), whose example shows that such writing was not the monopoly of Whigs or radicals. It was often couched in strictly religious terms (an example is Lady Norton’s, The Applause of Virtue of 1725), but the moral seriousness of such writings was more often than not secular. Macaulay’s adoption of the letter as the vehicle of her views places her text in a well-deﬁned genre, which included Elizabeth Singer Rowe’s Letters Moral and Entertaining in Prose and Verse (1728), Hester Chapone’s Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773) and, subsequently, Laetitia Hawkins’, Letters on the Female Mind (1793) and Mary Hays’, Letters and Essays, Moral, and Miscellaneous (1793).16 Macaulay’s Letters on Education, are in many ways the capstone of her political philosophy. The book continues the theme of a politics of active virtue sounded in her History. But where the dominant theme of the History is liberty, the dominant topic of the Letters is equality. And, just as her History had the educational aim of supplying the lack of due attention to human liberty in modern historiography, so her Letters on Education was aimed at making good the lack of a proper moral education for all. It is to this work which Macaulay owes her credentials as a feminist largely on account of her championship of education for girls. It should of course be said female education informs part of the broader discussion of education for both sexes, which Macaulay insists should be the same for each. The ﬁrst lesson to be learned from reformed approach to education is the principle of gender equality – that all human beings are equal, men as well as women. That there is but one rule of right for the conduct of all rational beings; consequently that true virtue in one sex must be equally so in the other.17 The equality which Macaulay champions in Letters on Education is gender equality – an ideal that cannot be explained in terms of the political premises that she shared with the ‘Real Whigs’, none of whom were known for egalitarian views. To account for Macaulay’s extension of her discussion of liberty and equality to women, we need to look elsewhere. Part of the answer may lie with her direct encounter with French radical thinking during her visit to France in 1777–78. But the Letters themselves give us important clues, especially the opening letter of the whole collection, which puts the spotlight on God. To understand how Macaulay brings theology in the service of a feminist argument, we need to look a little more closely at the religious dimension of her thought.

Religious discourse In Catherine Macaulay’s daily life, religion and politics were interconnected. Many of the radical politicians of her acquaintance were dissenters, among them the republicans, Thomas Hollis and Richard Baron, the Wilkite, James Burgh, and the non-conformist ministers, Caleb Fleming and the already-mentioned Richard Price. But her close associates also included Anglican ministers, notably Thomas

Religious Roots of Catherine Macaulay’s Feminism 543

Wilson, in whose house she lived in Bath, and who adopted her daughter, Catherine. Another Anglican of her acquaintance was Augustus Toplady.18 The discourse of rational theology which she adopts is well suited for negotiating the confessional common ground between Anglicanism and dissent. It is notable that she avoids the potentially contentious topic of Trinitarianism. But she was no deist: the gospel promise of the Messiah is an essential component of her religious understanding. Hers is very much the voice of rational Christianity, and Protestant rationalism at that. Macaulay’s Protestant allegiance is plain to see in her History, though her pamphlets make few explicit references to religious doctrine and contain very little by which to gauge on her speciﬁc beliefs. Nevertheless, from her few references, we can deduce important fundamentals. And the ﬁrst of these relates to the deﬁnitional boundaries she draws. Although a staunch advocate of religious toleration, she shared the opinion of her contemporaries and predecessors that this did not extend to Roman Catholicism. (In her Address to the People of England she condemns the British government for reducing the civic rights of their new French Canadian subjects, while at the same time allowing Roman Catholicism remain as the established religion). One further pointer to the limits of Macaulay’s religious position may be gleaned from the Burke pamphlets, and that is her repudiation of chiliasm, the belief in the literal thousandyear reign of Christ on earth. In Observations on … the Revolution in France she alludes to the Christian doctrines of the birth and second coming of the Messiah as a period of egalitarian utopia: … a period of time when the iron sceptre of arbitary sway shall be broken; when righteousness shall prevail over the whole earth, and a correct system of equality take place in the conduct of man … what ideas do more naturally associate in the human mind than those of the ﬁrst appearance of the infant Jesus and his future universal reign in the hearts of his people.19 Lynne Wythey cites this passage as evidence that Macaulay subscribed to the doctrine of millenarian perfectionism, through which she links Macaulay’s Protestantism to the dissenters of her acquaintance. The analogy between politics and theology which Macaulay invokes here can indeed be linked to the school of Protestant perfectionist eschatology deriving from the inﬂuential English bible scholar, Joseph Mede (1556–1638). Mede interpreted the visions of the Book of Revelation as representing political events in the human world and understood the second coming in spiritual terms as the gradual restoration of moral perfection.20 However, the passage cited represents not Macaulay’s view, but that of Bishop Thomas Newton.21 By citing this millenarian opinion indirectly, Macaulay sets herself at some distance from the millennialism it implies. Furthermore, she speciﬁcally rejects as ‘fanciful’ that idea of the millennium ‘which is supposed to exist in the kingdom of the saints’ – a clear allusion to the Fifth Monarchists. Her aim here is to undermine Burke’s attempt to damn Price by association with Hugh Peters and other Civil War millenialists.22 The presence

544 Women, Liberty and the Nation

of this millenarian reference, then, is explicable in terms of the polemical context in which she was writing. But it also indicates that the ‘good old cause’ which she championed was not the cause of the Fifth Monarchists and Ranters. The most important clue about Macaulay’s personal religious beliefs is to be found in her concept of God, whom she believes to be supremely benevolent, a deity whose providential design ensures that human history unfolds as a ‘series of benevolences’. That there is a link between divine benevolence and human liberty and equality, is stated explicitly in Observations on … Present Discontents of 1770. Here she comments on the relationship between God and the world, making a logical link between her conception of a benevolent God and a just earthly polity. If the deity is a benevolent God, tyrannical rule can be no part of his providential design. It would be unworthy the idea we ought to form of God, to suppose him so capricious a being as to bestow that high degree of wisdom and ingenuity, which we often see displayed, in regulating the more triﬂing concerns of life … in support of tyrannic and destructive systems; and not rendering him [man] adequate to regulations so necessary to his security, happiness, and perfection: without which all the benevolent designs of Providence in his creation would appear to be almost totally frustrated.23 The conjunction of, or rather contrast between, a deity conceived in terms of ‘wisdom and ingenuity’ and benevolent Providential design, with the ‘unworthy’ view of God as a ‘capricious being’, indicates that Macaulay is alluding to contrasting schools of theology: those who argue that the omnipotent deity exercises his will in accordance with the divine attributes of justice, goodness and wisdom, and the voluntarist view according to which the divine will is free and unfettered, unconstrained by considerations of justice, goodness or wisdom. 24 The despot who rules by command alone is the earthly equivalent of the arbitrary God of voluntarism. It is voluntarist theology,therefore, albeit in reductive form, which furnishes Macaulay with the model of the earthly tyrant. Macaulay’s appeal here to the ‘wisdom and ingenuity’ of God, and the benevolence of God’s Providential design is echoed in her defence of Price and the French Revolution, where she insists that the authority of lawmakers rests with the rights of men, which we owe to the providential purposes of a benevolent God.25 The account of God in Letters Concerning Education conﬁrms Macaulay’s belief in a benevolent deity, which, again, she contrasts with the deity conceived as merely omnipotent: Instead of that cold inexorable being, whose very perfections destroy the hope of the worshipper, we address a deity whose power is only equalled by his benevolence. A deity whom we are told regards us with the tenderness of an earthly parent, and who will not suffer one sparrow to fall to the ground with out his notice.26

Religious Roots of Catherine Macaulay’s Feminism 545

In Macaulay’s view, to conceive of the deity as a ‘cold inexorable being’ without concern for creation, entails a misunderstanding of the nature of God, notably the justice of God, without which divine power would not be exercised benevolently. As a contrast to her God of benevolence, she gives as one example of such an indifferent and deterministic deity (‘that cold and inexorable being’), the monstrous god of the pagans. But she also states unequivocally that it is a conception of the deity propagated in ‘the greater part of the Christian world’, and links this powerful and retributive deity to the Augustinian doctrine of predestination and election. The supreme Protestant exponents of this doctrine were, of course the Calvinists.27 But Macaulay is in no doubt that the doctrine was a perversion of Christian teaching which was adopted widely in an attempt to frighten people to piety: Almost every sect of Christians, in order to spur on the lazy virtue of their votaries, have represented the glorious justice of God, in a light which conﬁnes his benevolence to a narrow sphere of action; and while he is represented as devoting to an eternity of torments the far greater number of the human race, the gates of paradise are barred to all but the elect. Tremendous thought!28 Macaulay’s God of benevolence is, then, an anti-voluntarist conception of God. Such a concept of the deity, was current in that strand of contemporary theology which may be described as liberal on account of its benign understanding of God and his attributes (‘liberal’ in this usage being not a political but a theological designation). It belongs to a school of theology with its roots deep in theological history, and which, in the eighteenth-century, straddles the non-conformist/ established church divide. In the Protestant tradition, this intellectualist theology takes its rise from the anti-Calvinist theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Among its major exponents were the Dutch theologian, Jacob Arminius, liberal puritans like Cambridge Platonists and the non-conformist leader Richard Baxter. It is to be met with in the theological tradition to which Richard Price and his associates subscribed. Macaulay’s conception of a benevolent deity is one that transcends the denominational boundaries of eighteenth-century Anglicanism and Dissent. It is to be found alike among latitudinarian Anglicans like Samuel Clarke and radical preachers like Richard Price. But it is of particular signiﬁcance that her conception of God and the implications she draws from that ﬁnd a distinct echo in the theology of the man in whose defence she penned her Observations … on the Revolution in France. And, indeed, in his Discourse on the Love of our Country, the work which occasioned Burke’s Reﬂections, Price insists that Christianity, in accordance with the nature of the God whom Christians worship, is ‘the Religion of Benevolence’. 29 And, in his Dissertation, ‘On Providence’, for example, Price expands on this idea, arguing that ‘A God without a Providence is undoubtedly a contradiction’, deriving his idea of the

546 Women, Liberty and the Nation

benevolence of God from his understanding of God’s attributes, in particular divine omnipotence, goodness and wisdom: We have the best reasons for ascribing to the Deity all possible excellence; or for conceiving of the ﬁrst cause of all Being absolutely perfect. In the idea of absolute perfection is implied inﬁnite power, wisdom and goodness; and in these, such a providence over all things as has been mentioned. The Deity cannot be an indifferent spectator of the series of events in that world to which he has given being. His goodness will as certainly engage him to direct them agreeably to the ends of goodness, as his wisdom and poser enable him to do it in the most effectual manner.30

Religion and gender equality Catherine Macaulay’s approach to religious topics is one which accords with her high regard for human reason. It is through reason, that human beings have the power to direct their lives in such a way as to secure happiness in this life and in the life to come. She summarises the guiding principles of religious belief in her Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth The principles of a rational belief in the protection of an all-perfect and omnipotent Being, the practice of virtue in this life, and the hopes of a more enlarged and a more permanent state of happiness in the life to come are so congenial to the natural constitution of man.31 In Macaulay’s view, of course, these principles are ‘natural’ not just to man, but to woman too – a view which she elaborates in her Letters on Education. Where, in her political pamphlets, her references to religion are relatively muted, in her Letters on Education the discussion of religion could not be more prominent, since the book opens with a discussion of the attributes of the supreme being. In Letters on Education, the relationship of liberty and equality to Macaulay’s conception of God, only touched on in the pamphlets, is developed into an argument to make God the benevolent upholder of liberty and equality in general: human ideas of equity and justice, are, she argues, founded on the ‘perfect benevolence of God’.32 But she takes this further to argue women’s right to participate in these. Not only is there one rule of right for men and women (see above), but Macaulay adds that women must be permitted access to wisdom, since their salvation (their ‘highest happiness’) depends on it. Given the nature of God, Macaulay argues, it would be inconsistent with the divine nature to create animate creatures (e.g. women) without allowing them the possibility of achieving happiness. If God is good and wise, he would not single out one creature for preferential treatment. To do so would be inconsistent with divine justice. Since the doctrine of posthumous rewards and punishments applies to women as well as men, women must not be deprived of the means to achieve this.

Religious Roots of Catherine Macaulay’s Feminism 547

That true wisdom, which is never found at variance with rectitude, is as useful to women as to men; because it is necessary to the highest happiness, which can ever exist with ignorance. Education plays its part here, too, of course, since ignorance cannot be dispelled without it. But, when educational purpose is couched in terms of salvation, education becomes a religious duty. This conclusion is underpinned by Macaulay’s conviction that that female equality with men is a consequence of divine benevolence, which, she declares, ‘equally extends to all creatures’.33 The subordination of women is not merely inequitable, but contradicts God’s providential design. It follows from this that theological doctrines which place limitations on the possibility of salvation, contradict divine providence. This explains the Macaulay’s attention in her Letters to theories which entail a narrow view of divine providence. One example is the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and election, according to which only a minority will be saved. Another example of misconceptions of the deity, to which Macaulay gives considerable space is William King’s An Essay on the Origin of Evil (the 1731 translation of De origine male, 1702).34 In order to avoid the danger of imputing authorship of evil to God, King sought to explain the presence of evil in the world through limitations on divine power. Where the Calvinists limit God’s benevolence in order to highlight his power (so laying themselves vulnerable to the charge that God is the cause of evil), King attempted to account for the existence of evil through limits on God’s omnipotence (God is not the cause of evil, but does not exercise his power to prevent it). That Macaulay should devote so much space to King is explicable by the fact that King claimed that his explanation of the existence of evil was consistent with a conception of God as beneﬁcent. By contrast with both King and the Calvinists, Macaulay holds that God, being inﬁnitely powerful and inﬁnitely beneﬁcent, exercises that power in accordance with his wisdom and goodness, without limitation. A major consequence of this view is that women are the objects of God’s justice, every bit as much as men. Divine benevolence is not limited to men but extends to women. That there is a direct link between Macaulay’s conception of the deity and her view the equality of women with men in human society is conﬁrmed in her Immutability of Moral Truth (published in 1783, but later incorporated into part 3 of her Letters on Education). In fact, the implications of the idea of God for the status of women is ﬁrst discussed by Macaulay in her critique in this work of the Tory leader, Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke whom she regarded as the epitome of unprincipled, atheistical self-interest. That Bolingbroke was a disciple of William King was a point not lost on Macaulay. In Immutability of Moral Truth she exposes Bolingbroke’s political and social anthropology as implying contempt for women. She shows that the laws and customs he commends in other societies (the examples she cites are China and Jewish law) all confer inferior status on women. Her arguments in favour of female liberty and equality, against Bolingbroke’s secular analysis of human society take their strength as much from her identiﬁcation of a failure in religious understanding on his part, as on her

548 Women, Liberty and the Nation

own clear view of the deity as supremely benevolent, and hence the just upholder of human equality. It contradicts the nature of God, she argues, to believe that it is agreeable to the wisdom and goodness of an all-perfect Being to form two species of creatures of equal intelligence and similar feelings, and consequently capable of an equal degree of suffering under injuries, and should consign one of these species [i.e. women] as a kind of property to a different species of their fellow creatures [i.e. men], not endowed with any qualities of mind sufﬁcient to prevent the enormous abuse of such a power.35 There is much more to Macaulay’s case for gender equality than its religious aspect. Attendant upon the arguments founded on religious principles, are arguments based on ethics. There is also a historical and education aspect to her case. I have dwelt on the matters of belief in order to show that Macaulay saw in theology a sure means of establishing female equality with men. Discussion of theological issues was the means by which she introduced a feminist dimension into her enlightenment politics.

Conclusion In Catherine Macaulay’s writings, we can discern key elements of her religious beliefs. Nevertheless, religion ﬁgures not as dogma, nor as the badge of confessional loyalty, but as a guide to political practice and the groundbase of the foundational principles of human political society. Reform and liberal theology go together: a benign God is necessarily a providential God who governs the universe in such a way as to allow human beings and human societies to change for the better. To this we might add that, as an appeal to reason, rather than authority, Macaulay’s theological preference for the doctrine of benevolence had value as a practical political argument, for it enabled her to undercut arguments based on custom and precedent used by the defenders of the status quo, notably Burke. Besides, by invoking God himself, Macaulay deﬁnes her discussion as belonging to a domain of knowledge deemed socially acceptable for female participation. However, her invocation of religion was not merely rhetorical embellishment of secular discourse. Her religious views are grounded in a theology which she shared with her political associates, Richard Price and his dissenting colleagues, a theology which had, therefore, strong political overtones. Unlike Price in his use of theological discourse, however, Macaulay uses religion as the springboard for her feminist arguments. The theological component of Catherine Macaulay’s arguments is not in itself feminist, but she turns it to feminist advantage by extending the theological premises she shared with dissenting radicals to deal with recognisably feminist issues, which are absent from the writings of Price and his fellow dissenters.

Notes 1. Richard Price, Political Writings, ed. D. O. Thomas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); H. Laboucheix, Richard Price as Moral Philosopher and Political Theorist,

Religious Roots of Catherine Macaulay’s Feminism 549

2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

trans. S. and D. Raphael (Oxford, 1982; French original, 1970); D. O. Thomas, The Honest Mind: the Thought and Work of Richard Price (Oxford, 1977). The extent and nature of Macaulay’s feminism is open to debate. Both Bridget Hill and J. G. A. Pocock argue its historical limitations. See Hill, The Republican Virago. The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Catherine Macaulay: Patriot Historian’, in Hilda Smith, ed., Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 243–58. Lynne E. Wythey, ‘Catherine Macaulay and the Uses of History: Ancient Rights, Perfectionism and Propaganda’, Journal of British Studies, 16 (1976), pp. 59–83; Hill, The Republican Virago, ch. 8. Price’s circle included Joseph Priestly, James Burgh, Theophilus Lindsay and Andrew Kippis. Jack Fruchtman, ‘The Apocalyptic Politics of Richard Price and Joseph Priestly’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 73 (1983). Wythey, ‘Catherine Macaulay’, p. 82. Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James I to the Brunswick Line, 8 vols (London 1763–91) vol. 1, p. xiv. Ibid., 5: xi. Ibid., 1: xi. Macaulay, Address to the People of England, Scotland and Ireland, on the Present Important Crisis of Affairs (Bath, 1775). Macaulay, Observations on a Pamphlet entitled Thoughts on the Cause of the present Discontents (London, 1770), p. 6. Macaulay, Observations on the Reflections of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke on the Revolution in France (London, 1790), p. 42. Observations on … Present Discontents, p. 9. Observations … on the Revolution, p. 78. Ibid., pp. 19 and 94. [Elizabeth Singer Rowe], Letters Moral and Entertaining in Prose and Verse by the Author of Friendship in Death. To which are added Ten Letters by another Hand. Dublin 1735 (1728); Lady Norton, The Applause of Virtue: in Four Parts. Book 1 consisting of several divine and moral Essays Towards the obtaining of Virtue. Memento Mori/ Book II. Consisting of Meditations on Death (London, 1725); Hester Chapone, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773); Mary Hays, Letters and Essays, Moral, and Miscellaneous (London 1793). Macaulay, Letters on Education with Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects (Dublin, 1790), p. 201. Hill, Republican Virago, pp. 150–1. Observations … on the Revolution, p. 21. For Mede see, S. Hutton, ‘The Appropriation of Joseph Mede’, in J. E. Force and R. H. Popkin (eds), The Millenarian Turn: Millenarian Contexts of Science, Politics and Everyday Life (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), pp. 1–13. Newton did not accept the gradualist version of millennial perfectionism. See Force and Popkin (eds), Newton and Religion (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999). Thomas Newton, Bishop of Bristol, whose Dissertations on the Prophecies, which have remarkably been fulfilled, and at this time are fulfilling in the world, 3 vols (London, 1754–58) saw nine editions before end of the eighteenth century. Burke, Reﬂections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987 (1968)). Observations on … Present Discontents, pp. 10–11. For an account of the theological issues, see F. Oakley, Omnipotence, Covenant and Order (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986). These are also discussed, in relation to the history of science, by A. Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination (Princeton,

550 Women, Liberty and the Nation

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

NY: Princeton University Press, 1986), and M. Osler, The Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Ibid., p. 79. Macaulay, Letters, p. 5. One hard-line Calvinist of her acquaintance was her friend, the Anglican, Reverend Augustus Toplady, whose publications included, The Historic Proof of the Doctrinal Calvinism of the Church of England (1774) and The Scheme of Christian and Philosophical Necessity Asserted (1775). Ibid., p. 5. Price, Political Writings, p. 180. Price, Four Dissertations, ed. John Stephens (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1990), p. 5. Macaulay, Treatise, Preface, p. vii. Macaulay, Letters, p. 6. Ibid., pp. 201–2; p. 5. William King, An Essay on the Origin of Evil, translated by Edmund Law, (London, 1732). King was, successively, Bishop of Derry and Archbishop of Dublin. His book provoked extensive controversy, and the translation saw 5 editions by the time of Catherine Macaulay’s critique. Macaulay, Immutability, pp. 156–8.

8.3 Romantic Patriotism as Feminist Critique of Empire: Helen Maria Williams, Sydney Owenson and Germaine de Staël Caroline Franklin

A steady patriot of the world alone, The friend of every country – but his own. (Canning and Frere, New Morality, 1798) ‘For, the outsider will say, in fact as a woman, I have no country …’ (Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, 1938) The rise of nationalism in republican France, and in Britain after the outbreak of war in 1793, rendered ‘feminism’ unpatriotic in both countries.1 In France, the Jacobin administration, after overthrowing the Girondins, excluded women from public affairs, and Marianne was replaced by Hercules as the symbol of the republic. Salonnières and female polemicists were silenced by the execution of Manon Roland and Olympe de Gouges. In Britain, Pitt’s Tory government mirrored the militarisation and masculinisation of political life across the channel. Hannah More became the preferred female role model: her formidable Evangelical energies channelled into loyalist voluntary associations supporting the armed forces and the militia; her publications combating the lower-class ‘enemy within’ through a mixture of religious quietism and jingoism; her public role conceded in return for her repeated insistence that most women were intellectually inferior to men and belonged in the home. By 1798, after the attempted uprising in Ireland, invasion fears were at their height in Britain. So the death of Mary Wollstonecraft and the candour of her husband William Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), which described her extramarital love affairs and her participation in Girondin political circles in republican France, offered an irresistible opportunity for loyalist propagandists. That Wollstonecraft, the leader of ‘the Amazonian band – the female Quixotes of the new philosophy’, had died from childbed fever was seen by Revd Richard Polwhele, in his satire on Wollstonecraft, The Unsex’d Females (1798), as demonstrating ‘the Hand of Providence … that the fallacy of her doctrines … might be manifested to the world; … as she died a death that strongly marked the distinction of the sexes, by pointing out the destiny of women …’.2 The Anti-Jacobin Review, founded 551

552 Women, Liberty and the Nation

with government support to counter the inﬂuence of Joseph Johnson’s liberal Analytical Review, devoted much of its ﬁrst number to a systematic defamation of Wollstonecraft, who had been one of the Analytical’s leading journalists.3 The level of subtlety may be gauged by its index reference on ‘Prostitution’ keyed to ‘See Mary Wollstonecraft’, which catalogued her ‘amorous’ exploits. It pronounced both Godwin and Wollstonecraft, ‘by precept or example, as destructive of domestic, civil, and political society’.4 Wollstonecraftian ‘feminism’ seemed dead in the water. Not only was it tainted by her supposed immorality but exposed as an unpatriotic ‘Gallic freak’. Political rights for women would not be achieved for over a hundred years; and even then suffrage was linked to women’s demonstrable patriotism in the ﬁrst World War. Yet oppositional women writers did not fall silent on political matters. In the decade after Wollstonecraft’s death, they followed the lead of Helen Maria Williams in packaging their propaganda in the suitably ‘feminine’ guise of travelogue or romance. They would wrest the discourse of nineteenthcentury romantic patriotism from conservative loyalists in order to dramatize woman’s right to speak out against male imperialism across Europe. *** Although Wollstonecraft’s death and posthumous reputation crystallised the issue, the question of how women could demonstrate their patriotism had been a live issue among women writers throughout the 1790s.5 Indeed the entire ‘revolution debate’ – as historians have dubbed the controversy that broke out in Britain following the publication of Burke’s Reﬂections on the Revolution in France (1790) – turned on the meaning of the term ‘patriot’. For most of the eighteenth century in Britain, a patriot was one who opposed courtly corruption, in the name of restoring ‘ancient’ rights. Catharine Macaulay’s Whig History of England (1763–83) was therefore denounced by Burke as ‘the patriotick scolding of our republican virago’.6 Wollstonecraft’s mentor Dr. Richard Price, in his Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789), preached that the true patriot should not irrationally love his country right or wrong, but use his/her reason to actively interrogate whether or not his nation followed the path of virtue: ‘Our ﬁrst concern as lovers of our country must be to enlighten it.’7 But Price’s adversary, Edmund Burke, offered a very different view of the matter, propounding a sentimental patriotism based on an organic view of the nation as an extension of kin relations. During the war against republican France this rival right-wing patriotism became identiﬁed with loyalist propaganda, involving the suppression of class and gender conﬂict for the national good.8 Conservative women writers such as More found this domestication of the polity could be enabling. Mary Wollstonecraft, by contrast, had not only been Burke’s ﬁrst major opponent with Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), but had continued her attack on his patriarchalism in Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and reconsidered his arguments in Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794) in the light of later events such as the execution of Louis XVI and the Terror.

Romantic Patriotism as Feminist Critique 553

These arguments over the meaning of patriotism related to a larger philosophical question of the age: was universal benevolence morally superior to familial affections? In his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), Godwin had secularised the uncompromising view of New England Calvinist theologian Jonathan Edwards that universal benevolence was superior to domestic affection because impartial and not rooted in egoism and possessiveness. He stressed instead the utilitarian principle of the greatest good of society being paramount. This devalued the personal, familial ties Burke had declared to be natural and the true root of patriotism.9 Wollstonecraft had also invoked the overriding importance of universal benevolence in Rights of Woman when she argued that women’s social and maternal role is to inculcate ‘the love of mankind’ in general.10 She was not so extreme as Godwin, who opposed cohabitation altogether. Wollstonecraft wanted personal love to coexist with and strengthen an ethos of universal benevolence within the family. However, she did elevate friendship over all other affections and parental love over sexual love because more conducive to social duty.11 Women, Wollstonecraft argued in the Rights of Woman, possessed too little public benevolence. Conﬁned to the family, without any rights of their own, women became self-centred and limited: [D]enied all political privileges, and not allowed, as married women, excepting in criminal cases, a civil existence, [women] have their attention drawn from the interest of the whole community to that of the minute parts.12 Wollstonecraft’s discussion of citizenship and gender brought out the contradiction between her own stress on the natural rights of humanity and an older civic republican tradition deriving from classical Greece, which saw citizenship in terms not of rights but obligations, such as political participation and military duty.13 Such responsibilities accompanied patriarchal status as head of the household, and thus had excluded women and slaves or indentured servants in the classical polis as they would in new republican nations, such as America, formed in deﬁance of old empires.14 At points in her book, Wollstonecraft therefore suggested that, as the wives and mothers of citizens, women too were active patriots – a style of pro-woman argument which was then popular in French revolutionary circles. The early stages of the French Revolution did see some concessions to female civil rights, but by 1804, when the Code Napoleon was published, these would be revoked. ‘[T]he women of France have nothing to do with the Constitution but to obey it’, Wollstonecraft’s friend Helen Maria Williams exclaimed in an uncharacteristically ‘feminist’ outburst in Sketches of Manners and Opinions in the French Republic towards the close of the Eighteenth Century in a Series of Letters (1801).15 Williams, who had moved to France shortly after the outbreak of the Revolution, had initially been a fervent patriot, adapting Burke’s sentimentalism to her own purposes by portraying republican ideals as chivalric, and celebrating the entrepreneurs of the newly commercial France as romantic heroes. But by 1801 she was sarcastic about male ‘universal’ suffrage accompanying Bonaparte’s

554 Women, Liberty and the Nation

military dictatorship: disillusioned that women had sacriﬁced the illicit sway they had exercised over courtiers and statesmen in the mistress system of the ancien régime, to gain nothing in return. Her account in Sketches of the state of women in France was reprinted in the Annual Register (1801), demanding: What claim has the Republic to the attachment of that part of the human race from whom it withholds the ﬁrst privilege of our nature … instruction and knowledge? 16 When women receive ‘the blessings of a liberal education’; when ‘honourable and digniﬁed employments’ are available to women without fortune; when widows are ‘shielded by the guardian care of the state’ from destitution; only then, Williams declared, would she wholeheartedly support ‘the tutelary sway of the republic’.17 Ironically, though, Williams was excoriated in Britain as an apologist for the French republic; and in the preface to Sketches, she repudiated charges by the Anti-Jacobin Review that she was unpatriotic to her native land, Britain. She acidly commented that as one who had been imprisoned by the real Jacobins, she was impervious to ‘the censure which has been thrown on writers of the female sex who have sometimes employed their pens on political subjects’. She presents herself as an outsider, uniquely situated to mediate through her writing between the excesses committed by the male militaristic systems of Robespierre or Nelson: The political system I most abhor is the system of terror, whether it be Jacobin terror in France, or royalist terror at Naples.18 She derides the contemporary cult of male martial heroism in both France and Britain. Though she admits the glamour of Napoleon’s Egyptian adventure (‘My imagination follows him in his perilous passage’),19 she cannot justify imperial aggrandisement such as the invasion of Switzerland.20 But her most blistering attack is reserved for the British naval hero, Horatio Nelson, then at the peak of patriotic adulation after the Battle of the Nile, when he had been made baron. The centrepiece of the book is the infamous letter 12. Here Williams used contemporary documents, provided by Neapolitan republicans who had escaped to France, to substantiate the charge that Nelson acted dishonourably in the name of Britain. When he returned to Naples, he had countermanded the terms of a treaty of surrender, signed in his absence by another ofﬁcer. Nelson had countenanced and supported the infamous state trials when hundreds of Neapolitan republican intellectuals and idealists were executed. Nelson’s copy of Sketches in the British library is several times annotated ‘a lye’, but in fact he had no answer to the charge except his blithe assumption that his own loyalty to a monarch (King Ferdinand) overrode promises made by inferiors to republicans. Sketches concluded with an impassioned plea for an end to all wars. But the following year, in 1802, Williams was brieﬂy imprisoned by Napoleon because her ode welcoming the Peace of Amiens seemed to him too favourable to England.21 In

Romantic Patriotism as Feminist Critique 555

the same year he also exiled Madame de Staël, the foremost European female intellectual of the period, whose novel Delphine he deemed critical of the government. Staël, in a chapter on women writers in her On Literature (1800), had commented bitterly on women’s anomalous position in the Republic, where they: belong neither to the natural nor to the social order. … Their destiny resembles that of freedmen under the emperors: if they try to gain any inﬂuence, this unofﬁcial power is called criminal, while if they remain slaves their destiny is crushed. … In monarchies, women have ridicule to fear; in republics, hatred. … [E]ver since the Revolution men have deemed it politically and morally useful to reduce women to a state of the most absurd mediocrity’.22 Forbidden to approach within forty leagues of Paris, then prohibited from France altogether, Staël would be exiled for ten years. In 1810 Napoleon would pulp her masterpiece of cultural theory, On Germany. Staël’s Swiss parentage was cited by hostile journalists impugning her patriotism: ‘Born in a country which no longer exists, wife of a Swedish man, French by circumstance, with no homeland but that of her delusion, it is possible that she cannot imagine any other’.23 But Staël turned her enforced travels to good account by visiting Italy in 1804 to gather materials for her allegory of colonisation, the courtship novel Corinne, or Italy (1807), which would appear in thirty-two French editions over the next forty years and become one of Romanticism’s seminal texts.24 To Napoleon, salonnières like Staël and her mother Madame Necker symbolized the effeminization of civic society which had characterized the ancien régime. Yet Enlightenment philosophes had also sometimes been ambivalent about the feminine presence in the salons. And the prominence of women in the political upheavals of the early years of the French revolution seemed to many to encapsulate an anarchy that must never return.25 The exclusion of liberal nineteenth-century salonnières and women writers from political discourse in France and Britain intensiﬁed their recourse to literature, as the only permissible intervention in the public sphere. They turned to history to seek understanding of the meaning of revolution, and thereby transformed ﬁctions of sensibility into a search for the origins of personal and national identity. Their pioneering ‘national tales’ laid the groundwork for the historical novel – destined to become the most inﬂuential form of prose ﬁction in the new century. Gary Kelly has pointed out that it was because historical ﬁction was so ﬁrmly associated with female liberals, in the early years of the nineteenth century, that the conservative writer Walter Scott concealed his authorship of the Waverley novels. When ﬁnancial embarrassment forced him to reveal it, he only acknowledged the inﬂuence of Maria Edgeworth.26 But Scott was silent about other women novelists, such as Jane Porter, author of Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) and The Scottish Chiefs (1810), whose ﬁction offered ‘a response to the European imperialism of Napoleonic France’, but also ‘a critique of ‘the increasingly obvious inadequacy of Britain’s ruling class to sustain and lead national resistance to this external challenge’.27 He certainly did not acknowledge the rafﬁsh Sydney

556 Women, Liberty and the Nation

Owenson (later Lady Morgan), author of The Wild Irish Girl (1806), Woman; or, Ida of Athens (1809), and The Missionary: An Indian tale (1811); whose ﬁctions explored resistance to imperialism in Ireland and India, the heart of the British empire. Owenson was of mixed origins: her mother was an English Protestant and her father an Irish actor who specialized in stage-Irishmen for the amusement of Anglo-Irish audiences in Dublin. Her novel, The Wild Irish Girl (1806), was a critique of the colonial status of Ireland as ratiﬁed by the 1800 Act of Union. In it, Owenson demanded a new respect for native Irish culture. On reading the manuscript, her publisher Sir Richard Philips, although a radical himself, had panicked and withdrawn his offer, declaring ‘The sentiments enunciated are too strongly opposed to the English interest in Ireland’. He only capitulated when the wily author brokered a deal with his rival, Joseph Johnson.28 On its publication Owenson was put under surveillance by agents of Dublin castle and viliﬁed in the press by John Wilson Croker. But the novel was a bestseller, going into seven editions in less than two years. Owenson’s tactic, later employed by Staël, was to use a heroine embodying the colonised nation, to charm the British traveller and the reader at the same time within a travelogue framed by a courtship narrative. The Wild Irish Girl offered English readers an eyewitness account of a cultural Other, in the manner of the travel writing of Helen Maria Williams, to whom Owenson had written an ode. But since French and British imperialisms both presented themselves as manifestations of Enlightenment modernity, opposing them meant romanticising the primitive. Like male-authored conjectural histories, which compared different cultures, Owenson’s genre of the ‘national tale’ owed much to Montesquieu’s contrasted cultural geographies.29 But – despite its antiquarianism – Owenson’s novel is situated in the present and addresses contemporary issues. It presents a passage through space not time, between two static and contrasting cultures: a journey from metropolitan centre to British periphery.30 The male protagonist of The Wild Irish Girl is an English aristocratic libertine, cheekily named Horatio, who travelling to Ireland ﬁnds his prejudices against the Irish immediately challenged by meeting witty articulate boatmen, who leave him ‘at a loss how to reconcile such civilisation of manner to such ferocity of appearance’.31 Expecting an experience similar to ‘ a party on the banks of the Ohio, with a tribe of Indian hunters’, he is surprised to ﬁnd in Dublin only ‘every elegant reﬁnement of life and manners’.32 The false metropolitan stereotype of the Irish as barbaric gives way to a new picture as Horatio travels further West. Owenson conjures up the ruined castle of Inismore, nostalgically lit with the golden light of the setting sun, inhabited by the frail old ‘Prince,’ the last of his feudal line except for his nubile young daughter, Glorvina. As the English observer spies on the beautiful harp-player through a window, straining to listen to her siren’s voice, he falls from the balustrade and thus into the life of the novel’s heroine.33 The conﬁguration of pathetic deposed ruler with a young daughter representing future fertility evokes nostalgia for the loss of a paternalistic ruling class, which supposedly commanded the ‘reverence and affection’ of the peasantry,

Romantic Patriotism as Feminist Critique 557

here shown at one point clustering round their prince in the ruined chapel of the castle, their celebration of mass softened into a harmless colourful relic of the Middle Ages.34 This nostalgia for feudal times seems conservative. But at the same time Owenson’s antiquarianism represented a clear challenge to the cultural hierarchies of Enlightenment history, in which ancient or rural cultures were generally represented as inferior to modern commercial, colonising nations. Horatio, along with the English reader, has his consciousness raised, as he falls in love with the ‘wild’ Glorvina and Ireland simultaneously. He learns to reassess his prejudices about the Irish, and to question his assumptions about modernity, progress, the Ascendancy, and the British Empire itself: ‘A new light broke upon my clouded mind’.35 Horatio’s bildungsroman takes the politically signiﬁcant form of letters to an English Member of Parliament. For Owenson combines romance with hardhitting polemic, as Horatio learns that he has entered the Castle of Inismore on the anniversary of the day that his Cromwellian forbears deposed and murdered its venerable prince, the ancestor of Glorvina. Thus while Glorvina exempliﬁes a suitably feminine attachment to home and locality, the novel as a whole makes a patriot critique of the injustices of British colonial rule. The two versions of patriotism – the oppositional Whig call for reform of corrupt government and the Burkean sentimental attachment to the customs of a particular patrie – are neatly combined. By these means the tale aims to galvanize public opinion and effect political change.36 The folk of Ireland, like women, were subjects not citizens of imperial regimes, but like women could lay claim to a valid cultural identity. The antiquarian Glorvina speaks on behalf of them, accepting woman’s conservative, domestic role as transmitter of culture and the mother tongue. Owenson wrote in 1807: ‘Politics can never be a woman’s science, but patriotism must naturally be a woman’s sentiment. … And though the energy of the citizen may not animate her feelings to acts of national heroism, the fondness of the child, the mistress, the wife and the mother, must warm and ennoble them into sentiments of natural affection’.37 Glorvina wears national costume and, with her harp symbolising the soul of the nation, functions as both artist and muse in one, with Horatio painting her as she plays national airs. She is a genius of place; a bard passing on the history of her people in its ancient language. The device of using Glorvina may have been suggested to Owenson by the folksong tradition of an aisling or vision of a disinherited maiden named Cathleen ni Houlihan representing Ireland.38 Nineteenth-century independence movements across Europe later encouraged women to wear peasant costume, complete with apron symbolizing maternity, to represent the nation. Men were less inclined than women to adopt national costume in movements of national liberation. Their sober suits emphasized that they took the progressive, bourgeois role of modernizing the state, while women symbolized purity and continuity. While she fulﬁls this allegorical role, Glorvina at the same time validates the modern female intellectual (and thus her antiquarian author). Horatio becomes

558 Women, Liberty and the Nation

her art tutor, and imagines that like Rousseau’s St. Preux in Julie, où La Nouvelle Héloïse, he will become romantically irresistible to his pupil. Initially he parrots Rousseau’s opinions on the education of women: ‘How much must a woman lose, and how little can she gain by that commutation which gives her our acquirements for her own graces!’39 But Glorvina proves his intellectual equal and, in her own country, his superior in knowledge of the indigenous culture. The roles are reversed, and it is through her that he ﬁnds enlightenment and renewed purpose in life: ‘What a vigorous spring has she opened in the wintry waste of a desolated mind’.40 Meanwhile, Horatio’s father has proposed that his son should make an arranged marriage with a very young English girl:’ ‘How delightful … to form this young and ductile mind, to mould it to your desires, … to watch the ripening progress of your grateful efforts, and ﬁnally clasp to your heart that perfection you have yourself created’.41 But since it is Horatio who has been re-formed, he and the reader can hardly accept this Pygmalion notion of woman as more malleable than man, or ﬁnd such a Rousseauist power relationship erotic. Patriarchal domination is rejected both as a model relationship between husband and wife or between England and Ireland. For Horatio discovers his own father to be his secret rival for Glorvina’s hand, but when Lord M- chivalrously gives way to his son the value of love is endorsed instead. The marriage thus constitutes an allegorical plea for reconciliation between the Anglo-Irish ascendancy and Gaelic–Catholic culture. This was timely as in 1807 there would be pressure for the short-lived Whig government to implement Catholic emancipation. As Ian Dennis comments, Owenson’s complex love triangle demonstrates that the colonial relationship is never simply binary for hybrid groups are ‘inevitably caught between the “metropolitan” or imperial power and the once and future “nation”’.42 Owenson thus attempted to mediate between feminism and femininity; between the Ascendancy and anti-imperial patriotic sentiment. Her romance was a ﬂimsy vehicle loaded with antiquarian scholarly footnotes, propagandising on behalf of a regional, oppositional patriotism in a colonised corner of Empire. Owenson even donned the Celtic cloak and harp of her heroine in English drawing rooms: performing her femininity and Irishness across the border of excess.43 But by the 1830s Catholic Emancipation was proving to be only the startingpoint, not the culmination, of Irish hopes, and Owenson was so alienated by the spectre of a turbulent mass movement for independence that she abandoned her Dublin salon and moved to England. In 1846 she dissociated her romantic patriotism from outright nationalism. In a preface to a new edition of The Wild Irish Girl she explained that when she had written it, in 1806, agrarian discontents had ‘not yet systematized into secret tribunals of vengeance, nor armed for the daring crime of open assassination’ (p. xix).44 Owenson has been too harshly dismissed by some as a writer who succeeded only in making their Irish subjects more exotic and interesting to the English, thus giving life to the imperial project.45 After the failed rising of the United Irishmen (referred to in the novel), she was being realistic in arguing for reform

Romantic Patriotism as Feminist Critique 559

not revolution. The artiﬁciality of the novel’s ending concedes that the marriage of Glorvina and Horatio is a frankly Utopian metaphor for an ideal Union of the future. Its status as a romantic dream is implied by the complicated machinations of the plot which bring it about. More problematic for the feminist and postcolonial reader alike is the way the binary oppositions make the colonised country correspond with the feminine and the arts, while Britain is represented by masculine rationality and authority. This likening of the colonial relationship to a marriage, where the sexes are portrayed as complementary rather than truly equal, was problematically reductive for both the Irish and women alike. In Staël’s Corinne, or Italy, by contrast, resolution through marriage is rejected and the novel ends tragically with the heroine dying of a broken heart. Both the critique of colonialism and the vindication of the woman artist are therefore more hard-hitting yet more pessimistic than in Owenson’s novel. Like The Wild Irish Girl, Corinne is a travelogue in novel form. Its chief male protagonist, Oswald, Lord Nelvil, is a Scottish nobleman who falls in love with the poet Corinne in Rome in 1794, while she is introducing him to Italian landscape and culture. The masculine realm of law, Britain, embodied by Oswald, is contrasted with Italy, the feminine land of art, symbolized by Corinne. But the political allegory is complicated by the fact that England was not Italy’s colonizer but her one-time defender against French invasion. It is Napoleon who is the unnamed coloniser. Corinne was begun in the summer of 1805, a month after Napoleon had himself crowned King of Italy.46 In a parody of this, we are given Corinne’s arrival at the Capitol in a Roman chariot drawn by four white horses, cheered by ‘wildly enthusiastic Romans’. She, the improvatrice, will be crowned ‘only for the gifts of genius’: ‘Her triumphal chariot had cost no one tears’.47 The episode points beyond the narrative, toward the author, who has been proscribed from criticizing the French regime, so underlining the novel’s political message which is ‘feminist’, in that it validates the female intellectual’s role, as well as anti-colonial. Corinne’s triumph is the triumph of the woman artist whose very denial of civil rights makes her the more disinterested and inﬂuential commentator. Here Staël was picking up on the way Enlightenment philosophes since Voltaire had represented the female sex as an agent of intellectual change, a civilising force. But as the novel unfolds, we witness the gradual extinguishing of Corinne, the voice of liberty in Italy. This is a replay of the French Revolution itself. Corinne has rejected both her Christian name and patronymic (symbol of patriarchal authority), and named herself after Korinna, the rival of Pindar and most famous female Greek poet after Sappho. Joan de Jean has observed that the rise of Napoleonic militarism saw adaptations of the Sappho myth by Bonapartist writers and painters which focused on the male beauty of Phaon as the source of Sapphic’s poetic inspiration, and also on her suicide after being rejected by him.48 But Staël retaliates by showing her poetess at the pinnacle of fame before meeting the love of her life, while his rejection of her signals his lack of imagination. Corinne is compared to Domenichino’s Sibyl, and in her art of improvisation gives herself up to inspiration to become the medium of her country’s spirit: ‘Here [in Italy] sense impressions mingle with ideas, all life is drawn from the

560 Women, Liberty and the Nation

same spring, and the soul like the air extends to the boundaries of earth and heaven. Here the genius feels at home …’.49 One of the earliest paeans to Romantic creative genius, inspiring Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), Corinne contains the ﬁrst use of the word ‘nationality’ in French,50 and endows the artist with bardic status – but to speak for the nation, not the prince. Corinne’s public odes are on ‘The glory and happiness of Italy’, and ‘The memories aroused by these places [the area around Naples]’. Her swansong when she is dying is addressed to Italy, the ‘liberal nation, you who do not banish women from your temple’.51 When Oswald had asked for the story of her origins, she had procrastinated by taking him sightseeing, so substituting the history of Italy itself for that of her own life. With her harp, improvisation, and her salon conversation, she is voice and presence of the living Italy (its zeitgeist), not the dead letter of textualized tradition. The Italian patriotism ventriloquized by Corinne’s art is by implication a plea for a unique culture not to be plundered (many of the works of art described in situ had actually been installed in the Louvre), or swept away through centralised imperial bureaucracy. But, as with Owenson, this sentimental patriotism is not developed into political nationalism. Corinne does not try to rouse her hearers to arms. Italy was regionalized: a mere geographical entity, it existed as a single nation only for a tourist like Oswald or its conqueror Napoleon. Indeed, the philosophical question the novel poses is comparable to that sparked by the Scottish philosophes: can the virtues of civic humanism be achieved in a country devoid of political autonomy? Corinne characterizes her weak, decentralised land as effeminate, for Italian men: prefer life to political interests, which barely touch them because they have no fatherland … [C]hivalric honour has little sway over a nation in which public opinion and the society that makes it do not exist. When all public authorities are so disorganized, it is quite natural that women should acquire a great ascendancy over men …52 A. L. Thomas had also commented that in Italy ‘the number of petty states, which is their misfortune in politics causes their grandeur in the belles lettres’, and had even speculated whether, if culture ﬂourishes among men less involved in realpolitik, it might be possible for women, too, to become great artists? ‘If not one woman has ever raised herself to a level with those great men is it the fault of education or of nature?’53 Italy, the land of Corinne’s dead mother, is a motherland, a non-patriarchal space where a woman artist and salonnière can fulﬁl her potential. Corinne’s father, however, as she eventually reveals to Oswald, was English. But by choosing to live in Italy, where no-one knows her past, she has created for herself a new identity entirely. Here she is judged only by her talent, not by her conformity to gender role.54 Marriage to the melancholy northerner, Oswald, however, would put an end to this. From his ﬁrst appearance dressed in mourning for his dead father, Oswald signals patriarchal law. When he ﬁrst hears of the famous

Romantic Patriotism as Feminist Critique 561

woman poet, he acknowledges, ‘In England he would have judged such a woman very severely’.55 Like Owenson’s Horatio, Oswald experiences with Corinne for the ﬁrst time a relationship of intellectual equality with a woman. But when they visit a British ship docked at Naples, Corinne is chastened by the military atmosphere of ‘command and obedience. The subordination, the seriousness, the regularity the silence, … the image of a free but strict social order …’.56 This conﬁrms her childhood memories of British provincial life as stiﬂing, philistine, a ‘living death’ where ‘women have no occupation but domestic duties’ and where ‘a delicately improved mechanical doll’ could have substituted for her: ‘It would have fulﬁlled my function in society very well.’57 Unsurprisingly, Oswald bows to convention, leaves Corinne, and eventually marries her meek English half-sister in accordance with his dead father’s wishes. He then ﬁghts the French in their invasion of Italy in 1798–99, and is unable to return to Italy until the Peace of Amiens of 1802. As an honourable British aristocrat and chivalrous hero, he symbolizes for Italy a political alternative to Napoleon: a more benevolent patriarchal authority, but one equally militaristic on the Roman model and just as repressive to women. What was a binary opposition in The Wild Irish Girl opens out into a more complex triangle in Corinne, or Italy (Italy with the two imperialist nations, England and France). The implication is clear: Italy’s cultural distinctiveness will be lost if it is subordinated to any uniﬁed nation-state, just as Corinne’s artistic individualism would be sacriﬁced were she to bind herself to a husband in a conventional marriage. To compare masculine England and effeminate Italy as extremes in political unity/ disunity was a Voltairean commonplace, but Staël reverses the usual hierarchy to celebrate Italian social energy and freedom from organized government.58 This is a Utopian dream of liberty in entirely negative terms, which is paralleled by Staël’s vision of female freedom from control, rather than a feminist campaign for participation in public affairs. The association of English constitutional government with rigorous masculine control of the public sphere and women relegated to the home (in contrast with a French ancien régime in which women wielded power through patronage, salons and boudoir politics) derives from Rousseau, whose republicanism was based on classical models. Woman is supposedly guardian of unchanging moral values (the eternal feminine), guiding men who intervene in the ﬂux of history. Staël does not overtly criticize this characterisation of English liberty (indeed it was her ideal too, for much of her political life). She merely rewrites Rousseau’s Julie, oú La Nouvelle Héloïse in Corinne as the tragedy of the exceptional woman artist sacriﬁced to gender convention when she could be beneﬁting mankind and even posterity.59 The Madonna ideal, epitomized by Corinne’s blonde sister Lucile, is supposedly validated when she is chosen by Oswald in preference to the Sibyl. Certainly these female roles are presented as incompatible with each other. The woman artist’s oppositional role is a product of her outsider status, her political exclusion from citizenship, and is also possible only as an alternative to marriage and motherhood. It is therefore doubly self-sacriﬁcial. Corinne’s death reﬂects Staël’s personal and political disillusion. The vision, however,

562 Women, Liberty and the Nation

of Oswald falling under Corinne’s spell, even temporarily, and of her inﬂuence extending to the next generation through her sister and niece, suggests the possibility of an exceptional woman acting as mediator between rival factions. The ﬁctions of these sentimentalist writers show their attempt to sublimate their proscribed political activism in courtship ﬁction mediating between contrasting cultures. To become the mouthpiece of sentimental patriotism in opposition to the twin imperialisms of Britain and France, these women accepted the gendering of nationalism, with their heroines becoming ‘symbolic bearers of the collectivity’s identity and honour’. 60 The patrie is feminine, and female ‘purity’ is the motive inspiring male chivalric defence of family and nation. Representing the nation as Woman lent its political plight particular pathos. These female authors thereby endowed the oppositional critiques of the old-style ‘patriot’ with Burkean sentimentalism. Their hybrid genre permitted them to voice heterodox views to a mass readership, beyond the dreams of most political pamphleteers . Paradoxically, their claim to speak was vested in the particular impartiality conferred on women by their marginality and irrelevance to the state. As Virginia Woolf would wryly put it: ‘For, the outsider will say, “in fact as a woman, I have no country …”.’61

Notes 1.

I am using the anachronistic term ‘feminism’ to refer to writing which proclaimed the intellectual equality of men and women or called for women to play more part in public life. 2. Richard Polwhele, The Unsex’d Females (London, 1798), note 44 to line 174. 3. Nicola Trott, ‘Sexing the Critic: Mary Wollstonecraft at the turn of the century’, in Richard Cronin (ed.), 1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballads (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 32–67, p. 35. 4. Anti-Jacobin Review, 1 (July 1798), 94–9. 5. See Angela Keane, Women Writers and the English Nation in the 1790s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 16. 6. Quoted by Philip Hicks, ‘Catharine Macaulay’s Civil War: Gender, History, and Republicanism in Georgian Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 41 (April, 2002), 170–98, 172. 7. D.O. Thomas (ed.), Richard Price: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 181. 8. See Hugh Cunningham, ‘The Language of Patriotism 1750–1914’, History Workshop Journal 12 (1981), 8–33; Otto Dann and John Dinwiddy (eds), Nationalism in the Age of the French Revolution (London and Ronceverte: The Hambledon Press, 1988), p. 7; David Eastwood, ‘Patriotism and the English state in the 1790s’, in Mark Philp (ed.), The French Revolution and British Popular Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 146–68. 9. See Evan Radcliffe, ‘Revolutionary Writing, Moral Philosophy, and Universal Benevolence in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 54:2 (Apr. 1993), 221–40, 231–2. 10. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (eds), The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, 7 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1989), 5, 66. Henceforth abbreviated to WMW. 11. WMW, 5:142; WMW, 5:189. Anti-Jacobin novels satirizing the couple’s ideas as unpatriotic and destructive of family life appeared at the turn of the century and were extremely popular. Examples include: Jane West’s A Tale of the Times (1799), Elizabeth

Romantic Patriotism as Feminist Critique 563

12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

Hamilton’s Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800), George Walker’s The Vagabond (1799), Charles Lloyd’s Edmund Oliver (1798), Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray (1804), and Charles Lucas’s The Infernal Quixote (London: 1801), and the anonymous novels St. Godwin (1800), The Citizen’s Daughter (1804), and Dorothea, or a Ray of the New Light (1801). WMW, 5: 256. See the discussions in this volume by Clark, Zagarri and Chernock. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), p. 51. Sketches of Manners and Opinions in the French Republic towards the close of the Eighteenth Century in a Series of Letters, 2 vols (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1801), 2, 60. From henceforth abbreviated as Sketches. Sketches, 2:55. Sketches, 2:56–8. Sketches, 1:6. Sketches, 1:317. Sketches, 1:21. M. Ray Adams, ‘Helen Maria Williams and the French Revolution’, in Earl Leslie Griggs (ed.), From Wordsworth and Coleridge: Studies in Honour of George McLean Harper (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1939), pp. 87–117, p. 111. Major Writings of Germaine de Staël, translated by Vivian Folkenflik (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), pp. 201–3. Fiévée, in an article of Nivôse an XI in the Mercure de France. Quoted by Catherine R. Montfort, ‘From Public to Private Sphere: The Case of Mme de Sévigné and Mme de Staël’, in Catherine R. Montfort (ed.), Literate Women and the French Revolution of 1789 (Birmingham, Alabama: Summa Publications, 1994), pp. 111–128, p. 119. Corinne, or Italy, trans. and ed. Sylvia Raphael, introduction John Isbell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. x. For example, Joseph Alexandre Ségur in his Women: Their Condition and Influence in Society, 3 vols, (1803), charged ‘three distinct parties of well-known women’, who were ‘directed by the deceitful lights of the new philosophy’, with bringing about the revolution with their ‘meddling’, just when ‘the importance of political events should have imposed upon them a system of retirement and silence’ (III. 19–23). See Gary Kelly, ‘Feminine Romanticism, Masculine History, and the Founding of the Modern Liberal State’, in Essays and Studies (1998), ‘Romanticism and Gender’, ed. Ann Janowitz, (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1998), pp. 1–18, p. 8. See also his ‘Women Writers and Romantic Nationalism in Britain’, in Literature of Region and Nation: Proceedings of the 6th International Literature of Region and Nation Conference, ed. Winnifrid M. Bogaards (Saint John, New Brunswick: University of New Brunswick Press, 1998), pp. 120–32, p. 128. In these broad surveys, Kelly brings together female historicizing writers of all shades of political opinion under the umbrella of bourgeois liberalism. Kelly, ‘Women writers and Romantic nationalism in Britain’, p. 127. William John Fitzpatrick, Lady Morgan. Her Career, Literary and Personal etc, 2 vols (London: Charles J. Skeet, 1860), 1: 111. Morgan also wrote her own comparative history of women: Woman and her Master, 2 vols (London: Henry Colburn,1840). See Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 128–60. Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, The Wild Irish Girl: A National Tale, ed. Kathryn Fitzpatrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 14. The Wild Irish Girl, p. 16. The Wild Irish Girl, p. 124. The Wild Irish Girl, p. 49. The Wild Irish Girl, p. 124.

564 Women, Liberty and the Nation 36. Lady Morgan later claimed, ‘At the moment The Wild Irish Girl appeared, it was dangerous to write on Ireland, hazardous to praise her, and difficult to find a publisher for an Irish tale which had a political tendency. For even ballads sung in the streets of Dublin had been denounced by government spies and hushed by the Castle sbirri...’, Fitzpatrick, Lady Morgan. Her Career, Literary and Personal, I: 109. 37. Fitzpatrick, Lady Morgan, Her Career, I:129. 38. See Robert Tracy, ‘Maria Edgeworth and Lady Morgan: Legality versus Legitimacy’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, (1985), 1–22, 20. 39. The Wild Irish Girl, p. 65. See also p. 144. 40. The Wild Irish Girl, p. 203. 41. The Wild Irish Girl, pp. 226–7. 42. Ian Dennis, Nationalism and Desire in Early Historical Fiction (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 51. For the view that the novel is a seminal formulation of Irish patriotism in the Protestant tradition, incorporating research into Gaelic culture by Protestant antiquarians like Charlotte Brooke and Edward Bunting, see: Elmer Andrews, ‘Aesthetics, Politics and Identity: Lady Morgan’s The Wild Irish Girl’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 13:2 (Dec. 1987), 7–19. 43. See Ina Ferris, ‘Writing on the border: the national tale, female writing, and the public sphere’, in Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright (eds), Romanticism, History and the Possibilities of Genre: Re-forming literature 1789–1837 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 86–106, p. 86. 44. See also Tom Dunne, ‘Haunted by History: Irish Romantic Writing 1800–50’, in Roy Porter and Mikulá§ Teich (eds), Romanticism in National Context, pp. 68–91. 45. Joseph Lew, ‘Sydney Owenson and the Fate of Empire’, Keats–Shelley Journal, 39 (1990), 39–65. 46. The way the novel functioned as a critique of Napoleon’s rule of Italy is explicated by Simone Balayé, ‘Madame de Staël, Napoléon et L’indépendance Italienne’, Revue des Sciences Humaines, 34:133 (Jan.–Mar. 1969), 47–56; and ‘Madame de Staël, Napoléon et La Mission de L’Ècrivain’, Europe, 480–81 (1969), 124–37. 47. Corinne, p. 23 (my italics). 48. See Joan de Jean, ‘Portrait of the Artist as Sappho’, in Madelyn Gutwirth, Avriel Goldberger, and Karyna Szmurlo (eds), Germaine de Staël: Crossing the Borders (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), pp. 122–40. 49. Corinne, p. 31. 50. Corinne, p. xii; p. 256. 51. Corinne, p. 28; p. 233; p. 401. 52. Corinne, p. 101. 53. Antoine Leonard Thomas, Essay on the Character, the Manners and the Understanding of Women in Different Ages, tr. Mrs. Kindersley (London, 1781), p. 97; p. 111. 54. Corinne, p. 22. 55. Ibid. 56. Corinne, p. 195. 57. Corinne, pp. 245–9. 58. See Ada Giusti, ‘The Politics of Location: Italian Narratives of Mme de Staël and Georges Sand’, Neohelicon, 22:2 (1995), 205–19, 207. 59. See Madelyn Gutwirth, ‘Woman as Mediatrix: from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Germaine de Staël’, in Avriel H. Goldberger (ed.), Woman as Mediatrix: Essays on NineteenthCentury Women Writers (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), pp. 13–30. 60. Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (London: Sage, 1997), p. 45. 61. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own/Three Guineas, ed. M. Barrett (London, 1993), p. 234.

SECTION 9 WOMEN AND REVOLUTIONARY CITIZENSHIP: ENLIGHTENMENT LEGACIES? Introduction Lynn Hunt

No nation, revolutionary or otherwise, granted women equal political rights in the eighteenth century (or the nineteenth century for that matter). The failure of the French revolutionaries to do so has seemed especially disappointing, in large measure because they accorded political as well as civil rights to so many previously excluded groups. The ﬁrst article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 insisted that ‘Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.’ Between 1789 and 1794, revolutionaries debated the meaning of those words. They carefully deﬁned the age of majority, imposed then withdrew property qualiﬁcations, almost immediately granted political rights to Protestants, eventually accorded such rights to Jews, and even abolished slavery. They devoted very little energy, in contrast, to the question of women’s political rights, assuming, as the journalist Louis Marie Prudhomme explained in 1791, that ‘civil and political liberty is in a manner of speaking useless to women’ because they are ‘born to a perpetual dependence from the ﬁrst moment of their existence until that of their decease.’1 A similar disregard for women’s political rights can be traced in the American Revolution and in British radical circles of the 1790s, Mary Wollstonecraft notwithstanding. In explaining the failure of the late eighteenth century revolutions to institute true equality for women, scholars have highlighted the defects of Enlightenment writings about women. In a pathbreaking work Joan B. Landes showed how Montesquieu and Rousseau prepared the way for the negative French revolutionary attitudes toward women’s participation in politics. ‘Montesquieu’s dream of the domestication of women,’ she argues, ‘was enacted by the male leadership of the French Revolution.’2 Hilda Smith and Joan Scott, as Arianne Chernock notes in her essay here, both pointed to the ‘false universal’ adopted in natural rights discourses, the cornerstone of Enlightenment political thought; in this view, natural rights discourses were inherently anti-woman. The great proponent of ‘the rights of man,’ Thomas Paine, never even deigned to discuss the rights of women. Such ﬁndings have sometimes led to categorical denunciations. Madelyn Gutwirth, for example, concluded that ‘the French Revolution itself arrived in the midst of a longer and broader struggle to resist women’s advancement in society and to restore an unquestioned male supremacy.’3 565

566 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

The authors in this section force us to reconsider these negative verdicts. Taken together the essays offer a broad deﬁnition of politics that includes activities from the British Parliament to French women’s petitions and pamphlets about ‘marital tyranny.’ By taking this wider view – rather than limiting themselves to ofﬁcial male discourse about women – the authors are able to paint a much more positive picture of women’s aims and accomplishments in the Atlantic world of the late eighteenth century. In many of the essays, the emphasis falls on practice rather than theory, on the negotiation of gender relations rather than their ideological ﬁxity. This emphasis on practices, from humanitarianism to petitions for divorce, acknowledges that women’s prospects were shaped not just by what men said about them but also by what women – and men – did. Yet it is not as if the traditional realms of politics are ignored in these pages. Rosemarie Zagarri shows that even in the new United States, where women’s rights excited little public debate, women’s rights kept coming up in the popular press because the logic of liberalism virtually required it. Not only did Wollstonecraft’s Vindication appear in more private American libraries than Paine’s Rights of Man but debates about male suffrage also invariably raised issues about gender assumptions. These were aired in debating societies, graduation addresses, and popular magazines. To forestall the egalitarian implications of natural rights doctrines, the Americans, like Europeans, ultimately turned to biological explanations. Sex excluded women just as race excluded free blacks from virtually all of the demands for universal suffrage in the United States. The insistence that property and wealth should not serve as barriers to political participation opened the door to exclusions based on biological grounds instead. By the mid-nineteenth century a once lively debate had been foreclosed. Biology, however, was not always predictable. In her study of the American physician and revolutionary Benjamin Rush, Sarah Knott unravels the connection between his views of nervous sensibility and republican politics. Rush believed that sensibility offered access to republican morality, and he proclaimed that the moral faculty itself was universal. Though he insisted that slavery was bad for the health as well as the morals of mankind, he nonetheless propounded the now familiar views about women’s nature. He even explicitly rebutted Wollstonecraft, arguing that the differences between men and women were not attributable solely to education; they were stamped on both sexes in the womb. By their nature, he granted, women were more ‘sensible’ than men and more inclined therefore to virtue, but their virtues were not political and not even entirely compatible with reason. Rush’s more positive view of sensibility did not lead him to include women in the world of true citizens. In some circumstances female sensibility could propel a political movement, in particular in philanthropic and humanitarian activities such as abolitionism. Anna Clark considers these as one of four major modes of female involvement in eighteenth-century British politics. The others were female aristocratic inﬂuence on parliamentary elections and patronage, participation in reform-minded debating societies, and full-blown feminist critiques of women’s subordination. In the

Introduction 567

late 1770s, some debating societies began to include women, and many of them staged debates on women’s role in politics. But female debating societies disappeared after 1788, and in 1798 the British government closed all the debating societies. The chronology bears much resemblance to the American and French cases. Wollstonecraft died in the midst of a furious backlash against feminist ideas in the 1790s, and even aristocratic women began to withdraw from politics, leaving only the engagement of middle- and upper-class women in philanthropic activities. Arianne Chernock comes to less bleak conclusions in her analysis of British ‘male feminists’ of the era. Mary Wollstonecraft may have been alone among women in speaking out, however hesitantly, for female political representation, but some male radicals did argue that women’s formal political participation was a natural right. A few cited the ‘ancient constitution’; had not the Saxons included women in their deliberations? Still others argued that women’s ‘greater degrees of sensibility’ could be mobilized to enlighten and soften politics. In short, the female citizen was not an absurdity to everyone. Nor did these views disappear entirely in the early nineteenth century. As soon as the Napoleonic Wars ended, arguments for women’s political representation revived. The real turning point, in Chernock’s view, came with the 1832 Reform Bill, which ofﬁcially deﬁned the British citizen as male. One of the most striking characteristics of the 1790s was the appearance of so many individual women willing to brave the social conventions of the time to write about politics, participate in political circles, and demand more rights for women. In this, Wollstonecraft was far from alone. Helen Maria Williams, Olympe de Gouges, Catherine Macaulay, Etta Palm, Jeanne-Marie Roland – the list is long of those willing to brave public opprobrium in order to make their voices heard. Felicia Gordon draws attention to two women who were less wellknown than these but no less willing to stick their necks out. Marie-Madeleine Jodin and Mary Darby Robinson both authored feminist treatises after colourful, not to say scandalous, lives as actresses and courtesans. Their backgrounds do not seem incidental. Although Jodin was Swiss by birth and Robinson English, they, like the French female militants Claire Lacombe and Théroigne de Méricourt, found that the step from the theatrical to the political stage could be a short one. Their lives as courtesans for the rich and famous brought them notoriety but also a sense for seizing opportunity, and this they did in life and in print. Despite the constant threat and frequent reality of public humiliation, Jodin and Robinson did not settle for ﬁnancial independence. For all their differences, they both publicly urged women to overcome the prejudices imposed on them. Their writings may remain marginal in the feminist canon, but their willingness to publish reminds us that the prescriptions about women’s participation should not be confused with the reality of women’s actions. Only in France did women set up their own political clubs, and only in France was the question of women’s rights actually aired in the national assemblies. From its very inception, the French Revolution had an ambiguous relationship to women. The new National Assembly promised liberty and equality to all French

568 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

citizens and subsequent assemblies offered divorce, equal division of family inheritances, and various other civil rights to women. Women joined political clubs, wrote pamphlets, and participated in demonstrations, riots, and revolts. But women never gained equal political rights. The National Convention suppressed women’s clubs in 1793, revolutionary courts executed some of the bestknown women as traitors, and leading revolutionaries derided female activists as ‘denatured women’ and ‘viragos.’4 Should this decidedly mixed outcome be viewed as a glass half full or a glass half empty? The glass-half-empty view dominated writings on women and revolutionary citizenship in the 1980s and 1990s. To many, however, the glass now seems at least half full. Suzanne Desan is one of those. Her essay on the ‘politics of intimacy’ explicitly challenges the view, developed and elaborated since Landes, that liberal and republican ideology necessarily entailed the exclusion of women from politics. Revolutionary legislation on the family, she counters, actually opened up a new ﬁeld of contestation over gender relations and promoted the emergence of new languages for questioning female subservience. The deputies did more than snatch away control of marriage from the Catholic Church; they initiated a continuing debate about the nature of marriage, conjugal love, and male as well as female sensibilities. Women contributed to these arguments in vociferous fashion, penning petitions and pamphlets and giving speeches at clubs. Women demanded greater rights within marriage and the family – much more often than they demanded political rights in the narrow sense of the term. In their words and actions, they actively contested the Rousseauist vision of female submissiveness. As all good work does, the essays here open the way to future research and reﬂection. They show the fruitfulness of refocusing attention, away from intellectual and political leaders toward more ordinary writers and activists. They also demonstrate what is to be gained by taking our eyes off the ultimate prize, equal political rights. If the question is why women did not gain equal political rights in the late eighteenth century revolutions, then the answer is in some ways all too obvious. After all women did not gain them anywhere until the twentieth century and still do not have them in many places. The overwhelming majority of men and women believed that women formed an essential but subordinate part of the family unit, whether as daughters or wives. What is most remarkable about the late eighteenth century is that so many individuals came to question this verity. In debating societies, clubs, the popular press, court cases and even the demi-monde of courtesans, the authors of these essays have uncovered a burgeoning world of political and social argument. Men and women thought and talked and wrote and published about the status of women, and in the process raised issues that remain salient for us today. We who take questioning everything as a matter of course can still learn from those who discovered for themselves the connection between gender, social relations, and political authority.

Notes 1. As quoted in Lynn Hunt, ed., The French Revolution and Human Rights (Boston: Bedford Books, 1996), p. 130.

Introduction 569 2. Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). 3. The Twilight of the Goddesses: Women and Representation in the French Revolutionary Era (New Brunswick, N. J., 1992), quote p. 383. 4. Pierre Gaspard Chaumette (November 17, 1793), in Lynn Hunt, ed., The French Revolution and Human Rights (Boston: Bedford Books, 1996), p. 138.

9.1 Women in Eighteenth-Century British Politics Anna Clark

In recent years, the traditional view that women were excluded from politics in the late eighteenth century has been challenged.1 Amanda Vickery, Amanda Foreman and Linda Colley have shown women advancing into the public sphere, attending the theatre, canvassing for elections, making patriotic speeches, and establishing charitable institutions. They explain away admonitions to women to stay out of politics as reactionary grumbling at the unstoppable progress of women in public.2 However, it is important to differentiate between women’s public presence in public places and their power to change events, between women’s authority, inﬂuence, and rights, and between feminine images and women’s activities. Furthermore, it is impossible to claim that ‘women’ advanced in the public, because aristocratic, middle-class, and plebeian women participated in politics in entirely different ways. Women’s participation in politics must also be analyzed in the context of eighteenth-century debates about the nature of the public.3 Conservative constitutionalists deﬁned the only legitimate public as Parliament, and believed that great aristocratic dynasties legitimately controlled politics through their inﬂuence.4 In reaction, many early eighteenth intellectuals abandoned parliamentary politics as irredeemably corrupt, and concentrated on an ‘informal public’ of culture and humanitarianism. However, reformers reclaimed and expanded ideas of citizenship, and formed associations to challenge Parliament’s monopoly as the only legitimate public. Images of gender played a key role in these debates about the nature of the public. Reformers tended to deﬁne citizenship in highly masculine terms, while images of femininity could symbolize corruption – or virtue. Nonetheless, reformers did open the discussion on the nature of rights. Four modes of female political participation emerged out of these versions of the public. First, aristocratic women were able to inﬂuence parliamentary elections and patronage because of their dynastic inﬂuence. Second, cultural critics justiﬁed women’s role in salons, philanthropy, and novel writing as an extension of feminine sensibility, but they warned them to stay out of politics. Third, some women claimed a voice in politics as patriots, citizens, or workers, but they did not necessarily claim the rights of women. Fourth, feminists critiqued women’s 570

Women in British Politics 571

subordination and advocated women’s rights. While most historians concentrate on the 1790s as the key moment in the beginning of feminism, this chapter will argue that the 1780s witnessed crucial debates over the legitimacy of aristocratic women’s inﬂuence, the efﬁcacy of humanitarianism, and the possibility of women’s rights. British women’s political participation also illuminates wider debates about whether the Enlightenment advanced or hindered women. While some historians have argued that Enlightenment thinkers deﬁned reason and the public sphere as masculine, thus excluding women, other historians have shown Enlightenment ideas of reason and democracy made feminism possible.5 Although the eighteenth century ended with the exclusion and retreat of most women from politics, this exclusion was a reaction to intense debates over women’s place and the invention of feminism.

British publics In the traditional interpretation of politics, the Crown and aristocratic families dominated the government and Parliament by exerting their ‘inﬂuence’. In this context, inﬂuence meant the ability to dispense patronage and ofﬁces in order to gain votes in Parliament, and access to funds; it could also mean access to the ear of politicians. As a result, traditional historians – often known as the Namierite school – concentrate on the tactical maneuverings for power, position and patronage among elite politicians on the national level.6 Elaine Chalus has brilliantly inserted women into this historiography by showing that aristocratic women functioned as conﬁdantes, advisers, agents, and partners to male politicians.7 These women derived their inﬂuence from their dynastic position, advantageous marriages, landholdings, and the personal connections of high society. This inﬂuence also extended to elections. Frank O’Gorman argues that voters deferred to such aristocratic inﬂuence in because ‘the landed interest expressed certain community values to which all (or most) subscribed:’ on one hand, these values included deference to traditional authorities, but on the other, a strong tradition of electoral independence.8 O’Gorman has pointed out that great families could not simply determine many elections; they had to use different kinds of inﬂuence to persuade voters. Chalus, Judith Lewis, and K.D. Reynolds have shown how aristocratic women exerted this inﬂuence through bestowing charities, canvassing, and entertaining voters.9 Aristocratic power could be quite coercive; like her male counterparts, a female landowner could threaten to evict tenants who did not vote as she instructed, withdraw her custom from a business, or withhold employment opportunities; charity could also be contingent on the correct vote. Nonetheless, those who beneﬁtted from the aristocratic system of patronage regarded aristocratic women’s inﬂuence as perfectly acceptable. Yet many middle-class and even aristocratic intellectuals rejected this system of political inﬂuence and patronage as hopelessly corrupt; in the early eighteenth century, they retreated to an ‘informal public’ where both men and women could engage in conversation, philosophy, novel-writing, and philanthropy.

572 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

Writers of the Scottish Enlightenment envisioned an ‘informal public’ where educated women and men could function as ‘moral agents’, practicing ‘political virtue’ and reﬂecting ‘on the legitimacy of political decisions’.10 At the same time, women seemed to symbolize the purity and reﬁnement of this informal public, its freedom from the corruption of practical politics; if women interfered in political activities, critics attacked them.11 However, by the middle of the century, a few women, such as the conservative Catherine Montagu and the radical Catherine Macaulay ran their own highly intellectual salons and exerted political inﬂuence.12 But they were exceptions; most middle- and upper-class British women were left out of the political conversations men enjoyed when they withdrew from the dinner table for port and pipes.13 Eighteenth-century radicals and reformers were not content to denounce political corruption, they wanted to change the system. Instead of inﬂuence and patronage, they envisioned politics as based on merit, true representation, open rational discussion, the rights of citizens, and public associations.14 They espoused an ideal of the independent voter as strongly masculine, based on male bonding and drinking in clubs and pubs.15 John Smail and others have also demonstrated that middling men created alternative political structures to aristocratic and gentry hegemony through the widespread creation of associations. Although women could contribute money to these associations, they could not join them.16 While these associations resembled salons in their open discussions of ideas, unlike private salons based on personal connections, they were public, accountable institutions formed for the purposes of action, for instance to police localities, inculcate moral reform, build canals, and so on.. Radical and reforming men in these associations usually envisioned rights as based on the inheritance of freeborn Britons: they believed they should enjoy the right to the protection of their property, and increasingly in the 1760s and 1770s, the right to speak freely and to participate in public politics. But rights tended to be based on masculinity, history, locality, and property. Radicals often criticized aristocratic female inﬂuence, but this was not just because they believed that femininity would corrupt politics.17 Rather, they used the image of ‘petticoat inﬂuence’ to attack the whole system of royal and aristocratic personal, patronage politics. For instance, Montesquieu argued that in monarchies, women would inevitably corrupt the polity with their personal inﬂuence.18 In Britain, radicals sometimes alleged that politicians allowed their mistresses to dispense patronage; if inﬂuence was obtained through sex, it could not be accepted as legitimate. By the 1760s, the British and French press spread scurrilous rumors about the political inﬂuence of Madame du Pompadour, Madame du Barry, and Augusta, the Queen Mother, the rumored mistress of the prime minister Lord Bute.19 After two decades of political ferment, the 1780s witnessed major challenges to conventional ideas of the public sphere, with important implications for women. In Spain, intellectuals debated whether women should join the new Economic Societies, and they eventually gained access to them.20 In France, young men founded their own formal associations and musées, a few of which eventually

Women in British Politics 573

admitted women, and women writers published in greater and greater numbers. Freemasons, who have been credited with helping to develop the associational network which preceded the French revolution, also debated on whether to adopt women into their societies; female freemasons began to develop amazonian rhetoric about women’s accomplishments and public virtue.21 In 1787, Condorcet began to consider whether women could hold public ofﬁce.22 In Britain, public opinion became more important to Parliamentary politics in the 1780s: reformers invented new forms of association and new ideas of rights, aristocratic women increased the visibility of their inﬂuence, and humanitarians left the retreat of the informal public to try to sway Parliament. In all these three versions of the public, the possibilities and limits of women’s political participation became more apparent. While Dror Wahrman explains the increased hostility toward women in politics as the culmination of a long term trend in gender ideology, it was in fact a speciﬁc reaction against women’s increased political activism.23 In 1779–80, reformers created the Yorkshire Association and its auxiliaries, a network of associations dedicated to Parliamentary reform. 24 This movement was important because it directly challenged Parliament’s claim to be the only legitimate public by creating a network of associations which served as a political force. The association movement also stimulated, and was stimulated by, a larger expansion of public life in which women could participate: debating societies. The debating societies were quite different from the salons of the informal public: they were open to all who could pay admission, not just those personally acquainted with the hostess, and they discussed political as well as cultural issues as part of the wider political movement, not as an alternative to politics. Although debating societies were originally founded to prepare men for professional careers, such as the law, in the late 1770s, some debating societies began including women (after much controversy).25 By 1780, women formed several of their own societies. 26 The debating societies are extremely signiﬁcant for women’s role in the political public. They allowed some women to gain experience in mixed political conversations, and the female debating societies enabled women to associate and organize on their own. The Association Movement stimulated a discussion of the rights of citizenship by demanding that the franchise be expanded. On one hand, it claimed to be resurrecting the purity of the ‘ancient constitution’ and evoked a traditional, masculine language of the citizenship of the ‘freeborn Englishman’. Country gentlemen such as Christopher Wyvill dominated the Association movement, and still believed that only property-holding men should qualify as voters. Yet glimmerings of the notion of the right to vote as a human right began to emerge. The Westminster Committee contemplated universal manhood suffrage. The Rev. Thomas Northcote supported the idea that the vote was a birthright, not a traditional custom or a privilege of Britons.27 The anonymous author of The People the Best Governors wrote that ‘Social virtue and knowledge … is the best, and only necessary qualiﬁcation’ for the vote.28 And these were qualities women could possess. Although the Association movement did not discuss women’s

574 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

suffrage, by challenging the traditional basis of the franchise they made such discussions possible. The debating societies provided one of the ﬁrst occasions on which the germs of feminist ideas – criticisms of women’s subordination and advocacy of women’s rights – could be discussed in a public forum. For instance, ‘La Belle Assemblée’ began by reassuring audiences that ‘The Ladies, knowing nothing of the affairs of state, do not interfere with them’. But these women soon acquired the conﬁdence to discuss politics, overcoming the ‘natural timidity of those who have but lately assumed their rights and privileges, by bursting those chains, with which through custom and illiberality, they have hitherto been fettered’.29 In 1780, debating societies in London conducted at least eleven discussions on women’s role in politics and education. They tended to focus on two questions: did women have the intellectual power to take advantage of education? And should women enjoy public politic rights?30 Of course, such ideas occasionally had appeared in the previous decades in isolated pamphlets or articles. But the debating societies gave them a wider exposure. In 1780, Mrs. E. Hayly, a frequenter of these debates, reprinted Female Restoration, which had been ﬁrst published in 1758, and distributed it at Freemason’s Hall, where many of these debates were held.31 While the pamphlet asserted women’s claim to reason and ability to hold political ofﬁce, these debating societies went beyond it to consider the right of women to vote in elections. Still, it was difﬁcult for these early feminists to overcome the strong association of masculinity with citizenship and femininity with corruption. Several societies, mixed and all-male, voted against motions that women should participate in elections or speak in public. For instance, on the 2 March, 1780, some debaters argued that women were ‘too liable to be seduced from their attention to the public weal, by the smooth and silken parasites who constantly infest a court, to rule a state’.32 Others compared bribable voters to women eager to surrender their freedom in marriage.33 Critics lambasted the debating women for appearing in mixed company and for daring to speak in public. Sometimes men dressed as women invaded the women only debating societies, presumably to ridicule them.34 And of course, women were never allowed to join the association movement. At the same time, aristocratic women’s political participation more visible, and more problematic. In the previous two decades, party politics had been resurrected, and more and more elections were contested, giving more scope to aristocratic women’s activities of canvassing. At the same time, public opinion, not just traditional dynastic clout, became somewhat more important in elections. Most notoriously, scandal erupted over the duchess of Devonshire’s campaigning for Charles James Fox in the 1784 Westminister election. Westminster was a London constituency with a largely plebeian franchise and a strong presence of the association movement and debating societies. The duchess won over voters to Fox by organizing the campaign, and herself venturing out into the muddy streets to shake hands – or even kiss the cheeks – of artisan voters such as butchers and shoemakers. She led a phalanx of ladies who helped her canvass. In response to her activities, newspaper columns told ladies that they should not

Women in British Politics 575

‘meddle’ with politics, and accused them of violating the ‘common decency’ and ‘dignity’ expected from married ladies of quality.35 Caricatures mocked the duchess as a ‘public woman’, a euphemism for a prostitute, who returned drunk and disheveled from a long evening of kissing butchers for their votes.36 Historians have often seen this controversy as motivated by hostility against women in politics, which the duchess of Devonshire deﬁed in order to set a precedent for the forward march of women into politics.37 The Foxites tried to create a new version of aristocratic female inﬂuence by celebrating the duchess as a ‘Female Patriot’. She could sway public opinion to aid a party, while traditionally aristocratic women swayed individual voters to aid their dynasties.38 However, the hostility against the Duchess of Devonshire derived as much from her deployment of aristocratic inﬂuence as the fact that she was a woman. Although Fox claimed to be ﬁghting for the liberties of the people, in 1783 he had backed off from the Association movement and engaged in a coalition government with the hated Lord North, the movement’s arch-enemy and architect of the American war. Many radicals opposed Fox’s candidacy and supported his opponent, Sir Cecil Wray, who had closer ties to the association movement. Radicals opposed the Duchess of Devonshire’s campaigning as just another example of aristocratic female inﬂuence and corrupt conventional politics.39 A commentator asked, ‘as it is held unconstitutional and unlawful for Peers to interfere at elections, it is equally so for Peeresses’.40 Radicals accused the Duchess of bribing tradesmen by promising to reward them for their votes with her custom – or punish them by withdrawing it. Reformers criticized the alleged ‘petticoat inﬂuence’ of female aristocrats in other constituencies as well, such as Newcastle and Norwich. In Newcastle, adventurer Andrew Stoney Bowes used the dynastic inﬂuence and wealth of his wife, the Countess of Strathmore, to win election as a Foxite member of Parliament in 1780, but in 1784, voters realized he was just another corrupt politician out for patronage, and rejected his claim that he deserved his seat due to his wife’s family heritage. The Countess gained no power from her political inﬂuence; in fact, her husband viciously tortured her behind the scenes.41 Fox’s opponents claimed their own version of ‘Female Patriotism’ was based on the public good, not the interests of an aristocratic dynasty or party. For instance, a Norwich ‘Female Patriot’ warned voters not to let Lady Coke’s beauty persuade them to vote for her husband, the Foxite candidate.42 Norwich women had even, as Wilson has discovered, suggested forming a female patriotic association.43 The women who canvassed against Fox in 1784 led a debate in 1788, after other aristocratic ladies campaigned in another Westminster election, proposing, ‘Do not the extraordinary abilities of the Ladies in the present age demand Academical honours from the Universities – a right to vote at elections, and to be returned Members of Parliament’.44 By the late 1780s, humanitarianism emerged as a new way in which women could engage in the public world while inspiring less controversy. The humanitarian movement is another example of the way in which the symbolism of femininity enabled, constrained, and contradicted women’s actual activism. In both

576 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

England and France, humanitarianism began to provide an alternative to the image of aristocratic petticoat inﬂuence. The shift away from militaristic classical republican notions of virtue toward more religious ideas of virtue which focused on charity and compassion helped give femininity a more positive valence.45 Instead of a lady using her sexual sway to corrupt politicians, women could use their pure virtue to inﬂuence public opinion to have sympathy for the oppressed, such as slaves. Whereas philanthropists and cultural critics often retreated from the political world as irredeemably corrupt, humanitarians in the 1780s began to try to inﬂuence Parliament concerning causes such as anti-slavery and other abuses of empire. For instance, women wrote poetry in hopes of swaying Parliament to abolish slavery. As Clare Midgely has demonstrated, women’s anti-slavery activism played an important role in shifting public opinion. Yet this very association of women with tender sensibility limited their power. By positioning themselves as gentle defenders of the afﬂicted, for instance, anti-slavery poets avoided the more radical implications of their political participation.46 In the 1780s and 90s, male anti-slavery advocates did not allow women to sign petitions to parliament or join their anti-slavery associations; instead, women were to act in their domestic role by using their purchasing power as housewives to boycott West Indian sugar.47 Hannah More, at that time an inﬂuential playwright, privately lobbied members of the House of Lords for abolition of the slave trade, but she limited her own efﬁcacy by refusing to speak, let alone appear, at any public gathering.48 Middle-class moralists advised women to support the cause of anti-slavery out of feminine sensibility, but warned them to avoid questions of politics or government.49 However, the anti-slavery movement also set an important movement for women by broadening the deﬁnition of rights. Traditionally, rights had been seen as the property of the free-born English man. The anti-slavery movement deﬁned rights as based on humanity, not any particular nationality. This cosmopolitan, universalist humanitarian set the stage for women’s rights. In 1789, the French Revolution transformed the political landscape. Parliament faded as the focus of political debate as politicians and critics envisioned – or feared – a total transformation of society. Mary Wollstonecraft regarded elections as ‘an empty shew [sic]’ where corrupt politicians lead the ‘gruff mastiff’ of the English electorate ‘by the nose’.50 Radicals formed conventions not to reform Parliament, but to replace it. In response, conservatives realized they would have to ﬁght the battle of public opinion, and win over the people’s hearts as well as elections in order to prevent revolution. Aristocratic female inﬂuence came under renewed attack, but a ﬁerce debate emerged as to what would replace it – women’s rights or women’s inﬂuence. The number of women serving as respected public intellectuals momentarily increased during the 1790s, contributing to debates on religious reform, the French revolution itself, and education. Earlier, a few exceptional women had been celebrated as the muses – one historian, one artist, one Shakespeare critic, and so on – but now, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Mary

Women in British Politics 577

Wollstonecraft and others engaged in public debates more generally. Most of these women did not openly advocate women’s rights, but those who did developed feminism in new ways. Catherine Macaulay, the renowned historian, now espoused feminist ideas publicly for the ﬁrst time. She, and Mary Wollstonecraft, denounced aristocratic female inﬂuence, but they wished to replace this limited inﬂuence with women’s rights. In her 1790 Letters on Education, Catherine Macaulay wrote, ‘By the intrigues of women, and their rage for personal power and importance, the whole world has been ﬁlled with violence and injury’.51 Similarly, Wollstonecraft denounced the inﬂuence of aristocratic women as part of a corrupt Parliamentary system. How is the ‘hard-working mechanic … represented’, she asked, ‘whose very sweat … varnishes the chariot of some female favourite?’ She argued that ‘If women are not permitted to enjoy legitimate rights, they will render both men and themselves vicious, to obtain illicit privileges’.52 Macaulay claimed that ‘when the sex have been taught wisdom by education, they will be glad to give up indirect inﬂuence for rational privileges’.53 Mary Wollstonecraft and Catherine Macaulay also signiﬁcantly went beyond the debating society women of the 1780s. Macaulay argued that women needed private as well as public rights, attacking the double standard which expelled a woman from society for unchastity while accepting male rakes.54 Unlike earlier ‘female patriots’, Wollstonecraft delineated women’s emotional, legal and physical oppression in private life. Of course, novelists had been exploring these ideas for decades, but Wollstonecraft articulated women’s subordination not only as an individual tragedy but as a social problem that should be solved.55 As her friend Mary Hays noted, ‘it is astonishing … that principles of private and domestic justice, do not at least keep pace in the minds of men, with those of a public and political nature’.56 While male radicals had long described the British government as a despotism, these women pointed out the despotic character of traditional masculine tyranny, ruled by passions and augmented by unjust laws.57 Mary Wollstonecraft’s version of feminism also included all women, not just women of a particular class. She articulated the stories of women facing poverty and sexual abuse.58 While Wollstonecraft concentrated on women’s private woes, she knew that they needed the public status of citizens to enforce their private rights. By the late 1790s, Mary Wollstonecraft had inspired an efﬂoresence of publications critiquing the social position of British women. In 1796, for instance, the Scottish writer Elizabeth Hamilton published Letters of a Hindoo Rajah in which she took the voice of a Brahmin to trace the disadvantages faced by women in Britain.59 In 1798, Mary Hays published a work she had written earlier, inspired by Wollstonecraft, the passionate Appeal to the Men of Great Britain on Behalf of Women, criticizing women’s subordination in marriage and education, followed in 1799 by her novel The Victim of Prejudice, which showed how the double standard oppressed a victim of rape. Mary Robinson anonymously published her rigorous critique of women’s oppression, A Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Mental Subordination, under the name Anne Frances Randall, and her

578 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

novel The Natural Daughter in 1799, under her own name. Two less radical works, by Priscilla Wakeﬁeld and Mary Anne Radcliffe, advocated greater opportunities for women in the professions and trades to enable them to support themselves and their families instead of having to resort to prostitution.60 Most liberals and radicals of the 1790s, however, still espoused fairly traditional views about women’s role. Many reviewers, for instance, agreed with Mary Wollstonecraft that women needed to be better educated and treated with greater respect, but with a few exceptions, they drew the line at women’s participation in politics.61 If women engaged in politics, The Critical Review feared, ‘the state would lose ten thousand useful domestic wives, in the pursuit of one very indifferent philosopher or statesmen’.62 While radicals and reformers challenged the notion that the voter must hold landed property, they strengthened the association of masculinity and citizenship.63 To be sure, the liberal Tusculorum debating society of Norwich admitted female friends and relatives to their meetings, but they do not seem to have contributed to the discussions or voted.64 Women could not join any of the formal reforming associations, such as the elite Friends of the People, or the plebeian London Corresponding Society. Mary Wollstonecraft and her feminist allies therefore did not have an organizational base which might have spurred support for their ideas. Unlike the French women of the early 1790s, who formed a Society of Revolutionary Republican Women, radical British women did not develop their own women’s organizations. Of course, the Jacobins eventually suppressed the activist French women, arguing that women’s place was in the home.65 In London, the debating societies continued to admit women, but the female debating societies had disappeared after 1788. To be sure, the mixed London debating societies continued to discuss the position of women, especially since the government prohibited political discussions after 1795, which left social issues as the only legal topics.66 When her husband William Godwin published Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1798 after she died, feminist ideas became the most lively topic for debate in April of that year. However, the government soon saw social issues as just as subversive as political questions: as prime minister Pitt proclaimed in Parliament, debating societies ‘agitated’ questions ‘which operate to loosen the foundations of morality, religion, and social happiness’.67 In 1798, the government closed down debating societies altogether and intensiﬁed prosecutions for sedition.68 The radical world of associations had been suppressed. The backlash against feminism also extended into print. Frightened by the French revolution, conservatives regarded Mary Wollstonecraft and other radical women as symbols of the social disorder which would result if Britain emulated the French revolution. They used revelations about Mary Wollstonecraft’s love life and death to discredit the wave of feminist publications.69 From the pulpit and in pamphlets moralists thundered that women must stay in the home and out of politics. ‘Leaving women to the exercise of … their natural and social rights’, the Anti-Jacobin Review warned, would encourage promiscuity, ‘annihilate virtuous principle’, and advance ‘Jacobin morals … dissolve … the tie of marriage [and] destroy one of the chief foundations of political society’.70

Women in British Politics 579

Hannah More, who had been a key ﬁgure in the informal public of culture and humanitarianism, joined the fray to denounce Mary Wollstonecraft in her ‘Strictures on Female Education’ of 1798. To be sure, More is sometimes seen as setting the stage for a greater expansion of women’s role; she decried those who believed that women should not be educated and suggested that female intellectual potential might be much greater than contemporaries thought. At the same time, she admonished other women to keep their learning within limits.71 On a visit to Paris, she was horriﬁed that ladies ‘neglected their families’ to attend lectures on anatomy at a lyceum: ‘I hope we shall never have such institutions here’ she sniffed to her sister.72 Middle-class women should concentrate on domesticity, she argued, while even upper-class women should avoid the study of science and politics as unfeminine.73 Privately writing to Horace Walpole about Wollstonecraft, Hannah More declared, ‘To be unstable and capricious, I really think, is but too characteristic of our sex; and there is perhaps no animal so indebted to subordination for its proper behavior as woman’.74 Like Wollstonecraft and Macaulay, Hannah More disdained traditional aristocratic female inﬂuence as corrupt. More criticized the system of patronage that rewarded connections more than merit. In her poem ‘The Bad Bargain, or the World Set Up for Sale’, she depicted the devil offering ‘a peerage, or a star and garter’, as mortals ‘sell their souls for reputation’ and a virgin ‘grants her virtue as the price’ of a title.75 In her famous tale ‘Village Politics’, she contrasted the ideal squire, benevolent and caring toward his villagers, with his ‘rantipolish’ wife, who ‘begged him to pull down [his] ﬁne old castle, and build it up in her frippery way’. The old castle, of course, symbolized British traditions, and the wife’s French aspirations might have alluded to Whigs such as the Duchess of Devonshire, with their fashionable French styles. When she denounced ‘female politicians’ as ‘disgusting and unnatural’, she referred as much to canvassing ladies as to feminists.76 In place of the old aristocratic ‘petticoat’ inﬂuence derived from dynastic clout and sexual allure, Hannah More developed a new, perhaps more convincing notion of female domestic inﬂuence.77 This inﬂuence derived from the informal public of novel-writing and humanitarianism, in which More herself had been prominent in the 1780s. As we have seen, humanitarians had ventured forth into the public world of Parliamentary politics to advance their goals. More herself had electioneered earlier in her career, helping Edmund Burke in a Bristol election, and had lobbied Parliament for the anti-slavery cause. But after an Evangelical conversion, she retreated to rural Somerset, where she established an empire of charity schools. Even as More expanded and elaborated on women’s philanthropic role, she insisted that other women also retreat from politics. She also wished to limit middle-class and working-class men’s participation in national politics. Although she differed in some ways from traditional ‘Church and King’ conservatives, she agreed with them that only the elite should debate political issues and enact policy; she actively propagandized against the vote for middle-class and laboring men.78 She did not believe in the rights of man, but in the duties of the rich and poor.79 More was famed for her philanthropy, but she

580 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

mainly wished to educate the poor in order to turn them away from radical principles. For instance, she taught them only to read, not to write.80 It could be argued that liberal women such as Catherine Cappe in Yorkshire and Eliza Fletcher in Edinburgh contributed as much or more in establishing female charitable work. Despite male opposition, they established open, accountable institutions, unlike More.81 Hannah More refused to join a patriotic ladies’ committee in the 1790s; she may have had a loose network of charitable women in Somerset, but she did not organize philanthropic associations open to anyone. To be sure, very late in life she deﬁed her ally William Wilberforce to join a Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Association, but there she followed the lead of more liberal women.82

Conclusion By the ﬁrst two decades of the 19th century, the four possibilities for women’s role in politics had signiﬁcantly changed. Although aristocratic women, as Judith Lewis has found, participated in more elections from 1790 to 1820 than they had previously, they faced much more intense hostility and began to withdraw from politics.83 Aristocratic women’s inﬂuence lost legitimacy when too blatant a display of patronage politics could be seen as corruption. In the cultural public, while the accomplishments of female worthies were celebrated in the 1770s and 1780s, by the 1790s and 1800s commentators often warned women to stay away from science, history, and politics.84 For instance, while the Scots Magazine had earlier lauded female learning, in 1800 it ridiculed ‘Female Accomplishments’, arguing that ‘a man might think his wife better employed in making custards than in making syllogisms; in pickling cucumbers than in extracting the square roots’.85 In France, women writers also faced a backlash.86 Middle- and upper-class women, however, expanded their role in the informal public of philanthropy. Despite her limitations, Hannah More’s advocacy of philanthropy gave middle-class women a sense of purpose. Yet male ofﬁcials often undercut female philanthropists’ control over their charitable institutions; even Hannah More faced ﬁerce opposition from local squires and clerics over her schools. Those who advocated women to join in humanitarian activities also warned them to stay out of the public world of politics. As Clare Midgely observes, in the 1820s female advocates for missionary work entered the public world to protect the rights of women in India or enslaved Africans, but they could not demand their own rights.87 Female domestic inﬂuence, therefore, was not a step on the way to feminism, but a reaction against it, or a detour around it.88 Women could no longer claim a public voice in parliamentary politics without facing intense social stigma. To be sure, a few liberal middle-class women were lauded as ‘female patriots’ for helping in elections, but they worked behind the scenes and did not advocate female associations or publicly speak.89 While women writers sometimes expressed veiled political comments in their novels,

Women in British Politics 581

more explicit female political commentary could be greeted with horror and dismay.90 Feminism had been soundly defeated by the backlash against Wollstonecraft and her friends in 1798. In the ﬁrst decade of the nineteenth century, female writers often ridiculed feminist characters in their novels.91 Without associations, feminists lacked a power base for their ideas. Plebeian women, however, had long organized themselves into female friendly societies, preached as Methodists, participated in strikes and rioted for food.92 To be sure, plebeian women did not demand individual rights for themselves as had Mary Wollstonecraft; they justiﬁed their participation in politics to meet the needs of their families and communities.93 Yet by 1817–19, plebeian women formed their own Female Reform Associations and claimed a place for themselves in radical politics. The socialists who emerged from this milieu were the ﬁrst to revive feminist ideas of women’s rights in the nineteenth century.94

Notes 1. For a longer elucidation of many of the themes in this chapter, see A. Clark, Scandal: the Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 2. A. Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres: a Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History,’ The Historical Journal 36 (1993), 383–414; see also her The Gentleman’s Daughter. Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998); L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992); A. Foreman, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (London: Harper Collins, 1998). For similar arguments, see H. Barker and E. Chalus, eds, Gender in Eighteenth Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities (London and New York: Longman, 1997). 3. J. Brewer, ‘This, that and the other: Public, Social and Private in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in L. Sharpe and D. Castiglione, eds, Shifting the Boundaries (Exeter: Exeter Univ. Press, 1995), 1–21. 4. C. S. Emden, The People and the Constitution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 12; J.A.W. Gunn, Beyond Liberty and Property. The Process of Self-Recognition in Eighteenth Century Political Thought (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1983), 278. 5. For this debate, see J. B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988); M. C. Jacob, ‘The Mental Landscape of the Public Sphere: a European Perspective’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 28, 1 (1994): 95–113; N. Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to a Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, and K. M. Baker, ‘Deﬁning the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France: Variations on a Theme by Habermas’, in C. Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 129, 202; D. Goodman, ‘Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime’, History and Theory 31, 1 (1992), 1–20; D. Goodman, The Republic of Letters (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); C. Hesse, The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); For the public sphere in general, see J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, translated by T. Burger (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1989 [1962]). For a discussion of the distinction between the ‘private’ public sphere and the public public sphere, see A. La Vopa, ‘Conceiving a Public: Ideas and Society in Eighteenth-Century Europe’, Journal of Modern History 64, 1 (1992): 76–116.

582 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship 6. For its most recent reincarnation, see J.C.D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). For debates on inﬂuence, see J.A.W. Gunn, ‘Inﬂuence, Parties and the Constitution: Changing Attitudes, 1783–1832’, The Historical Journal 17 (1974), p. 318. 7. E. Chalus, ‘My Minerva at My Elbow: The Political Role of Women in EighteenthCentury England’, in S. Taylor, et al, eds, Hanoverian Britain and Empire: Essays in Memory of Philip Lawson (Suffolk and Rochester: Boydell Press, 1998), pp. 210–228. 8. F. O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties: the unreformed electoral system of Hanoverian England 1734–1832 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 2, 10, 19, 179, 218; for a somewhat similar interpretation, see J. A. Phillips, Electoral Behavior in Unreformed England: Plumpers, Splitters and Straights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). 9. E. Chalus, ‘“That epidemical Madness”: Women and electoral politics in the late eighteenth century’, in: Barker and Chalus, eds, Gender in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 151–178, E. Chalus, ‘Women, Electoral Privilege and Practice in the Eighteenth Century,’ in: K. Gleadle and Sarah Richardson, eds, Women in British Politics, 1760–1860. The Power of the Petticoat (London/New York, 2000), pp. 19–38; K.D. Reynolds, Aristocratic Women and Political Society in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1998); J. S. Lewis, Sacred to Female Patriotism: Gender, Class, and Politics in Late Georgian Britain (New York: Routledge, 2003). 10. D. Gobetti, Private and Public. Individuals, households, and body politic in Locke and Hutcheson. (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 122. See also S. M. Purviance, ‘Intersubjectivity and Social Relations in the Philosophy of Francis Hutcheson’, in J. Dwyer and R. Sher, eds, Sociability and Society in Eighteenth Century Scotland (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1993), 28, 34. 11. G. Barker-Benﬁeld. The Culture of Sensibility. Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); B. M. Benedict, ‘Service to the Public: William Creech and Sentiment for Sale’, in J. Dwyer and R. B. Sher, Sociability and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1993), 133. 12. S. H. Myers, The Bluestocking Circle. Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 282; B. Hill, Republican Virago: the Life and Times of Catherine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 5. 13. M. Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1996), 34 14. N. Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1998), 18; N. Rogers, Whigs and Cities. Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 172; K. Wilson, The Sense of the People, 14. 15. J. Brewer, ‘Commercialization and Politics,’ in N. McKendrick, et al. The Birth of a Consumer Society. The Commercialization of Eighteenth Century England (London: Hutchinson, 1982), p. 383. 16. J. Smail, The Origins of Middle Class Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 121; see also N. Rogers, ‘The Middling Sort in 18th Century Politics,’ in J. Barry and C. Brooks, eds, The Middling Sort of People. Culture, Society and Politics in England 1550–1800 (London: Macmillan, 1994), p. 167. 17. For such an interpretation, see K. Gleadle and S. Richardson, ‘Introduction: the Petticoat in Politics: Women and Authority,’ in Gleadle and Richardson, eds, Women in British Politics, 1760–1860. The Power of the Petticoat (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), pp. 1–12. 18. C.-L. de Secondat Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws ed. D. W. Carrithers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977 [1757]), Book 4, ch. 14, pp. 144–5; D. Schaub, Erotic Liberalism: Woman and Revolution in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littleﬁeld, 1995), p. 138. 19. For an elucidation of this scandal, see ch. 2 in Clark, Scandal.

Women in British Politics 583 20. See M. B. Peruga, ‘Neither Male Nor Female: Rational Equality in the Early Spanish Enlightenment,’ in this volume. 21. Goodman, Republic of Letters, p. 271; Hesse, The Other Enlightenment, p. 39; J. M. Burke and M. C. Jacob, ‘French Freemasonry, Women, and Feminist Scholarship,’ Journal of Modern History 68 (1996) 513–549. 22. Condorcet, ‘Letters from a Freeman of New Haven to a Citizen of Virginia on the Futility of Dividing the Legislative Power among Several Bodies’ (1787), in I. McLean and F. Hewitt, trans. and eds, Condorcet, Foundations of Social Choice and Political Theory (Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, 1994), pp. 298–9. 23. Dror Wahrman, ‘Percy’s Prologue: From Gender Play to Gender Panic in EighteenthCentury England,’ Past & Present 1998 (159) 145. 24. H T. Dickinson, ‘Radicals and Reformers in the Age of Wilkes and Wyvill,’ in J. Black, ed., British Politics and Society from Walpole to Pitt, 1742–1789 (London, Macmillan, 1990), p. 125. 25. T. Fawcett, ‘Eighteenth Century Debating Societies,’ British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 3 (1980), pp. 21; A Short History of the Westminster Forum (London, 1780). 26. M. Thale, ‘Women in London Debating Societies in 1780,’ Gender & History 7 (1995) 5–24. 27. Rev. T. Northcote, Observations on the Natural and Civil Rights of Mankind, the prerogatives of princes and the powers of government, in which the equal and universal right of the people to election and representation is proved by direct and conclusive arguments (London, 1781), p. 10. 28. The People the Best Governors; or a Plan of Government founded on the Principles of Natural Freedom (London, 1776), p. 9. 29. D. Andrews, London Debating Societies, (London, 1994), pp. 131, 89. 30. Andrews, London Debating Societies, pp. 76–113. 31. A Lady [Mrs. E. Hayley], Female Restoration, by a Moral and Physical Vindication of Female Talents; in opposition to all dogmatical assertions relative to the disparity in the sexes. Dedicated to Her Majesty; and humbly addressed to the Ladies of Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1780). The British Library copy attributes this pamphlet to Mrs. E. Hayley, who Mary Thale notes was known to frequent the public assemblies during 1780. Thale, ‘Women in London Debating Societies,’ p. 22, n. 28; This work was published earlier under the title Female Rights Vindicated in 1758, and may have been adopted from similar earlier work. 32. Andrews, London Debating Societies, p. 76. 33. History of the Westminster Forum (London, 1784), p. 265. 34. Andrews, London Debating Society, pp. 98, 101. 35. History of the Westminster Election, containing Every Material Occurrence … . by Lovers of Truth and Justice (London, 1784), p. 252. 36. M.D. George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires (London: British Library, 1978), vol. 5, Caricatures 6487, ‘The Election Tate a Tate;’ 6493, ‘Female Inﬂuence; or, the Devonshire Canvas,’ 6533, ‘A Certain Dutchess kissing Old Swelter-in-Grease the Butcher for his Vote,’ 6548, ‘Wits Last Stake or the Cobling Voters and Abject Canvassers;’ 6549, ‘Dark Lanthern Business or Mrs. Hob and Nob on a Night Canvass with a Bosom friend’; 6560, ‘The Tipling Duchess,’ all 1784. 37. Colley, Britons, p. 250; Foreman, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, ch. 9. For other articles on the Duchess and the Westminster election, see A. Stott, ‘Female Patriotism’: Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and the Westminster Election of 1784,’ EighteenthCentury Life 17 (1993), pp. 60–84 and J. S. Lewis, ‘1784 and All That: Aristocratic Women and Electoral Politics,’ in A. Vickery, editor, Women, Privilege and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the Present (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 89–122. 38. Stott, p. 79; History of the Westminster Election, p. 313. 39. P. Kelly, ‘Radicalism and Public Opinion in the General Election of 1784,’ Bulletin of the Institute for Historical Research 45 (1972) 73–88; Phyllis Deutsch, ‘Moral Trespass

584 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

40. 41.

42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60.

61.

in Georgian London: Gaming, Gender, and Electoral Politics in the Age of George III,’ Historical Journal 39 (1996) 637–656. History of the Westminster Election, pp. 233, 243, 264. In Newcastle, Andrew Robinson Bowes accused his opponent Charles Brandling of obtaining interest through ‘petticoat’ inﬂuence since his daughters were married to prominent local families with considerable electoral inﬂuence; but Brandling retorted that Bowes only stood because of his marriage with the Countess of Strathmore. Newcastle Courant 24 April 1784. For a more detailed account, see Clark, Scandal, ch. 3. The Election Magazine; or, Repository of Wit and Politics (Norwich, 1784), pp. 15, 42. Wilson, Sense of the People, p. 422. Andrews, London Debating Societies, p. 223. Interestingly enough, a Gillray caricature portrayed the new La Belle Assemblée as controlled by Mrs. Hobart, who had canvassed for Wray in 1784. Handwritten notations on the print give the names of Mrs. Hobart and other ladies, in R. Godfrey, James Gillray. The Art of Caricature (London: Tate Publishing, 2001), p. 210. M. Linton, ‘Virtue Rewarded? Women and the Politics of Virtue in Eighteenth-Century France,’ History of European Ideas 26 (2000) 51–65. C. Midgely, Women against Slavery: the British Campaigns 1780–1870 (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 32; see also M. Ferguson, Subject to Others. British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (London: Routledge 1992). C. Sussman, ‘Women and the Politics of Sugar, 1792,’ Representations 48 (1994) 48–69. T. Taylor, Memoir of Mrs. Hannah More (London, 1838), p. 95. J. Burton, Lectures on Female Education and Manners (Rochester, 1793), vol. 2, pp. 50–51, 166; Burton also quotes a manual called ‘The Polite Lady’ giving the same advice. M. Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Man, and Vindication of the Rights of Women in J. Todd and M. Butler, eds, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Pickering and Chatto, and New York: New York University Press, 1989), vol. 5, pp. 40, 43, 243. Catherine Macaulay, Letters on Education (London, 1790) p. 213. Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Women, in Todd and Butler, eds, Works, vol. 5 of 7, pp. 43, 68. Among many important recent works on Wollstonecraft, see M. J. Falco, Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), especially M. Ferguson, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and the Problematic of Slavery,’ and B. Taylor, ‘Religion, Radicalism and Fantasy, ‘History Workshop Journal 39 (1995), pp. 102–112 and B. Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Macaulay, Letters on Education, p. 215. Macaulay, Letters on Education, pp. 219–220. G. Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 17, 30. [M. Hays], ‘By a Woman,’ Monthly Magazine 2 (1796): 784. G. Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism (London: Macmillan, 1991) p. 173; Mary Hays, An Appeal to the Men of Great Britain on Behalf of Women (London, 1798), reprinted in Marie Mulvey Roberts and Tamae Mizuta, eds, The Radicals. Revolutionary Women (London: Routledge and Thoemmes Press, 1994), p. 133. Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, p. 232. [M. Robinson] A. F. Randall, A Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Mental Subordination (London, 1799) pp. 2, 10, 66, 71, 78. P. Wakeﬁeld, Reﬂections on the present condition of the female sex; with suggestions for its improvement (London, 1798); M. A.Radcliffe, The female advocate;or An attempt to recover the rights of women from male usurpation (London, 1799). For men espousing women’s suffrage, see [T. S. Norgate], ‘On the Rights of Women,’ The Cabinet vol. 1, p. 178, vol. 2, pp. 36–42. Attribution from P. J. Corﬁeld and C. Evans, eds, Youth and Revolution in the 1790s (Stroud: Sutton, 1996), p. 190; G. Philips, The Necessity for a Speedy and Effectual Reform in Parliament (Manchester,

Women in British Politics 585

62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78.

79. 80.

81.

1792), p. 12. Reprinted in History of the Franchise, edited by A. Clark and S. Richardson, vol. 2 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2000). For reviews and discussions of Wollstonecraft’s ideas, see Analytical Review 13 (1792), 481–3; Scots Magazine 54 (1792) 284; Monthly Magazine n.s. 8 (1792) 198; Edinburgh Magazine 7 (1796) 360. Critical Review n.s. 3 (1791) 392 . For instance speech by T. Flood in 1790, in The Parliamentary History of England (London, 1818), vol. 28, p. 459; A. Clark, ‘Gender, Class, and Nation: Franchise Reform in the Long Nineteenth Century,’ in J. Vernon, ed., Rereading the Constitution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 239–242. Norfolk and Norwich Record Ofﬁce, NNAS. Cup. 2. Tuscularum Society, Minutes, 1793–95. D. Levy, H. Applewhite, and M. Johnson, eds, Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1795 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979) for primary documents. Morning Post 18 April 1798. H. Jephson, The Platform. Its Rise and Progress (London, 1892), vol. 1 of 2, p. 280. M. Thale, ‘London Debating Societies in the 1790s,’ Historical Journal 32 (1989) 84. R. Polwhele, The Unsexed Females (London, 1798). Anti-Jacobin Review 1 (1798) 94. H. More, ‘Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education,’ Works (Philadelphia, 1832), vol. 1, p. 209. William Roberts, Memoirs of Life and Correspondence of Hannah More, (New York, 1836) vol. 1, p. 238. H. More, ‘A View of the Principles and Conduct,’ p. 366; More, ‘Strictures on the Modern System of Female education,’ p. 203. Roberts, Memoirs, vol. 1 of 2, p. 427. H. More, ‘The Bad Bargain’ , Works, vol. 1, p. 46. ‘Rantipolish’ means ‘ wild, disorderly, rakish’ (Oxford English Dictionary). H. More, ‘Village Politics’ (1793), Works, vol. 1, pp. 59–61. H. More, ‘Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education,’ Works (Philadelphia, 1832), vol. 1 of 2, p. 268; M. More, Mendip Annals; or, a Narrative of the Charitable Labours of Hannah and Martha More in their Neighbourhood, being the Journal of Martha More., ed. by A. Roberts (2nd edn. London, 1859), H. More, ‘A View of the Principles and Conduct prevalent among Women of Rank and Fortune,’ in Works vol. 1 of 2, p. 366. M. More, Mendip Annals, pp. 6, 126. However, her own ideology limited her ability to claim authority within the moral realm. In the 1801 Blagdon controversy, local clergymen accused her of appointing Methodist schoolteachers, of sympathy to the French revolution, and even spread rumors that she had lovers. While she ultimately regained her reputation, she could never defend herself openly, relying on male allies to come to her aid. E. Kowaleski-Wallace, Their Fathers’ Daughters. Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth and Patriarchal Complicity. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 73. See also C. Ford, Hannah More: A Critical Biography (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), p. 172. H. More, ‘The History of Mr. Fantom,’ in Works, vol. 1 of 2, pp. 62, 122. S. Pedersen, ‘Hannah More meets Simple Simon: Tracts, Chapbooks, and Popular Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century England,’ Journal of British Studies 25 (1986) 84–113; A. Stott, ‘Patriotism and Providence: the Politics of Hannah More,’ in Gleadle and Richardson, Women in British Politics, pp. 39–55. H. Plant, ‘Gentlewomen dissenters: Women of the Rational Dissenting Elite in Yorkshire, 1770–1830,’ presented at Feminism and Enlightenment Colloquium, May 27, 2000 and J. Rendall, ‘Women that would plague me with rational conversation,’ in this volume; see also, for Cappe, Memoirs of the late Mrs. Catherine Cappe, written by herself (Boston, 1824), and for Fletcher, Autobiography of Mrs. [Eliza] Fletcher, of Edinburgh (Carlisle, 1874), p. 68.

586 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88.

89.

90.

91.

92.

93.

94.

Midgely, Women against Slavery, p. 48. Lewis, Sacred to Female Patriotism, p. 155. N. Clarke, ‘The Rise and Fall of the British Woman of Letters,’ in this volume. The Scots Magazine 62 (1800): 165 Hesse, The Other Enlightenment, p. 132. Clare Midgely, ‘Female Emanicipation in an Imperial Frame: English women and the campaign against Sati (widow burning) in India, 1813–30,’ Women’s History Review 9 (2000) 95–121. This is reminiscent of an old debate in American women’s history. Some historians asserted that female domestic culture provided a precedent for feminism, but many others refuted this view, arguing that early 19th century female reformers explicitly rejected feminism, and that feminists criticized domestic culture. See M. Ryan, ‘The Power of Women’s Networks,’ in J. Newton, et al, eds, Sex and Class in Women’s History (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1985), pp. 167–186. For the debate on the potential links of these networks to feminism, see E. Dubois, M. J. Buhle, T. Kaplan, G. Lerner, and C. Smith-Rosenberg, ‘Politics and Culture in Women’s History: a Symposium,’ Feminist Studies 6 (1980) 26–63. In the 1802 Norwich election, liberals lauded “female patriots” for helping out behind the scenes, but did not invite them to the victory banquet. Norfolk Chronicle 31 July 1802. Amelia Opie played some role, but it was not reported in the newspapers, and her husband rebuked her: C. Brightwell, Memorials of the Life of Amelia Opie (Norwich, 1854), p. 126. For instance, when Anna Laetitia Barbauld published her radical poem 1811, she was savaged in the press. G.A. Ellis, A Memoir of Mrs. Anna Laetitia Barbauld (Boston, 1874), vol. 2, p. 272. [E. Hamilton], Memoirs of the Modern Philosophers (Bath and London, 1800), vol. 3, p. 310; Kelly, Women, Writing, and Revolution, p. 150; A. A. Opie, Adeline Mowbray, or the Mother and Daughter (London: Pandora, 1986 [1802]). Rogers, Crowds, pp. 230–3; see also J. Bohstedt, ‘Gender, Household and Community Politics: Women in English Riots, 1790–1810,’ Past and Present 120 (1988) 88–122 and John Bohstedt, ‘The Myth of the Feminine Food Riot,’ in: H. B. Applewaite and D. G. Levy, eds, Women and Politics in the Age of Democratic Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), pp. 21–60. T. Laqueur, Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working-class Culture, 1780–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); D. Valenze, Prophetic Sons and Daughters: Female Preaching and Popular Preaching in Industrial England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); for female friendly societies, A. Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 38. B. Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem (New York: Pantheon, 1983), p. 186.

9.2 Extending the ‘Right of Election’: Men’s Arguments for Women’s Political Representation in Late Enlightenment Britain* Arianne Chernock

In recent years, historians have presented a more optimistic vision of enlightened gender relations in late eighteenth-century Britain. Where we once spoke of the consolidation of ‘separate spheres’ for men and women, we now identify ﬂux, ﬂuidity and substantial possibilities for creativity. As Barbara Taylor notes in this collection, ‘[B]y the mid eighteenth century, men and women of the British middle ranks were becoming more like each other – in social attitudes and behaviour, in educational and professional aspirations, in conversational codes, even in their reading matter – than at any previous point in history.’1 There is one area of discussion, however, that has not as yet been subject to this same critical revaluation: notions of citizenship. While we happily acknowledge women’s involvement in eighteenth-century political life as canvassers and advisors, we continue to insist that the concept of citizenship itself, associated as it so often was with ‘masculine’ qualities of rationality, virility and independence, resisted feminist interpretation.2 Even Mary Wollstonecraft could only ‘hint’ at the prospect of women one day serving as electors or parliamentarians – surely a benchmark for the most radical enlightened views.3 But as I will show in this chapter, the masculinity of the citizen was signiﬁcantly open to question in Britain during this period – far more so, at least, than has previously been acknowledged.4 Analysing a select constellation of radical male reformers who demanded a woman’s right to vote and, in some instances, even her right to stand for parliament, I want to suggest an alternative, and markedly more positive reading of the relationship between politics and gender during the turbulent 1790s, one that casts doubt on the ‘inevitability’ of women’s political exclusion and that complements Rosemarie Zagarri’s essay here regarding the debates about female citizenship that took place in America after the Revolution. For an examination of the writings of these reformers – including London Corresponding Society members John Gale Jones (1769–1838), William Hodgson (1745–1851) and Thomas Spence (1750–1814); Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society members Thomas Cooper (1759–1840) and George Philips; radical essayists George Dyer (1755–1841) and Thomas Starling Norgate (1772–1859); legal scholars Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and Edward 587

588 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

Christian (?–1823); artillery ofﬁcer Alexander Jardine (1739?–99) and Unitarian minister William Shepherd (1768–1847) – shows some seeking sexual equality, even in the explosive realm of politics. This chapter will focus exclusively on these men’s arguments, as I have found no evidence of women recording their views in print on the subject of female political representation, with the key exception of Mary Wollstonecraft.5 Against those who insisted that the blurring of sexual distinctions in political life would yield disastrous results – women would only confuse ‘us and themselves in the labyrinth of politics,’ the conservative moralist Richard Polwhele declared in his 1798 The Unsex’d Females – Jones and his compatriots claimed that it was precisely the inclusion of women in the category of citizen that would guarantee a healthy polity.6 Far from advocating a ‘separate sphere’ of activity for women, expressly outside of and distinct from the political, these men, trained up in a rational Dissenting tradition that placed strong value on egalitarian modes of thinking, maintained that the well-being of the country depended on the elimination of such boundaries. Britain, they collectively argued, would only be truly great when mothers, sisters, daughters and wives were able to represent their own interests, independently, so as to fully distinguish themselves from their fathers, brothers, sons and husbands. Education, property rights, professional opportunities – these were a start, but they were not enough. To truly destroy ‘that Despotism at present exercised over the FEMALE WORLD,’ they would need to remove all traces of patriarchy.7 How did these men arrive at this striking conclusion? Certainly, a recognition of the ‘contradictions’ in natural rights theory contributed to their reassessment, but this was by no means the exclusive source of their claims. Reformers informed and inspired by a spectrum of radical discourses, they also grounded their arguments for women’s political participation in constitutional theory and appeals to an essential ‘revolutionary’ femininity.8 In the following pages, I will chart the range of logics men invoked to turn the prevalent ‘masculinist’ notions of citizenship on their heads. By way of conclusion, I will brieﬂy examine the debates leading up to the Reform Bill of 1832, suggesting that the pro-Woman arguments ﬁrst advanced by reformers of the 1790s helped launch a serious and sustained dialogue about the sexual qualiﬁcations for citizenship in Great Britain.

‘Rational beings, men and women’ During the 1790s, natural rights theory gained a prominent place on the radical agenda. Seeking ‘annual parliaments’ and ‘universal suffrage,’ members of the London Corresponding Society (LCS) and other corresponding and constitutional societies across Great Britain began to insist that representation was a natural right, regardless of property or social status. Rational subjects, they had as much claim to political participation as any land-owner or aristocrat. As Thomas Paine so eloquently stated in The Rights of Man (1791), ‘Natural rights are those which appertain to man in right of his existence. Of this kind are all the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind, and also all those rights of acting as an individual

Extending the ‘Right of Election’ 589

for his own comfort and happiness, which are not injurious to the natural rights of others.’9 By ‘man’ here, of course, it is generally believed that Paine was referring exclusively to men, not to men and women.10 As Joan Wallach Scott explains, in discussing the inherent anti-Woman bias of natural rights discourses, ‘the political individual was … taken to be both universal and male; the female was not an individual, both because she was nonidentical with the human prototype and because she was the other who conﬁrmed the (male’s) individual individuality.’11 Hilda Smith has recently described this phenomenon as the adoption of the ‘false universal.’12 Certainly, there is truth in this line of argumentation. Scholars, however, have perhaps been too quick to focus exclusively on the limits of natural rights discourse. For while the rhetoric of natural rights was certainly construed by many as of limited applicability to women, there was a carefully constructed counter-argument circulating during the period. One need only consult the pamphlets and membership proﬁles of the LCS itself, in fact, to see that there wasn’t clear consensus on this issue. While it is true, as Anna Clark notes in this collection, that the LCS did not admit women as members, the society did demonstrate a marked interest in female political activity.13 On at least two separate occasions, publisher Richard Lee printed advertisements for Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman at the back of LCS pamphlets endorsing ‘universal suffrage and annual parliaments.’14 Moreover, John Gale Jones, Thomas Spence and William Hodgson, all active members of the LCS, made very clear in their own appropriation of natural rights theory that their ‘man’ was a ‘universal man,’ in so far as it also included women and free blacks (though still excluding minors and the insane). Jones, a talented surgeon, politician and master debater (E.P. Thompson described him as having ‘an excellent voice; sharp, clear, and distinct’), traveled around England on behalf of the LCS promoting the idea of universal suffrage and a ‘female legislature’ – an idea ﬁrst presented to him by a politically engaged women in Chatham.15 Spence, meanwhile, suggested that women deserved the full rights of citizenship, including the vote, in his writings on the politics of his utopian ‘Spensonia.’16 Hodgson offered more muted support in his 1795 The Commonwealth of Reason and 1796 Proposal for Publishing by Subscription a treatise, called the Female Citizen, or a Historical … Enquiry into the Rights of Women, in which he made very clear that he endorsed the idea of ‘female citizenship,’ but failed to spell out his program in any detail.17 And when one considers the basis for the natural rights argument, it is actually not that surprising that certain men understood it as a justiﬁcation for women’s formal political participation. If reason were to be the sole grounds for citizenship – and not property or household status, both of which were also being called into question (often by the same ﬁgures) as the exclusive prerogatives of men – then what was to prevent women from being included in the category? Some men might have considered women too irrational, too subject to inﬂuence, to be taken seriously as voters, but there was more than enough evidence in circulation that women were as rational as men. As Alexander Jardine had noted in his 1788 Letters from Barbary, France, Spain, Portugal & C, ‘The talents or abilities

590 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

of the sexes are probably nearly equal, when equally cultivated: or, if some mental constitutional differences exist, these are not greater than between individuals of the same sex, and not beyond the power of habit and education to assimilate and equalize.’18 It was only a short (though highly signiﬁcant) step from this position to Jardine’s belief that ‘The nation that shall ﬁrst introduce women to their councils, their senates, and seminaries of learning, will probably accelerate most the advances of human nature in wisdom and happiness.’19 Thomas Cooper’s 1792 Reply to Mr. Burke’s Invective, written in response to Edmund Burke’s condemnation of Cooper for traveling to Paris on behalf of the Manchester Constitutional Society, similarly captures this sentiment, with its impassioned discussion of the many British women who had already demonstrated a marked ability to perform as ‘reasonable’ politicians: I have read the Writings of Mrs. M. Graham, of Miss Wollstonecroft, of Mrs. Barbauld, of Mrs. Montague, Miss Carter, Miss Seward, Mrs. Dobson, Miss H.M. Williams, & c. in England – I have conversed with Theroigne, with Madame Condorcet, Madame Robert, Madame Lavoisier, & c. in Paris. What these Women are, other Women might become. I have often felt my own inferiority, and often lamented the present iniquitous and most absurd notions on the Subject of the disparity of the Sexes. I have conversed with politicians, and read the writings of politicians, but I have seldom met with views more enlarged, more just, more truly patriotic; or with political reasonings more acute, or arguments more forcible, than in the Conversation of Theroigne, and the Writings of Miss Wollstonecroft. Let the Defenders of male Despotism answer (if they can) ‘The Rights of Woman’ by Miss Wollstonecroft [sic].20 The last words of this passage seem to have achieved a degree of cultural currency during the 1790s, for they subsequently appeared not only in the British essays of Thomas Starling Norgate and John Bristed, but also in an American article quoted by Zagarri entitled ‘On the Rights of Woman,’ published in the National Magazine in 1800.21 A contradiction thus lay at the heart of natural rights theory – a contradiction, moreover, that moderate and conservative critics were all too willing to point out. As the ‘Independent’ author Robert John Thornton, M.D. argued in his The Politician’s Creed (1795), ridiculing natural rights reformers, ‘If this right be natural, no doubt it must be equal, and the right, we may add, of one sex, as well as of the other. – Whereas every plan of representation we have heard of begins by excluding the votes of women: thus cutting off, at a single stroke, one half of the public from a right which is asserted to be inherent in all.’22 Women were excluded from natural rights arguments on the grounds of their limited mental faculties, but there was an increasing body of knowledge that suggested that women were in fact as capable – if not, as Cooper indicated, more capable – of reasoning as men.23 Identifying reason as a human rather than sexual attribute, these men could thus characterize political engagement as the ultimate form of self-expression.

Extending the ‘Right of Election’ 591

Indeed, this was the framework within which Wollstonecraft laid out her own (albeit tentative) claims to political citizenship in the Vindication. Drawing up a portrait of Woman as a rational being – a being whose reason was a gift from God no less – Wollstonecraft brieﬂy sketched out the political implications of her radical argument for those women whom she described as ‘of a superior cast’: ‘I may excite laughter, by dropping an hint, which I mean to pursue, some future time, for I really think that women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without having any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government.’24 These reformers, owing in all likelihood to their status as men, were able to be more explicit in their arguments in favor of female political representation. Pursuing Wollstonecraft’s ‘hint,’ as Thomas Starling Norgate put it, they were to ‘endeavour to supply the omission, by considering on what that right [to female representation] is founded’ – a ‘right’ that Norgate located in men and women’s shared capacity to reason.25 Would that the House of Commons represented ‘rational beings, men and women,’ George Dyer lamented in his article ‘Defects in the English Constitution, as to Representation,’ in which he decried ‘property, and property of a particular kind’ as the legitimate basis for citizenship.26 Jeremy Bentham likewise noted that women possessed the ‘soundness’ of mind – or, as he sometimes put it, ‘appropriate intellectual aptitude’ – required of political actors, even though his argument for women’s inclusion in the electoral process was grounded more in utility than natural right.27 For Bentham, the fact that women were capable of reason meant that they needed to be accounted for in his general feliciﬁc calculus. Provided that women passed a literacy test, Bentham continued, he thought them ﬁt not only to vote, but also to stand for parliament.28 The very rationality that these men claimed as a human attribute, however, must be considered, for it was a rationality of a qualitatively different nature from the independent, autonomous variety endorsed by many of their peers. As some of these men insisted throughout their arguments, their reason was necessarily bounded, shaped in a social context. Independence itself was a myth. As Bentham carefully explained in his ‘Observations on Article Six of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen,’ responding to the argument that political rights would ‘call [women] from the exercise of their domestic duties,’ ‘The men have their domestic duties as well as the women: it will not call off the one sex more than the other.’29 Five years later, T. S. Norgate would make a similar point in his essays on ‘The Rights of Woman,’ written for the Norwich Cabinet in 1794–95: ‘What man is there disengaged from domestic concerns? We all, whether male or female, have a part, and none, whether male or female, have the whole of our time so necessarily employed as not to admit leisure for investigating a subject of such paramount importance to everyone, as that of politics.’30 George Philips further corroborated these claims by noting in a speech delivered at the Free Mason’s Tavern in 1793 that a woman would be no more inﬂuenced by a man than a man by a woman: ‘It is objected against them [women] that they are subject to an undue inﬂuence from male electors: but if this be a

592 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

sufﬁcient plea for exclusion, what chance will men have of retaining their privilege? Are not they, to say the least, as liable to undue inﬂuence from the other sex?’31 These were grave concerns. If women were to be excluded from natural rights arguments on the grounds of their poor reasoning abilities, Philips argued, then men, too, failed to make the bar. As much as these men were justifying women’s ﬁtness for political life, they were also simultaneously scrutinizing the category of reason itself.

Remembering the Anglo-Saxon abbess Natural right was not the only grounds on which late-eighteenth-century political reformers demanded female citizenship. The ‘ancient constitution,’ along with Paine’s ‘rights of man,’ informed the rhetoric of those clamoring for women’s political representation. Revisiting a ‘pure’ Anglo-Saxon history, reformers could claim political citizenship as a female right legitimated by that ‘lost, but not irrecoverable, heritage of ancestral liberties.’32 In his 1793 Complaints of the Poor People of England, for instance, George Dyer remarked that, ‘It has frequently been observed, that in the saxon times, all who paid scot and lot had a vote in framing the laws. To what extent this policy extended, has been disputed by many; but it seems highly probable, from the great concourse of people that assembled, and from the terms in which those assemblies were described, that none were, at least, excluded from attendance.’33 Dyer’s ‘great concourse of people’ explicitly included women. Such an argument might, at ﬁrst, seem counter-intuitive. After all, scholars have typically asserted that constitutional discourses had very little to offer women. As James Epstein, for example, has recently argued in Radical Expression, constitutionalism was of scant signiﬁcance to those interested in emancipating women, because ‘the constitutionalist notion of citizenship’ was ‘rooted’ within ‘traditions of Anglo-American political thought in which civic virtue was armed and male.’34 Certainly, the language of classical republicanism – with its ‘hyper-virile imagery of citizenship’ – saturated much of the constitutionalist rhetoric.35 But why interpret constitutionalism in such a strict sense? After all, as James Vernon has suggested, ‘being unwritten, lacking a deﬁnitive text whose interpretation could be ﬁxed and secured as deﬁnitive, [the constitution’s] meaning, and the identities it gave voice to, were always unstable and endlessly contested.’36 The constitution, in other words, was primed for hermeneutics. It could be used to justify more than the political participation of male heads of households. And indeed, where many reformers saw only evidence of a militaristic and exclusively male political past, men including Thomas Starling Norgate, Thomas Cooper, Calidore, George Philips and George Dyer located alternative and far more egalitarian meanings in early English history. As Dyer mused in his proWoman writings on the ancient constitution, ‘[T]he advantages of the British constitution belong to all: they should belong equally to all; all equally should feel an interest in their support.’37 Chastising those around them for treating the

Extending the ‘Right of Election’ 593

constitution like ‘a sensitive plant, shrinking from the slightest breath of inquiry’ (the words were Cooper’s, but Norgate borrowed them in his own The Principles of Government), they found, upon ‘close inspection,’ that the nation’s early political actors were neither as militaristic nor exclusively male as was generally assumed. In their readings of the nation’s past, the ‘principles of the English constitution’ revealed strong proto-feminist leanings.38 The author Calidore, for example, wrote in The Gentleman’s Magazine of the Saxon’s favorable attitudes towards women’s political inclusion. His ‘Saxon ancestors,’ he explained in a letter written in 1788, ‘looked up to the female sex as imbued with a superior intelligence, and deliberated with them in national emergencies.’ Nor was ‘this deference for the softer sex … left behind them by our forefathers, when they migrated into this island … for we ﬁnd that the Abbesses had seats in the great council holden in 694.’39 Calidore substantiated his claims by citing Hicke’s Thesaurus,40 an early eighteenth-century text whose pages indicated that “[N]ot only Abbesses, but other women, sat and decided in the county-courts (‘the great seats of Saxon justice,’ Blackstone), in equal numbers with the men. For instance, after the Abbots and Nobles are mentioned, the ladies follow, with many other ‘“Thanes and good wives” whose names are omitted.’41 In his own writings on the subject, Norgate moved forward about 200 years, paying particular attention to a general council held by Ethelwolf in 885, at which abessess as well as abbots actively participated.42 For Norgate, this provided signiﬁcant evidence that women should be able not only to elect representatives, but also to serve as representatives themselves, an argument that he substantiated by citing examples from other early cultures: Can we maintain that females are unﬁt for councils, when Artemisia, queen of Halicarnassus, before the battle of Salamis, saved, by her advice, the mighty army of Xerxes, who remarked, when the battle was over ‘that on this day the women had behaved like men, and the men like women;’ or shall we say that they are unﬁt to govern, when the ability with which Semiramis swayed the scepter of Assyria, induced Plato to maintain ‘that women as well as men ought to be instructed with the government of states, and the conduct of military operations?’43 For Norgate, the ‘ancients,’ Anglo-Saxon, Greek, and Assyrian alike, had all set a positive egalitarian example. It wasn’t only the distant past that Norgate and others called up in making an argument for extending the right of election to women. More recent history also offered tantalizing evidence of a speciﬁcally English pro-Woman political tradition. In particular, they cited the fact that women could become queen in England, unlike in France, where Salic Law forbid women to hold executive power. This was a policy that England had long defended, particularly so when Henry IV attempted to introduce French policy to English soil. As Norgate proudly observes, ‘when a tyrant and usurper Henry IV endeavoured to introduce the Salique law (by which every female and even the descendants in a female line

594 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

were excluded from the crown of France) the commons of England, equally disregarding his entreaties and his threats, peremptorily refused to gratify his desire.’44 In a self-congratulatory fashion, these men thus linked Elizabeth I’s sixteenth-century successes with the probity of earlier English legislators. In an essay titled, ‘Observations on the Reign and Character of Queen Elizabeth,’ published the same year as his Cabinet essays ‘On the Rights of Women,’ Norgate summed up Elizabeth’s reign in the following terms: I shall conclude with the most willing acknowledgment that Elizabeth possessed many excellent qualities: she paid all the debts which had been contracted by her father, sister, and brother, in three preceding reigns; never demanded, nay generously refused, any supply from parliament, when she had no immediate and pressing occasion; she was wonderfully tolerant in matters of religion, if we consider the example which her predecessor had set; her abilities were great and splendid …45 Elizabeth’s ‘fearless[ness] in mind,’ her ‘penetrating eyes,’ her ‘dauntless heart,’ her ability to serve as a ‘matchless tyrant in petticoats’ – these achievements were all interpreted as a sign not only of Woman’s political adroitness, but also of England’s prescience in providing such an avenue for female expression.46 Norgate was not the ﬁrst to express such beliefs. Over the course of the eighteenth century, Scottish and English conjectural theorists had frequently cited the absence of Salic Law in Britain as evidence of the nation’s ‘civility.’ As the Glasgow educational reformer John Anderson boasted in his Common-Place Book, written at mid-century, ‘The French are reckoned the most polite People in Europe to the Fair Sex, & yet they don’t allow a Woman to mount their Throne ….’47 When it came to the treatment of queens, Anderson argued, Britain reigned supreme. Yet this very national strength also helped illuminate another contradiction. In Britain, a woman could hold the highest ofﬁce, but was excluded from all other ‘subordinate’ political positions. Why, Calidore demanded, were women in Britain able ‘to hold the supreme executive power, without any subordinate; to be queens, but not constables’? Why, given that women could exercise ultimate political control, were they barred from ‘the least part of the legislative’?48 Norgate shared Calidore’s concerns. ‘It seems not a little extraordinary and inconsistent,’ he noted, that we should be thus jealous of depositing in female hands, authority and ofﬁces of an inferior nature, when we have not scrupled to place the sex in that situation which of all others has been esteemed the most honourable and momentous – we have not scrupled to place them on a THRONE.49 Jeremy Bentham was also troubled by these legal ‘inconsistencies,’ and condemned the system that placed a woman on a throne but barred her from balloting in a local election. In his unpublished critique of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1789 (in which he chastised the French for not making

Extending the ‘Right of Election’ 595

their claims universal), he appealed to English history, arguing that ‘if no sensible inconvenience can be found to arise from the entrusting them with the exclusive power of royalty, what danger can there be in their possessing so small a fragment of political power, and that in common with the other sex.’50 For Bentham, nowhere were the British laws more contradictory and confused than in regards to Woman – on the one hand telling her that she was too irrational to vote, on the other, allowing her to ﬁll the highest political ofﬁce; on the one hand insisting on her unsuitability for leadership, on the other, allowing her to take on formal responsibilities. Bentham loved to cite those cases that challenged orthodox ideas about women and politics. His ‘Nonsense Upon Stilts, or Pandora’s Box Opened’ (1795), for example, refers readers to the case of ‘The King Against Alice Stubbs and Others,’ argued before the King’s Bench in 1788, in which it was ruled that Alice Stubbs could legally serve as ‘overseer of the poor’ in her tiny township of the monastery of Ronton Abbey.51 In his Plan of Parliamentary Reform, published in 1817, Bentham would note that ‘In the county of York, if my information be correct, may be found a borough, to which belong two seats, in relation to which the electoral function is virtually performed by a single person of the female sex.’52 As Bentham repeatedly demonstrated, one did not need to look to the distant past for evidence of an alternative to an exclusive politics. Though people might avert their eyes, women continued to exercise formal – as well as informal – political power in Britain.53 The Anglo-Saxon Abbess was not an aberration, but rather, a signiﬁer of a vital female political tradition.

‘Feminine’ revolutions In examining natural rights and constitutionalist arguments for female citizenship we have seen how some political reformers drew markedly different conclusions from those languages that have been typically construed as ‘masculine’ in their orientation. As much as natural rights-based and constitutionalist arguments were invoked to claim citizenship as speciﬁcally male, so they could be equally called on to create a gender neutral political subject. This same ﬂexibility was apparent in the language of sentimentalism – a language that, in the tradition of Rousseau, gendered Woman as a soft, sensitive, acutely-feeling subject, one whose nerves were construed as ‘more delicate and more susceptible than men’s.’54 For many, this particular conception of femininity prompted concerns about what might happen to real women in the political sphere. That Woman was identiﬁed as ‘more feeling’ was seen as justiﬁcation for her lack of representation. Even though it was widely believed that Woman, as a ‘sensible’ subject, had a particular responsibility to prepare her sons and husbands for the duties of citizenship, it was Man’s ultimate duty to protect her and defend her political interests.55 As George Butler warned in a speech delivered in 1793 at the Cambridge Speculative Society, women’s involvement in formal politics would only prove ‘injurious to the temper of its devotees.’56 But against those who implied – either implicitly or explicitly – that politics was too rough a playing

596 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

ﬁeld for such delicate creatures, this select constellation of reformers again mounted a compelling defense. Far from denying women’s inherent sensibility, many of these men embraced it, only they used this feminine difference as the grounds for her inclusion in politics. That women did ‘seem to possess greater degrees of sensibility, – quicker and nicer perceptions,’ as Alexander Jardine put it, could be seen as a distinct political asset.57 Women, too, of course had long been exploiting their supposedly superior sensibility for political gain – as Linda Colley and Anne Mellor have both lucidly demonstrated, Georgian women frequently cited their status as feeling, moral subjects in order to convince others of the legitimacy of their public interventions.58 As Colley writes ‘[I]f politics was indistinguishable from morality … then surely women as guardians of morality must have some right of access to the political?’59 But male reformers’ arguments were different in the sense that they claimed that Woman’s heightened sensibility – her ‘radical virtue’ – warranted not only her presence in the public sphere, but also her formal involvement in the nation’s political life.60 Beyond encouraging her to embroider liberty caps, they wanted her to cast a ballot. Unlike those critics who urged women to ‘beware of politics’ lest they suffer injury, these men asserted that women’s sensitivity would make them valuable political players. Rejecting outright the argument that women would actually be physically harmed by the jostling and pushing so characteristic of elections – as George Philips carefully explained in his lecture addressing female political representation, ‘voting by ballot’ would prevent disorder at the election site – they insisted that women, as benevolent subjects, were in a position to make a strong contribution to ‘enlightening’ politics.61 In part, this was because they believed that women would be able to soften and curb men’s brash tendencies. Drawing on ideas about the female sex elaborated by Hume and others at mid-century, they insisted that her mere presence at the voting box would help ‘civilize’ the proceedings.62 Women, Alexander Jardine observed, ‘can … more easily stop the source of the most destructive passions, and hence of the greatest evils in life’ – critical skills in the realms of politics.63 Calidore, meanwhile, suggested in his letters to The Gentleman’s Magazine that female politicians would serve as ‘softening,’ ‘reﬁning’ and ‘restraining’ agents.64 But these men weren’t interested in women exclusively as mediators; they also felt that female politicians would practice a more humane politics. As John Gale Jones commented, citing a conversation held with an ‘amiable and virtuous’ wife in Chatham, ‘A female legislature … would never have passed those horrid Convention Bills, or abrogated the dear prerogative of speech!’65 Calidore offered very similar views in his letters. ‘The natural tenderness of the sex, if they had been permitted to assist at the national councils, would most indubitably have prevented our numerous legal proscriptions, which are written deeper in blood from year to year,’ he insisted, adding that Their humanity, so tremblingly alive toward the preservation of mankind, who are so peculiarly instructed to their care during the early stages, would have

Extending the ‘Right of Election’ 597

been studious to contrive laws preventive of crimes, instead of dealing out sanguinary edicts, which extirpate, without amending, the human race.66 For Calidore, what mattered was not simply that ‘abbesses’ had been present at Anglo-Saxon councils, or that Elizabeth had ruled England, but that these women, as exemplary female politicians, had tended to be more humanitarian in the policies that they endorsed. ‘When the Saxon women sat … in our courts,’ he observed, ‘capital punishments were extremely rare.’ He also noted that during the reign of Elizabeth ‘[no] person died by the hands of the executioner.’ Capital punishment, slavery, warfare – these, in Calidore’s opinion, were ‘absurdities truly masculine.’67 By ‘masculine absurdities,’ Calidore was really referring to those policies to which he and many of his fellow reformers were opposed. In praising a ‘feminine’ politics, they were as much endorsing their own reformist platform – one advocating an end to slavery, to war, to cruelty, to religious discrimination – as they were acknowledging the real accomplishments of past illustrious women. The ‘feminine,’ in this sense, was a means of venting an oppositional politics in a way that attacked the current administration. Female legislators, Calidore and others assumed, would necessarily favor those very reformist policies that they themselves were trying to push through. Woman thus stood for all those ideas and actions to which reformers seeking to update the social contract themselves subscribed. This tendency to use the ‘feminine’ as a metonym for all reformist goals and aspirations became more explicit in works published after 1789 – the period in which reformers’ vision of a revitalized British society became increasingly utopian in form. In the writings of George Dyer and Thomas Spence, Woman came to represent not only the ideal itself, but also the means by which reformers would achieve perfection. Dyer, the Cambridge-based Dissenting poet, identiﬁed a revolutionary potential in women’s sensibility (although for him, Woman’s deep-seated humanitarian spirit stemmed less from ‘nature’ than from her own culturally speciﬁc experience of subjugation). In the preface to his poem ‘On Liberty,’ written in 1792, he explained: [T]he modes of education, and the customs of society are degrading to the female character, and the tyranny of custom is sometimes worse than the tyranny of government. When a sensible woman rises above the tyranny of custom she feels a generous indignation; when turned against the exclusive claims of the other sex, is favourable to female pretentions; when turned against the tyranny of government, it is commonly favourable to the rights of both sexes. Most governments are partial, and more injurious to women than to men.68 Dyer believed that women, once given formal power, would put aside their speciﬁc grievances with men in order to reform the system that had worked to perpetuate their subjection – to make that system, as a whole, more

598 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

equitable. Based on this belief, Dyer concluded that women were generally ‘more uniformly on the side of liberty’ than men. As G.J. Barker-Benﬁeld notes in his discussion of Dyer’s progressive attitude towards women’s presence in politics, the female sex was – in Dyer’s view – ‘primed for revolution.’69 The radical bookseller and utopian land reformer Thomas Spence clearly shared Dyer’s beliefs. In addition to publicizing Dyer’s own work on the subject (Spence included Dyer’s essay on the ‘defects’ of the English Constitution in his own Pig’s Meat; or, Lessons for the Swinish Multitude in 1793), Spence expanded on this logic in several texts written about ‘Spensonia’ between 1793 and 1797.70 Spensonia, a community that Spence began imagining during the 1770s (though not spelling out in its fully articulated egalitarian form until the mid-1790s ) is signiﬁcant to our discussion because of how he represented women in his utopia.71 Achieved through dramatic land redistribution, Spensonia would be a place in which men and women would share equal property rights, and by extension, equal civil and political rights. Women, Spence wrote in his Something to the Purpose, would possess the ‘same right of suffrage’ as the men, and would demonstrate a strong interest ‘in every public transaction.’72 Spence further elaborated this point in one of his later writings on the subject: ‘The constitution guarantees to all the Spensonians Equality, Liberty, Safty [sic], Property, parochial and private, the free exercise of worship, the enjoyment of all the Rights of Man.’73 As this quotation suggests, Spence, a disciple of Paine, grounded his argument for women’s political representation largely in natural rights theory. But it was also a decision based on what he took to be women’s unique contributions to the ﬁeld of politics. Spence knew that his was a bold vision, one that would demand the utmost energies from the reforming populace if it were ever executed. And like Dyer before him, he suspected that men on their own might not be completely up to the task. In The Rights of Infants; or the Imprescriptable Rights of MOTHERS to Such a Share of the Elements As Is Sufﬁcient to Enable Them to Suckle and Bring Up Their Young, sold for two pence from his book stall at the top of Chancery Lane, London in 1797, Spence openly recounted his loss of faith in the male population’s ability to transform their social conditions. ‘[W]e have found our husbands to their indelible shame, woefully negligent and deﬁcient about their own rights, as well as those of their wives and infants,’ Spence explained, in a ﬁctionalized exchange between a ‘woman’ and an ‘aristocrat.’ Following this observation, Spence’s ‘woman’ proceeds to demonstrate that it is her sex that is the ultimate ‘defender of rights’ – or, as David Worrall has recently put it, the ‘immediate agents of revolution.’74 ‘Our sex were defenders of rights from the beginning,’ Spence’s ‘woman’ spits at the ‘aristocrat,’ And though men, like other he-brutes, sink calmly into apathy respecting their offspring, you shall ﬁnd nature, as it never was, so it never shall be extinguished in us. You shall ﬁnd that we not only know our rights, but have spirit to assert them, to the downfall of you and all tyrants. And since it is so that the men, like he-asses, suffer themselves to be laden with as many pair of

Extending the ‘Right of Election’ 599

panyers of rents, tythes, & c. as your tender consciences please to lay upon them, we, even we, the females, will vindicate the rights of the species, and throw you and all your panyers in the dirt.75 Because Spence thought that women were more closely aligned with Nature (in a Rousseauian sense), he suggested that they were also more aware of and willing to ﬁght for natural rights. Unlike Man, who had slipped completely over to the side of Culture, Woman was still a part of Nature and, as such, constantly reminded of what it was that those around her (especially her offspring) had sacriﬁced to live in a competitive society. To this end, Spence portrayed women as the catalysts of change. While his men are out drinking, the women demonstrate a steely resolve to set the world aright through coordinated political activity: [W]e women, mean to take up the business ourselves and let us see if any of our husbands dare hinder us. Wherefore, you will ﬁnd the business much more seriously and effectually managed in our hands than ever it has been yet. You may smile, tyrants, but you have juster cause to weep. For, as nature has implanted into the breasts of all mothers the most pure and unequivocal concern for their young, which no bribes can buy, nor threats annihilate, be assured we will stand true to the interest of our babes, and shame, woe, and destruction be to the pitiful varlet that dare obstruct us.76 There was a distinct conclusion to be drawn from this argument: if reformers were to be successful in toppling the aristocracy, they would need to include women in the political process. In The Struggle for the Breeches, Anna Clark describes Spence’s budding feminism as an effort ‘to goad apathetic men into activism by portraying them as so unmanly that their wives have to demand their rights themselves.’77 For Clark, Spence’s repeated trumpeting of women’s strong sentiments has less to do with touting ‘women power’ than with convincing men that they must leave their houses and ﬁght the good ﬁght. Certainly, Spence’s argument is problematic – particularly so when viewed through a modern lens. One cannot help but feel that he was using Woman (in her role as sentimental Mother) to achieve particular political ends. His reductive understanding of Woman – as a ﬁgure naturally sympathetic to revolution – suggests that he was far more comfortable dealing with female political participation in the abstract than in its concrete, and unquestionably messier, form. What, for instance, would Spence have made of the woman who wasn’t at all maternal, or who was maternal but entirely comfortable with the status quo? The criticism advanced by one outspoken opponent of Spence’s political plan (and of women’s political representation in general) draws attention to this problem. In his Constitutional Politics (1817), Thomas Williams, editor of The Philanthropic Gazette, astutely observed that ‘Spence indeed admits females to the elective franchise, and even married women; but if these vote with their husbands, then has every married man a double vote – if against them, their votes

600 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

are neutralized. But what abundant food is here for perpetual domestic strife!’78 Reading this critique now, one only wonders whether Spence himself would have supported those women who did not exhibit ‘revolutionary’ sentiments – or worse, those who rejected the Spensonian plan. ‘Doubling,’ in other words, held out tremendous appeal to Spence, but ‘neutralizing’ was something that he doesn’t seem to have contemplated. One suspects that he would not have responded favorably to the political participation of a conservative evangelist like Hannah More. To characterize Spence’s ‘Woman’ as mere propaganda for the ‘male cause,’ however, is to fail to read his writing in context. For his vision of a society transformed by ‘feminine’ inﬂuence shares much with other arguments circulating during the period. Indeed, for Calidore, Jardine, Dyer and Spence alike, the ‘feminine’ had become less a device for ‘goading’ men than the embodiment of what they, as activists, themselves aspired to. Throughout their arguments, they insisted that Woman, in her capacity as elector and, in some instances, even as representative, would work tirelessly to promote justice, humanity, and equality – the very goals of their movement. Of course, this was an essentialist argument. That real women had the potential to create controversies rather than solve disputations, to advocate war rather than counsel peace, to support capital punishment rather than authorize its curtailment – such possibilities were simply not contemplated by these reformers. But the fact that the feminine (as represented by a heightened sensibility) had come to have such positive reformist connotations is a critical development, regardless of the fact that it was founded on an essentialist notion of sexual difference. For these men who characterized women as acutely feeling beings, the prospect of female suffrage was eagerly anticipated. In their opinion, all women aspired to be reformers, and all reformers, in a sense, aspired to be women.

A Pro-woman political legacy The arguments I’ve detailed here in favor of women’s political rights were the key ones, but they were by no means exclusive. To each of these major discourses – natural rights-based, constitutionalist and sentimental – men added other justiﬁcations and explanations, although all were usually presented as secondary considerations. These included the beneﬁts of greater numerical representation, the injustice of taxation without representation, and the necessity of transforming women’s ‘informal’ political power into legitimate participation.79 As Jeremy Bentham noted in his reﬂections on the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen,’ it was in men’s interest to transform women’s boudoir politics into something more transparent and ofﬁcial.80 The only way to end the ‘nocturnal administration’ of women was to bring the fair sex’s political activities into the daylight. That there were so many ways in which one could express one’s commitment to female political rights, however, only substantiates the claims made earlier in this essay: the prospect of the female citizen, far from being universally ridiculed

Extending the ‘Right of Election’ 601

and rejected during the last decades of the eighteenth century, was openly and seriously debated by a vocal minority. This was a period that saw the proliferation of discourses about the female citizen, discourses that explicitly linked women’s political rights to the establishment of a modern democracy. Indeed, the presence of these dissenting voices challenges us to rethink the historiography (and chronology) of women’s suffrage. While their arguments did not lead directly to female political representation – for this right, British women would have to wait until the early twentieth century – they did, to quote historian William Stafford, signiﬁcantly expand ‘what could be said, where it could be said, and by whom it could be said.’81 These men, all prominent leaders within radical reforming circles, established an important precedent for speaking out in favor of the female citizen. What’s more, through various forms of argumentation, they highlighted how integral women’s political rights would be to national regeneration, or what they commonly referred to as the ‘perfection’ of the Glorious Revolution. These were not abstract considerations. A brief survey of the ﬁrst decades of the nineteenth century suggests that, after a period of relative quietism during the Napoleonic Wars, inclusive arguments were again picked up (sometimes verbatim) by the next generation of radical reformers. As the Revolutionary generation aged, and in some instances emigrated, younger men revived and refashioned their disquisitions for a new era.82 The natural rights argument for women’s political representation, for example, would resurface in the parliamentary speeches of Henry Hunt (a close friend of an aging John Gale Jones), Sir Francis Burdett and Matthew Davenport Hill.83 Constitutionalist arguments, meanwhile, played a central role in the essays of George Ensor, whose The Independent Man, published by Joseph Johnson in 1806, demanded ‘Have we not, in our own annals, women famed for their political government?’84 Samuel Ferrand Waddington, who penned a ‘Vindication of Female Political Interference’ for Carlile’s The Republican in 1819 in the aftermath of the St. Peterloo massacre, drew similar attention to the nation’s history. Quoting directly from Calidore’s 1788 letters to the Gentleman’s Magazine, Waddington observed that ‘in this island, the Abbesses had seats in the Great Council’ – a point that would be made again in The New Charter (1831), in which the anonymous author cited the English policy towards Salic Law as further evidence of women’s ancient liberties.85 Why were so few prepared for an extension of the franchise to women, the author queried, when no one appeared ‘startled at the appointment of the Duchess of Kent to the ofﬁce of regent, or at the prospect of the Princess Victoria one day becoming queen?’86 Arguments for the feminization of reform also continued to circulate, with the ‘female revolutionary’ featuring regularly in T.J. Wooler’s The Black Dwarf (a newspaper published from 1817 to 1824 devoted to parliamentary reform) among other publications. As one author demanded, writing in 1818, ‘[W]hat security have the men to offer? They have betrayed their own interests, how can they be expected to be true to the interests of others? They have mortgaged their own future welfare – how can they guarantee the future welfare of others? No! no! ladies. Trust them no further. … Erect the banner of female independence,

602 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

since man has confessed himself a slave.’87 Waddington likewise congratulated women for their extreme commitment to ‘humanizing’ the age.88 In fact, as Barbara Taylor has shown, it was this precise association of femininity with revolution that encouraged the Owenites to bring women into their ranks during the 1820s and 30s.89 All of these logics would come together in William Thompson’s Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, published in 1825. In this text, the Owenite socialist drew on many of these earlier arguments to make a decisive attack on James Mill, who had maintained in his 1820 ‘Article on Government’ that women didn’t need the vote because ‘almost all’ of their ‘interests’ were ‘involved either in that of their fathers, or in that of their husbands.’90 Charging Mill with bringing ‘barbarism, under the guise of philosophy, into the nineteenth century,’ Thompson emphasized that ‘despotism’ would only disappear when men and women shared equally all civil and political rights.91 In the end, then, what we see is a lively debate that, far from being conﬁned to the utopian 1790s, continued into the ﬁrst decades of the nineteenth century and beyond. Within this framework, the Reform Bill of 1832 itself takes on new meanings. For in deﬁning the citizen exclusively as male – the ﬁrst time that the political subject became gendered in ofﬁcial British discourse92 – the Bill must be seen ﬁrst and foremost as a response to the ambiguity of citizenship during this period. It was not, as has often been argued, merely conﬁrmation of what had long been taken to be self-evident. Against those who claimed that ‘the principle of universal suffrage … leads to an absurdity [the female voter],’ there were those who believed that female political representation was critical to national regeneration.93 As in so many other instances, the language of 1832 – with its insistence on ‘separate spheres’ for men and women – belied a far more complicated reality, one characterized by competing hopes and visions for the future.

Notes * I would like to thank Barbara Taylor, Sarah Knott, Thomas Laqueur, Carla Hesse and James Vernon for their helpful comments on early drafts of this chapter.

1. Barbara Taylor, ‘Feminists versus Gallants: Manners and Morals in Enlightenment Britain,’ included in this volume. 2. For a fascinating discussion of the emergence of a speciﬁcally male political subject in the 18th century, see Matthew McCormack, ‘“The independent man” in English political culture, 1760–1832,’ PhD dissertation, University of Manchester, 2002. See also Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 3. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London: Everyman, 1995 [1792]), p. 167. 4. Amanda Vickery observes in her ‘Introduction’ to Women, Privilege, and Power: British Politics 1750 to the Present, ed. Amanda Vickery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 36 that ‘Although male opposition to female suffrage is notorious, the activities of supportive men have until very recently been lost to view.’ This is certainly true

Extending the ‘Right of Election’ 603

5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

of the scholarship covering the late eighteenth century, where there is as yet no equivalent to Angela John and Claire Eustance’s excellent The Men’s Share? Masculinities, Male Support and Women’s Suffrage in Britain, 1890 – 1920, eds Angela John and Claire Eustance (London: Routledge, 1997). Indeed, with the exception of Mary Wollstonecraft, I have found no evidence of women recording arguments in favor of their political rights in Britain during the 1790s. This, however, does not mean that women weren’t discussing these issues. See Donna Andrew, London Debating Societies, 1776–1799 (London: London Record Society, 1994). As Andrew notes, women’s debating clubs such as La Belle Assemblée were discussing female political representation as early as 1788. Richard Polwhele, The Unsex’d Females: A Poem (London: 1798). William Hodgson, Proposal for Publishing by Subscription a treatise, called the Female Citizen, or a Historical … Enquiry into the Rights of Women (London: 1796). See Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, p. 214: ‘[Natural rights] was … but one of a quiverful of intellectual weapons to be kept sharp and handy for contestation.’ See also Mark Philp, ‘The Fragmented Ideology of Reform,’ in The French Revolution and British Popular Politics, ed. Mark Philp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 50–77. In this essay, Philp describes 1790s radicalism as extremely ‘protean.’ Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1992 [1791]), p. 39. What Paine himself thought about female citizenship is unclear at best. For some time, Paine was considered to be the author of ‘An Occasional Letter on the Female Sex’ (1775), but this attribution has now been called into question. See Mary Catherine Moran, ‘The Progress of Women: L’Essai sur les Femmes/Essay on Women from Paris to Edinburgh to Philadelphia,’ included in this volume. To further complicate matters, there is no clear discussion of sex or gender in any of Paine’s works after 1776. Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 8. Hilda Smith, All Men and Both Sexes: Gender, Politics, and the False Universal in England 1640–1832 (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), p. 3. Smith further deﬁnes the ‘false universal’ as the ‘social phenomenon of not seeing or perceiving women in certain contexts’ and not conceiving of women as ‘having inherent qualities or relevant experiences for the categories from which they are omitted.’ See Anna Clark, ‘Women in Eighteenth-century British Politics: Competing Interpretations,’ included in this volume. For the LCS pamphlets advertising Wollstonecraft’s work, see Citizen Binns, Thelwall, Jones, Hodgson & c., Account of the Proceedings of a Meeting of the London Corresponding Society Held in a Field Near Copenhagen House, Monday, October 26, 1795; Including the Substance of the Speeches of Citizens BINNS, THELWALL, JONES, HODGSON, & C., With the ADDRESS TO THE NATION, and the REMONSTRANCE TO THE KING. And the Resolutions Passed by Upwards of Two Hundred Thousands Citizens, Then and There Assembled (London: Citizen Lee, at the TREE of LIBERTY, 1795); and Account of the Proceedings of a Meeting of the Inhabitants of Westminster, in Palace-Yard, Monday, November 26, 1795. Including the Substance of the Speeches of the Duke of Bedford, Mr. Sheridan, Mr. Fox, & C. With the Petition to the House of Commons (London: Citizen Lee, at the TREE of LIBERTY, 1795). See John Gale Jones, Sketch of a Political Tour through Rochester, Chatham, Maidstone, Gravesend, & c., including Reﬂections on the Tempers and Dispositions of the Inhabitants of Those Places, and on the progress of the societies instituted for the purpose of obtaining a parliamentary reform. (London: J.S. Jordan and J. Smith, 1796), p. 91. Jones writes: ‘I believe we might as well have a cabinet of tea drinkers, as an administration of drunkards; and it would certainly be better to witness a complete representation of the School for Scandal, then be present at the performance of the Devil to pay!’

604 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship 16. For Thomas Spence, see Something to the Purpose. A Receipt to Make a Millennium or Happy World. Being Extracts from the Constitution of Spensonia. From the Declaration of Rights (London: date unknown). 17. For William Hodgson, see The Commonwealth of Reason (London: 1795), p. 104, and Proposal for Publishing by Subscription a treatise, called the Female Citizen, or a Historical … Enquiry into the Rights of Women (London: 1796). Unfortunately, I have been unable to locate the treatise itself in any of the major research libraries and archives in North America and the United Kingdom. This suggests either that the treatise was destroyed, or that it was never actually written. 18. Alexander Jardine, Letters from Barbary, France, Spain, Portugal, & C. 2 vols (London: T. Cadell, 1788) Vol. I, p. 311. 19. Jardine, Vol. 1, p. 145. 20. Thomas Cooper, ‘PROPOSITIONS Respecting the FOUNDATION of CIVIL GOVERNMENT. Read at the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, on March 7, 1787, and FIRST PUBLISHED in the Transactions of THAT Society, Vol. 3,’ in A Reply to Mr. Burke’s Invective Against Mr. Cooper and Mr. Watt in the House of Commons on the 30th of April (London: J. Johnson, 1792), p. 99. While Cooper thought that reason was an important criterion for suffrage, he also believed that property should be taken into consideration. 21. See Thomas Starling Norgate, ‘On the Rights of Woman, Part 1st,’ in The Cabinet 3 vols (J. March, 1795), Vol. I, p. 183; John Bristed, A Pedestrian Tour through part of the Highlands of Scotland, in 1801 (London: J. Wallis, 1803), pp. 373–4; and ‘On the Rights of Woman,’ National Magazine, or, A Political, Historical, Biographical, and Literary Repository 2 (1800), p. 206. 22. Robert John Thornton, M.D., The Politician’s Creed (London: Sherwood, Neely and Jones, 1795), p. 125 23. Whether men like Cooper and Jardine were encouraged to include women in their natural rights arguments from a personal desire to solve this contradiction is a question beyond the scope of this essay. There are no journal entries or recorded conversations that express their deliberations on this point. What is clear is the abundance of voices calling for the acceptance of women as rational creatures. As such, natural rights theory made an effective point of attack for those men seeking to create a female citizen – whether prompted by recognition of potential inconsistencies within their own philosophical systems or by the search for the most powerful arguments for women’s political representation. 24. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, p. 167. This passage has generally been taken to be one of the very few explicit statements regarding women’s political rights issued during this period. 25. Thomas Starling Norgate, ‘On the Rights of Woman, Continued,’ in The Cabinet, Vol. II, p. 43. 26. George Dyer, ‘Defects in the English Constitution, As to Representation,’ reprinted in Pig’s Meat; or, Lessons for the Swinish Multitude, Part Second. (London: T. Spence, 1793), p. 149. 27. See Jeremy Bentham, ‘Plan of Parliamentary Reform, in the form of a Catechism,’ in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. John Bowring (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843 [1817]), Vol. III, p. 463, as well as Jeremy Bentham, ‘Observations on Article 6,’ UCL Bentham MSS, CIXX, f. 144. 28. Jeremy Bentham, ‘Continued Discussion of the French constitution,’ UCL Bentham MSS CIXX, f. 151. Although these observations were never published, Bentham elaborated on many of them in his essay ‘Nonsense Upon Stilts, or Pandora’s Box Opened, or The French Declaration of Rights Preﬁxed to the Constitution of 1791 Laid Open and Exposed – with a Comparative Sketch of What Has Been Done on the Same Subject in the Constitution of 1795, and a Sample of Citizen Sieyes,’ written in 1795 though not published in English until 1816. See Lea Campos Boralevi, Bentham and the

Extending the ‘Right of Election’ 605

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

Oppressed (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1984) and Annie L. Cot, ‘“Let There Be No Distinction Between the Sexes”: Jeremy Bentham on the Status of Women,’ paper presented at the conference on ‘The Economic Thought of Jeremy Bentham,’ 26, 27 January 2002 at Tokyo Metropolitan University, for an extended discussion of the intersection of utilitarianism and feminism in Bentham’s writing. It must be noted here, however, that Bentham became markedly quiescent on this issue in later age, in some cases even backing down (at least in part) from his earlier claims. In his Radical Reform Bill, Bentham insisted that while there would be no ‘absurdity’ in making women electors, making them parliamentarians would lead to the ‘absurdity of an intermixture betwixt sex and sex.’ See Bentham, Radical Reform Bill, with Extracts from the Reasons in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. III, p. 567. Boralevi, p. 16, argues that Bentham ‘play[ed] down’ his arguments regarding women’s representation in later years in large part because he ‘feared that his opponents’ scorn for women was also extended to the claim for universal male suffrage.’ Jeremy Bentham, ‘Observations on Article 6, continued,’ UCL Bentham MSS, CIXX, f. 145. Norgate, ‘On the Rights of Woman, part 2nd,’ p. 48. George Philips, The Necessity of a Speedy and Effectual Reform in Parliament (Manchester, 1793), p. 12. Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (London: Hutchinson and Co, 1979), p. 31. George Dyer, The Complaints of the Poor People of England (London: J. Johnson, 1793), p. 197. James A. Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 23. Taylor, p. 211. James Vernon, ‘Notes toward an introduction’ in Re-Reading the Constitution, ed. James Vernon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 2. George Dyer, ‘On the Best Means of Promoting the Fundamental Principles of the English Constitution,’ reprinted in The Pamphleteer, 24 (1818), p. 438. This article was taken from an original print published in a ‘miscellany’ some years earlier. Emphasis his. Certainly, theirs were selective readings. Men inclined towards ‘championing’ the female sex, they were no doubt primed to highlight those aspects of the ‘ancient constitution’ that reinforced their pro-Woman political philosophy, and to characterize their reformist platforms as fundamentally ‘constitutional’ in nature, as Philips and others maintained in their speeches and writing. This does not mean that we should reject their willful readings. The constitution, after all, only existed at the level of interpretation – to be manipulated by radicals and conservatives alike. And, as Sheila C. Dietrich argues in ‘An Introduction to Women in Anglo-Saxon Society (c. 600–1066),’ in The Women of England: From Anglo-Saxon Times to the Present, ed. Barbara Kanner (London: Mansell, 1980), pp. 32–44, Anglo-Saxon records certainly can lend themselves to feminist readings. She writes, p. 32: ‘Women (at least the upper class women usually depicted in the documents) emerge from Anglo-Saxon records possessing an impressive independence and inﬂuence.’ Calidore, ‘To Mr. Urban,’ in The Gentleman’s Magazine, 58 (February 1788), p. 100. Unfortunately, extensive background research has not revealed Calidore’s true identity. I have decided to include him (or possibly her) here, however, because the author selfconsciously adopts a male perspective. As Calidore notes in his next letter written for The Gentleman’s Magazine, 58 (March 1788), p. 224, ‘Having thus … hastily thrown together such strictures in vindication of the inherent rights of women as readily occurred, I have only to lament, that they have not been arranged and adorned by one of the fair sex; they would have possessed that superior elegancy which a female hand alone can give.’

606 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship 40. This text was likely George Hickes’ Linguarum Vett. Septentrionalium Thesaurus Grammatico-Critico et Archaeologicus. L.P. (Oxoniae: E. Theatro Sheldoniano, 1703–05). 41. Calidore, ‘To Mr. Urban,’ in The Gentleman’s Magazine, 58 (February 1788), p. 101. 42. Norgate, ‘On the Rights of Woman, continued,’ Vol. II, p. 46. Of this council, Norgate explains in a footnote: ‘A general council was held by Ethelwolf in 885 praesentibus et subscribentibus archiepiscopis et episcopis Angliae universes, nec non Beorredo rege Merciae, Edmundo East-Anglorum rege, abbatum et abbatissarum, ducm, & c. inﬁnita multitudine [Millar on English Government.] The convention of this Wittenagemote was to grant a charter or tythes, and at which were present and subscribed their names, the archbishops and bishops of England, Burthred king of Mercia, Edmund king of East-Anglia, and of abbots, abbesses, dukes & c. a great multitude.’ Emphasis his. 43. Norgate, ‘On the Rights of Woman, part 1st,’ Vol. I, pp. 180–181. 44. Norgate, ‘On the Rights of Woman, continued,’ Vol. II, p. 46. 45. Norgate, ‘Observations on the Reign and Character of Queen Elizabeth,’ in Essays, Tales and Poems (Norwich: J. March, 1795), pp. 142–143. 46. Bentham, ‘Emancipation-Preface,’ July 25, 1818, UCL Bentham MSS, VIII, folder 1, f. 6. 47. John Anderson, Common-Place Book [date unknown], Strathclyde University Manuscripts, John Anderson Collection, MS 35. See also William Alexander, M.D., The History of Women, From the Earliest Antiquity, to the Present Time (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1779), p. 317 and Anonymous, The Laws Respecting Women (London: J. Johnson, 1777), which chastises France throughout for trying to impose the Salic Law on England. 48. Calidore, ‘To Mr. Urban,’ in The Gentleman’s Magazine, 58 (February 1788), p. 101. 49. Norgate, ‘On the Rights of Woman, continued,’ Vol. II, p. 46. 50. Bentham, ‘Observations on Article 6,’ UCL Bentham MSS, CIXX, f. 144. Bentham apparently experienced difﬁculty choosing the right words with which to express this belief. In his manuscript, the words ‘occupying’ and ‘sharing’ are written next to ‘possessing’ – ‘sharing,’ however, is crossed out. 51. ‘The King against Alice Stubbs and Others,’ 21 April 1788, in Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Court of King’s Bench from Trinity Term, 27th George II to Michaelmas Term, 29th George III. Both Inclusive, eds Charles Durnford and Edward Hyde East (London: Printed for His Majesty’s Law-Printers, 1789), p. 396. 52. Jeremy Bentham, Plan of Parliamentary Reform, in the form of a Catechism, with Reasons for each article: with an Introduction, showing the Necessity of Radical, and the Inadequacy of Moderate, Reform (1817) reprinted in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. III, p. 463. 53. In this sense, Bentham was making an argument for what feminist scholars have recently come to celebrate – the fact that ‘women’s political power could carry legal weight.’ See Elaine Chalus, ‘Women, Electoral Privilege and Practice in the Eighteenth Century,’ in Women in British Politics, 1760–1860: The Power of the Petticoat, eds Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 19. Hilda Smith makes a similar point in ‘Women as Sextons and Electors: King’s Bench and Precedents for Women’s Citizenship,’ in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Hilda Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 324–342. 54. G.J. Barker-Benﬁeld, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. xvii–xviii. 55. See John Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse: Sensibility and Community in Late-Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987), p. 136. 56. George Butler, ‘On Female Literature,’ delivered December 3, 1793, reprinted in the Speculative Society of Cambridge – Minutes and Essays, 1788–1795, British Library Add MSS 19716, f. 147. 57. Jardine, Vol. I, p. 312. In this sense, my argument clearly diverges from Zagarri’s analysis of the American scene. While her American reformers believed that ‘a naturalized understanding of sex differences provided a powerful rational for justifying women’s exclusion

Extending the ‘Right of Election’ 607

58.

59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65.

66.

67.

68. 69. 70.

71.

from politics and government,’ there were some British reformers who grounded women’s political inclusion precisely in these perceived sexual differences. See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) and Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). See Colley, p. 274. Susan Kingsley Kent, Gender and Power in Britain, 1640–1990 (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 158. Philips, p. 54. For an extensive discussion of the ways in which the gendering of ‘civilization’ helped women gain greater access to the public sphere, see Mary Catherine Moran, ‘Between the Savage and the Civil: Dr. John Gregory’s Natural History of Femininity,’ included in this volume. Jardine, Vol. I, p. 312. Calidore, ‘To Mr. Urban,’ in The Gentleman’s Magazine, 58 (February 1788), p. 100. Jones, p. 91. The London Corresponding Society had petitioned against the passage of the Convention Bills on several occasions, as indicated by publications including Account of the proceedings of a meeting of the people, in a ﬁeld near Copenhagen-House, Thursday, Nov 12; including the substance of the speeches of citizens Duane, Thelwall, Jones, &c. With the petitions to the King, Lords, and Commons . . . on the subject of . . . a convention bill (1795) and To the British Nation. The reply of the London Corresponding Society, to the calumnies propagated by persons in high authority, for the purpose of furnishing pretences for the pending Convention Bill (1795). Calidore, ‘To Mr. Urban,’ in The Gentleman’s Magazine, 58 (February 1788), p. 101. Emphasis his. We see a similar logic in Alexander Jardine’s writing. ‘The nation that shall ﬁrst introduce women to their councils, their senates, and seminaries of learning, will probably accelerate most the advances of human nature in wisdom and happiness,’ Jardine observes in Vol. I, p. 145. Calidore, ‘To Mr. Urban,’ in The Gentleman’s Magazine, 58 (February 1788), p. 101. Emphasis his. The poet Robert Southey also seems to have shared these views. According to William St. Clair, The Godwin and the Shelleys (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), p. 162, Southey’s poem ‘The Triumph of Woman’ came ‘near to suggesting that women are a superior species who, if given a political chance, could turn aside the aggressiveness of males and bring about international peace and disarmament.’ George Dyer, cited in Barker-Benﬁeld, p. 381. Emphasis his. Barker-Benﬁeld, p. 381. Much has been written about Spence and his ideas about land reform – indeed, with the exception of Jeremy Bentham, Spence is perhaps the most well-known of the ﬁgures discussed in this paper. It is my purpose here, therefore, to focus exclusively on the ‘Spensonian’ plan as it related to women, and in particular, the ways in which he expected ‘the fair sex’ to help him realize his utopian vision. See Francis Place, Collection for a Memoir of Thomas Spence, and the Spenceans, Illustrative of the Folly and Cruelty of the Government in Prosecuting the Spenceans, British Library, Add MS 27808, f.161. Place notes that Spence delivered a lecture on the Spensonian or Spencean System to the Philosophical Society of Newcastle on 8 November 1775. But as Malcolm Chase explains in The People’s Farm: English Radical Agrarianism, 1775–1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 57, ‘In his original lecture of 1775 “the whole people” would seem implicitly to exclude women, while the remaining publications of his Newcastle and early London years certainly disregard any need to make an explicit case for the rights of women. However, in a striking parallel to the development of his millennial interests, his Rights of Infants of 1797 contains a sustained argument in favour of allowing women full political rights.’

608 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship 72. Spence, Something to the Purpose: A Receipt to make a Millennium or Happy World. Being Extracts from the Constitution of Spensonia. From the Declaration of Rights (London: T. Spence, date unknown). 73. Spence, The Constitution of Spensonia, A Country in Fairy-Land, Situated Between Utopia and Oceana, Brought from Thence by Captain Swallow, Printed as Part of the Important Trial of Thomas Spence, For a Political Pamphlet, Intitled ‘The Restorer of Society to Its Natural State’ on May 27th, 1801 (London: A. Seale, 1801), p. 91. 74. David Worrall, Radical Culture: Discourse, Resistance and Surveillance, 1790–1820 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), p. 31. 75. Spence, The Rights of Infants; or, the Imprescriptable Right of MOTHERS to Such a Share of the Elements As Is Sufﬁcient to Enable Them to Suckle and Bring Up Their Young, in a DIALOGUE Between the ARISTOCRACY and a MOTHER of CHILDREN. To Which Are Added, by Way of PREFACE and APPENDIX, Strictures on Paine’s Agrarian Justice (London: T. Spence, 1797), p. 8. 76. Spence, The Rights of Infants, p. 8. 77. Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 149. Worrall, p. 32, similarly dismisses Spence’s feminism, describing Spence as ‘at best, an opportunist feminist, someone who perhaps drew a quick political lesson from events like the women’s march Versailles in 1789, but the tactics of having women in the vanguard of a coup d’etat was a piece of practical revolutionary politics that the Spenceans well understood.’ 78. Thomas Williams, Constitutional Politics; or The British Constitution Vindicated, Against the Spenceans, and Other Advocates of Universal Suffrage, Election by Ballot, & C. Lately Published in The Philanthropic Gazette: and Now Revised, and Considerably Enlarged (London: 1817), p. 9. 79. See, for example, Daniel Isaac Eaton (posing as one ‘Citizen Randol of Ostend’), who argued in his A Political Catechism of Man Wherein his natural rights are familiarly explained, and exempliﬁed, in a variety of observations on the government of a neighbouring island … Together with some remarks on the unsocial tendency of Catholic churches, established by law (London: Daniel Isaac Eaton, 1795), p. 27, that the vote be extended to unmarried women on the grounds that ‘the more numerous the elective body is, the more permanent will the rights and liberties of the people be.’ In his ‘Defects in the English Constitution, As to Representation,’ reprinted in Part Second of Pig’s Meat, p. 149, George Dyer lamented the fact that ‘Females, though possessed of 100,000 l. a year, either in land or money, have no representatives.’ Meanwhile, Edward Christian, Professor of the Laws of England at the University of Cambridge, insisted in his ‘notes and additions’ to Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, 12th edn (London: W. Cadell and T. Davies, 1800), p. 445, that all women who paid taxes should be allowed to vote: ‘With regard to the property of women, there is taxation without representation; for they pay taxes without having the liberty of voting for representatives; and indeed there seems at present no substantial reason why single women should be denied this privilege.’ 80. See Jeremy Bentham, ‘Observations on Article 6 of Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen’ UCL Bentham MSS, CIXX, f. 145. Bentham writes: ‘Supposing it ever so desirable to exclude the women from all political inﬂuence, it will be acknowledged to be impossible. To exclude them from all inﬂuence in political matters, you must change the nature of things and exclude them from all inﬂuence. The question is then whether what inﬂuence they possess they shall enjoy it by law or contrary to law: quietly or by struggling: openly or contraband: whether the one half of the species are to be subjected to a stigma in the view of preventing what it is impossible to prevent.’ 81. William Stafford, ‘Shall We Take the Linguistic Turn? British Radicalism in the Era of the French Revolution,’ in Historical Journal 43 (2000), p. 588. 82. Alexander Jardine died in 1799. Thomas Starling Norgate ceased publicizing his opinions on women’s political rights, though he did remain active in the public sphere

Extending the ‘Right of Election’ 609

83.

84.

85. 86.

87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

92. 93.

through the printing of a newspaper, The East Anglian, from 1830 to 1833. Edward Christian, George Philips and William Shepherd fell silent on the subject of ‘the right of election,’ although William Shepherd at least continued to lobby for female educational reforms. Thomas Cooper, meanwhile, emigrated to America in 1794, where he became an opponent of John Adams’ administration and in 1820, the President of South Carolina College (now the University of South Carolina). William Hodgson descended into London’s ‘underworld,’ where he be became a spokesmen for libertinism. John Gale Jones, George Dyer and Jeremy Bentham alone remained actively involved in advocating the extension of political rights to women in the nineteenth century. See the Dictionary of National Biography entries for Henry Hunt, Francis Burdett and Matthew Davenport-Hill; see also Sir Francis Burdett, ‘Opinion of the English House of Commons in relation to Mr. Bentham: extracted from the Debates of 2nd June 1818,’ in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, Vol. IV, p. 568; and Rosamond and Florence Davenport-Hill, The Recorder of Birmingham. A Memoir of Matthew Davenport Hill; with selections from his correspondence (London: Macmillan, 1878). George Ensor Esq. The Independent Man: or, An Essay on the Formation and Development of Those Principles and Faculties of the Human Mind Which Constitute Moral and Intellectual Excellence (London: J. Johnson, 1806), Vol. II, p. 417. Samuel Ferrand Waddington, ‘Vindication of Female Political Interference,’ The Republican Vol. I, no. 3 (September 10, 1819), p. 45. The New Charter (London, 1831), p. 3. The author of this incredible document also cited many other reasons why women should have the vote, including the fact that women had the ability to reason; that women were not always properly provided for by brothers, fathers and husbands; and that election in the future would be by ballot, thus eliminating the ‘rancorous spirit and riotous proceedings of elections.’ The Black Dwarf, Vol. II, no. 36 (September 9, 1818), p. 576. The author may have been Thomas Hardy. Waddington, p. 45. Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1983). James Mill, ‘Article on Government,’ Encyclopedia Britannica (London: 1820), p. 500. William Thompson, Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to retain them in political, and thence in civil and domestic slavery; in reply to a paragraph of Mr. Mill’s celebrated ‘Article on Government’ (London, 1825), pp. ix and 213. In his concluding argument, Thompson asks, ‘Shall none be found with sufﬁcient knowledge and elevation of mind to persuade men to do good, to make the most certain step towards the regeneration of degraded humanity, by opening a free course for justice and benevolence, for intellectual and social enjoyments, by no colour, by no sex to be restrained? As your bondage has chained down man to the ignorance and vices of despotism, so will your liberation reward him with knowledge, with freedom and with happiness.’ As Chalus notes, p. 20, ‘women in England and Wales were not legally disenfranchised until the Reform Act of 1832.’ Anonymous, England’s Danger; or Reform Unmasked (London: John Hatchard, 1819), p. 9.

9.3 Filles publiques or Public Women: The Actress as Citizen: Marie Madeleine Jodin (1741–90) and Mary Darby Robinson (1758–1800) Felicia Gordon

Et nous aussi, nous sommes citoyennes. [And we too are citizens.]1 Individual lives often transgress the boundaries set for them. The two eighteenth-century actresses considered here, Marie Madeleine Jodin and Mary Darby Robinson, manipulated and challenged contemporary assumptions about gender and status. Mary Robinson, after an early success on the stage (1776–1780), gained notoriety as mistress of the Prince of Wales and fame as a poet and novelist, whereas until recently Marie Madeleine Jodin has ﬁgured largely as a footnote to Diderot studies.2 Viewed in relation to historical debates today concerning the bourgeois public sphere as deﬁned by Jurgen Habermas, we see a different conception of the public emerging from their experiences.3 Their lives, read across feminist revisionist historians’ contestations of separate spheres ideology, throw light on what was meant by the public and the private.4 Habermas’ theory of the newly-emerging bourgeois public sphere of salon culture in the eighteenth century has been widely criticised by feminist historians for its gender myopia and masculinism.5 For Habermas, the bourgeois public sphere belongs neither to state institutions nor to the market place but is rather: ‘a sphere of private people who have come together in public’. These private people (male persons) were part of a much-expanded urban culture, including a new community of readers, beneﬁting from periodical literature and from new urban forms of sociability such as salons, coffee houses and political groupings. This new urban bourgeoisie moulded a shared consciousness, or what Habermas terms, ‘public opinion’.6 What Habermas’ theory does not take into account is that a different public sphere had long existed for women that did relate to the market place, namely the marketing of sex. This public sphere – the world of prostitution and by analogy the stage – crossed social boundaries in often-unsettling ways. Though notoriously and often scandalously visible in daily life, prostitutes, courtesans – their more genteel sisters – and actresses teetered on the verge of invisibility in status or class terms. Private life was implicitly or explicitly deemed the proper sphere for women. When in the course of the nineteenth century many women 610

Filles publiques or Public Women 611

succeeded in public life, for example in literature, painting or philanthropy, they often did so in the guise of enacting domestic roles.7 The following micro-historical account, following Jodin’s and Robinson’s public careers as actresses, courtesans and writers, reveals the pervasive derogatory sense of the word ‘public’ when applied to women. Its associations were always demeaning and remained, well into the next century, a signiﬁcant barrier to women’s advancement. In Jodin’s and Robinson’s feminist discourses, we see how enacting the acceptable feminine persona became a necessary tool in their struggles for independence and self-respect. Parallel to the comparatively recent theory of an eighteenth-century bourgeois public sphere lies a much older reading of social relations, namely the idea that separate spheres for men and women are natural rather than customary. Among eighteenth-century philosophers, Jean Jacques Rousseau offered the most powerful articulation of the view that women were by nature destined for domestic duties and were rightfully conﬁned to the private sphere. Those who violated that natural destiny were deemed corrupt and debased. This description of women’s role applied particularly to the middle ranks (though its language was universalist) and was also intended as a condemnation of the supposedly loose morals of aristocratic women. It conveniently ignored the often-public labour of working women.8 It is evident that Rousseau, as Karen Offen argues, though expressing many of his own personal fears about women, was also reacting to contemporary ‘enlightened’ opinion, over the emerging debate on women’s emancipation: Rousseau’s antifeminist arguments constituted a response to the many women writers who published critiques of the superﬁciality of girls’ education during the eighteenth century and who defended women’s right to reason and to acquire advanced knowledge in the best Enlightenment tradition.9 Much twentieth-century feminist historiography followed Rousseau’s analysis by tracing the institutionalisation of separate male and female spheres, and resistance to this institutionalisation, as part of the political as well as social repercussions of the separation of the public and the private. This notion of a stark separation between male and female spheres in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has recently been demolished by research demonstrating the extremely porous nature of the supposed gender boundaries. The behaviour of real men and women did not correspond to the advice of conduct manuals, as Amanda Vickery has conclusively demonstrated. Nevertheless, the ideology of separated spheres, namely the belief that men and women had different moral capacities and were therefore predestined to different social roles, had direct and often damaging practical consequences for women’s emancipation. This concept of moral separation is the central issue tackled by Jodin and Robinson. They had both lived as courtesans and actresses and had a clear understanding of what it meant to be a woman in the public sphere, in the vulgar sense. Valuing the freedom and independence their careers gave them, they

612 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

endeavoured to redeﬁne the meaning of ‘public’ for women in a positive sense. They sought a uniﬁed conception of morality across the sexes, believing that the double ethical standard, one for men and another for women, underpinned male despotism. With hindsight, given the failure of the French Revolution to gain rights for women, and the counter-revolutionary pressures exerted on the public role of women in England, it is tempting to see the aspirations of such individuals as Robinson and Jodin as ‘impossible’ and to suggest that women’s continuing subjection was inherent in the Enlightenment project. I will argue here that the writings and careers of individuals of the lower and middle ranks like Jodin and Robinson testify to powerful beliefs in the possibility of change in gender and class relations as they were perceived in the late eighteenth century. The lives of these two actresses, better known for their amorous entanglements than their politics, offer revealing insights into women’s political consciousness, as radical Enlightenment thought was disseminated to a class of individuals not usually associated with the century’s intellectual ferment.10 Like Olympe de Gouges, these women believed that: ‘Tout est possible dans ce siècle de lumières et de philosophie.’ (Everything is possible in this age of enlightenment and philosophy.)11 Robinson and Jodin were exceptions to the prevailing culture of domesticity, which encouraged women to internalise their inferiority and accept that their lot lay exclusively in the private sphere. Jodin was the daughter of a Genevan watchmaker living in Paris, and thus a member of the artisan class. A teenage rebel turned actress, she was remarkably widely read and soaked in Enlightened discourse.12 She was an assertive individual, convinced of her talents and rights, even in her teens. In a letter of dismissal to a former lover written in the early 1760s when she was 17 or 18, Jodin’s language, even by twenty-ﬁrst century standards, shows remarkable strength of character and is explicitly feminist. ‘I am not at all concerned as to what all the scum that surround you might say. By their behaviour they are not ﬁt to kiss the tips of my shoes. You advise me to be ruled by others. I have only ever taken advice from my own brain. … We [women] have the same rights as you.’13 This language of rights persisted throughout her life, and was especially marked in her disputes with colleagues and lovers and her frequent recourse to the law. Mary Darby Robinson, Jodin’s junior by nearly two decades, was the daughter of a ship’s captain fallen on hard times. In her memoirs Robinson tended to romanticise her early afﬂuent upbringing. As an adult, she absorbed both the cadences of romantic literary style and radical ideas. In part, the vicissitudes of both women’s lives turned not only on their desire to better themselves, but also on their refusal to accept inferiority of either status or gender. Living in an historical moment when the exclusion of women from public life seemed to some radical thinkers no longer natural and at the very least problematic, they dramatised the aspirations of enlightened women towards full and equal citizenship. For both women, the concept of citizenship was associated with the possibility of an ethical life within the framework of the public sphere. They understood

Filles publiques or Public Women 613

citizenship as being the full participation by women and men in the honourable life of the community, where equal ethical standards would apply to both sexes and where women would be equipped by education to play a full part in intellectual, social and economic life. Jodin, focusing on women’s poverty and degradation in prostitution, made a powerful case for women to recognise their commonality, to understand that a woman’s position as a commodity in the prostitute-client relationship was mirrored by a woman’s position in marriage, also seen primarily as an economic union. In this her analysis was not dissimilar from that of Engels a century later.14 While recognising status as an important marker of social difference, she believed that the relative liberties and privileges of wealthy women were in some sense contaminated by the deprivations and humiliations of the poor and sexually vulnerable. Robinson, by contrast, attacked social custom, the tyranny of ‘mental subordination’, rather than legal inequalities.15 She addressed her plea for change to intelligent and socially privileged women, who were, she believed, too often the slaves of fashion and convention: ‘Oh my unenlightened country-women! Read, and proﬁt, by the admonition of Reason. Shake off the triﬂing, glittering shackles, which debase you. Resist those fascinating spells, which, like the petrifying torpedo, fasten on your mental faculties. Be less the slaves of vanity, and more the converts of Reﬂection. … Let your daughters be liberally, classically, philosophically, and usefully educated … let them read and think like rational creatures.’ (L.W.E. p. 94) The ‘petrifying torpedo’ of male admiration must be resisted, not because female desire was wrong, but because too many women, in Robinson’s view, constructed themselves solely in terms of their relation to men, or as Simone de Beauvoir was later to express it, become the Other. Robinson, like Jodin and Wollstonecraft, imagined a society where women would be educated sufﬁciently to understand their value as responsible individual subjects and not simply as objects of desire. Still exuding Enlightenment optimism, she maintained that women would be freed by refusing the lures of admiration based on appearance, in favour of ‘rational wisdom’. The equality she sought was less that of legal statutes than of social respect. Though these prescriptions are scarcely new (similar ones had been urged, for example, by Mary Astell, Hannah More and, of course, Mary Wollstonecraft), it is signiﬁcant that Robinson, a famous beauty, well accustomed to the lures of admiration, should articulate them in what was a darkening political climate for liberal ideas.16 Though Jodin and Robinson took different approaches in their feminist treatises, both women set out ambitious programmes that would allow women to operate legitimately and with honour within the public sphere.17 Jodin’s Vues législatives pour les femmes (Legislative Views for Women) was published in 1790; Robinson’s Letter to the Women of England in 1799. Jodin and Robinson had lived the realities of the public sphere of the stage and marketable sex, so different

614 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

from the new bourgeois public sphere of conviviality and debate posited by Habermas. Though not participating in salon society, they did participate in aspects of the new sociability enshrined in Enlightenment culture. They aspired to transform the term ‘public life’ for women of the middle and lower ranks into a positive signiﬁer, as it already was for aristocratic and royal women.18 Their espousal of Enlightenment radical politics stemmed in part, as it did with Mary Wollstonecraft, from hostility to hereditary privilege whether of status or gender.19 They both attacked the notion of separate ethical spheres, advocated by Rousseau in his Emile; but at the same time, aware of the power of Rousseau’s moral appeal, they co-opted aspects of separate spheres ideology for persuasive rhetorical ends, for example employing phrases like ‘the weaker sex’ for the strategic purpose of placating their male readership. The lives of these two women were remarkably similar in many respects. Both women experienced downward as well as upward social mobility and strongly identiﬁed with the middle ranks. Robinson fondly recalled her afﬂuent bourgeois childhood in Bristol before her father lost his money in unwise shipping ventures and deserted her mother for a mistress. She experienced the humiliations of debtors’ prison, when she loyally accompanied her debt-ridden husband to the King’s Bench. Jodin retained a powerful and elitist sense of her watchmaker father’s honourable title as a citizen of Geneva. She inscribed herself in her feminist treatise, deliberately echoing Rousseau, as: ‘daughter of a citizen of Geneva’.20 When at the age of eighteen she was imprisoned as a ‘libertine’ in la Salpêtrière, the hospital/prison for common prostitutes, she received a dreadful object lesson in what loss of status meant. Determined to redeﬁne the meaning of women’s public sphere, Jodin focused her Legislative Views for Women on the most commonly understood notion of ‘public women’, namely prostitutes. She noted how even in the sexual free market, status distinctions operated. The police harassed proletarian women prostitutes whereas the ‘better class’ of courtesans was ignored. Actresses, as women appearing before the theatrical public, were contaminated by their social identiﬁcation with ‘public women’, namely prostitutes. Even aristocratic women who appeared to operate legitimately in the public sphere, like Georgina Duchess of Devonshire, did so by reason of their class and family connections, not their gender.21 In any case, the Duchess, too, was the target of libels and cartoons when she participated in political campaigns. Any woman who entered the public arena was likely to be tarred with the imputation of selling her services in a sexual sense, the point Rousseau made explicit in his attack on actresses in Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles, (Letter to d’Alembert on the Theatre).22 Jodin and Robinson both had well-publicised love affairs, Jodin most notably with the Danish Envoy to Saxony, Count Werner XXV von der Schulenburg, and probably with Stanislas Poniatowski, King of Poland. Her overly public liaison with Schulenburg resulted in such scandal at the Court of Dresden that Jodin was ﬁrst imprisoned then expelled from Saxony, and Schulenburg resigned his diplomatic post.23 Robinson brieﬂy and notoriously became the mistress of the young

Filles publiques or Public Women 615

Prince of Wales (1779–80) and later, of Lord Malden, The Earl of Dorset, the Earl of Cholmondely, Charles James Fox and the Liverpool MP, Banastre Tarlton, to name only her most illustrious lovers. Both women were the subjects of vicious libels. Both women showed considerable entrepreneurial ﬂair in their business dealings. Jodin, with Diderot’s help, invested the fortune she acquired from her acting and her lovers and was able to retire on a modest competence. On quitting the stage, Robinson turned her talents to literature and became a best-selling poet and novelist, though remaining perpetually in debt. They both moved in intellectual circles: Jodin was a protégée of Diderot, Robinson a friend of Coleridge, Wollstonecraft and Godwin. Yet they knew only too well what it meant to be a public woman in the popular or vulgar use of that term, understanding the contradictions of the sexual double standard. Both wrote feminist treatises denouncing the degradation of women and were enthusiasts for radical thought and for the early stages of the French Revolution. If we compare Robinson’s autobiographical sketch and Jodin’s Mémoire sur délibéré, their similarities are striking. Both women, who by the time they turned to writing had extensive professional and sexual experience, portray themselves as injured innocents in a wicked world. Jodin, the perpetual rebel, equates herself with Iphigenia and Ariadne – two of the most pathetic and helpless heroines of classical mythology. Robinson’s success as a poet, actress and novelist turned partly on her ability not to challenge concepts of femininity, or decorum, in spite of her well-publicised amorous career; in other words, she was able to embrace convention while in fact defying it. Their ﬁctionalised self-portraits represent not so much hypocrisy as a realistic estimate of what constituted acceptable femininity. Temperamentally, Jodin and Robinson appear to be almost polar opposites. The former was intelligent, passionate, but injudicious, the latter, while paying lip-service to bourgeois decorum, showed a hard-headed determination to survive and prosper. In her memoir, Robinson constructs herself as a sensitive soul, an innocent victim, pursued by licentious rakes and the far-too-attractive Prince of Wales. One can appreciate, however, that this portrait, like that of the sorrowing poet of her verse, appealed to the feminine stereotype of passive woman-hood, a fragile persona to suit the literary market.24 Jodin, according to Diderot, possessed a ‘violent’ temperament. In her professional dealings, she was quick to take offence and to defend her rights. In Warsaw she risked prison when she broke her contract, refusing to perform unless she received a grovelling apology from the manager and the actor who had assaulted her. But she discovered, as did Mary Robinson, that women’s attempts to defend their honour were doomed to failure.25 When she was imprisoned in Dresden, almost certainly in order to discredit her lover, she launched a legal case against the Saxon Court. It seemed axiomatic to the Saxon Foreign Minister, the Baron von Ende, who had Jodin arrested, that as an actress she could have no rights. (Remarkably, in Angers, she took her theatre director to court for breach of contract and won; the whole affair is recorded in her Mémoire sur délibéré. 26) On a personal level, it is

616 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

clear that in her affair with Schulenburg she resisted a position of inferiority. Their relationship foundered partly on their extravagant life style, which threatened to ruin Schulenburg, and partly on Jodin’s refusal to play a subordinate role. In every crisis of her life, Jodin showed what her enemies and friends considered to be a deplorable streak of independence and a belief in her rights. Like Jodin, Mary Robinson had to abandon her middle rank status in order to seek, or repair, her fortune. Recruited to the stage by David Garrick and later Sheridan, she delayed her début for two years because her family thought it far better that she sell herself into a disastrous marriage than that she sell her talents on the stage. Their overwhelming disapproval of this latter course typiﬁed the situation of actresses on the English stage and more generally of middle-class women who sought employment. The favoured modes of paid work were those that aped domestic roles, such as enlisting as a governess or companion. Novels of the period mirrored this attitude towards women’s work whilst rejecting the theatre as a valid means of earning a living since it required public display.27 Robinson’s memoirs reﬂect the constraints of propriety, constraints that were perhaps more difﬁcult to challenge, because internalised, than laws that directly disadvantaged women. Jodin and Robinson entered the public sphere of the market by selling their talents as actresses and writers.28 They remained to a great extent in control of their ﬁnancial destinies. They both made good professional salaries.29 In addition, their love affairs represented an important source of income. Their eventual ﬁnancial independence, even when precarious, had a direct impact on their analysis of women’s subordination. As a salaried actress in Warsaw playing leading roles, and possibly thanks to the largesse of her lovers, Jodin was able to afford a sumptuous dress for her costume wardrobe and to rent a summer villa. On leaving Warsaw for Dresden in 1766–67, she was suddenly in receipt of 12,000 livres (the equivalent of four years of her salary), possibly a payment from King Stanislas Poniatowski for sexual favours or for discretion with regard to them. She sent these funds to Diderot to invest in a life annuity for herself and her mother. After her break with Schulenburg in 1769, Jodin proﬁted to the tune of some 25,000 livres, also invested by Diderot in annuities.30 Mary Robinson’s amorous career was publicised in the many libels and cartoons concerning her relationship with the Prince of Wales in 1779–80. Like Jodin and Schulenburg in Dresden, it was the extremely public display of her relationship with the Prince that made Robinson a target of press slanders. She was supposedly paid £5000 for the return of his compromising letters, but an additional annuity of £500 may not have been paid in full. Unable to return to the stage thanks to the publicity surrounding this affair, Robinson began publishing poetry and novels. She constructed her persona – the sorrowing beauty traduced by husband and lover – with a sure hand, subliminally in her poetry and more overtly in her autobiography and in novels like Walsingham, the tale of an undisciplined heart. One evident advantage of the true story of her hardships was that it sold well. Though she was perpetually in debt, there seems little doubt that she was ﬁnancially successful with her writing and that she used her

Filles publiques or Public Women 617

colourful past as a commodity in her poetry.31 The severe, possibly rheumatic, complaint that struck her down in 1783 increased her expenses and shortened her life, but she never ceased to write, supporting not only herself but her mother and daughter as well. The culture and status of the stage was a crucial forcing ground of Jodin and Robinson’s political radicalism. The theatre, while certainly not a respectable career for a young woman in either France or England, constituted a rare possibility of ﬁnancial independence for those women who succeeded in what was a demanding profession. As Mary Robinson recognised, they had prospects of ‘both fame and afﬂuence’.32 However, from a legal perspective, the position of actors and actresses in France and England was markedly different. Actors in the ofﬁcial French theatres, though licensed by the crown, were, in law, proscribed or ‘infamous’ persons. They were forbidden to marry, could not legitimise their children, leave them property or be buried in consecrated ground. Actors and actresses often evaded the worst of these rigours by working abroad or taking early retirement, but this did not negate the fact of Church/State proscription. Unsurprisingly, the French stage attracted, as Diderot noted, some of the most marginalized and questionable members of society. ‘Who but the most necessitous and desperate would envisage a stage career?’ 33 The French tragedian Lekain, writing to David Garrick in July 1765, expressed the frustration of his profession: You (English actors) are in the good graces of your clergy, whilst our archbishop has sent us all to the devil; you are your own master, and we are slaves; you enjoy a fame that is real, and ours is always in dispute; you have a brilliant fortune and we are poor; there are some terrible contrasts for you.34 As Lekain suggested, the status of English actors and actresses, while not necessarily ‘respectable’ was, nevertheless, not ‘infamous’. Like their French counterparts, English actors in general and actresses in particular occupied ambivalent positions in the public’s estimation. However, they could and did marry, often well. Miss Farren, a contemporary of Robinson’s, married her aristocratic lover, Lord Derby. Some celebrated actresses, like Mrs. Siddons, even achieved respectability. On the other hand, unlike the actors of the ofﬁcial French theatre, English players were not employed by the state and were subject to the vagaries of their managers and the theatrical market. In France, apart from the hope of money and fame, the acting profession offered compensations especially for women. Under the guardianship of their parents before marriage and of their husbands after, French women remained in a state of perpetual tutelage. Exceptionally however, actresses, like opera singers, enjoyed immunity from parental and police authority. Though the Crown showed itself to be a severe employer in cases where actors were found in breach of contract – prison was a frequent form of punishment – the stage represented for women a site of relative freedom. Moreover, the administrative arrangements of the Comédie Française, copied more or less by other companies throughout

618 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

Europe, were surprisingly democratic and un-gendered. In any given theatrical production, decisions concerning the apportioning of roles, the choice of plays, and so on, were made by the troupe as a whole. Actresses had the same rights as actors in policy-making.35 In the provincial and court theatres where Jodin performed (Warsaw, Dresden, Bordeaux and Angers), the tradition of collective decision-making, whether under royal or municipal authority, was the rule. Women in the French acting profession were, then, in a paradoxical position. Excluded from ‘respectable’ society and civil protection, they operated within their profession in a largely sexually-egalitarian manner. Indeed, part of the virulent criticism prominent actresses like Mlle Clairon attracted stemmed precisely from their visible positions of authority in this well-illuminated corner of the public sphere. As Mercier remarked: ‘The prestige which covers an actress renders her the most dangerous woman one can imagine.’36 A great deal of the odium heaped on actresses by Rousseau, Bauchamont, Restif de la Bretonne and Mercier stemmed from the perception that actresses were independent persons. In England, both actresses and actors found their social marginalization galling. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who strove to throw off the taint of being an actor’s son, called the theatre ‘the greatest Nursery of Vice and Misery on the face of the Earth.’37 This was the same Sheridan who went on to write the hugely successful play, The Rivals, and to run a theatre company. But his sensitivity to the moral corruptions of the theatre, a sensitivity that did not extend to the licentious mores of the Whig aristocrats with whom he mixed so freely, echoes the prejudices of Mary Robinson’s father and brother whose ‘invincible sense of honour’ meant that they could not bear to see her perform on the stage.38 Yet, as in France, there was the plus side, as Mary Robinson noted. Success on the stage gave her ‘the consciousness of independence … the only true felicity in this world of humiliations.’39 The fact that both women published feminist treatises at the end of their careers could be seen as surprising and certainly not unproblematic. Jodin seems to have spent the last eleven years of her life in respectable retirement and to have put her scandalous past behind her. Nevertheless, her philosophical and political radicalism, fostered by her friendship with Diderot and her admiration for materialist philosophers like Helvetius and d’Holbach, found its voice in her Legislative Views for Women, published in 1790 in the early days of the French Revolution. She certainly had no need to address the National Assembly, as she did, on the subject of delinquent women. There still would have been those who would remember her humiliating incarceration in la Salpêtrière and who would make a disparaging connection between the author and her subject matter. Robinson, for her part, seems an unlikely convert to English Jacobinism, given her almost star-struck admiration for royalty (the Prince of Wales and, as I shall show, Marie Antoinette.) A conversion there undoubtedly was, however, one brought about by her experience of marital unhappiness, her competence as a professional actress and writer and her friendship with English radicals such as Godwin and Wollstonecraft. Robinson’s abiding sense of injustice over her family’s neglect and the public humiliations her romantic attachments brought

Filles publiques or Public Women 619

her, further fuelled her political and feminist understanding. In the broader political context, her revolutionary sympathies, ﬁrst expressed in a poem, ‘Ainsi va le monde’ (So goes the world) (1790),40 were also evidenced in her novel Hubert de Sevrac (1796): ‘But at that dreadful period, [the Terror] when the tumult of discontent perverted the cause of universal liberty; when vast multitudes were destined to expiate the crimes of individuals, indiscriminate vengeance swept all before it, and like an overwhelming torrent engulphed every object that attempted to resist its force. It was at that momentous crisis, that the wise, the virtuous and the unoffending were led forth to the scene of slaughter; while in the glorious effort for the emancipation of millions, justice and humanity were for a time unheard or unregarded.’ 41 Robinson retained her conﬁdence in ‘the glorious effort for the emancipation of millions’, while, like the anti-revolutionary Burke, lamenting the fate of the French monarchs and the victims of the Terror.42 Jodin’s Legislative Views for Women and Robinson’s Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Mental Subordination (1799) are very different in their range, intended audiences and rhetorical strategies. Each reveals the ways in which their authors’ personal and professional lives honed their political/ feminist analyses. A central issue in both is their authors’ views of the French Revolution and the monarchy, illustrating important cross-channel differences. 43 Jodin died in 1790, the year of the publication of her Legislative Views for Women, and did not live to see the September Massacres, the march on Versailles, the ﬂight of the King and Queen to Varennes, or their trials and executions. She knew nothing of the Terror. Might she, like Olympe de Gouges, have hoped to play an active role in revolutionary politics? Her treatise certainly suggests it. Resident in Paris during the early uprisings of 1789, she welcomed the Revolution, but evidently feared mob violence, linking in her treatise sexual licence to public disorder:44 To restore decency among the People, who are deaf to all morality once they have broken the curb of subordination, thenceforward becoming strangers to all proper feeling and all social observance, one needs to remove from them the tempting objects, which perpetuate licentiousness and incite to shameful excess. (V.L. p. 10) Jodin’s Vues législatives brilliantly demolished the public/private distinctions of separate sphere ideology and argued for a new social/legal dispensation in which women would participate fully as citizens. The moral reform of women themselves, especially prostitutes, was central to this project. Public prostitution, Jodin argued, had a direct impact on the private sphere. Public women and their male clients infected and undermined the family. Her social model, based on the family, envisaged a constitutional monarchy with the King maintaining

620 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

his role as the father of his people. Though critical of the excesses of the aristocracy, she considered many of them to be salvageable as citizens and praised female members of the royal family (Mme Elizabeth, Mme la Duchesse d’Orléans) for their philanthropic works, hoping to enlist them in her proposed women’s legislature. Such women had the requisite qualities of high-minded social responsibility, which would enable them to reclaim delinquent women. What of the prostitutes themselves, often decried by conservative reformers as fundamentally and irredeemably vicious? In Jodin’s account, poverty and destitution are identiﬁed as the root cause of the trade engaged in by ‘these unhappy rebels’: When one considers the humiliations, which must accompany their [prostitutes’] vile mode of life, exposing them to such cruel insult, it is plain that only sheer destitution, or lack of any foothold in Society, could lead women to it. (V.L. p. 42) The mechanism for moral reform that Jodin envisaged would operate through an all-women magistracy and legislature dealing exclusively with women’s and family issues. Women would take over the maternal role in the state that nature had decreed they take in their families, erasing public/private distinctions. While enlisting Rousseau’s maternal rhetoric, Jodin subverted his binary opposition of separate sexual/ethical spheres.45 She argued that women could lead genuinely moral lives only by participating fully and honourably as citizens in public as well as in private. The fact that women’s public identity, outside the protected status afforded to women in the aristocracy and monarchy, was deﬁned by prostitution, showed the corrupting effects on the community as a whole of a degrading practice encouraged both by legislators and the morals police. Although her proposal to create a women’s legislative body staffed by women appeared to endorse a separate spheres agenda, Jodin was, as one of her critics noted, undermining male authority in the family and revolutionising the concept of women’s public role.46 In addition she championed divorce reform as part of a programme of alleviating private misery whilst improving public morals.47 Mary Robinson’s Letter to the Women of England (1799), published nine years after Legislative Views for Women, was situated in a markedly different political climate and written for a different audience. Where Jodin’s treatise formed part of the body of reformist literature, including the cahiers de doléances (dossiers of complaint) of the early revolutionary period which were addressed to the allmale National Assembly, Robinson wrote for an educated elite, the gentlemen’s daughters chronicled by Amanda Vickery.48 Where Jodin dwelt at length on the need to alleviate working-class women’s poverty, Robinson spoke to the condition of her ‘enlightened countrywomen’, protesting at the customs that debased them. Jodin signed her treatise with her own name, making her Legislative Views for Women the ﬁrst signed, female-authored feminist work of the French revolutionary period. Robinson, as she frequently did for other works, chose to write under a pseudonym, that of Anne Frances Randall. Her caution may reﬂect

Filles publiques or Public Women 621

attacks on the English Jacobins in 1790, led by Burke, which set the tone for anti-radical discourse.49 Writing during the Directory (1795–99), a period of relative stability following the Terror, Mary Robinson, in common with other English women Jacobins (Charlotte Smith, Helen Maria Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft) attempted to salvage enlightened principles while deploring the excesses of the French Revolution.50 In particular she was haunted by the ﬁgure of Marie Antoinette.51 As well as evoking the Queen in her Letter to the Women of England, Robinson wrote two pieces on Marie Antoinette; a prose essay written in 1791, Impartial Reﬂections on the Present Situation of the Queen of France (on the Queen’s arrest), and a poem, ‘Monody to the memory of the Late Queen of France’ (1793.) Like Burke in his famous apostrophe: ‘… and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision’,52 Robinson, who had met the Queen in Paris in 1781, was dazzled by her.53 Her description of Marie Antoinette’s charm and high-mindedness strongly echoed Burke. But whereas Burke invoked the Queen’s plight in order to dramatise sentimental manhood and to recall the lost age of chivalry, Robinson exhibited a high degree of identiﬁcation with the Queen. Just as the naïve heroine of Robinson’s autobiographical memoir was shown exposed to the corruptions of London life, so Robinson described the young Marie Antoinette as prey to every corruption of aristocratic life. The French court was a place: ‘where vice, avarice, levity and oppression revelled in the plenitude of power. … The unaffected and artless vivacity of her mind, was but feebly armed against the united machinations of envy and detraction’ (Impartial Reﬂections, p. 14). ‘The unsuspecting temper, elevated soul, simplicity of manners’ of the ‘beauteous Antoinetta’ (p. 15) mirrored Robinson as she saw herself. As Judith Pascoe has shown, in her memoir Robinson focused on Marie Antoinette’s body to the point of fetishism (her white arms), whereas in the ‘Reﬂections’ and the ‘Monody’, the Queen was entirely etherealised: she ‘lifts her out of the cultural milieu in which female is allied with sexual and political corruption.’54 Robinson’s Marie Antoinette was a far cry from the heartless decadent of revolutionary legend. By the fortitude shown during her imprisonment and at her execution, she was transformed into a symbol of female heroism. Robinson attempted to recuperate the Queen, who for Burke symbolised royal majesty and pathos, and for the French Jacobins frivolity and corruption, as the embodiment of women’s heroic courage and stoic patience under absolute humiliation. By her glittering royal life and shameful death – carried to the guillotine in an open cart, an exposure that deliberately echoed the age-old public shaming of prostitutes – Marie Antoinette had encompassed the full range of what was understood by the concept of ‘public’ as it was applied to women. Robinson portrayed Marie Antoinette as a heroic martyr, though prostituted at her trial and death. ‘Let the strength of her mind, the intrepidity of her soul, put to shame the vaunted superiority of man’(L.W.E. p. 27). The French perspective was very different. Jodin could not contemplate the inclusion of the despised Queen in a reform programme. She focussed on

622 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

prostitutes – those degraded women festering in the civic space, evidence of male lust and despotism. She sought to legitimise women’s place in the public sphere by reforming ﬁlles publiques or femmes en monde (public women or women in the world = whores) and giving women a legislative role that would transform the ordinary meaning of ‘public women’. Other Dames de France known for their philanthropy, royal ladies such as Princess Elizabeth, could be enlisted in the civic project. But the Queen was not deemed morally recoverable. Marie Antoinette was simply erased from Jodin’s text. The latter’s central argument maintained that women should exercise their maternal natures in the public service of the state. While the King could still be invoked as the father of his people, the Queen failed utterly as a maternal icon. This absence would be ﬁlled by the collective maternal presence of legislatively-empowered women. Marriage, as a site of male power, is central to both Jodin’s and Robinson’s feminist texts.55 Public and private despotism are revealed as two sides of the same coin. They described the private sphere of marriage as an inherently political and public institution. To counter this despotic power, Jodin proposed a woman’s court, run by women for women, to deal with family disputes. This court would effectively destroy ‘la puissance maritale’ (the husband’s prerogative), the father’s control over his children and the husband’s over his wife. She also argued for the institution of divorce, which was not permitted in France. (Divorce was available in England, but in very limited form, and only to social elites.56) For Jodin, divorce was a particularly feminist issue because it gave individuals, in the words of the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’, the free disposition over their own bodies. Robinson too recognised that domestic tyranny underlay other forms of social tyranny. She dwelt principally on disparity of tastes and intellect in marriage, reﬂecting her own wedded experience, and offered a bitterly satirical account of the double sexual standard. Women, unlike men, could not defend their honour or exact revenge if their reputations were attacked. Whereas adulterous men were viewed with an indulgent eye, adulterous women suffered viliﬁcation. (L.W.E. pp. 6–7) The double sexual standard was not only personally galling for the wife but evidence of corrosive social hypocrisy. Robinson and Jodin are closer in their feminist views than might at ﬁrst appear. They both attacked privilege of gender and birth. The fact that many aristocratic women shone in political or scholarly spheres was, they maintained, an index of status privilege, not of merit or talent alone. They argued that women themselves must overcome the prejudices imposed on them, and that the precondition for justice lay in self-control, through education. For these women, writing in the 1790s, the concept of citizenship did not turn purely on the question of the suffrage; rather it was a matter of allowing women to take a legitimate place in the newly emerging public sphere.57 Self-government, in the varying senses in which they understood it, would be a means to render the expression ‘public’ a term of honour when applied to all women, rather than a term of contempt as traditionally understood in the expression ‘ﬁlle publique’.

Filles publiques or Public Women 623

Jodin and Robinson were beautiful and able women who had led glamorous lives as actresses and mistresses of wealthy men. They were radicalised by their experiences of poverty, by their sexual adventures, by their careers in the quasiegalitarian culture of the professional theatre, by becoming ﬁnancially independent and by their exposure to Enlightenment thought. From childhood, they had internalised the meritocratic values of the middle ranks. In spite of their success as professional women in public spheres of activity, or perhaps because of it, they also strongly internalised the contempt women risked when they identiﬁed themselves with public life.58 Though both were able to subvert and even proﬁt from many of the proscriptions placed upon women, they aspired to transcend gender polarization, independently invoking the dictum of the seventeenth-century Cartesian feminist, Poulain de la Barre, that ‘the mind/soul has no sex’.59 It was arguably also their range of sexual experience and their awareness of its social consequences for themselves as women, in contrast to the largely unsullied public reputations of their male partners, which fuelled their demands for gender equality. Though they did not repudiate women’s rights to passion, they attempted to deﬁne women as more than sexual beings, as persons qualiﬁed to join that critical public sphere ‘of private people coming together as a public through the “historically unprecedented” public use of their reason’.60 Dena Goodman remarks that: ‘there was no such thing as a “public” woman in eighteenth-century France’.61 Alas, there were ‘public women’ galore in ancien régime France and England, though not in Habermas’ restricted deﬁnition of the authentic bourgeois public sphere. The persistence of the vulgar sense of ‘public woman’ effectively impeded women’s access to the public sphere of newly empowered citizens, by potentially reducing any woman to her sexuality. Linguistic usage was not purely symbolic but a marker of empirical limits.62 Caroline Gonda queries whether: ‘the “public sphere” in some sense [is] always already a stage, and therefore an improper space for women or a space only for improper women. If “bad women” are “necessarily public”, are all women’s public appearances shadowed or tainted?’63 In theory, the answer in France and England at the close of the eighteenth century was ‘yes’. In practice, some exceptionally able and fortunate women, independently of court circles, achieved distinction in the ﬁelds of letters, painting, the theatre, education, philosophy, philanthropy and social reform. Many therefore participated in public life, yet at this historical moment when the language of rights was central to political discourse, these women still needed to disguise their work with the appearance of domesticity. This trend increased in the post-revolutionary settlement. The woman of letters of the early to mid-eighteenth century became the ‘lady novelist’ of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a more respectable and less challenging role. The Jacobins in France and the anti-Jacobins in England were as one in rejecting a public, civic role for women. Marie Madeleine Jodin and Mary Robinson, though perhaps utopian in their rational optimism, convey a vision of gendered equality that could have transformed the public sphere. Their writings demonstrate that far from seeming ‘impossible’, feminist aspirations were deeply embedded in the Enlightenment

624 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

project. Their careers as actresses stood them in good stead. Unlike their more respectable contemporaries, they could envisage all the world a public stage, for women as well as men. In articulating their desire to give women full citizenship, Jodin and Robinson reveal an historical moment of possibility, a resistance to women’s construction as victims and a determination to fashion all women as actors within a more generous conception of the public sphere.

Notes 1. Marie Madeleine Jodin, Vues législatives pour les femmes (Angers: Mame, 1790), p. 1. 2. A protégée of the philosopher who befriended her and her mother after her watchmaker father’s death, Marie Madeleine Jodin ﬁrst came to scholars’ attention through the 21 letters addressed to her by Diderot. See Diderot, Correspondance, Georges Roth, ed. (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1959–1963); also, Felicia Gordon and P.N. Furbank, Marie Madeleine Jodin 1741–1790, actress, philosophe and feminist (Aldershot: Ashgate 2003). 3. The creation of a ‘public sphere’ in the eighteenth century has attracted wide attention since the publication of Jürgen Habermas’, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1962), trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (reprint, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1989). This discussion is further indebted to John Brewer, ‘This, that and the other, Public, Social and Private in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, in Shifting the Boundaries, Transformation of the Languages of the Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century, eds Dario Castiglione and Lesley Sharpe (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1995); Dena Goodman, ‘Epistolary property, Michel de Servan and the plight of letters on the eve of the French Revolution’, in Early Modern Conceptions of Property, eds John Brewer and Susan Staves (London: Routledge, 1995); Daniel Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty, Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–1789 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Sarah Maza, ‘Women, the Bourgoisie and the Public Sphere’, French Historical Studies, 17, I (1992), 935–956; Jane Rendall, ‘Women and the Public Sphere, Gender and History, 11, 3 (Nov. 1988), 475–488; Anthony J. La Vopa, ‘Conceiving a Public, Ideas and Society in Eighteenth-Century Europe’, Journal of Modern History, 64 (1992), 79–116; Marie Fleming, ‘Women and the “Public Use of Reason”’, in Johanna Meeham, ed., Feminists Read Habermas, Gendering the Subject of Discourse (London: Routledge, 1995), 17–138; Nancy Fraser, ‘What’s Critical about Critical Theory?’, in Meeham, Feminists Read Habermas, 21–56; Joan B. Landes, ‘The Public and the Private Sphere, a Feminist Reconsideration’ in Meeham, Feminists Read Habermas, 91–116; Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). 4. See: Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus, eds; Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities (London: Longman, 1997), Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter, Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), Rosemary Sweet and Penelope Lane, Women and Urban Life in Eighteenth-Century England, ‘On the Town’ (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). 5. See especially Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution. 6. Jane Rendall, ‘Women and the Public Sphere’, pp. 478–9. 7. Gary Kelly, Women, Writing and Revolution, 1790–1827 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 3–29 and 183, argues that the discourse of domesticity could be and was appropriated by English women writers to enable them to participate in political discourse through print culture. 8. See, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile (1760), P.D. Jimack, ed. (London: Dent, 1974), Chapter V., ‘Sophy or Woman’ 321–444 and Rousseau’s Lettre à Mr. D’Alembert sur les spectacles (Geneva: Droz, 1948).

Filles publiques or Public Women 625 9. Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1700–1950, A Political History (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 39, commenting on Rousseau’s 1758–59 exchange with the Encyclopédiste, d’Alembert. 10. For a discussion of the patronising attitudes to actresses by scholars see, Claire Tomalin, Mrs Jordan’s Profession (London: Penguin, 1995), xvii. 11. Olympe de Gouges, ‘Projet adressé à l’Assemblée Nationale le jour de l’arrestation du Roi’ (1792). Following on from Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer; French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1996), Darlene Levy in her discussion of Olympe de Gouges ‘An Empowered Pen in the Service of Impossible Citizenship’ makes a cogent argument for ‘impossibility’. For a view of the Enlightenment as inherently ‘masculinist’ see Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), and for a critique of her position, Daniel Gordon, ‘The Public Sphere in the eighteenth century, Philosophy, Sociology and Gender in the Enlightenment Conception of Public Opinion’ French Historial Studies, 17, no.1 (1992) 899–903. 12. This is clear not only from her Legislative Views for Women, but also in her private correspondence where, to the Polish Chamberlin Moszynski, she invokes in her defence ‘the most sacred rights of society’. 13. Felicia Gordon and P.N. Furbank, Marie Madeleine Jodin 1741–1790, actress, philosophe and feminist, p. 11. 14. Friederich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan (1891). 15. Citing Mary Wollstonecraft as someone who has already taken on the ‘philosophical sensualists’, Robinson limits herself to unshackling women from male prejudice and their own vanity (L.W.E., pp. 1–2). 16. Judith Pascoe, Mary Robinson, Selected Poems (Peterborough, Canada: Broadview Press, 2000), notes the ambiguities in Robinson’s political position. Writing against slavery, for example, she was for many years the companion of Banastre Tarleton, an outspoken proponent of the slave trade, p. 531. 17. On the relationship between acting and prostitution in England see Kimberley Crouch, ‘The Public life of actresses, prostitutes or ladies?’ in Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus, eds, Gender in Eighteenth Century England, 58–77. 18. Gary Kelly, ‘Bluestocking feminism’, in Women, Writing and the Public Sphere 1700–1830, Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Clíona Ó Gallchoir, Penny Warburton eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). While showing the achievements of the bluestockings in extending the boundaries of women’s intellectual and social activities, Kelly also notes ‘the social prejudice against women making themselves public’, p. 175. 19. Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings, Politics, Gender and Sentimentality in the 1790s (London: University of Chicago Press, 1995) characterises The Vindication of the Rights of Women as principally a republican manifesto; Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft, a Revolutionary Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2000), 177–87. 20. Marie Madeleine Jodin, Vues législatives pour les femmes, title page. For an analysis of this text see Felicia Gordon, ‘Vues legislatives pour les femmes 1790, A Reformist-Feminist Vision’, History of Political Thought, XX, 4 (1999) 649–673. 21. For a stirring account of female aristocratic political activity see Amanda Foreman, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (London: Harper Collins, 1998). Even the wealthy and privileged duchess was subject to gross satires for her ‘public’ involvement in politics. Had she been a French artisan’s daughter her many amorous escapades would probably have earned her a spell in prison as a ‘libertine’. On the issue of women and decadence see Helena Rosenblatt, ‘On the Misogyny of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Letter to d’Alembert in Historical Context’, French Historical Studies, 25, 1 (2002), 99–114, who argues that Rousseau’s Letter is primarily an attack on mores of aristocratic women and that Rousseau’s hostility to women is a function of class or status not inherent

626 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

misogyny. The historical speciﬁcity of the Letter has been comprehensively analysed by John Hope Mason, ‘The Lettre à d’Alembert and its place in Rousseau’s thought’, Rousseau and the Eighteenth Century; Essays in Memory of R.A. Leigh (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1992). Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lettre à Mr. D’Alembert sur les spectacles, 101–120. In his diary Schulenburg noted, as evidence of the public nature of their relationship, ‘La Jodin, who being my mistress [amie] and known as such, lived in my residence, rode in my carriages and often accompanied me, was, in spite of this, seized after having performed one day at the theatre, driven off in a carriage very roughly by four grenadier guards and taken to prison.’ ‘Journal fait par moi à Copenhague, 1736–1780’, Journal of Werner XXV von der Schulenburg, Rep. H Beetzendorf II, II no. 118–127, Sachsen-Anhalt, Landeshauptarchiv Aussenstelle Wernigerode. There were almost certainly other political reasons behind Jodin’s arrest, namely the wish of the Saxon Foreign Minister, von Ende, to discredit Schulenburg, via his mistress. Jacqueline Labbé, ‘Selling One’s Sorrows, Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson and the Marketing of Poetry’, The Wordsworth Circle, XXV, 2 (1994) 68–71. Mary Robinson, Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Mental Subordination, 1799 (Woodstock Books: Poole, 1998), p. 7. Marie Magdeleine Jodin, Mémoire sur Délibéré pour Demoiselle Marie-Magdeleine Jodin, Actrice de Comédie Contre le Sieur Neuville, Directeur de Comédie (Angers: A. J. Jahyer, 1774). For the importance of these mémoires under the ancien régime see Sara Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs, The Causes Célèbres of pre-Revolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Edward Copeland, Women Writing about Money, Women’s Fiction in England, 1790–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 185–9, cites Mme de Genlis, The Young Exiles (1799) and Fanny Burney’s The Wanderer (1814) as novels showing the heroines tempted by but resisting public performance. Robinson reﬂected some of her own experience in her novel of 1799, A Natural Daughter, where the heroine goes on the stage in search of independence and thereupon is despised by her husband. For women and contract law see Carol Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988). Pateman explores particularly the position of prostitutes with regard to contract theory. Actresses operated within similar contradictions. See also Jo Labanyi, ‘Adultery and the Exchange Economy’ in Scarlet Letters, Fictions of Adultery from Antiquity to the 1990s, ed. Nicholas White and Naomi Segal (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1997), 98–108. However, Robinson’s extravagant spending habits and her lover, Tarleton’s gambling mania reduced her to ﬁnancial disaster on a number of occasions. Publisher’s varied in their payments from the miserly (£10 over four years) to the generous (£150 per annum for three years). See Judith Pascoe, ed., Mary Robinson Selected Poems, 32–34. For details of Jodin’s ﬁnancial affairs see Felicia Gordon and P.N. Furbank, Marie Madeleine Jodin 1741–1790, ch. 3 and 6. Jacqueline Labbé has shown how ‘for Robinson … to be bold enough to manipulate the belief that sexual behaviour and self-display ruin women forever means that she too refuses to be silenced by convention.’ ‘Selling one’s sorrows’, p. 68. Perdita, The Memoirs of Mary Robinson 1758–1800, M.J. Levy ed. (London: Peter Owen, 1994), p. 99. Denis Diderot, ‘Paradoxe sur le comédien’ (1777), Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Roger Lewinter, X (Paris: Club Français du Livre, 1971) p. 415. Some Unpublished Correspondence of David Garrick, ed. George Pierce Baker (Boston: Houghton Miﬂin and Co. 1907), p. 81. Lenard R. Berlanstein, ‘Women and Power in Eighteenth-Century France’, in Visions and Revisions of Eighteenth-Century France, Christine Adams, Jack B. Censer and Lisa Jane Graham, eds (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), p. 156.

Filles publiques or Public Women 627 36. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, quoted in Berlanstein, p. 155. 37. Quoted in Fintan O’Toole, A Traitor’s Kiss, the Life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (London: Granta Books, 1997), p. 84. 38. Perdita, p. 99. Marguerite Steen, The Lost One, a Biography of Mary (Perdita) Robinson (London: Methuen and Co., 1937) while presenting a colourful and detailed account of Robinson’s life retains intact the double sexual standard which ensured that Robinson was seen ‘rightly’ as a subject of scandal whereas her lovers appear as morally neutral. 39. Katherine M. Rogers, Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), p. 18. As a much sought after actress, Robinson, like Jodin, was zealous in the maintenance of her contractual rights. Her engagement to act in the company of Mr. Coleman of the Haymarket Theatre broke down when the leading role of Nancy Lovel in The Suicide was given to another actress. Correctly believing that her right to play this role formed part of her contractual agreement, Robinson refused to perform unless it was restored to her. The manager, rather than offend a second actress, paid Robinson a full salary for the summer without requiring her to appear in a single play. In this incident, Robinson portrays herself as displaying a business-like toughness, very much at variance with the persona she portrayed elsewhere in her memoirs. 40. Robinson dedicated this poem to Robert Merry (1755–1798) as a rejoinder to his paean to the Revolution, ‘The Laurel of Liberty’ (1790). It produced a minor sensation. Merry is described by the DNB as a ‘dilletante’. He founded the Della Cruscan School of poetry, entailing an ornate and sublime style which Robinson also affected. More interestingly from a political perspective, he was an enthusiast for the French Revolution, writing an ode on the fall of the Bastille, ‘Ode for the Fourteenth of July, 1791’ and also in 1791 presented a treatise to the National Convention on the ‘Nature of Free Government’. His inﬂuence on Robinson was far more than poetic. See James L. Clifford, Robert Merry, a Pre-Byronic Hero (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1943). 41. Mary Robinson, Hubert de Sevrac, A Romance of the Eighteenth Century, 3 vols., (London: 1796), I, p. 7. 42. For an analysis of the impact of Burke’s celebration of Marie Antoinette in his Reﬂections on the French Revolution and its relationship to sentimentalised manhood see Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings, 1–19. 43. See Günter Lottes, ‘Radicalism, revolution and political culture, an Anglo-French Comparison’, The French Revolution and British Popular Politics, Mark Philip, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 78–98. 44. Jodin’s attacks in her Vues legislatives on pornographic representation whether in print, or in the theatre suggest that she was alive to the wide range of forbidden literature that formed the cultural underground of pre-revolutionary France. See Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (London: Fontana Press, 1997). 45. It is evident that while Jodin admired Rousseau as another ‘citizen of Geneva’ and was fully aware that she needed to utilise his rhetoric in the interests of addressing the Convention, she was entirely un-persuaded by his views on women’s incapacity for public life and their separate moral economy. The evidence of her Vues legislatives undermines the arguments of those who like Helen Rosenblatt, ‘On the “Misogyny” of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Letter to d’Alembert in Historical Context’, French Historical Studies, 25, 1 (2002) 91–114, who insist that Rousseau’s views on women are purely status based and focused on the perceived problem of decadence in Geneva and elsewhere. Jodin’s too recognises decadence in her culture, but her solution is not to marginalize women within that culture. 46. Jodin, Vues legislatives, letter from Jean Baptiste Lynch, pp. 44–47. 47. See Suzanne Desan, ‘The Politics of Intimacy in Revolutionary France’, in this volume, which explores the gendered tension inherent in conceptualising marriage as both a force of social unity and of individual liberty. 48. See Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter, Women’s Lives in Georgian England.

628 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship 49. Janet Todd argues that Godwin’s Memoirs about Mary Wollstonecraft had made feminist writings dangerous for the author’s reputation. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Revolutionary Life, p. 491 n. 5. 50. For the English Jacobins see, Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction, A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); James T. Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke (London: Routledge, 1963); Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 29–87; Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel, 1780–1805 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976); Charlotte Smith, Desmond, Antje Blank and Janet Todd, eds. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1997); Eleanor Ty, Unsexed Revolutionaries, Five Women Novelists of the 1790’s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); Helen Maria Williams, Letters Written in France (1790; Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1989). 51. For the fetishising and demonising of Marie Antoinette see, Lynn Hunt, ‘The Many Bodies of Marie Antoinette; Political Pornography and the Problem of the Feminine in the French Revolution’ in Eroticism and the Body Politic, Lynn Hunt, ed. (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1991), 108–130; Sara Maza, ‘The Diamond Necklace Affair Revisited (1785–1789), the Case of the Missing Queen’, in Eroticism and the Body Politic, 63–87; Judith Pascoe, Romantic Theatricality, Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997). 52. Edmund Burke, Reﬂections on the Revolution in France, William B. Todd, ed. (London: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1968). 53. Pascoe, Romantic Theatricality, 124–125. 54. Ibid. p. 125. 55. The political implications of attacks on domestic tyranny had a long history in the English novel, see Jerry C. Beasley, ‘Politics and Moral Idealism, the Achievement of Some Early Women Novelists’, in Fettered or Free? British Women Novelists 1670–1815 (London: Ohio University Press, 1986), 216–236. Jodin drew much of her material on marriage and divorce from the Encyclopédie article, ‘Marriage’ and Albert Hennet’s, Du Divorce (Paris: 1789). 56. Dissolutions of marriage in England could only occur by private Act of Parliament and were the only legal divorces until the mid-nineteenth century. Roderick Phillips, Putting Asunder, A History of Divorce in Western Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 227–241. 57. One must qualify the sense of social exclusion expressed by Robinson by stressing the long existence in Britain of a thriving literary marketplace for women, from which of course she proﬁted. Nevertheless, Robinson felt, probably rightly, that unlike her male contemporaries, she would always partly be judged on her sexual record. See Edward Copeland, Women Writing about Money, p. 189 and Linda C. Hunt, ‘A Woman’s Portion, Jane Austen and the Female Character’ in Fettered or Free?, p. 12. 58. Copeland, Women Writing about Money, 191–212, details the contradictions between genteel aspiration, poorly paid authorship and the distaste many women writers displayed toward their own profession. Like actresses, women writers were supposed to ‘perform’ from necessity, not choice. 59. François Poulain de la Barre, De l’égalité des deux sexes, discours physique et moral où l’on voit l’importance de se défaire des préjugez, (Paris: 1673), p. 109. Jodin, in her Legislative Views for Women paraphrases him as follows, ‘ Sirs, we are not on this earth a different species from you, the mind has no sex, any more than does virtue’, p. 19. Robinson, in her Letter to the Women of England, echoes the same phrase, ‘If men would be completely happy by obtaining the conﬁdence of women, let them unite in confessing that mental equality, which evinces itself by indubitable proofs that the soul has no sex’, p. 17. 60. Joan B. Landes, ‘The Public and the Private Sphere’, pp. 94–5. For a further critique of Habermas’s over-valuation of the inclusiveness of the liberal public sphere see, Marie Fleming, ‘Women and the Public Use of Reason’, 118–19.

Filles publiques or Public Women 629 61. Dena Goodman, ‘Public Sphere and Private Life, Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime’, History and Theory, 31, 1 (1992), p. 19. 62. ‘The male is only a male now and again, the female is always a female … everything reminds her of her sex’, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile (1760), translated by Barbara Foxley, P.D Jimack, ed. (London: Everyman Library, 1974), p. 324. 63. Caroline Gonda, ‘Misses, Murderesses and Magdalens, women in the public eye’, in Women, Writing and the Public Sphere 1700–1830, p. 66. Similarly Mary Jacobus, ‘Intimate connections, scandalous memoirs and epistolary indiscretion’, Women, Writing and the Public Sphere 1700–1830, shows how Godwin’s Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘allowed the anti-Jacobins to represent Wollstonecraft as a “public woman” with “French” morals’ p. 275.

9.4 The Politics of Intimacy: Marriage and Citizenship in the French Revolution Suzanne Desan

Among the many newspapers springing to life in the early years of the French Revolution, one, entitled the Courrier de l’Hymen, the ‘Marriage Gazette’, offered an unusual format: side-by-side with political news summaries and witty editorials critiquing marriage practices, it featured what could only be called personal ads, quite detailed paid announcements by individuals who hoped to engage in that matrimonial institution that the rest of the journal seemed bent on reforming. Among the hottest candidates were deputies, members of the National Assembly. One representative from the Antilles advertised for a ﬁancée in Paris: he hoped she would have ‘a gentle character and an agreeable face’, and concluded, ‘Although I am a member of the legislative body, I don’t need her to have strong opinions on politics and would even prefer that she leans neither to the right nor to the left but rather maintains a judicious moderation.’ A later issue printed a scathing reply from one woman who declared that there could be no marriage without politics and that even though she was 25, ‘forgotten for seven years in an Ursuline Convent’ (in other words even though she was desperate), she ‘would not take him even though he was a deputy and even if he owned all the 660,000 unhappy beings who paid with their liberty and their blood for the wealth and pleasure of 40,000 Europeans. I hate tyrants and executioners … and I don’t want anything to do with someone who does not cherish with his whole heart this happy Revolution which has restored the rights of man.’1 Soundly rebuked, the deputy probably slunk off to ﬁnd a less vocal wife from a procolonial town like Nantes or Bordeaux. Perhaps with her fervent anti-slavery opinions, this anonymous young woman was especially politicized, but on a broader scale, she gives an inkling of that revolutionary moment when the most private and personal ties took on profound political resonance. She was not alone in seeing politics within intimacy. This essay will ask how husbands and wives, legislative deputies, moralists, unhappy clergymen, and male and female members of political societies from across France together imagined the political possibilities of marriage, once it had been reformed along revolutionary lines. I will argue that reforming marriage was integral to inventing and negotiating the gendered meaning of citizenship in revolutionary France. The revolutionaries 630

Marriage and Citizenship in the French Revolution 631

had tremendous hopes for marriage: as a cultural institution, they believed that it could become a political and moral space for regenerating citizens, a site where the gendered characteristics of wives and husbands could foster social unity and patriotic transformation. At the same time, citizens and legislators recognized the centrality of marriage as a legal institution, albeit one deeply in need of reform. Since marriage played such an integral role in determining the legal status of each woman and man, the creation of the juridical, rights-bearing individual demanded the reconﬁguration of marriage. Many pamphleteers and jurists argued that the marital practices of the Old Regime had held husbands and wives in ‘chains’ and had sacriﬁced the liberties and rights of sons and daughters. According to this logic, a new state made up of free citizens required a different kind of marriage. The revolutionaries attempted to make marriage not only into a locus of individual liberty, but also an institution that bound citizens to each other, to the social whole, and to the new state. As a miniature social contract uniting husband and wife and uniting citizens to the state, marriage held great political potential. The interconnection between citizenship and marriage did not emerge seamlessly in the 1790s, nor did it have the same ramiﬁcations for men and women. Rather, the deﬁnition of citizenship and visions for conjugal reform were hammered out in dialogue between state and society, in the halls of the legislature and in public arenas of debate from political clubs to festivals to newspapers. The very act of building a secular state and creating the legal individual called the gendered practices of intimacy into question. Even as deputies struggled to deﬁne the relative rights of women and men within marriage and state, revolutionary citizens across France strove to create a vibrant new political culture and to ignite the moral and emotional ﬁres of citizenship: in the process, they threw the issue of gender dynamics and domestic politics open for debate. By exploring this contestation over marriage and citizenship, I challenge the assumption that the Revolution’s primary impact on women was to exclude them from public politics and to promote a Rousseauist gender ideology of domesticity and republican motherhood.2 Although I am focusing on France, I hope more broadly to question the assumption that liberal or republican ideologies necessarily led to the curtailment of women’s rights and that the republican family and marriage necessarily were structured to deprive women of rights.3 At least in the case of the French Revolution, the attempt to invent the individual citizen had far more ambiguous results. The revolutionaries certainly encouraged a domestic political role for women and the gloriﬁcation of marriage rested on cultivating (and debating) distinctly different gender characteristics for women and men. But at the same time, no uniﬁed Rousseauist ideology or set of domestic practices emerged during the Revolution. On the contrary, revolutionary family reforms – including the legal attempt to institute individual rights within marriage and the cultural debates over the regenerative possibilities of love and gender complementarity – opened up contestation over gender relations and the nature of masculinity and femininity. Moreover, new laws disrupted the traditional patriarchal practices of families and endowed women as well as men with

632 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

new civil rights within the home. The Revolution created both languages and laws for critiquing and questioning female subservience in practice, in print, courtrooms, and households across France. Moreover, by politicitizing every aspect of everyday life, the Revolution generated new forms of power for both women and men. How, according to the revolutionaries, would the legal and cultural reconstruction of marriage underpin revolutionary politics, regeneration, and state-building? And how did this reform of marriage contribute to conﬁguring civil rights and constructing the republican ideals of masculinity and femininity? To explore these questions, I will ﬁrst examine the deputies’ early reform of marriage and then analyze public expectations of the regenerative power of conjugal love.

Building the individual and the secular state: marriage as social and civil contract In the early 1790s, the legislators passed a stunning series of laws that reconﬁgured marriage. In the Constitution of 1791, the National Assembly deﬁned marriage as a ‘civil contract’. In 1792, at the moment of creating the Republic, the Legislative Assembly reduced paternal authority over marriage choices, lowered the age of majority, removed all nuptial matters from clerical control, and established a secular état civil for recording births, marriages, divorces, and deaths. Most strikingly, they legalized divorce, made it remarkably accessible to both women and men, and even allowed no-fault divorce for ‘incompatibility’ or ‘mutual consent’. In the fall of 1793, the Convention voted in principle to grant wives an equal share in control over marital communal property. In passing these radical reforms, the deputies responded to the vocal outpouring from petitioners and pamphleteers advocating marital reform, and also acted within a particular political, legal, and religious context. To secularize marriage and recognize its voluntary, contractual character was a crucial component in disentangling the new state from Catholicism, establishing juridical uniformity, and deﬁning individual civil rights. In this section, I explore how marital reform grew in part out of lawmakers’ attempt to build a different kind of relationship between the state and the individual. The revolutionaries were attempting to root political sovereignty in a social contract among citizens: so too, they came to imagine marriage as the quintessential social contract in miniature. Marriage, like the state, should guarantee individual liberty and rights. It should be rooted in freedom, in the legal, natural, and voluntary contract of individuals. Yet at the same time, its moral and emotional force should bind individuals together, as well as to the state and public good. As Nicolas de Bonneville stated in his Le nouveau code conjugal in 1792, ‘Marriage is the social bond that unites the citizen to the patrie and the patrie to the citizen.’4 More than just an analogy, the social contract of marriage held a pivotal position in deﬁning the legal status of the citizen. The Old Regime jurist Bourjon had written, ‘Almost all civil rights ﬂow from the legitimacy of marriage.’5 Marriage

Marriage and Citizenship in the French Revolution 633

served as a fundamental legal matrix for deﬁning rights, identity, and status. Marriage (or that of one’s parents) determined each citizen’s nationality, ﬁliation, legitimacy, and right to inherit. It informed the control – or in women’s case, lack of control – over certain forms of property. Civil obligations, most notably taxation and conscription, varied according to marital status. Because marriage played such a key role in elucidating the legal status of individuals, the deputies found that they could not invent and outline the juridical meaning of citizenship without also remaking marriage. Indeed, since the legislature increasingly rooted the legitimacy of the new state in guaranteeing the legal rights of individual citizens, marriage became a crucial terrain for deﬁning what these civil rights were and how they would be enacted in day-to-day life. As part and parcel of inventing citizen and secular republic, the lawmakers took marital and civil matters out of the hands of the Church. In their lengthy debates over secularizing marriage and the état civil, the revolutionary jurists’ most clearly developed their conception of marriage as a potential site of liberty and force for social and political unity. In February 1792, the legislator Muraire promised that the Committee had ‘established {their proposed law to laicize the état civil} on two bases: liberty and the good of the State’. The état civil implicitly cemented a new reciprocal relationship – a relationship of rights and duties – between the free individual and the state. ‘The citizen is born in the bosom of the municipality’, declared Muraire in February 1792, thus the state ‘should assure each citizen his most precious property: his civil status’. The state staked its own legitimacy in becoming the protector of individual liberty and legal status. As the deputy Gohier stated in the ongoing debate, ‘Slaves have no état civil. Only the free man has a cité, a patrie; he alone is born, lives, and dies as a citizen.’ As careful recorders of birth, marriage, and death, government representatives then would safeguard each individual from (religious) prejudice, facilitate the transfer of familial property and name, and guard the uniformity of the law.6 Within the new and strong reciprocity between the nation and the individual, each citizen also owed the state, for the interests of the two were inextricably intertwined and marriage constituted a bridge between the two. ‘The citizen lives and dies for the patrie’, Muraire announced. If marriage was a locus of liberty and juridical identity, it was also a political act and a social duty. ‘Marriage belongs to the political order.’ Tellingly, he spoke of the nuptial act as that ‘interesting moment when, recognizing that his duties toward society are not limited to personal devotion, {the citizen} engages in a contract to reproduce himself’. Knitting marriage ever closer to patriotism, the deputy Jollivet proposed that loyalty to the nation be part of the legal deﬁnition of marriage: it would be a freely chosen contract in which couples pledged ‘to live together and to raise their children with love of the patrie and respect for its laws’ (my emphasis).7 Within its very deﬁnition, marriage now implied a political as well as a personal commitment. In envisioning marriage as a social and political obligation, these jurists embraced current pronatalist thinking that had grown out of utilitarian and populationist Old Regime discourse. Mercantile state theorists, physiocrats, and various philosophes had argued that marriage was a useful, natural duty of

634 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

subjects, who should produce population for state and society.8 Patriotic priests who hoped to marry engaged in this rhetoric. One avid priest calculated in 1790 that if France’s 100,000 clergymen married, they might well father 10,000 children per year – and they would be well-educated! The pronatalist goals of the enthusiastic new Nation reinforced the tendency to represent marriage as productive and to penalize celibacy as sterile and selﬁsh. The war would up the ante further, but already in 1791, festivals celebrated fertility: in Rouen a mother who had given birth to twenty-ﬁve children was given the honorary role of ﬂag-bearer in a special ceremony. In yet another ceremony, a banner read: ‘Now is the time to make a baby!’ as if everyone would read it, get the idea, and rush home to perform patriotic acts. Over its course, the Revolution placed additional taxes on bachelors, privileged married men in the sale of biens nationaux, and in 1795 even required that representatives on the Council of Ancients be married.9 Beyond this discourse on marriage as a civil obligation, the revolutionary lawmakers began to theorize a speciﬁc republican linkage between citizenship and marriage. Because the revolutionaries believed that they were founding society anew and because they envisioned the conjugal bond between husband and wife as the original social contract, marriage took on a palpable importance in constructing ties not only between the individual and the collectivity, but also between nature as intimate and human, and society and the state as collective and institutional. Marriage marked the quintessential and natural union between man and woman: this most elemental social bond, grounded in the natural complementarity of the genders, should enable virtually everyone to contribute to the Nation. At the juncture between affect and law, ideally, marriage united sentiment with the state and fully embodied the revolutionaries’ dream of rooting society in natural law. Because of its legal and ofﬁcial structure and its simultaneous basis in a natural and free contract, the conjugal relationship had a moral and political power that sexual liaison or love alone did not possess in the eyes of the revolutionaries. It civilized male and female sexuality and harnessed it to the state and social good. As the deputy Vergniaud commented in 1792: Marriage is the ﬁrst social convention. … Only the mutual consent of the spouses forms its essence. Nonetheless, in the state of civilization, a distinction is made between the two sexes simply coming together because of need or momentary caprice and the will to unite one’s whole existence with the loved one, to give and receive happiness constantly, and to transmit life to children. … Among all civilized people, the instinct of modesty has provoked opprobrium toward the ﬁrst of these unions; in contrast, they have honored the second with the name of marriage, surrounded with pomp and solemnity.10 As Vergniaud outlined, although marriage was freely chosen, it also puriﬁed morals, even as it produced new life for society and state and happiness for the individual – at least in its ideal form. As Vergniaud also suggested, the public in all its ‘pomp and solemnity’ must bear witness to the union. Public and ofﬁcial approval enabled marriage to play

Marriage and Citizenship in the French Revolution 635

its moral role; the public puriﬁed the conjugal bond by elevating it above mere sexual caprice and certifying the couple’s responsibility to the social whole. Since the debunked Catholic Church could no longer legitimize marriage, the new France would turn to ‘society’, ‘the social body’, and the ‘state’ to sanction the conjugal union, both legally and ceremonially. Gohier proposed that civic marriage be celebrated on the Altar of the Nation, and various deputies imagined festivals to cement the bond between the two citizens and between citizens and the state. Here is one wedding vow: ‘I Pierre Dupont, declare, as a free man and good citizen, that I take Madeleine Legrand as my friend and as my wife.’ Likewise, each ﬁancée, ‘as a free woman and good citoyenne’, declared that she took her ﬁancé ‘as my friend and as my husband’. Just as these vows highlighted both citizenship and freely chosen companionship, the deputy Bonneville made explicit that the patriotic act of marriage had its natural origins in love: ‘The Constitution has wanted the law on marriages to be all love and all friendship, like the law of nature’, he commented.11 Crucially, as the deputies emphasized this voluntary contract of love as a key underpinning of citizenship, they called into question fundamental aspects of marriage. Already in 1791–92, the legislators were keenly aware of the ﬂood of pamphlets and petitions critiquing arranged and indissoluble marriage. Moreover, the logic of marriage as a state-ordained civil contract between rightsbearing individuals had opened up on-going debate on conjugal matters, from divorce to illegitimacy to arranged marriages. Muraire stressed that marriage – of all civil acts – most demanded liberty. Durand de Maillané and Lasource reiterated his argument that paternal ‘despotism’ and ecclesiastical barriers to free marriage choice had to be overturned. The Legislative Assembly moved slowly however, wary of offending rural religiosity and fomenting greater religious strife when the split over clerical loyalty to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy had already alienated many potential supporters of the Revolution. ‘The people are not yet philosophes’, pronounced François de Neufchâteau in March 1792.12 But the overthrow of the king in August 1792 unleashed a decisive leftward movement, a pressing need to rid France of the vestiges of ‘feudalism’, and an increase in anti-clerical sentiment and policies. The legislature could now respond more freely to popular agitation for conjugal reform. Moreover, overturning the monarchy and inventing the Republic made family reform into a social priority. The deputies strove to do more than debunk the patriarchal authority of kings and fathers: they now counted on constructing a new familial structure to mirror and promote the new political structure. Just as the Republic replaced the monarchy, so too, the conjugal family rooted in freely chosen, companionate marriage should replace the lineage family built on paternal power and arranged, indissoluble marriage. On the eve of declaring the Republic, the Convention drastically reduced paternal control over marriage, lowered the age of majority, abolished nuptial impediments, secularized the état civil, and then legalized divorce.13 This attempt to transform marriage into a site of individual liberty and voluntary commitment raised the question of wives’ rights as contracting individuals.

636 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

When the Legislative Assembly debated divorce, Aubert-Dubayet called upon his colleagues to consider the happiness and rights of women: ‘The contract that ties spouses is made in common: indubitably they should both enjoy the same rights, and the woman should not be the slave of man.’ Most deputies did not share Aubert-Dubayet’s feminist proclivities, but they acknowledged that wives also had to have civil rights within the voluntary contract of marriage. The Assembly passed a divorce law with bold ramiﬁcations for women. Wives as well as husbands gained the full right to break the conjugal contract. Although this law disadvantaged some wives by requiring them to ﬁle divorce in their husbands’ place of residency, in all other ways it made divorce equally accessible to men and women, at least by the letter of the law. In practice, wives faced greater legal and economic difﬁculties in obtaining divorce, but they also made more frequent use of the law than did their husbands. Wives initiated divorce twice as often as husbands did in the 1790s.14 A year later the same logic of reciprocity of rights informed another striking assault on male conjugal authority by the Convention: as part of their attempt to legislate a uniﬁed civil code, the deputies voted in principle to allow wives an equal control over communal marital property. Pons de Verdun concluded that the Convention ‘exhorts you to re-establish the equality of rights in such an intimate society; without it {this equality of rights}, there is no real society’. ‘Aren’t women half of ourselves?’ asked Lecointe-Puyraveau. ‘Why wouldn’t they have the same rights that we do?’15 The vote for equitable control over marital property would fall by the wayside along with the rest of the failed Civil Code of 1793, but both the divorce law and the laws curtailing parental authority over marriage stood and had tremendous ramiﬁcations for gender practices within families. When the legislators attempted to deﬁne the role of contractual, lay marriage as a bond between state and citizen and as an arena of individual liberty, they endowed women as well as men with new civil rights.

Regeneration, conjugal love, and gender dynamics When the deputies redeﬁned marriage as a civil contract that could be broken, they took a step that was in some ways fraught with danger for the new state. In 1792–93, as the revolutionaries stripped away the legal indissolubility of marriage, they were keenly aware that their actions made property arrangements uncertain. Within the escalating war on Christianity, the lawmakers also knew that secular, contractual marriage lacked the sacral glue, the moral force of unity that characterized Old Regime sacramental marriage. To create the juridical individual, to count on his or her free choice as the foundation of marriage – these acts were loaded with anxiety. The deputies imagined that the public validation of marriage by the new state would endow the institution with a new sacrality, but they also relied on other forces of cohesion. Repeatedly, they expressed their conﬁdence in the regenerative power of the law: their newly crafted laws would transform the social and moral practices of marriage and citizenship. For example, to legalize divorce and abolish arranged marriages would reduce adultery and illegitimacy.

Marriage and Citizenship in the French Revolution 637

But above all, the jurists, like many other revolutionaries, invoked the affective power of marriage and the potent force of gender complementarity. Conjugal love was central to the revolutionary project of refashioning marriage as a linchpin of citizenship: the bonds of sentiment and the ‘natural’ force of heterosexual love could unite the family and even underpin the new politics. As Gohier suggested, so powerful were the emotions connecting man and woman, that the nation should tap into the affective power of conjugal love in order to foment patriotic fervor.16 Outside the halls of the legislature, various revolutionaries argued even more extensively that nuptial love had a political and ethical role to play in the Revolution. In the late Old Regime, novels, plays, treatises, and legal briefs had fostered an image of marriage as a socially useful site of true affection between husband and wife.17 Embracing and building upon this imagery, the revolutionaries demanded even more of marriage: it should facilitate moral regeneration and patriotic conversion. According to various pamphleteers, clubmembers, and moralists, male and female qualities naturally and necessarily worked in direct relationship to each other. Once refurbished by liberty, marriage could bring about two forms of regeneration: it could elevate the different but complementary virtues of husband and wife and simultaneously stimulate patriotic allegiance. Making marriage freer and more loving had moral and political urgency. Lequinio, a Breton deputy and divorce advocate, offered an archetypal vision of the impact of the divorce law on men and women: ‘The same law will necessarily produce contrary effects in the two sexes: to men it will give gentleness, to women energy; the ﬁrst will stop being insensitive, unjust, and dissipated; and women will be less languid, or less coquettish and frivolous; equilibrium will be established in the spouses’ dispositions and wills.’18 As Lequinio suggests, marriage theorists argued that men would bring stability, vigor, and depth to their wives. But they placed far greater emphasis on the ability of wives to cultivate their husbands’ sensitivity and to enkindle their patriotism. Republican motherhood has received greater attention from historians, but in the 1790s it was meant to operate in tandem with republican wifehood.19 Swept up in the zeal of the early Revolution, both male and female revolutionaries called on women to put their peculiarly powerful inﬂuence on men to work for patriotism within the bedroom. Male and female members of Jacobin clubs urged pro-revolutionary wives to use their seductive charms and their sensibilité in order to convert men to patriotism. Feminine ‘sensibilité’ implied a certain moral and emotional sensitivity, compassion, and impressionability. Women were believed to be morally powerful and to have a special ability to touch and evoke the emotions of others, especially their husbands and children. The seductive and moral components of sensibilité operated in uneasy alliance. ‘The power of women is in their sensibilité; let us use this valuable arm’, urged Françoise Sanson at the Jacobin Society of Caen. At outdoor festivals and club meetings from Nantes to Nimes, young women pledged to shun aristocrats and lend their hearts only to republicans and soldiers. Wives in the ‘Société des dames citoyennes’ promised to ‘double our tenderness in order to heighten our husbands’ civic loyalty’. After taking a

638 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

similar oath, the women’s club of Ruffec heard an exhortation from one of their male colleagues: ‘If it is necessary, let a prudent and friendly refusal of your caresses be the punishment of traitors [to the cause]; use the irresistible force of your insinuations to weaken the heart of stone [bronze] which the sweet name of liberty cannot move.’20 In cultivating men’s patriotism, women ideally should foster two different but complementary sets of male personal qualities: male action, energy, and bravery on the one hand, and male sensitivity to politics and people on the other. Male sensibilité – their medical and psychological make-up – ideally encompassed both sets of characteristics although they could be in tension with each other. During the Revolution, men were typically seen as fundamentally more energetic and independent than women; perennially restless, they were virtually bursting with the desire for liberty and independence. In the world of caricature, for example, male citizens purge the diseased and fattened members of privileged orders and emerge as peasants, workers, or members of the National Guard; they stand surrounded by emblems of virility and sexual potency. In 1792, with the coming of war and the creation of the Republic, Jacobin ideology in particular deﬁned masculinity in terms of military loyalty, and worked to fuse a classical model of Spartan and stoic soldierhood, drawn from antiquity, with the rough and tumble image of the pike-bearing sans-culotte, drawn from the streets of Paris. Allegiance to one’s fellow soldiers was central, and revolutionary men incited each other’s militant patriotism. Ceremonies and prints promoted an image of soldiers as virile brothers, united by fraternal ties and marching off to defend each other’s honor.21 But for all of their homosocial emphasis on fraternal male loyalty to la patrie, the revolutionaries fervently believed that patriotism and energetic bravery were rooted in family honor and also in female approval. The acts of marrying and of fathering children aroused the honor, vigor, and patriotism of men, even priests. As one clerical pamphleteer promised, their marriage would bring ‘more energy to national character and more nerve to patriotism’. Spartan masculinity and fraternity drew strength from heterosexual love. By emphasizing the power and naturalness of the conjugal bond, the revolutionaries protected the homosocial, male bond from association with effeminacy or homosexuality. Elizabeth Colwill has argued that Marie-Antoinette’s depiction as a lesbian ‘warned citoyens and citoyennes to police the “natural” boundaries of desire’. Likewise, fraternal bonds and patriotism were deﬁned in contrast to the purported homosexuality and feminine weakness of priests and aristocrats, portrayed as sodomites in pornographic pamphlets and caricatures. Revolutionaries depicted male strength, fortitude, and even love of nation as a ‘natural’ outgrowth and corollary to love of women. As Chabot proclaimed, ‘Unhappy the man who doesn’t love women! He who resists this most holy, sweet, and sacred inclination in Nature, he will never be a good republican.’ Revolutionary festivals celebrated the biological family; only the unmarried citizen, the bachelor, was left out in the cold.22 Revolutionary leaders counted on women to spark and sustain the virility and virtue of husbands and sons. Dominique Godineau has shown that Parisian

Marriage and Citizenship in the French Revolution 639

sans-jupons and members of the ‘Citoyennes républicaines révolutionnaires’ repeatedly roused their husbands to political insurrection or derided them as ‘faint-hearted’ or ‘cowardly’ when they failed to take to the streets or march on the Convention. Likewise, wartime festivals and solemn send-offs of volunteers by women’s clubs invariably included reminders that their wives’ praise and love would be the reward of fearless struggle on behalf of the patrie en danger. Caresses and domestic intimacy would welcome them home if they fought honorably. ‘One never sees men retreat in the ﬁeld of honor, when they sense women behind them’, pronounced the ‘Amies de la Constitution’ of Dijon, who soon orchestrated an elaborate song ceremony to inspire the newly recruited soldiers in the summer of 1792. For their part, male patriots echoed this view. As one self-proclaimed ‘nephew of the Père Duchesne’ wrote to the Vedette in Besançon in the war-crazed summer of 1792, ‘Women, women, know that your ascendance over us, it’s inconceivable. As you please, you can turn our emotions toward heroism or cowardice.’ As he urged each woman to send ‘letters burning with patriotism’ to her soldier-lover, he invoked an ardor in which love of woman and of patrie blurred.23 If republican wives were urged to foster virility and fearlessness, within marriage women should also encourage the other side of masculine patriotism, its humane and sensitive side, so crucial for the new politics. A prospective ﬁancée ‘wants a virtuous man, sensitive and kind, who thinks and acts according to his heart’, editorialized one moralist in 1790. Divorce pamphleteers and revolutionary moralists built an image of the attentive husband to complement the ideal of the sentimental father. The self-proclaimed Homme mal marié covered the page with tear-drenched ink depicting his surprise at how domesticity tamed his dissolute libertine soul, marriage offered him ‘the most tender love’, and fatherhood awakened unexpected compassion and kindness in his soul. Clergymen repeatedly celebrated the power of marriage to make men humane and indicted celibate men as callous and egotistical. ‘My heart froze’, lamented one. Without wives to awaken their humanity, warned another, ministers ‘are less sensitive to your suffering… . The hardening of the heart is an almost inevitable effect of celibacy, and the supernatural graces of religion, as heavenly as it is, cannot replace this active and profound sensibilité, that is poured into our hearts by natural means.’ The clerical proponents of marriage wrote out of their individual anguish, but they invariably linked their appeals for the softening powers of female companionship to its greater social good. Only married men could transcend individual interest and work for the ‘general good’.24 It is crucial to recognize that the revolutionaries believed that male sensitivity had political signiﬁcance. According to Rousseauist and republican conceptions of political participation and transparency, only by maintaining a sincerely open heart could each (male) citizen honestly and directly sense the general will, act for the sovereign Nation, and participate in a form of politics that could transcend factionalism. Expressing one’s emotions and intuitions candidly seemed to guarantee open politics and formed an essential contrast to the manipulative and secretive politics of the corrupt Old Regime court and monarchy. This aspect of male

640 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

sensibilité protected revolutionaries from the artiﬁce and egotism of the Old Regime in a way that neither reason, nor abstract loyalty to nation could. As Brissot stated: ‘Reason shows me only shadows, where the moral sense enlightens and directs me…. I am happy when I work for the good of my fellow humans, when I do good for them.’ Sensitivity tied the individual citizen to the social and the bien public. The legal act of marriage bound the individual citizen to the body social and the state, but the affective beneﬁt of marriage completed and deepened this bond. For the compassion awakened by conjugal love had universal political and humanitarian ramiﬁcations. The husband imbued with humanitarianism could act on behalf of the public good.25 If conjugal love could somehow cultivate a masculinity balanced between aggressive vigor and humanitarian sensitivity, it should also enable the husband to instill seriousness and stability into his wife’s habits and psyche. ‘The sweet metaphysics of love’ would endow women with virtue and strength. Although most commentators agreed that revolutionary marriage should be more companionate and egalitarian, they did not fully agree on what these qualities meant for an intimacy traditionally built on woman’s submission. Some stressed a Rousseauist model in which each wife would become ‘gentle, modest, considerate, mindful of her reputation, eager to win over her husband rather than defy his authority’, in the words of one Jacobin priest. From this perspective, women’s ability to seduce men for the patrie depended on the clever and charming use of their own powerlessness. For example, Hubert de Matigny proclaimed that wives should not be enslaved to husbands against their will, celebrated the glories of conjugal love, and then proceeded to deﬁne that love as women’s willing servitude: ‘If, on the contrary, love has formed the spouses’ union, then the wife is legally and fully under the yoke, and remarkable thing, she likes it! … She loves the slavery of love.’ For Matigny, male dominance was both natural and Godgiven. He urged men to be gentle and to ‘cover their authority with ﬂowers’. Each wife could best convert her husband to patriotism through cajoling him and bending her will to his.26 But this emphasis on female submission was far from uniform. While scholars have tended to read Rousseauist gender ideology as dominant and quite uniﬁed, in fact, its inﬂuence was markedly uneven and malleable. Moralists and activists often appropriated some of Rousseau’s ideas and rejected others. Many revolutionaries assimilated his stress on women’s moral power but rejected his insistence on female dependence and docility. As the ever irrepressible Etta Palm d’Aelders chided, ‘To form free men, it is necessary to know liberty.’ In the hands of some theorists, the new politics emphasizing equality or individual rights trumped Rousseauist ideologies of submission and supplied an explicit language for attacking an excessive male authority which undercut the ideal workings of companionate marriage. The petitioner William Williams stated before the Legislative Assembly in 1792, ‘To disregard equality, the principle that conserves all domestic unions; to claim to dominate one over the other … is to demonstrate the symptoms of incompatibility; this provokes the dissolution of a contract, signed too lightly.’27

Marriage and Citizenship in the French Revolution 641

When the revolutionaries emphasized the need for rights and the political power of women to cultivate patriotism within marriage, they opened up space for a vocal, feminist critique of marital tyranny. In the early 1790s, a ﬂood of petitions, pamphlets, women’s cahiers, and speeches at political clubs invoked women’s crucial moral role within marriage as grounds for reforming marriage along more equitable lines. Two points received particular stress. First, for companionate marriage and mutual regeneration to work, women could not simply be frivolous nothings – seductive and subservient. Second, both as individual citizens and as forces of regeneration, women should be granted greater legal rights and control over property within marriage. With its systematic reinforcement of female servility and airiness, Old Regime marriage had turned women into childish and resentful rivals of men, claimed Madame Fumelh. In her Mémoire sur le divorce, she protested that forming women as light-headed nothings converted them into slaves who resented their despotic husbands. As a result most marriages became riddled with ‘internecine warfare, hatred, scorn, and intrigue’. For men’s own good, they should do away with this emphasis on woman’s seductive charm, suppleness, and sacriﬁce, and offer them an education which would make them worthier and more well prepared for companionate marriage. This upbringing and education would foster women’s inherent moral capabilities, emotional sensitivity, intellectual delicacy, and vivacious imagination. As many commentators asserted, if women were to exercise charm on behalf of the patrie, they must be freed from the ﬂirtatious and degrading task of pleasing men with coquettry. They should raise themselves above the most superﬁcial and frothy forms of political seduction. A leading Jacobin woman in Dijon demanded in 1793: ‘Do you wish to hold women forever in a state of childhood or of frivolity? … It is time to bring about a revolution in the customs of women; it is time to reestablish their natural dignity.’28 Many authors and activists argued that the revolutionary context and reformed marriage transformed women in a striking fashion: they would no longer be so gullible and easily duped by pretty words with no meaning. According to this view, far from simply creating domestic subordination, the Revolution generated public, political allegiances that informed and revolutionized private ties. As clubmember Maugras laid forth the Besançon women’s plan to enlighten consciences and propagate liberty, she stated simply, ‘Raised to the heights of the Revolution, we prefer liberty and equality to all the platitudes of love.’ In a 1792 speech to the ‘Amies de la Constitution’ of Bordeaux, Marie Dorbe denounced the laws that degraded women and left them ‘reduced to housework and the education of children’. Urging unmarried members to invest their love lives with revolutionary patriotism and conversion, she proclaimed, ‘Tell them {your lovers} that the language of ﬂattery and romance (langue romanesque) no longer pleases you, and that now you only love frankness and truth.’ If women were to exercise intimate political persuasion, male-female companionship must now rest on transparency and truth rather than the ageold games of trickery in love.29

642 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

Some of these theorists explicitly critiqued Rousseau’s emphasis on female subservience and drew a direct linkage between woman’s moral, political role and her demand for greater legal rights within marriage. Madame de Cambis, a member of the Cercle Social, commented that Rousseau had not fully recognized how women needed to be ‘rehabilitated’ and lifted above the level of degrading superﬁcialities, and that had not become possible until the current ‘salutary crisis’. She pointed out that marriage and motherhood – the very acts that fulﬁlled woman’s duty to society – deprived her of the right to property and left her ‘without rights, without property, without status (état), without power’. She demanded the restoration of this right, not out of pity for women’s unhappiness, but because it was a natural, inherent right. Without this right, women could not be citizens, nor could they adequately perform their crucial role of molding men’s morals and raising the nation’s children. ‘If we want morals, then women have to respect themselves (s’honorer); and if we want them to respect themselves, then we have to give them back their rights, their property; all of these are as holy, as sacred as the rights and property of men.’30 Madame de Cambis’s words point to another strong vein within the discourse on marriage that I can only begin to suggest here. The Revolution unleashed a torrent of demands in favor of granting women greater rights within marriage or within the family more generally. Many clubmembers and authors expressly rejected the notion that since wives had potent, seductive sway over their husbands, they had no need for legal rights within marriage. ‘In vain shall one try to persuade {women} that their captivity is only apparent, and that they exercise a real empire through the force of their charms’, proclaimed the poster the ‘Avis aux Mères’ angrily. This anonymous author assailed marriage as an unequal contract and insisted upon the right to divorce, better education, and shared administration of communal property. In his 1793 Déclarations des droits des amants, Plaisant de La Houssaye offered a point-by-point defense of perfect reciprocity and equality between the couple: he advocated communal property, equal rights, and shared sovereignty. Nor should either one be master over the other, for love was governed only by ‘their gentle, constant, and mutual will’.31 While some men championed greater civil rights for women and called for power-sharing between spouses, female petitioners and pamphleteers were especially likely to highlight women’s rights. From the provinces came poorly penned petitions defending divorce, freedom from arranged marriage, egalitarian inheritance for daughters, and greater control over property for wives. Early petitioners urged on the lawmakers who gradually put versions of these laws into effect, and those lobbying later in the 1790s demanded the continuation or improvement of these new social and legal practices. While some petitioners simply couched these demands in rights ideology, others noted that greater stature for women could improve the dignity and mutual regard of husband and wife, so necessary for the new political role that marriage should play. ‘A man who knows that his wife can demand a divorce will not treat her like a slave and will not think of himself as the great lord {grand seigneur}’, promised Femme Berlin in 1792. Likewise, in 1794, Femme Girard berated the Convention for its

Marriage and Citizenship in the French Revolution 643

law requiring wives to initiate divorce in their husband’s place of residence. She pointed out their lack of logic; after all ‘you have restored equality’, she reminded the deputies. The residence law fell short of ‘the essence of our current legislation … to eliminate all difﬁculties that hinder the exercise of citizens’ rights.’ Two women from Rouen made explicit their view that a new form of politics and state demanded a realignment of gender power within the household: ‘If we ﬁnally accept as an organizing principle that the strong will no longer impose laws on the weak in the great family of the State, why would we allow it in our own families?’32 In short, even as the Revolution placed tremendous emphasis on the centrality of marriage, heterosexual love, and gender complementarity, it also opened up spaces for vibrant debate over the nature of ideal gender characteristics and gender relationships within the couple. In certain ways, the newly envisioned relationship between politics and marriage – the politicization of sensibilité – gave added strength to calls for conjugal reform and provoked critique of reducing women to superﬁcial seductresses. At the same time, reforms in the civil laws governing marriage not only fueled this debate but also created spaces for attempting to transform marriage in practice.

Conclusion: marriage, citizenship, and gender The revolutionaries infused marriage with political, legal, and cultural importance in constructing citizenship. Forging the link between citizenship and marriage took place both in the realm of law and state-building and in the realm of political culture. In the process of building the secular state and deﬁning the rights-bearing individual, law-makers in the Legislative Assembly redeﬁned marriage as a civil contract binding individuals to each other and to the nation-state. Public agitation and the ideology of natural rights encouraged them to imagine this contract as one that could be broken and had to be freely chosen; perhaps its control should even be equally shared by husband and wife. In 1792–93, as the deputies struggled to ﬁnd a form of marriage built on both legal individualism and state cohesion, they undermined lineage practices, curtailed parental authority over marriage choice, grounded the nuptial contract fully in state rather than church law, made divorce accessible to both men and women, and even passed the principle that women and men should have equal administration over their communal marital property. At the same time, outside the halls of the legislature, the revolutionaries invested marriage with great political and moral responsibility in the refashioning of revolutionary citizenship. Building on and beyond the Old Regime valorization of sentimental marriage, they gloriﬁed and politicized the power of heterosexual love. Revolutionaries hoped it would integrate the splintering force of juridical individualism. In addition, as the Revolution radicalized, it increasingly degraded traditional sources of cultural authority and unity, including religion, monarchy, corporate bodies of myriad sorts, the lineage family, and paternal authority. As these Old Regime sources of certainty and structure

644 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

tumbled, the natural bonds of conjugal love and family unity assumed ever greater importance as an imagined source of political transformation as well as social cohesion. Divisions between a private realm and a public one became unimaginable, as deputies in Paris, male and female moralists, and women’s club members from Pau to Besançon all argued in varying ways for building politics out of intimacy. The revolutionaries demanded that the institution of marriage perform a crucial act of integration: like citizenship, this relationship should simultaneously embody individual freedom and attachment to the social whole. In this sense, expectations for the miniature social contract of marriage mirrored and undergirded the tension built into the broader republican goal of harmonizing individual rights and liberty on the one hand with political regeneration and social unity on the other. After the Terror, when fears of social disintegration increasingly outweighed the republican commitment to individual rights and equality, revolutionary leaders would redouble emphasis on marriage and the conjugal family as sources of moral cohesion, and they gradually abandoned their earlier conﬁdence that the family could also encompass individual liberty and equality. In a growing backlash against the challenges to male authority in families, the rights of wives came under particular attack, culminating after the Revolution in the Napoleonic Civil Code that sharply curtailed women’s civil rights. During the Revolution itself, this exploration of marriage should contribute to our understanding of notions of maleness and femaleness. The idea that intimate relationships could contribute to making citizens was based on widespread assumptions about the distinct and complementary gender contributions of wives and husbands. Although its impact on practice was uneven, this conﬁdence in the power of gender complementarity held immense staying power in the French imaginary of gender into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.33 In the shorter term, it contributed to crafting certain ideals of revolutionary masculinity and femininity. The Revolution marked an especially striking shift in ideals of maleness. In the 1790s, republican gender ideology did not root men’s identity and stature in their position as commanding husbands or patriarchs within the home. Rather, republican masculinity should encompass both energetic, unﬂinching dedication to the Nation and humane sensibilité both inside and outside the household. At times, these visions of masculinity competed against one another. The new politics required fraternal bonds and stoic valor, but also a kind of moral acuity and sensitivity that could only come from intimate relationships and companionship with women. The true patriot married as a companion, for marriage joined this individual to the social whole, allowed him to embrace fraternity while protecting him from the effeminizing overtones of homosexuality, and provided a space for the politicized love of a woman to foster his moral qualities. These images of maleness left room for debating what the nature of femininity and male-female relations should be. Within the contestation over gender ideals, virtually all conjugal models called upon wives to be exceptionally dedicated to

Marriage and Citizenship in the French Revolution 645

the social whole via the family and to cultivate their husbands’ sensibilité, strength, and political allegiance to the Revolution. But these commentators did not uniformly and simply embrace Rousseauist visions of marriage based on sweetly submissive wives. Rather, this model competed with others and often faced ardent criticism for turning husbands into tyrants and reducing wives to subservience, silliness, and seduction. Female and male marriage reformers painted alternate scenarios of companionate marriages in which wives shared contractual rights, affection, education, and control over property with their husbands. Some commentators embraced independence, political criticism, and equal power within marriage as crucial components of revolutionary femininity. At the same time, changes in law offered women as well as men new status as civil individuals within family and state. Women did not win the full exercise of political rights, nor did the state overturn male authority in marriage. Wives faced a gendered web of moral expectations within the family. But women nonetheless gained a louder political voice within home and state and gained unprecedented civil rights as legal individuals, including the crucial rights to choose their own nuptial partners, break the conjugal bond, and make demands on the state as juridical individuals. These changes made themselves felt in the day-to-day practices of intimacy, as thousands of French women entered family courts to win greater inheritance or escape unhappy marriages. My purpose here is not to idealize revolutionary marriage or its possibilities for women, but rather to emphasize that constructing citizenship opened up cultural and legal contestation over gender dynamics and domestic roles in distinct ways. The Revolution simultaneously endowed women with new civil rights within family and state, encouraged a moralizing, domestic role for women, and fostered vibrant debate over the nature of that role and over the nature of male-female relations.

Notes 1. Courrier de l’Hymen, ou Journal des dames, #1, 20 février 1791, and #4, 3 mars 1791. 2. This argument has been most forcefully articulated by Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 1988). On women and domesticity, see also Madelyn Gutwirth, The Twilight of the Goddesses: Women and Representation in the French Revolutionary Era (New Brunswick, NJ, 1992); Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1992), ch. 3. 3. For interpretations of liberalism and republicanism as contributing to the limitation of women’s rights, see Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, 1988); Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), chs 1–2; Geneviève Fraisse, Muse de la Rasion. La démocratie exclusive et la différence des sexes (Aix-en-Provence, 1989); Christine Fauré, La démocratie sans les femmes: essai sur le libéralisme en France (Paris, 1985); Linda Kerber, No Constitutional Right to be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (NY, 1998); Isabell Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815 (Ithaca, NY, 1996); Christine Hunefeldt, Liberalism in the Bedroom: Quarreling Spouses in Nineteenth-Century Lima (University Park, Pa., 2000). Historians, such as Kerber, Hunefeldt, and Scott, who emphasize the gender constrictions of republicanism and liberalism also stress women’s creativity in working these systems. For a critique of Pateman’s and Landes’s theories in the American context, see Rosemarie Zagarri’s piece in this volume,

646 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

‘Women’s Rights before Seneca Falls’. For a critique of Kerber’s notion of republican motherhood, see Jeanne Boydston, ‘Making Gender in the Early Republic: Judith Sargent Murray and the Revolution of 1800’, in The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic, eds James Horn, Jan Lewis, and Peter Onuf (Charlottesville, Va., 2002), 240–66. Nicolas de Bonneville, Nouveau code conjugal, établi sur les bases de la Constitution, et d’après les principes et les considérations de la loi déja faite et sanctionée, qui a préparé et ordonné ce nouveau code (Paris, 1792), 6. Bourjon, Le droit commun de la France et la coutume de Paris réduit en principes (1747), as cited in Jacques Mulliez, ‘Droit et morale conjugale: Essai sur l’histoire des relations personnelles entre époux’, Revue historique 278 (1987): 35–106, 54. Muraire, in J. Mavidal and E. Laurent, eds, Archives parlémentaires de 1787 à 1860. Receuil complet des débats législatifs et politiques des chambres françaises (Paris, 1879), première série, (hereafter AP), 38: 531–7, 15 Feb. 1792, Rapport sur le mode à employer pour constater les naissances, mariages et décès; Gohier, AP 45: 389, 19 June 1792. Muraire, AP, 38: 531–3, 15 Feb. 1792; Jollivet, AP 41: 422–24, 432–47, qu. 436, 10 Apr. 1792, Projet de décret sur le mode de constater les naissances, mariages et décès. Diderot, ‘Célibat’ in Encylopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751–72), ARTFL Encyclopédie Project; Carol Blum, Strength in Numbers: Population, Reproduction, and Power in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore, 2002); Jacqueline Hecht, ‘Célibat, stratégies familiales et essor du capitalisme au XVIIIe siècle: réalités et représentations’, in Ménages, familles, parentèles et solidarités dans les populations méditerranéennes (Paris, 1996), 257–84; Mulliez, ‘Droit et morale conjugale’, 48–55; Jean-Claude Perrot, ‘Les économistes, les philosophes et la population’, in Histoire de la population française. De la renaissance à 1789, ed. Jacques Dupaˆquier (Paris, 1988), 499–551. Le mariage des prêtres (Paris, 1790), 97–9. Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York, 1989), 522; Jacques Godechot, Les Institutions de la France sous la Révolution et l’Empire (Paris, 1968), 167; Slogan quoted in Marcel Reinhard, André Armengaud, and Jacques Dupaˆquier, Histoire générale de la population mondiale (Paris, 1968), 289; Jacques Gélis, ‘L’Enfant et l’évolution de la conception de la vie sous la Révolution’, in L’Enfant, la famille, et la Révolution française, ed. Marie-Françoise Lévy (Paris, 1990), 69–77. Vergniaud, AP 41: 419, 10 Apr. 1792. Gohier, AP 45: 390, 19 June 1792; Bonneville, Nouveau code conjugal. Muraire, AP, 38: 531–7, 15 Feb. 1792; Durand de Maillane, AP 26: 166–72, 17 May 1791; Lasource, AP 46: 214 & 216, 7 July 1792; François de Neufchâteau, AP 40: 71, 17 Mar. 1792. These laws all passed in Aug.–Sept. 1792. On the politics of Aug.–Sept. 1792, see JeanLouis Halpérin, L’impossible Code Civil (Paris, 1994), 100–1. On anti-patriarchal sentiment, see Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1992), ch. 2. Aubert-Dubayet, AP 49: 117–18, 30 Aug. 1792. On divorce in practice, see Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley, 2004), ch. 3. Pons de Verdun, Lecointe-Puyraveau, AP 77: 679–80, 6 brumaire an II (27 Oct. 1793). Gohier, AP 45: 390, 19 June 1792. David Denby, Sentimental Narrative and the Social Order in France, 1760–1820 (Cambridge, England and NY, 1994); Joan DeJean, ‘Notorious Women: Marriage and the Novel in Crisis in France (1690–1715)’, The Yale Journal of Criticism 4 (1991): 67–85; Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley, 1993), ch. 6; Joan Hinde Stewart, Gynographs: French Novels by Women of the Late Eighteenth Century (Lincoln, Neb., 1993). Letter from Lequinio, député de Morbihan, in Moniteur 48: 17 février 1792. Gutwirth, Twilight of the Goddesses, chs. 3 & 4; Elke Harten and Hans-Christian Harten, Femmes, Culture et Révolution, trans. Bella Chabot et al. (Paris, 1989), 37–46 and ch. 5;

Marriage and Citizenship in the French Revolution 647

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

Hunt, Family Romance, chs. 4 & 6; Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, 129–38. More recently, Lynn Hunt has questioned the importance of republican motherhood in the revolutionary imaginary: ‘Male Virtue and Republican Motherhood’, in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, 4: 195–208. Suzanne Desan, ‘“Constitutional Amazons”: Jacobin Women’s Clubs in the French Revolution’, in Re-Creating Authority in Revolutionary France, ed. Bryant T Ragan and Elizabeth Williams (New Brunswick, NJ, 1992), 11–35; Discours fait et prononcé par Françoise Sanson, Veuve Duval, dans la séance publique des Amis de la Constitution, le 15 avril: Avis aux dames portées pour la Contre-Révolution (Caen, n.d.), 7; Pierre Trahard, La sensibilité révolutionnaire (1789–1794) (Paris, 1936), 199; ‘Registre de la société des amies des vrais amis de la Constitution à Ruffec’, ed. M. Chauvet, Révolution française 46 (1904): 247–78, 248, 258–9 {also published with membership list in Bulletin historique et philologique 3 and 4 (1902): 528–30}. On virile fraternity, see Antoine de Baecque, The Body Politic: Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary France, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, 1997, orig. 1993), 140–6; Marcel David, Fraternité et Révolution française (Paris, 1987); Hunt, Family Romance, ch. 3, esp. 67–70; Jacques-Louis Ménétra, Journal of My Life, ed. Daniel Roche (NY, 1986); Albert Soboul, The Sans-Culottes, trans. Rémy Inglis Hall (Princeton, 1980), 144–62. Moyens de rendre le clergé citoyen, ou le Mariage des prêtres (N.p., n.d., c. 1790–91), 14; Lynn Hunt, ‘Pornography and the French Revolution’, in The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800 (New York, 1993), 301–39. On MarieAntoinette, see Hunt, Family Romance, 91–114; Elizabeth Colwill, ‘Pass as a Woman, Act like a Man: Marie-Antoinette as Tribade in the Pornography of the French Revolution’, in Homosexuality in Modern France, eds Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan (New York, 1996), 54–79, qu. 63. Chabot, cited in Trahard, Sensibilité révolutionnaire, 125. Although the Constituent Assembly decriminalized sodomy by omitting it from its 1791 penal code, the revolutionary era did not valorize homosexuality. See Michael David Sibalis, ‘The Regulation of Male Homosexuality in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, 1789–1815’, in Merrick and Ragan, 80–101. On festivals, see Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, 187–95, 179–80; Michel Vovelle, Les métamorphoses de la fête en Provence de 1750 à 1820 (Paris, 1976), 194–206. Dominique Godineau, ‘Masculine and Feminine Political Practice during the French Revolution, 1793–Year III’, in Women and Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution, eds Harriet B. Applewhite and Darline G. Levy (Ann Arbor, 1990), 61–80; Lettre des Amies de la Constitution aux sociétés patriotiques des femmes, Journal patriotique de la Côte-d’Or, 20 Sept. 1791; BM Dijon, Fonds Juigné, no. 58, recueil 112, P. Baillot, ‘Chant de la Côte-d’Or pendant la guerre de la liberté’; Vedette, 24 July 1792, as cited in Henriette Perrin, ‘Femmes de Besançon’, Annale revolutionnaires, 9 (1917): 629–53 and 10: 37–63, 505–32, 654–72, and 9: 641–2. Charles Rousseau, Essai sur l’éducation et l’existence civile et politique des femmes dans la constitution française (Paris, 1790), 23; L’homme mal marié, ou Questions à l’auteur du Divorce (Paris, n.d, c. 1789–90), esp. 6–7; Les funestes effets de la vertu de la chasteté dans les prêtres, ou Mémoire de M. Blanchet, curé de Cours, près la Réole en Guyenne, avec observations médicales, suivi d’une adresse envoyée à l’Assemblée nationale (Paris, 1791), 7; Motion faite dans l’Assemblée générale du district de Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, pour le mariage des Prêtres (Paris, 1789), 6 & 12; Plaintes et doléances de M. l’Abbé T***, Ch. du. C. de B., concernant le célibat ecclésiastique, adressées à MM. les Députés composant l’assemblée des Etats-Généraux (n.p., 1789), 29. On transparency, see Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1984), 44–6; Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: La Transparence et l’obstacle (Paris, 1957). On male sensibilité, see Anne Vincent-Buffault, Histoire des larmes, XVIIIe–XIXe siècles (Paris, 1986), ch. 5; Hunt, Family Romance, ch. 2. Brissot as quoted in William Reddy, ‘Sentimentalism and Its Erasure: The Role of Emotions in the Era of the French Revolution’, Journal of Modern History 72 (2000): 109–52; Denby,

648 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

26.

27. 28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

33.

Sentimental Narrative, 139–45. On gendered sensibility in the American context, see Sarah Knott, ‘Sensibility and the American War for Independence’, American Historical Review, 109: 19–40 (2004), and ‘Benjamin Rush’s Ferment: Enlightenment Medicine and Female Citizenship’ in this volume. Dominique Lacombe, curé constitutionnel de la paroisse Saint Paul de Bordeaux, Discours à l’occasion de la loi qui permet le divorce, prononcé dans l’église de Saint Paul (Bordeaux, 1793), 24–5; {Matigny}, Traité philosophique, 67, 80–1, 112–13. Etta Palm d’Aelders, Discours lu à la Confédération des Amis de la Vérité (Caen, 1791), 3–4; AN DIII 361, Mémoire de William Williams, jurisconsulte anglais, 19 Mar. 1792. (Madame Fumelh), Mémoire sur le divorce; Annales de l’éducation du sexe, No. 1, c. Mar. 1790; Révolutions de Paris, 16–23 February 1793, Réponse de la citoyenne BlandinDesmoulins de Dijon au citoyen Prudhomme, 10 February 1793. For analysis of prerevolutionary women’s writings on female education, sensibility, and Rousseau, see in this volume Jean Bloch, ‘Discourses of Female Education in the Writings of EighteenthCentury French Women’. Lettre de la citoyenne Maugras, c. Mar. 1793, as quoted in Perrin, ‘Femmes de Besançon’, 10:42–3; AM Bordeaux I78, Discours de Mlle Dorbe à la Société des amies de la Constitution pour l’anniversaire du grand homme Mirabeau, 10 Apr. 1792. Madame de Cambis, Du sort actuel des femmes (Paris, n.d., c. Sept. 1791) 7–11. ‘Avis aux mères de famille’, late 1789, poster reproduced in Révolution et les femmes, vol. 3; {Madame Cailly}, Griefs et plaintes des femmes malmariées (n.p., n.d.), 19–20; Plaisant de La Houssaye, Déclaration des droits des amants in La Constitution des Amours (Paris, 1793), as quoted by Harten and Harten, Femmes, culture et Révolution, 165. AN DIII 361, Pétition de la femme Berlin au Président de l’Assemblée nationale, 27 Sept. 1792.; AN DIII 361, Pétition de la femme Girard à la Convention nationale, n.d., sent to the Comité de législation 9 pluviôse an II (28 Jan. 1794); Remonstrances des mères et ﬁlles normandes de l’ordre du tiers (Rouen, 1789). In Women’s Words: Essay on French Singularity, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago, 1997; orig., 1995), Mona Ozouf has interpreted gender complementarity as a social practice, rather than as an ideal that inﬂuenced but did not totally determine social practice. Echoing the revolutionaries’ own visions, she has argued that unifying gender relations and a liberating state became a social reality in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, pre-empting the need to develop a strong feminist movement in France. On the staying power of notions of gender complementarity into the 20th c., see Michèle Riot-Sarcey, ‘The Difﬁculties of Gender in France: Reﬂections on a Concept’, Gender and History 11 (1993): 489–98.

9.5 Benjamin Rush’s Ferment: Enlightenment Medicine and Female Citizenship in Revolutionary America Sarah Knott

Atlantic history has yet to make Enlightenment a key subject of analysis. Certainly some of the cold war Atlanticists built their thesis of a liberal ‘Atlantic civilization’ in part on the backs of the philosophes. Their lumières generated a certain uniformity of ideas in rejecting tradition and espousing freedom, equality and natural rights.1 But as the Atlantic paradigm has become not just white, but also black and even green (the Irish contribution), its concerns have been characterised less by the movement of ideas than by that of people: ‘traders, settlers, and migrants’ to use the terms of one recent introduction to the British Atlantic world. To the extent that ideas are under scrutiny, they are treated largely as a way of getting to identity, whether as religion, gender, class, or race.2 The ‘oceanic interculture’ proposed by Joseph Roach can invite us to examine Enlightenment in the Atlantic world. A vibrant transatlantic print culture provided its material possibility. To take a singular example, Mary Catherine Moran traces the travel, translation, rewriting and reprinting of a work of Enlightenment historiography between Parisian salon culture and urban North America via an Edinburgh print shop; academician Antoine-Léonard Thomas’s Essai was ‘improved’ and even misattributed to Thomas Paine. Revolution sharpened and shifted such easy transnationalism. It has been a truism since the late eighteenth century, after all, that America’s revolution realised European Enlightenment. French philosophe Anne Robert Turgot wrote to British radical Richard Price, with an optimistic sense of Atlantic circularity: ‘They are the hope of the human race; they may well become its model.’3 Tracing a northern and largely anglophone axis, this essay examines one hopeful element of Enlightenment in the Atlantic world – medicine – and its less than hopeful formulation of gender, sex and female citizenship. If Peter Gay was perhaps over-stating the case when he claimed medicine as the main ‘cure’ offered by Enlightenment and the very foundation of its optimism – ‘nothing after all was better calculated to buoy up men’s feelings about life than growing hope for life itself’ – medicine certainly took its place among the ‘sciences’ of man. The Enlightenment medical profession saw health as key to human emancipation from fear, suffering and want, and medicine as central to practical humanitarianism and to ‘philosophical’ concerns like taxonomy and the natural 649

650 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

and social order.4 I argue that in the second half of the eighteenth century Enlightenment medicine was transmitted across the Atlantic to the British colonies, where it was rapidly institutionalized by a generation of physicians. It did not remain unchanged for long. Under the pressures of the republican ideals and nationalist imperatives of the American Revolution, and then of the spectacle of revolution in France, Enlightenment medicine was transformed. The main subject of the transformed medicine was that man of enlightened sensibility and virtue, the new republican citizen. The hopeful and urgent goal was his moral improvement. But concerted attention was also paid to those differences which bounded and constrained citizenship in the early American republic, especially and uniquely, as we will see, the difference made by sex. *** The story of Enlightenment medicine in North America testiﬁes to the fertility of the Atlantic paradigm, for in the mid to late eighteenth century, European, particularly Scottish, medicine was transplanted to the colonies almost wholesale. In the 1760s, that decade in which Britain’s Atlantic empire reached its apogee, the ﬁrst colonial American medical school institutionalized enlightened medicine. Each of its ambitious young professors had trained in Edinburgh. The most luminary of the Scottish medics, William Cullen, generously endorsed the American school, situated in the largest colonial city of Philadelphia, as having ‘a better chance for transmitting what can or should pass to posterity than any College on this side of the Water’.5 This Enlightenment medicine was based in nervous physiology. Where once iatromechanics and the humours had explained the body’s natural and diseased workings, now these explanations were found in the ‘sensibility’ of the nerves and the bodily system. In Philadelphia and in Edinburgh, as in Montpellier and Gottingen, ‘sensibility’ was pathologized in the form of disorders like hysteria, hypochondria and melancholia, which were all recharacterised as nervous conditions. Of the move to nervous physiology, Philadelphia Quaker and Edinburgh medical student George Logan wrote to his brother: ‘As the Boerhaavians accounted for every disease of the body from … the ﬂuids, … Dr. Cullen refers them to … the nervous system’. As Cullen himself famously put it: ‘almost the whole of the diseases of the human body might be called NERVOUS’.6 In the late eighteenth century, hundreds of medical students from up and down the northern Atlantic seaboard attended the school in Philadelphia. Dozens more continued to polish their training in Edinburgh, as well as in London and Paris.7 This might, indeed, be loosely described as an oceanic interculture, if one in which the North Americans played poor colonial cousins: a transatlantic network of physicians, with a locus in Europe, connected by experience, knowledge, friendship and correspondence. While in the School’s early years a number of approaches were taught – students were promised ‘parts of more than one system, without being forced by the authority of names or the rigour of laws, to assent to any of them’ – by the 1780s, Cullenism reigned.

Enlightenment Medicine and Female Citizenship 651

Nerve-minded physicians were joined by local apothecaries and other entrepreneurs. The Pennsylvania Gazette advertised ‘the eminent Dr. Hill’s nervous medicines, universally esteemed in all nervous, hysterical and hypochondriacal diseases’, which arrived in shipments from London. Mineral springs catering for those with ‘relaxed’, ‘debilitated’ and ‘weakened’ nervous constitutions aped the names of English spa towns: Bristol, Harrowgate and the like.8 But there was also resistance to such fertile – and proﬁtable – Atlanticism. Physician John Foulke told the members of the American Philosophical Society that their ‘honest forefathers’ had in fact left behind ‘Hysteria’, ‘madness’ and a ‘long train of nervous complaints’ in ﬂeeing their ‘European Oppressors’ for the New World. Nicholas Collin, Rector of the Swedish Churches in Pennsylvania, commented caustically on the frequency of nervous complaints in Europe owing to the widespread ‘indulgencies of a civilised life’. Locally-trained doctor William Currie agreed that America was a ‘favored portion of the world’ where man had ‘regained the native dignity of our species’. As Foulke explained it, the yawning gap of the Atlantic and the simple task of making a new society had separated the physical fate of colonists and Europeans: ‘change of climate together with their frugality & Industry secured to [our forefathers] and their Posterity a freedom from the tyranny of those hereditary Miseries’.9 Foulke’s pairing of tyranny and heredity echoed the political rhetoric of the recent revolution: this was the American Philosophical Society’s annual oration of 1789. William Currie made explicit the point. America was free of an aristocracy, of powerful ecclesiastical orders, of arbitrary kings, of venal Parliaments and of high taxes, hence the freedom from nervous disease. Like Foulke and Collin, he associated nervous disease with fashion, immoderation, corruption, luxury run amok and civilisation in decline. These were the symptoms of old Europe. From New England to the South, America was characterized rather by equality and by decent livings, the very bases of good health. ‘None of the enervating reﬁnements of luxury or dissipation’, Currie insisted, ‘are to be found here.’10 These insistences squared tidily with the prescriptive tenets of classical republicanism, for republicans should be neither luxurious nor dissipated nor overreﬁned, but rather independent, self-reliant, and reasonable. Such statements were more optimistic than factual. Even as Philadelphia enjoyed prestige as the new Republic’s ﬁrst capitol, its Public Dispensary, that monument to Enlightenment humanitarianism for the ‘indigent poor’, administered to (among others) hysterics and hypochondriacs. Botanist William Young collaborated on the production of an ‘American Balsam’ for those with similar debilities which, being prepared mainly from American plants, had ‘the best effect … as it is most natural to the constitution of the people’. Clients of one city book-shop could linger not just for the latest novels but for the more immediate sensations of a shot of electricity – a nervous stimulant – at two shillings and six pence a time. This scopious culture of nervous cures and disorders, plus devastating epidemics of Yellow Fever in 1793 and 1798, rather ﬂew in the face of cheery assertions of New World distinctiveness and the healthfulness of the republic. Currie, for one, acknowledged the number of nervous complaints among

652 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

the ‘ladies’ and in ‘the opulent and fashionable class of men’ due to sedentary life, not least, rather ominously, to the drinking of tea.11 Enlightenment medicine and the disorders it identiﬁed thus posed quite the dilemma to those determined to found a simple and healthy republican nation. This was the stage for innovation. *** No American physician sought to confront and resolve the dilemma of Enlightenment medicine and its nervous disorders as intensively and extensively as Benjamin Rush, once William Cullen’s greatest American devotee. On Cullen’s death in 1790 Rush told the College of Physicians that they had lost a ‘distinguished citizen of the republic of medicine’: using a by now thoroughly wellworn metaphor of Enlightenment he pictured that ‘although, like the sun, he shone in a distant hemisphere, yet many of the rays of his knowledge have fallen upon this quarter of the globe’. Rush judged Cullen’s stature to be among the leaders of the Enlightenment enquiry into the natural world: ‘Ever since [coy Nature] was driven from the heart, by the discovery of the circulation of the blood, she has concealed herself in the brain and nerves. Here she has been pursued by Dr. Cullen … no candid man will ever explain the whole of [the operations of nature] without acknowledging the foundation of his enquiries was laid by [Cullen’s] discoveries.’ What Newton was to astronomy, and Franklin was to electricity, Cullen was to medicine.12 Rush swam in the same politicized waters as Foulke, Currie and Collin, all colleagues in the American Philosophical Society. In the late 1770s, he had been a critic of British tyranny and an enthusiastic proponent of independence, and like Currie a surgeon in the continental army. The war won, in 1787–8 he was an ardent supporter of the federal constitution.13 (The detractors of ‘Dr Rush’ during Pennsylvania’s federal Constitution debates had much sport in dubbing him ‘Galen’ and ‘Doctor Puff’).14 So how did the eulogist of Cullen’s immense ‘genius’ solve the worrisome signs of nervous disorder among the citizens of the new nation? Rush’s opportunity coincided neatly with his mentor’s death: in 1790 he left his post in chemistry and was made professor of the ‘Institutes’. Newly required to deliver an entire system of medicine, Rush moved sharply away from his Scottish teacher’s disturbing emphasis on the nerves. He took a pair of related steps. First, he replaced the nervous system with the vascular system (the heart and blood) as the chief locus of pathology and means of explanation for the body’s natural and diseased states. Second, he developed a unitary theory of disease which deﬁned all diseases as degrees of fever originating in irregular and convulsive motions in the vascular system. This was the basis for his notorious use of blood-letting. (Rush’s patients during the Yellow Fever epidemic of 1793 might be bled two or three times a day, often with more than a pint of blood removed each time.)15 To Cullen’s broad claim that almost all diseases might be labelled ‘NERVOUS’, Rush’s response was: ‘I will say that there is but one disease in the world[:] … irregular convulsive or wrong action in the [vascular] system

Enlightenment Medicine and Female Citizenship 653

affected.’ If physicians like Foulke and Currie fretted about the implications of nervous disorder in the republic, Rush’s developments (while admittedly retrograde in the re-emphasis on the blood) emptied out the worrying meanings of nervous disease. Hysteria, for example, became a fever in the vascular system like any other fever, indeed, the term only ﬁgured in the system at all ‘in conformity with custom’.16 The link between these theoretical medical developments and republican politics was made explicit by Rush himself. The ‘republican forms of government of the United States’ were ‘favourable to boldness and freedom of enquiry’. The ‘disorganisation’ of Rush’s old principles was, he told in his autobiography, owing to ‘the activity induced in my faculties by the evolution of my republican principles by … the American Revolution’. This self-styled ‘republican ferment’ articulated itself in a thoroughly energized environmentalism that connected those former principles to the artiﬁce and dangerous luxury of late eighteenth-century British society. Cullen had lived ‘in a country in which indolence – and luxury have let loose a number of new diseases’, diseases which were based ‘particularly [in] the nervous system’. His medical system was thus founded on laws ‘unfolded by the phenomena of the present artiﬁcial diseases of Great Britain’. In contrast, Rush’s simple system, with its ‘leading principle’ of disease as primally vascular, was properly appropriate to ‘the climate of our country’ and ‘the present state of society and manners’. Republican ferment indeed.17 Viewed in this light, Rush’s medical innovations are inseparable from the many other attempts at republican cultural innovation in these years: nationalist magazines such as the Columbian Magazine and the American Museum, for example, which sought to replace British literary imports, or Noah Webster’s bemusing determination to craft a uniquely American spelling and language.18 The logic of climatic and socio-historical environmentalism allowed Rush to reject the plausibility of British medicine and to set a properly American medicine in its place. Republican unease at the implications of nervous disease and the imperatives of building a distinctive American nation thus interrupted the easy transmission of Enlightenment medicine that had once made something of a continuous professional medical culture from Edinburgh to the North American mainland colonies. This was a complex interruption, however. For while the implications of theories focussing on nervous disorder compelled Rush’s rejection of Cullenism, nationalist concerns also propelled a second and more complex process: an extension of medicine from the body to the more mysterious workings of the mind and hence to morality. In an optimistic if logically uncomfortable twist, Rush endowed nervous sensibility – one of the hallmarks of Scottish Enlightenment medicine – with a renewed explanatory force as the moral foundation of the new republican citizen. Unlike Cullen, but in line with his politicized agenda, Rush used the format of his lectures to formalise the meeting-ground of medicine and ‘metaphysics’. The Scottish medical professoriat had speciﬁcally enjoined against physicians investigating the mind: John Gregory cagily warned against ‘this specious kind of

654 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

philosophy, which gives so much room for imagination, and so little for experiment’. With characteristic averment rather than argument, Rush contended rather that the history of the faculties and operations of the human mind was ‘the most certain of all kinds of knowledge’. Not only was it certain, it was ‘the most useful of all the sciences’, of interest to anyone who had ‘anything to do with the duties, the government, the interests and the health and happiness of man’. Quite a mandate.19 The ‘Institutes’ lectures, many manuscript volumes of closely packed, scored through and emphatic prose, crafted an elaborate architecture of the mind which drew on the faculty psychology of Scottish moral philosophy and the writings of pious English materialist David Hartley. The intricate mental ediﬁce had ten ‘faculties’ or internal capacities, instinct, memory, imagination, understanding, will, passions, principle of faith, moral faculty, conscience and sense of Deity. In various dynamic combinations, they in turn produced the operations of the mind: perception, association, judgement, reason and volition. Sensibility was neither a faculty nor an operation of the mind. It was the ‘power of having sensation excited from the action of impressions’ in every part of the body endowed with nerves, and hence the fundamental connection between the body and the sentient mind: two entities that were always entangled and never separable, that worked analagously to each other – Rush’s quickest intellectual reﬂex was to analogy – and that could be understood together by the laws of sensation. That is, sensibility fused body and mind and facilitated a synthetic theory of metaphysical medicine.20 More narrowly but even more importantly, sensibility was associated with an element of psychology of singular concern to those interested in the duties, governance, interests, health and happiness of mankind: the moral faculty, that ‘capacity in the human mind of distinguishing and choosing good and evil, or … virtue and vice’. Sensibility was ‘the avenue to the moral faculty’ and ‘everything which tends to diminish it tends to diminish morals’. Or, again, it was ‘the centinel of our moral faculty’ and the only guard for the mind from ‘the inroads of every possible vice’. 21 Set in a synthetic theory of body and mind, the implication was far-reaching and strikingly literal: there were ‘mechanical’ means for promoting morality. Light and darkness, hunger, even smells could inﬂuence the moral faculty. In a signal example, the ‘extraordinary wickedness of the people who live [near] … Mount Vesuvius’ was occasioned by ‘their being constantly exposed to the smell of sulphur emitted’.22 The resulting prescriptions went far beyond the removal of inhabitants from the mountain-sides of evil-smelling volcanoes. The ‘same republican ferment’ that had upturned former medical principles, the autobiography reported, led now to reformist commentaries on the widest variety of subjects concerning the republican citizen: education, philanthropy, public punishment.23 If the laws of sensation determined that sensibility was destroyed by passive habit but increased by active exercise, they decreed the support of philanthropic institutions such as the Public Dispensary which in treating the poor allowed sensibility ‘to be kept alive, by constant exercise’. Philanthropy was important less for the

Enlightenment Medicine and Female Citizenship 655

sake of its largely passive objects, than for securing benefactors’ morality and ﬂouting the much-touted classical lesson of necessary republican decline: Rush publicly enjoined that men should ‘keep sensibility alive, by a familiarity with scenes of distress from poverty and disease’.24 The new republican citizen, it was clear, should be characterized by the steady ﬂexing of sensibility. Few were as happily situated as the physician to practice what Rush professed: ‘by sympathizing with our fellow creatures’, he complacently promised his medical students, ‘we produce a sensibility in our tempers that is favourable to the growth of every virtue’.25 With the ringing optimism of the early post-revolutionary years Rush glimpsed perfectability itself in the application of these laws. The mastery of ‘mechanical’ means, he told members of the American Philosophical Society and Pennsylvania General Assembly, made it possible ‘to produce such changes in [man’s] moral character, as shall raise him to a resemblance of angels – nay more, even to the likeness of GOD himself’.26 Small wonder that Rush’s pronouncements were not conﬁned to medical lecture-halls but littered the pages of early national magazines. His homo was a creature of inﬁnite possibility, who would set the republic on a path towards heaven – and decidedly away from old Europe. But what of women? *** Thomas Jefferson was sceptical of medical system-builders succeeding ‘one another like shifting ﬁgures in a magic lantern’. Nonetheless, he hoped that ‘it is from this side of the Atlantic, that Europe, which has taught us so many things, will at length be led to sound principles in this branch of science’.27 If Jefferson’s expectation of west-east inﬂuence in medicine went initially unfulﬁlled, the afﬁrmation of inalienable rights and self-determination articulated in his Declaration of Independence of 1776 did, as Turgot put it, make the United States the hope and model for enlightened Europe. For many Americans, the fall of the Bastille and the calling of a National Assembly were beguiling and appropriate emulation. Flattered revellers at Fourth of July celebrations toasted to French success. But the guillotining of Louis XVI and the events of the Terror divided American responses and factionalized political culture. Like many others of conservative bent, Benjamin Rush was horriﬁed at the way in which the American Revolution seemed to be turning into the opening act of a secular drama of violent political liberation. The delight taken at the sight and sound of the guillotine, he told his students, was a perversion of the moral faculty. The ‘present state of things’ at home and abroad – this in 1794 – exhibited (in tellingly awkward prose) ‘the blackness of darkness in morals, government & religion’.28 French women drew the radical conclusions about women’s rights and citizenship that American women had not. In the revolutionary war, American women had petitioned, boycotted, rioted, fought, sought widows’ pensions, and formed temporary benevolent associations. With the exception of boycotting, a term and tactic novel to the patriot cause, these were traditional if politicizing

656 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

activities directed primarily to self-preservation, family and community. There had been no American antecedents to those French women’s clubs which now self-consciously demanded more political rights for women as women; no mocking and mimicking ‘Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne’ to a ‘Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen’. The most well-known of the few private letters unearthed that articulates something more – Abigail Adams’ ambiguous injunction to John Adams to ‘Remember the Ladies’ for ‘all men would be tyrants if they could’ – is best understood as a criticism of husbands’ exercise of unlimited power over their wives, not a thorough-going claim to political equality.29 Feminist reactions to the Declaration of the Rights of Man, like other elements of French revolutionary culture, crossed the Atlantic with newspapers and refugees. If the feminist Cercle Social was rarely mentioned in the American press, the activities of the outspoken Olympe de Gouges and Madame Roland were certainly reported. The terms ‘citizeness’ and ‘citess’ suddenly turned up in American nuptial documents, no doubt surprising more than one clerk. Virulent anti-French commentator and editor William Cobbett complained that women ‘began to talk about liberty and equality in a good masculine style’. Perhaps the most important feminist reaction to French rights talk in fact came from Britain: Mary Wollstonecraft’s bracing Vindication of the Rights of Woman, imported in its year of publication and reprinted in some hundreds of copies in Boston and Philadephia. Writing to her daughter and Benjamin Rush’s wife in 1792, literary salonnière Annis Boudinot Stockton liked its emphasis on female education and improvement; Wollstonecraft conﬁrmed her belief that ‘there is no sex in Soul’, men and women having ‘equal powers of mind, and understanding’. The narrator of Charles Brockden Brown’s ‘Rights of Woman’, one Mrs. Carter, meanwhile wittily told readers of the Weekly Magazine that women should have the right both to elect and to hold ofﬁce, for excluding women made no more sense than excluding ‘from all political functions everyone whose stature did not exceed ﬁve feet six inches’. Elias Boudinot’s Fourth of July oration aptly observed that ‘the Rights of Women are no longer strange sounds to an American ear’ being ‘now heard as familiar terms in every part of the United States’.30 As much as explanations internal to medical history, this swirling rights talk has been used to explain the strikingly concerted attention paid to sexual difference in late eighteenth-century continental Europe, especially the proliferation of medical theories of sexual dimorphism or complementarity. The deﬁnitive moment and place is deemed that of French revolution and reaction: moral anthropologists and physicians like Roussel, Cabanis and Moreau saw women as thoroughly and essentially different. They did so despite or perhaps even because of the presence of female intellectuals: at Autueil, for example, Anne Catherine Helvétius presided over a salon which generated medical theories of woman’s utter distinctiveness and lesser intellectualism. Early nineteenth-century France saw a rash of treatises which investigated in painstaking detail the absolute distinction between the sexes. The need formally to exclude women from the claims and gains of natural rights generated intellectual energy indeed. That this

Enlightenment Medicine and Female Citizenship 657

energy drew especially from medicine, a ﬁeld whose thoroughly direct scrutiny of the body made it hyper-resistant to female intellectual contribution, is surely no accident.31 The Federal Constitution, which Rush defended as ‘pregnant with an increase of freedom, knowledge and religion’, signals as well as any other document the political exclusions and indeed the embarassments of rights talk and republican citizenship in the young United States. (Many, of course, disagreed that the Constitution’s provisions were sufﬁcient to secure ‘the blessings of liberty’ and insisted on a bill of rights. Rush objected: rights were not to be bestowed by men in government for ‘we enjoy all our natural rights from a pre-occupancy, antecedent to the social state’ and it would be ‘absurd to frame a formal declaration that our natural rights are acquired from ourselves’.)32 The document did not treat Native Americans as part of the citizenry: identiﬁed as members of their own tribal sovereignties they were placed outside the body politic. There was more embarassment around a second exclusion: the enslaved. These ‘other persons’ – the term ‘slave’ was assiduously avoided – were collapsed awkwardly onto property: enslaved blacks counted as three-ﬁfths of a person for the purposes of state representation, as cargo of a resumed transatlantic trade, and as property to be protected on the crossing of state lines. Among free inhabitants meanwhile, women appeared nowhere at all. Their exclusion from political citizenship was secured in state constitutions which, the notorious and short-lived case of New Jersey aside, found them to be dependents and unworthy of suffrage. The fully endowed republican citizen, we can intuit, was a highly distinctive ﬁgure.33 Given what we know of continental European medical theory, were the same lines of difference and distinction constituted in Rush’s system of medicine in the years after 1790? Yes and no. The lectures described ﬁrst a monogenetic humankind blessed with sensibility; the moral faculty had a ‘universal and essential existence’ in the human mind. Cases and anecdotes of women as well as men, blacks as well as whites, surface in the lectures. We ﬁnd the child of a slave, a pair of brothers, a ‘lady’, a sailor, ‘a black slave in Virginia’, a New Jersey widow, the remarkable Benjamin Franklin (even at eighty-four, showing no signs of mental decay), Rush himself. The most frequent and typically the only line of difference in the medical writings was an innocuous one: moment in the life-cycle, or age. Born, maturing, declining, dying, this was a singular humanity.34 Native Americans were cordoned off from ‘We the people’ as members of tribal sovereignties and here they were sequestered by a punitive historical and environmental logic. Rush argued that some native American groups lacked morality not because of the ‘original constitution of their minds’, but due to a primitive mode of living that rendered dormant their moral faculties. Like the Scottish conjectural history writers examined by Sebastiani and Tomaselli, Rush perceived human history as a path of progress from savagery to civilisation. Native Americans were at an earlier and less civilized stage of history: their unforgivable ferocity was due to the cruel killing of animals for subsistence, depleting their moral sensibility and fuelling incessant warfare. History thus separated out native

658 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

Americans from those who properly belonged to the polity. Indeed, Rush imagined the republic as poised perfectly on a middle ground between the crude insensibility of native Americans to the west and the misplaced or excess sensibility of Europeans to the east: the ‘difference of Sensibility between persons in highly civil[ize]d & savage life’ could be seen in the contrast between, on the one hand, the ‘debilitated’ European who composes ‘dying sonnets to a fresh mistress every day, and sheds tears as he retreats after a refusal from each of them’ and, on the other, the native American who ‘views the whole sex with indifference, and disdains to acknowledge that he has ever felt for a moment a predilection for any One of them’.35 Though advocating the Constitution as fertile with freedom, Rush must have shared the awkwardness in the circumlocutious provisions for dark-skinned ‘other persons’. The document’s unsubtle silence on chattel slavery was consequent on a growing divide between North and South, between those states slowly committing to gradual – very gradual – emancipation, and those committed to slave-holding. Rush had been the most vocal non-Quaker critic of slavery in the decade and a half before gradual emancipation in Pennsylvania (1780) and in the early republic he reafﬁrmed to his medical students that slavery was ‘as repugnant to the health, as it is to the morals, & general happiness of mankind’. Where southerner Thomas Jefferson argued for the forced repatriation of enslaved blacks owing to a difference and inferiority ‘ﬁxed in nature’, Rush drew rather on an antislavery inheritance of religious conviction and humanitarian benevolence to imagine blacks as the lowest ranks of American society, in simple need of freedom and moral rejuvenation. If he deemed blacks in the West Indies to support surgery more easily than ‘white people’ because of their lesser sensibility, the logic was environmental not essential difference. The title of a short essay composed for the Columbian Magazine makes the point most clearly: ‘An Account of the Diseases Peculiar to the Negroes in the West Indies, and Which are Produced by Their Slavery.’ Slavery was the peculiarity; again environment – this time a morally repellant institution which could be inchmeal eradicated – explained human difference. The modern ‘racial’ differentiation of sensibility in American medicine would await other thinkers later in the nineteenth century.36 The small number of blacks in the North and the sheer gradualism of the Pennsylvania legislation – providing for children born to slaves after 1780 to gain freedom after serving until their twenty-eighth birthday, if they were male, and after their twenty-ﬁrst, if they were female, leaving unrelieved all slaves born before it – meant that emancipation posed little threat to the social order.37 Rights talk about women, no longer a strange sound to American hearing by the early 1790s, had more dangerous and immediate potential. Rush is well-known as a chief male author of a new ideology of womanhood, an ideology ﬁrst dubbed ‘republican motherhood’ by Linda Kerber, though now understood to be derived from Enlightenment as well as from republicanism, and concerned not just with the maternal role but with the entire moral reach of domesticity: the education of sons, the reﬁnement of male manners, the promotion of national virtue. American ideologues simply added a political edge to

Enlightenment Medicine and Female Citizenship 659

enlightened social histories of women; female reason and moral agency underpinned the republic. As Rush put it in an address to the Young Ladies Academy, made in those same months he was urging ratiﬁcation of the Constitution, given the equal share ‘all citizens’ had in newly secured freedom, women must instruct their sons ‘in the principles of liberty and government’. The cultivation of reason in ‘our ladies’ was ‘friendly to the order of nature, and to private as well as public happiness’. As subjects became citizens, existing gender hierarchies would be maintained but domesticity politicized. No natural rights here.38 The Young Ladies Academy speech has generated a scholarly quarrel over the exact elements of republican womanhood.39 But the real meat of Rush’s views on women – his response to female rights talk, the centrality of sensibility over reason to women’s moral authority – lay elsewhere, in a lecture wholly devoted to the female body and mind.40 Rush implied that his medical lectures described an unsexed body: they considered ‘those aspects of the animal economy, which belong alike to the male and female constitution’. In the structure of the lectures, women were placed as variants on that bodily constitutution. After the female lecture – largely a list of ‘more than’ and ‘less than’ peculiarities – the need for a separate section on men was abruptly dismissed: ‘little remains to be said; for all the general observations which I have delivered … apply to the male constitution; and most of them that did not, were mentioned in the last lecture’. Women were sexed as particular, and men were presented as universal.41 The female lecture found ‘degrees’ of ‘contrast’, ‘degrees’ of ‘inferiority’ and an ‘original’ difference between women and men. Femininity was stamped on each muscle, bone, and organ and etched on each element of the mind’s architecture. Body and mind had here as elsewhere a ‘corresponding history’; both were powerfully and analogously marked by sex. If history separated American citizens from native Americans outside the polity, essential difference was used in the more urgent task of separating women from male republican citizens. Rush asserted that there ‘is a natural and original difference between the mind of a woman and a man, as certainly as there is between their bodies’. The political context was thoroughly explicit; sometime after 1792, responding to the ‘ingenious and eloquent female author of the rights of Woman’ (Mary Wollstonecraft), he added that: ‘There is an original difference in the bodies and minds of men and women, stamped upon both in the womb by the hand of nature’, a clear ‘line’ between male and female. The idea the unnamed Wollstonecraft had ‘started’ (in fact, popularized and politicized, witness Annis Boudinot Stockton), of the difference between the male and female mind as attributable purely to education, was a medical nonsense.42 From Rush’s notes, we can detect that some of the additions and elaborations of female difference in the lecture drew – albeit utterly silently – on the French theorist Cabanis, placing him in line with continental European sexual incommensurability. But given the identiﬁcation of ‘many exceptions’, the claim was neither complete nor wholly unambiguous. ‘We ﬁnd as many female minds and bodies among men’, Rush stated baldly, ‘as we do masculine minds and bodies

660 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

among women’ – and this from a man who occasionally and perhaps begrudgingly could be found praising the odd female friend for her ‘masculine understanding’.43 Within this somewhat truncated essentialism, women were assigned a particular sensibility: ‘The nerves of women are more sensible than the nerves of men, and more susceptible to impressions of mind and body.’44 The analogous logic was attended to scrupulously in the account of the female mind that followed: if women had superior physiological sensibility, then they had superior morality. Before the American Philosophical Society in 1786, Rush had observed that it was due ‘to the connection between good morals and sympathy that the fair sex in every age, and every country, have been more distinguished for virtue, than men’. ‘How seldom’, he had asked rhetorically, ‘do we hear of a woman, devoid of humanity?’ Now he elaborated that women’s moral faculties were more ‘sensible’, more acute and more active. For this singularly inﬂuential a uthor of republican womanhood, women’s moral role was derived from their unique sensibility, underpinning a quicker and more sensitive moral sense, more than any novel appreciation of their rational capacities.45 More active sensibility: this was certainly a promising endowment. But the lecture also made the female moral faculty ‘more circumscribed’ and local in its ‘operations’. Rush posed it thus: ‘Women possess more kindness, more humanity, and more charity than men, but less benevolence. They are kind relations and neighbours, but how seldom to do we meet with a female citizen of the world?’ The latter term is an interesting one, capturing the peculiarly late eighteenth-century articulation of an admiration for worldly engagement beyond the cosy circle of family and community. Rush’s circuitous argument drew on a naturalized separation of roles: women have a position in the family and household; women have a superior physical and moral sensibility; women’s practice of that sensibility is restricted to individualized charity; one rarely meets a ‘female citizen of the world’. Women were not political citizens and nor were they turned outwards to the social monde.46 The constraining circuitry was disingenuous and prescriptive, not merely descriptive: this was the very moment that, in Philadelphia as in other northern cities, American women both black and white were forming the ﬁrst all-female reform societies. The worldly female citizen could be found too in his immediate circles; Rush was in correspondence with Cullen’s daughter Robina Miller – ﬂatteringly she addressed him as ‘Dear Father’ – who sought from him ‘what is passing on the other side of the Atlantic … both from personal attachment to America, & as a Citizen of the World’.47 Finally, the separate and sustained account of women’s nature – a feature of the lectures not anticipated in Rush’s Scottish medical education – brought the fruits of sensibility and reason into outright conﬂict. Earlier, Rush had simply celebrated that the rules of sensibility were a welcome supplement to reason’s deﬁciencies: happily for the human race … duty and … happiness are not left to the slow operations or doubtful inductions of reason … ! Sensibility was a complement to reason. With their superior sensibility, Rush assigned women ‘quicker

Enlightenment Medicine and Female Citizenship 661

perceptions’, a quality of genius. But he also accorded them poorer judgement and reason, for ‘perception [is] weakened, by the constant exercises of judgement and reasoning’. In women, the practice of reason weakened perception; reason and sensibility were at odds.48 Just as rights talk was being newly targetted at women, the essentially sexed body composed in the female lecture underwrote the maleness of full citizenship in the emerging nation. ‘Many of the disorders, not only of domestic, but of political society’, Rush exhorted in closing, stem from the inversion of ‘exactly those degrees of inferiority and contrast between the two sexes … described’. The republican future depended unmistakably on sexual distinction, and inferiority and contrast – not just in reason and understanding, but ultimately in sensibility’s reach – starkly limited even the domestic moral role of republican women. The meliorative sensibility compatible with reason and the perfecting exercise of benevolence and philanthropy was reserved for male citizens as much as was political suffrage. If, as Rush belaboured, ‘it would require a pen made of a quill plucked from an angel’s wing’ to describe the ‘sublime and heavenly’ pleasures of the moral faculty ‘operating in actions of benevolence, embracing friends, country, the whole world’, the quill owed much to St Paul, and only sturdy masculine arms could stretch to the embrace.49 *** American independence created a need for nationalism that exceptionalist theories sought to resolve. If the intellectual heritage of médecin-philosophe Benjamin Rush was ‘Atlantic’, the medical system he formulated was determinedly exceptionalist. Its contradictory double transformation from Cullenism – the rejection of the nervous system as the locus of pathology, and the reinscribing of the nerves and their sensibility as a physical foundation of the moral faculty – depended on a rejection of the plausibility of ‘corrupt’ British medicine in a different climate and in a new society. Medical exceptionalism sought to lift Americans precisely out of an oceanic interculture, not by the adopting of African ways, nor by turning to a hinterland of native Americans, but by conceiving of a distinctive, and typically European-descended, American body that could be perfected. Under pressure of rights talk and feminism circulating across the Atlantic, and in the face of some women’s attempts to expand their social role, that body was sexed in newly essential if not yet fully absolute ways. For Enlightenment radicals like Turgot, exceptionalism meant America should serve as hope to Europe, modelling deliverance from the meagre common lot of the old regime. Rush’s physical determinism somewhat gave the lie to this. But the fate of his medical system tells us most about the assymetry of the Atlantic world. Rush’s sun did not shine in the distant hemisphere of Europe. Even if he was the ‘Father of Psychiatry’ in America, the rays of his knowledge fell short or, as it were, on still waters. The medical system spelled bifurcating uses of a shared cultural stock. It had little effect on the eastern side of the Atlantic, where cutting-edge medical thinkers – those shifting ﬁgures of the magic lantern, to use

662 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

Jefferson’s evocative if sceptical phrase – had passed on to a new and radically different kind of science of mind and brain best described as ‘Romantic’.50

Notes 1. A. P. Whitaker, ‘The Americas in the Atlantic Triangle’, Ensayos sobre la historia del Neuvo Mundo (Mexico, 1951), p. 89; Jacques Godechot and R. R. Palmer, ‘Le problème de l’Atlantique du XVIIIème au XXème siècle’, 10th International Congress of Historical Sciences, Relazioni (6 vols, Florence, 1955), v, 221, 226; Jacques Godechot, France and the Atlantic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, 1770–1799 trans. Herbert H. Rowen (New York: Free Press, 1965), pp. 19–22. Along similar lines, though without the identiﬁcation of these as Enlightenment ideas per se, see Michael Kraus, The Atlantic Civilization: Eighteenth-Century Origins (New York: Cornell University Press, 1949). 2. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (eds), The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 1. A powerful exception to this focussing on Spain and Spanish America is Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the EighteenthCentury Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 3. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), xi; Mary Catherine Moran, ‘The Progress of Women’ History Workshop Journal, 59 (2005). Turgot quoted in Joyce Appleby, ‘Recovering America’s Historic Diversity: Beyond Exceptionalism’, Journal of American History 79 (1992), 419. One literary approach has been to equate American Enlightenment and Revolution: Robert A. Ferguson, ‘The American Enlightenment, 1750–1820’, in Sacvan Bercovitch (ed.), The Cambridge History of American Literature. Volume 1 1590–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 345–537. My thanks to Mary Catherine Moran for generously sharing her essay with me before publication. 4. Peter Gay, ‘Enlightenment: Medicine and Cure’, The Enlightenment (2 vols, New York, 1966-9) ii, 12–23, quotation p. 12; Roy Porter, ‘Medical Science and Human Science in the Enlightenment’, in Christopher Fox, Roy Porter and Robert Wokler (eds), Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 53–87. Also see Roy Porter (ed.), Medicine in the Enlightenment, Clio Medica 29 (Amsterdam: Adopi, for the Wellcome Institute Series in the History of Medicine, 1995); Guenter B. Risse, ‘Medicine in the Age of Enlightenment’, in Andrew Wear (ed.), Medicine and Society: Historical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 149-95; Andrew Cunningham and Roger French (eds), The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 5. Helen Brock, ‘North America, a Western Outpost of European Medicine’, in Andrew Cunningham and Roger French (eds), The Medical Enlightenment of the EighteenthCentury (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 194–216; D.C. Brunton, ‘The Transfer of Medical Education; Teaching at the Edinburgh and Philadelphia Medical Schools’, in Richard B. Sher and Jeffrey R. Smitten (eds), Scotland and America in the Age of the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 242–58; Jane Rendall, ‘The Inﬂuence of the Edinburgh Medical School on America in the Eighteenth Century’ in R.G.W. Anderson and A.D.C. Simpson (eds.), The Early Years of the Edinburgh Medical School (Edinburgh: Royal Scottish Museum, 1976), pp. 95–124. Historical Society of Pennsylvania (hereafter HSP), Gratz Collection, American Physicians, case 1, William Cullen to John Morgan, 10 Sept. 1768. 6. Christopher Lawrence, ‘The Nervous System and Society in the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Barry Barnes and Steven Shapin (eds), Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientiﬁc Culture (London: Sage, 1979), pp. 19–40. HSP, Logan Family Papers, George Logan to Charles Logan, 2 March 1778. Cullen quoted in W.F. Bynum, ‘Cullen and the

Enlightenment Medicine and Female Citizenship 663

7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

Nervous System’, in A. Doig, J.P.S. Ferguson, I.A. Milne and R. Passmore (eds), William Cullen and the Eighteenth Century Medical World (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), p. 152. George W. Corner, Two Centuries of Medicine. A History of the School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1965); Whitﬁeld J. Bell, ‘Philadelphia Medical Students in Europe, 1750–1800’, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 107 (1943), 1–30. ‘Charge Delivered to the Graduates in Medicine … in May 1773’, United States Magazine 1 (1779), 209; Pennsylvania Gazette, 5 May 1768; Carl Bridenbaugh, ‘Baths and Watering Places of Colonial America’, William and Mary Quarterly 3 (1946), 152–81. HSP, John Foulke, ‘Oration pronounced by Doctor Foulke before the American Philosophical Society, Feb 7’ (1789); Nicholas Collin, ‘An Essay on those Inquiries in Natural Philosophy which are at present most beneﬁcial to the United States of North America, Read Before the Society the 3d of April, 1789’, in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (6 vols, American Philosophical Society, 1771–1809; reprinted New York: Kraus Corporation, 1966), iii, 3; William Currie, An Historical Account of the Climates and Diseases of the United States of America (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1792), p. 87. Currie, Historical Account, pp. 408–9. ‘Report of the Physicians of the Philadelphia Dispensary’, Columbian Magazine, Or Monthly Miscellany 1 (1787), 229–33; Pennsylvania Gazette, 12 June 1782; 20 Oct. 1784; Currie, Historical Account, pp. 107, 111. Benjamin Rush, An Eulogium in Honor of the Late Dr. William Cullen (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson; New York: Durell, 1790); extracted in Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine 5 (1790), 110–13. Carl Binger, Revolutionary Doctor: Benjamin Rush, 1746–1813 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1966). John Bach McMaster and Frederick D. Stone (eds), Pennsylvania and the Federal Constitution 1787-1788 (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1888, reprinted 2 vols, New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), ii, 642, 675, 677, 682. Lester S. King, Transformations in American Medicine: From Benjamin Rush to William Osler (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1991); Richard Harrison Shryock, Medicine and Society in America: 1660–1860 (New York: New York University, 1960), pp. 67–72. Brunonianism shows that these developments were not without Scottish precedent, but Rush’s particular claims for the vascular system and for the primary panacea of bloodletting were essentially unique to himself: Roy Porter, ‘Brunonian Psychiatry’, in W.F. Bynum and Roy Porter (eds), Brunonianism in Britain and Europe (London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1988), pp. 89–99. Rush quoted in Robert B. Sullivan, ‘Sanguine Practices: A Historical and Historiographical Reconsideration of Heroic Therapy in the Age of Rush’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 68 (1994), 222; HSP, Benjamin Rush Papers, Library Company Collection, ‘Lectures on the Practice of Medicine’, vol. 9, p. 432. George W. Corner (ed), The Autobiography of Benjamin Rush (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948), p. 89; HSP, Rush Papers, ‘Introductory Lecture to a Course of Lectures upon the Theory & Practice of Physic … Nov 2 1789’, pp. 28, 41, 34. On the medical environmentalism of Enlightenment, see L.J. Jordanova, ‘Earth Science and Environmental Medicine: The Synthesis of the Late Enlightenment’, in L.J. Jordanova and Roy Porter (eds), Images of the Earth: Essays in the History of the Environmental Sciences (Chalfont St. Giles: British Society for the History of Science Monographs, 1979), pp. 119–46. See, for example, Jill Lepore, A is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002); Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution (New York: Crowell, 1976). John Gregory, Lectures on the Duties of and Qualiﬁcations of a Physician (2nd edn, London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1772), p. 77; Eric T. Carlson, Jeffrey L. Wollock and

664 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

32. 33.

34. 35.

Patricia S. Noel (eds), Benjamin Rush’s Lectures on the Mind (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1981), pp. 404, 407 (hereafter LOM). LOM, pp. 83, 404–556. Rush, ‘An Inquiry into the Inﬂuence of Physical Causes on the Moral Faculty, Delivered Before the American Philosophical Society … on the 27th of February, 1786’, in his Medical Inquiries and Observations, Volume 2 (Philadelphia: T. Dobson, 1793), pp. 2, 43; ‘An Enquiry into the Effects of Public Punishments upon Criminals, and upon Society’, American Museum 2 (1787), 145. LOM, p. 279. Corner, Autobiography of Benjamin Rush, p. 89. See especially Michael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760–1835 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Rush, ‘An Inquiry into the Inﬂuence of Physical Causes on the Moral Faculty’, pp. 44–5. See Rush, ‘An Enquiry into the Effects of Public Punishment’, p. 144, for further discussion of the active/passive distinction. HSP, Rush Papers, ‘Introductory Lecture on the Vexations and Distresses of a Medical Life, delivered Nov 27th 1797’, pp. 38-9. Rush, ‘An Inquiry into the Inﬂuence of Physical Causes on the Moral Faculty’, p. 44. Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Caspar Wistar, June 21 1807, Paul Leicester Ford (ed.), The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (10 vols, New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1892–9), ix, 83. My thanks to Roark Atkinson for pointing me to this letter. LOM, p. 612; HSP, Rush Papers, ‘Introductory Lecture to a Course of lectures … Nov. 3 1794, on the application of metaphysicks to medicine’, p. 27. Lynn Hunt, ‘Constitutions, Human Rights, and the Rights of Women in the Atlantic World of the 18th Century’, in M’hammed Sabour (ed.), Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité (Joensuu: University of Joensuu, 1992), pp. 186–204; Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980; reprinted 1986); Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980); Edith B. Gelles, ‘The Abigail Industry’, William and Mary Quarterly 45 (1988), 666–7. This paragraph is indebted to Susan Branson, ‘These Fiery Frenchifed Dames’: Women and Political Culture in Early National Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), chs 1–2, quotations on pp. 72, 49. Annis Boudinot Stockton to Julia Stockton Rush, 22 March 1792, in Carla Mulford (ed.), Only For the Eye of a Friend: The Poems of Annis Boudinot Stockton (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), pp. 304–7. Boudinot quoted in Francis D. Cogliano, Revolutionary America 1763–1815 (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 210. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (London: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 194–207; Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), pp. 143–183; Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of EighteenthCentury France (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 242–57 and, on Auteuil, Elizabeth A. Williams, ‘Physicians, Vitalism, and Gender in the Salon’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 29 (2000), 1–21. McMaster and Stone (eds), Pennsylvania and the Federal Constitution, i, 300, 295. Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conﬂicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 130–4; Judith Apter Klinghoffer and Lois Elkis, ‘The Petticoat Electors: Women’s Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776–1807’, Journal of the Early Republic 12 (1992), 159–93. LOM, pp. 133, 143, 641, 615, 617, 656, 540, 656. Rush, ‘An Inquiry into the Inﬂuence of Physical Causes on the Moral Faculty’; ‘An Inquiry into the Natural History of Medicine among the Indians of North America, and a Comparative View of their Diseases and Remedies with those of Civilized Nations’, in his Medical Inquiries and Observations (Philadelphia: Prichard and Hall, 1789);

Enlightenment Medicine and Female Citizenship 665

36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

41.

42. 43.

44. 45. 46.

‘An Account of the Vices Peculiar to the Savages of North America’, Columbian Magazine 1 (1786), 9–11; HSP, Rush Papers, ‘Lectures on the Practice of Medicine’, vol. 13, quotation on p. 583. For the broader intellectual debate in this decade, see Eve Kornfeld, ‘Encountering ‘the Other’: American Intellectuals and Indians in the 1790s’, William and Mary Quarterly 52 (1995), 287–314. HSP, Rush Papers, ‘Lectures on the Practice of Medicine’, vol. 16, p. 754; Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia ed. David Waldstreicher (Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s Press, 2002), p. 176; ‘Lectures on Pathology’, p. 14; ‘An Account of the Diseases Peculiar to the Negroes in the West Indies, and Which are Produced by Their Slavery’, American Museum 4 (1788), 81–2. Rush’s main antislavery publication is An Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements in America, upon Slave-Keeping (Philadelphia: John Dunlap, 1773), which ran to 5 American editions before 1776. On early nineteenth century racialized conceptions of sensibility, see E. B. Clark, ‘”The Sacred Rights of the Weak”: Pain, Sympathy and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America’, Journal of American History 82 (1995), 463–93. Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderlund, Freedom By Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 100–13. Kerber’s original formulation was that the ideal republican mother was ‘competent and conﬁdent. She could resist the vagaries of fashion; she was rational, benevolent, independent, self-reliant’ and hence ‘had the power to direct the moral development of the male citizens of the republic’; Women of the Republic, pp. 204, 229. The debate can be traced especially through Jan Lewis, ‘The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic’, William and Mary Quarterly 44 (1987), 689–721; Ruth H. Bloch, ‘The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America’, Signs 13 (1987), 37–58; Rosemarie Zagarri, ‘Morals, Manners and the Republican Mother’, American Quarterly 44 (1992), 192–215. Benjamin Rush, Essays, Literary, Moral and Philosophical, ed. Michael Meranze (Schenectady: Union College Press, 1988), pp. 44–5, 54. Margaret A. Nash, ‘Rethinking Republican Motherhood: Benjamin Rush and the Young Ladies Academy of Philadelphia’, Journal of the Early Republic 17 (1997), 171–191. LOM, pp. 684–98. The modern edition is muddled on the archival provenance of this section of the text: it is in fact from the 17th of 18 continuously paged notebooks in the Rush Papers at HSP: ‘Lectures on Physiology’ (Rush Papers, Box 4, 7397.F). Note that this attribution sheds doubt on the distinction the modern edition makes elsewhere between LOM and EV, as held at HSP and the College of Physicians in Philadelphia respectively. My thanks to James Green at the Library of Company of Philadelphia for his sustained help on this point. Ibid., 684, 699. A similar structuring of sex is also found in HSP, Rush Papers, ‘Lectures on the Practice of Medicine’, vol. 16, pp. 727–9: ‘Women are subject to all the diseases of Men and to certain diseases which are peculiar to them’. LOM, pp. 698, 687–8, 696–7. HSP, Rush Papers, ‘Medical Notes’ (1804-1809), pp. 425–436; LOM, p. 697; Corner, Autobiography of Benjamin Rush, p. 315. On Cabanis, see Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology; Elizabeth A. Williams, The Physical and the Moral: Anthropology, Physiology, and Philosophical Medicine in France, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994); Martin Staum, Cabanis: Enlightenment and Medical Philosophy in the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). LOM, pp. 686. Rush, ‘An Inquiry into the Inﬂuence of Physical Causes’, p. 46; LOM, p. 689. Compare Adam Smith and other British commentators: Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). On the citizen of the world in the British context, see Evan Radcliffe, ‘Burke, Radical Cosmopolitanism and the Debates on Patriotism in the 1790s’, Studies in EighteenthCentury Culture 28 (1999), 311–39.

666 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship 47. LOM, pp. 689–90; HSP, Rush Papers, vol. 25, Robina Millar to Benjamin Rush, 13 April 1802. My thanks to Jane Rendall for this reference. On female reform societies, see Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 12. 48. Rush, ‘An Inquiry into the Inﬂuence of Physical Causes on the Moral Faculty’, p. 18; LOM, p. 695. 49. LOM, pp. 698, 611. For the elaboration of these ideas in early nineteenth-century American culture, see Rosemarie Zagarri’s contribution to this volume. 50. Binger, Revolutionary Doctor, pp. 259, 296. On the new brain science, see for example, Jan Goldstein, ‘Mutations of the Self in Old Regime and Postrevolutionary France’, in Lorraine Daston (ed.), Biographies of Scientiﬁc Objects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 86–116.

9.6 American Women’s Rights Before Seneca Falls Rosemarie Zagarri

The failure to extend political rights to women in the aftermath of the American Revolution is often seen as symptomatic of a deep and abiding failure in the American political system.1 Political theorists such as Carole Pateman, Joan Landes, and others regard it as a part of a failure of liberal polities in particular and liberalism in general to incorporate women. Liberal states, they say, are based on a ‘fraternal contract’ that is essentially ‘masculinist’ in character. ‘Structural sexism’ represents an ‘enduring’ or ‘fundamental’ feature that makes liberal governments resistant to change. Indeed, they suggest, full incorporation of women into the polity may be structurally impossible.2 This approach, however, depicts liberalism as an ahistorical theory, an unchanging set of political ideals that persist over time. In fact, however, liberalism was a practice, a set of evolving institutions that was constantly subject to change, challenge, and contestation. This was particularly true in the early American republic. Long before the ﬁrst women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls in 1848, Americans debated the scope and meaning of women’s political rights. Contrary to conventional expectations, the debate arose not because women were demanding the right to vote or hold public ofﬁce, but because of a growing awareness of the internal contradictions within liberalism itself. Beginning in the 1790s, two events converged to focus attention on women’s exclusion from the polity: the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the emergence of Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic– Republican party. Wollstonecraft’s work brought the language of ‘woman’s rights’ into popular usage and raised the question, both directly and indirectly, of women’s political participation. Quite independently, the Jeffersonians’ efforts to expand the white male franchise inadvertently drew attention to an even more extreme injustice: the exclusion of women from the vote. While only some men had been excluded on the basis of property or wealth, it was increasingly clear that all women were excluded simply on the basis of their sex. Such a conﬂict could not be easily dismissed or ignored. If not adequately addressed, the issue might raise questions not only about the new American government’s justice and fairness, but also its claim to legitimacy and popular support. In the wake of the American Revolution, the search for a solution preoccupied a generation of 667

668 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

politicians, intellectuals and popular writers – men and women alike. As several essays in this volume suggest, especially those by Arianne Chernock, Anna Clark, and Suzanne Desan, this phenomenon was not limited to the United States, but extended throughout the Atlantic world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries .3 Like all revolutions, the American Revolution produced its share of unintended consequences. No individual or group could control the direction of events or the ﬂow of ideas. Once the rebellion was under way, certain ideas took on a life of their own. This was especially true with regard to concepts regarding women. American Whigs invoked equality and natural rights not in order to alter gender relations, but as a way of legitimating their rebellion against Britain. At ﬁrst, colonists attempted to defend themselves by insisting on their rights as English people. British authorities, however, insisted that Parliament was incapable, in its capacity as the people’s representatives, of making laws that were unjust or unconstitutional. Seeking alternative grounds for their protest, colonists turned to universal principles. Natural rights, more than other kinds of rights, commanded assent because they were said to be inalienable, immutable, and universal – possessed by virtue of one’s personhood rather than a result of one’s citizenship, parentage, or property. Thus the Declaration of Independence invoked not the laws of Britain but the ‘Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.’ Furthermore, ‘all men are created equal’ meant that all Americans would be equal before the law. No aristocrats or hereditary monarchs would enjoy special privileges. The people would govern themselves. To paraphrase Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, in England the King was law, but in America the law was King. The American Revolution raised the question of women’s rights, not directly and explicitly, but only indirectly and by implication. The issue gained little attention during the war itself. Although some individuals clearly understood that equality and natural rights might be applied to women, their musings surfaced mostly in private letters, memoirs, and conversations. Abigail Adams, for example, wrote a personal letter to her husband John Adams, urging Congress to ‘Remember the Ladies’ when making a new code of laws. She did not, however, publicly petition Congress or push for any further changes. Hannah Lee Corbin insisted in a letter to her brother, Richard Henry Lee, that if taxation and representation were thought to be mutually dependent, then women who pay taxes should also be allowed to vote. Although Lee agreed in principle, neither he nor she pursued their ideas any farther. Author Judith Sargent Murray penned a powerful discussion of the ‘Equality of the Sexes’ in 1779. Even so, she did not call for women’s political rights and did not publish the piece until 1790.4 Thus while revolutionary ideals produced some consideration of the question of women’s rights, there was little public debate and no collective movement for change. Signiﬁcantly, however, one American state did, with little fanfare or debate, pursue the issue of equality to its logical conclusion. In 1776 the New Jersey state legislature wrote a new constitution that deﬁned voting qualiﬁcations in genderneutral terms, opening the franchise to ‘all inhabitants’ who were ‘worth ﬁfty

Women’s Rights Before Seneca Falls 669

pounds.’ Whether or not this wording was initially intended to include women, subsequent legislation in 1790 and 1797 removed the ambiguity and explicitly used the words ‘he and she’ to refer to electors. Although no more than a few hundred women (usually wealthy widows) ever voted in any given election, they did cast ballots in both state and federal elections.5 Controversy nonetheless dogged the experiment. Although members of both political parties courted female voters, neither side ever lost its doubts about the wisdom of enfranchising women. William Grifﬁth called woman suffrage ‘perfectly disgusting … a mockery of this invaluable and sacred right.’6 Another critic sarcastically commented, ‘Our constitution … admits to the pole [sic] people of all sexes, colors, tongues, characters, and conditions …. In our unbounded generosity, we would admit to a participation in our choicest rights … the worthless and the penniless; – as motley a group as the day of Pentecost or the pool of Bethesda ever witnessed.’ 7 Other authors ridiculed the ‘fair electors’ or maligned them as ‘metamorphos’d witches.’ 8 Finally, in 1807 a law was passed that abolished female suffrage, along with that of free blacks.9 Signiﬁcantly, women did not mount any public protests or raise popular objections. Despite the reversal, New Jersey had taken a profound step. Allowing women to vote had made the unimaginable a reality. Women could behave politically in exactly the same ways as men. Perhaps even more important was the rationale for expanding the franchise. Women had not argued for their own inclusion. There is no evidence that women sent petitions, held rallies, or mounted private campaigns to lobby for suffrage reform. Rather, the legislators appear to have acted out of principle. Those in power – white males – understood that if they took notions of equality and natural rights seriously, then they must, in the interest of fairness and consistency, allow women to vote. As a Trenton newspaper put it, the assembly had acted ‘from a principle of justice, deeming it right that every free person who pays a tax should have a vote.’10 What had started out as a justiﬁcation for rebelling against Britain ended in a critique of gender inequality. Yet no other state followed New Jersey’s lead. In fact, it was only with the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman that the issue of women’s rights gained widespread, popular attention in the United States. Whereas American revolutionary ideology had raised the question of women’s political rights obliquely, Wollstonecraft’s work posed the question directly, in a way that could not be avoided. Wollstonecraft forced Americans to come to terms with meaning of equality and natural rights for women. First issued in 1792 in Britain and then republished in the United States, Wollstonecraft’s title deliberately echoed that of Thomas Paine’s treatise on the French Revolution, The Rights of Man, issued the previous year.11 While Paine had argued for the right of all human beings to certain universal privileges, the speciﬁc rights he had asserted – the right to own property, to vote, to participate in government – were, in fact, limited only to men. Typically for his time, Paine did not even consider whether women had rights or what those rights might be.

670 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

In contrast, Wollstonecraft explicitly applied the concept of natural rights to women, thus exposing the gendered assumptions behind Paine’s thinking. She constructed an image of woman as an independent rights bearer, an individual who had ‘a voice … [and] participation in the natural rights of mankind.’12 If natural rights were universal, then they should apply to all people, regardless of sex. ‘If the abstract rights of man will bear discussion and explanation,’ she insisted, ‘those of woman, by parity of reasoning, will not shrink from the same test.’13 The greatest social inequities, she declared, did not exist between or among males. While only some men had been denied their rights, all women were excluded simply on the basis of their sex. ‘The rights of humanity have been … conﬁned to the male line from Adam downwards,’ with the result that half of the population had been kept from realizing its full human potentialities.14 ‘The tyranny of man’ and the perpetuation of a ‘male aristocracy’ had oppressed women in all aspects of their lives, retarding the development of their reason, hindering the growth of their virtue, and preventing them from making a full contribution to society.15 Signiﬁcantly, Wollstonecraft mentioned women’s exclusion from governance only once, and then, only brieﬂy and tentatively. ‘I may excite laughter,’ she noted, ‘by dropping a hint, which I mean to pursue at some future time, for I really think that women ought to have representatives.’16 She never took up the issue again. It was more important, she believed, that women gain greater educational and economic opportunities than participate in what she considered a deeply ﬂawed political system.17 Female suffrage would presumably come in the wake of other gains. Despite Wollstonecraft’s reluctance to discuss woman suffrage, her work had profoundly political implications for women. If women possessed natural rights, those rights were given by God and found in nature. If men refused to recognize that women had rights, then, according to Wollstonecraft, ‘by the same rule, their duties vanish, for rights and duties are inseparable.’18 The effect was to transform women into what modern political theorists call ‘rights bearers.’19 By appropriating the language of rights, Wollstonecraft endowed women with the moral authority to lay claim not just to rights in general, but speciﬁc rights, including, potentially, the right to vote and hold public ofﬁce. In future years, other writers would pursue the political ramiﬁcations of her ideas more systematically than Wollstonecraft herself had. In the United States, Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication popularized the notion of woman’s rights and brought it into widespread usage. As early as 1792, excerpts from the work appeared in periodicals and magazines. Numerous pieces of poetry, ﬁction, humor, and prescriptive essays bore the title, ‘The Rights of Woman’ or contained allusions to women’s rights. By 1795, three American editions of A Vindication had been published. In fact, a modern study ﬁnds Wollstonecraft’s treatise in more private American libraries of the era than Paine’s Rights of Man.20 As early as 1793, Congressman Elias Boudinot could announce, ‘The Rights of Women are no longer strange sounds to an American ear; they are now heard as familiar terms in every part of the United States.’21

Women’s Rights Before Seneca Falls 671

Men were put on notice. ‘Let the defenders of male despotism answer (if they can) the Rights of Woman, by Miss Wollstonecraft,’ declared the National Magazine.22 By the turn of the century, even a hardened Wollstonecraft-hater had to admit, her ‘ingenious vindication of the Rights of Woman [was] universally known.’23 Many men appeared to be prepared to acknowledge women’s rights and even to admit their complicity in women’s subjugation. In a poem on the subject of ‘Woman’ presented at Harvard’s commencement in 1796, William Boyd ruefully admitted, ‘Curs’d be the thought, that man unkind could prove/A proud oppressor to his fondest love.’24 Just as England had stiﬂed America’s freedom, so men repressed women. ‘It appears ever to have been the policy of our sex,’ a Boston man said, ‘to arrogate to themselves a superiority over the other, and to treat them will all the spirit of a petty tyranny …. We seemed to have claimed a prescriptive right for calling them our inferiors, and we can give no better account of our authority for treating them as such, than that custom has so established it.’25 Male authority rested on a chimera and a delusion. ‘Man has been the principal cause of their [women’s] faults,’ remarked a Philadelphia author, ‘by neglecting to give them an education suitable to the dignity of their sex, deluding them with falsehoods, and compelling them to be subservient to their imperious wills.’ Ending with a solemn vow, the writer concluded, ‘I shall always be found among the foremost to contribute my feeble efforts to defend THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN.’26 Yet as sweeping as the concept of ‘woman’s rights’ seemed, its usage did not necessarily imply a commitment to women’s political rights. In fact, many authors at the time discussed women’s rights without reference to politics or governance. For them, women’s rights referred to a plethora of other rights: women’s intellectual equality with men and their right to an adequate education; women’s spiritual equality with men and their right to achieve salvation; or women’s social equality with men and their right to be men’s friends and companions. Thus something more was needed to give the concept political valence. In fact, at the very same time that the ‘rights of woman’ was gaining popularity, Americans were also discussing the scope and meaning of men’s rights. This convergence compelled Americans to consider, though not necessarily to accept, the notion that women might vote and hold public ofﬁce. During the 1790s, the Democratic–Republican party rose to prominence by celebrating liberty, equality, and the expansion of political participation to all white males. Although the framers of the US Constitution had not anticipated the emergence of political parties, strong alliances had emerged within the ﬁrst few years of the new republic’s founding. While these groups did not possess all the features of modern political parties, they did have distinct ideologies and coherent principles. For Federalists, led by George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, the American Revolution was seen as a political contest that ended with the achievement of independence. Abhorring the turmoil in France, they advocated the creation of a strong, highly centralized ﬁscal–military state based on the British model.27 In contrast, Republicans, led by Thomas Jefferson and

672 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

James Madison, saw the American Revolution as the ﬁrst act in a larger struggle to transform the social order. They advocated a limited national government, strong local control, and the leveling of social distinctions. They welcomed the French Revolution as a visible extension of their own ideals and principles.28 Differences in ideology translated into different kinds of appeals to the populace. While ﬁrm believers in representative government, Federalists supported the maintenance of a traditional hierarchy and social structure. They urged electors to defer to their social betters, insisting that voting should be restricted to property owners and ofﬁceholding to the traditional white, male elite. Republicans, in contrast, claimed that power belonged with the people. Like the Federalists, they, too, understood the ‘people’ to refer only to adult, white males. Republicans, however, exploited what historian Daniel Rodgers has called ‘the subversive possibilities’29 of rights talk and called for the expansion of the franchise and elimination of property qualiﬁcations for holding ofﬁce. Elected ofﬁcials were not only to represent the voters’ wishes, but to come from among the people themselves. Propertyless men, artisans, mechanics, and aliens would all be brought into full membership in the political community. The result was the growing popularity of the Republicans and the increasing obsolescence of the Federalists. After Jefferson’s election in 1800, no Federalist ever again won the White House; their power in Congress waned.30 Jefferson’s election, moreover, represented another important turning point: the decisive moment at which the country shifted from a discourse that supported hierarchy and deference to one that advocated the universal principles of equality and natural rights. Liberalism henceforth became the predominant language of American politics.31 In effect, Republicans won not just the electoral battle for ofﬁce but also the discursive contest over the meaning of the American Revolution. During the colonial period, questions held seldom arisen about whether women could vote or hold public ofﬁce. Most colonial election statutes, as well as most of the ﬁrst state constitutions, did not even mention the sex of the voter or used gender-neutral language in discussing suffrage qualiﬁcations. Women’s exclusion was thought to be so self-evident that it did not need explanation. At the same time, while all voters were assumed to be men, voting itself was not deﬁned as an exclusively male prerogative. As in England, suffrage in America depended on an individual’s ability to meet certain property or wealth qualiﬁcations. The ownership of land was thought to guarantee one’s independence, virtue, and stake in society. Moreover, since one of the primary functions of government was taxation, and the function of representation was to insure fair taxation, those who did not own property had little need for representation. Most women, it is true, could not or did not own property (with the exception of widows) and thus were not entitled to vote. But they were far from alone. Many other individuals, including propertyless white males, free blacks, and slaves, also could not vote. Class, not sex, thus represented the primary basis for inclusion or exclusion. In the wake of the American Revolution, property and wealth qualiﬁcations for voting came under attack, primarily from Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans.

Women’s Rights Before Seneca Falls 673

From the 1790s through the 1830s, most American states abolished property qualiﬁcations for voting and expanded the franchise to include all adult white males. At the same time, virtually every state constitution written after 1790, including rewritten constitutions from the original thirteen states and constitutions from states newly admitted to the union, speciﬁcally limited the franchise to ‘males,’ or ‘men’ – and most often to ‘free, white’ men.32 Not surprisingly, this movement often generated bitter controversy. Opponents of universal male suffrage feared that eliminating property qualiﬁcations for white males might open the ﬂoodgates to other dispossessed groups, including women. In response, Democratic-Republicans sought to assure their critics that their commitment to liberal principles did not extend beyond white males. Linking women’s rights to men’s rights might damage their efforts on behalf of men. ‘It will not do,’ said a Virginian at the 1829 state constitutional convention, ‘to test any rule by extreme cases.’33 Political rights for women thus did not ﬁgure in their agenda. The debate over universal male suffrage revealed the gendered assumptions about political participation underlying the franchise. Ironically, success for white males highlighted the inequity of excluding women. A poem written in 1821 during the debate over the New York state constitution voices this concern. Whereas previously the possession of property or wealth had distinguished voters from non-voters, it was now ‘generally admitted’ that ‘ev’ry one must have a vote,/Who does not wear a petticoat.’ Yet once sex represented the basis of demarcation, new injustices and inconsistencies appeared. Although men who had ‘forfeit[ed] all pretentions/To decency and common sense’ enjoyed ‘the birthright of election,’ women, though ‘pure as Eden’s queen’ could ‘never to election come.’ Women, it was clear, were not excluded because they lacked sufﬁcient property, education, or virtue, but simply because they were women. Such a rationale did not make sense. ‘But why should women be denied./And have their tongues completely tied,/[when] For party broils well ﬁtted.’34 The demise of property qualiﬁcations for voting for white males thus made explicit what had been implicit: the sexual basis of the social contract. But it also did more. By the 1830s, law as well as custom would prevent women from voting. Whereas women’s prior exclusion had been implicit and unexamined, now their exclusion became deliberate, legally sanctioned, and unequivocal. The franchise had become an exclusively male prerogative. To sum up the argument thus far: While the American Revolution had enshrined the principles of equality and natural rights as foundational principles, Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman extended the meaning of these concepts to include women. The Jeffersonians’ success in expanding white male suffrage came to represent the deﬁning outer limit of the party’s commitment to egalitarian principles and helped to focus attention on women’s inability to vote. At the same time, Americans were well aware that women in New Jersey had indeed proven that they were capable of exercising the franchise. Taken together, these circumstances contributed to the emergence between 1790 and 1830 of a vigorous debate in the popular press on the scope and meaning of

674 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

women’s political rights. The debate occurred not because women demanded it, but because the logic of liberal, universal principles required it. Consideration of women’s political rights surfaced in a wide variety of venues. A whole range of organization, institutions, and print media took up the issue. As in England at the time, debating societies and organizations seemed eager to explore the issue. On at least three occasions in the 1780s and two times in the 1790s, the Brothers in Unity, a Yale College debating group, discussed variations on the question, ‘Whether Women ought to have a share in Civil Government,’ or ‘Whether Females ought to be excluded from a share in Civil Government?’35 At least ﬁve times between 1788 and 1800, the Belles-Lettres Society of Dickinson College discussed issues relating to women such as: ‘Ought women to participate in the government of a state or not?’; ‘Whether it is the design of nature that women be entirely excluded from civil and ecclesiastical preferments’; and whether ‘women ought not to be legislators?’36 A University of North Carolina debating organization, the Dialectic Society, asked its members in 1803 and 1804 to consider whether ‘females ought to be upon equal footing with us in education and power?’37 Perhaps not surprisingly, none of these propositions passed. What is more signiﬁcant, however, is the question of women’s rights received attention at all. It was as if a dam had been breached. Women, who had previously been invisible to the public eye, were now seen as potential members of the polity. Women, too, began to voice their opinions on the subject of political rights. Unlike later generations of feminists who expressed their views collectively, these women tended to speak as individuals. At her graduation in 1793 from the Philadelphia Ladies Academy, for example, Priscilla Mason inveighed against women’s exclusion from governance. ‘The Church, the Bar, and the Senate are shut against us,’ she said. ‘Who shut them? Man; despotic man, ﬁrst made us incapable of the duty, and then forbid us the exercise.’ Anticipating the day when women would participate more fully in the nation’s political life as lawyers or judges, she argued in favor of the creation of a ‘senate of women.’ Such an institution, she said, ‘would ﬁre the female breast with the most generous ambition, prompting [it] to illustrious actions. It would furnish the most noble theatre for the display, the exercise and improvement of every faculty. It would call forth all that is human – all that is divine in the soul of woman; and having proved them equally capable with the other sex, would lead to their equal participation of honor and ofﬁce.’38 In her view, sex would be no barrier to a woman’s ability to garner public honors or hold political ofﬁce. Questions about women’s exclusion from governance led inevitably to discussions of fairness and equity. An article in the New-York Daily Advertiser asserted, ‘The present custom in the world, especially in America, of excluding women from any share in legislation is both unjust and detrimental. It is certainly unjust to exclude from any share in government one half of those who considered as equals of the males, are obliged to be subject to laws they have no share in making!39 Writing in The New-York Weekly Museum in 1816, ‘A Lady’ commented on the ‘curious fact,’ as she put it, ‘that a republic which avows equality of right

Women’s Rights Before Seneca Falls 675

as its ﬁrst principle, persists in an ungenerous exclusion of the female sex from its executive department.’40 Author John Neale acknowledged the double standard and condemned it. Women’s inability to ‘participate in their legislative council’ meant that women were ‘not free,’ or at least not ‘free, in the sense that Men are free, according to any deﬁnition of liberty.’41 As he saw it, women’s inability to participate in government made their condition perilously close to that of slaves. The Philadelphia writer Charles Brockden Brown made perhaps the most sustained contemporaneous case against women’s exclusion from the polity. First published in the New York Weekly Magazine in 1798 and later issued as part of the novel Alcuin, the piece featured a dialogue between a disgruntled woman, Mrs. Carter, and her male companion, Alcuin. Speaking through Mrs. Carter, Brown articulated the basic problem emerging from a system that claimed a commitment to equality of right but excluded women from political participation. ‘I shall ever consider it, as a gross abuse,’ said Mrs. Carter, ‘that we are hindered from sharing with you in the power of chusing our rulers, and of making those laws to which we equally with yourselves are subject.’42 Such a situation reﬂected a contradiction at the heart of the American experiment. ‘Even the government of our country, which is said to be the freest in the world, passes over women as if they were not [free]. We [women] are excluded from all political rights without least ceremony. Lawmakers thought as little of comprehending us in their code of liberty, as if we were pigs, or sheep. That females are exceptions to their general maxims, perhaps never occurred to them. If it did, the idea was quietly discarded, without leaving behind the slightest consciousness of inconsistency or injustice.’43 The result injured all women, since the practice ‘annihilates the political existence of at least one half of the community.’44 The conclusion seemed inevitable. ‘This constitution,’ declared Brown through Mrs. Carter, ‘is unjust and absurd.’45 Although such a view was deﬁnitely in the minority, the idea was being publicly expressed. Signiﬁcantly, even those who were hostile to the idea of women’s political rights sensed a tension between their commitment to liberal principles and the exclusion of women. Speaking in 1798, Harvard president John Thornton Kirkland made a distinction between ‘the right to protection, and the right to govern the state.’ While men possessed the right to governance, women, because of their need for protection, should be excluded ‘from the direct exercise of the powers of civil government. ‘ At the same time, Kirkland sarcastically remarked, ‘Had the new theory of the Rights of Women enlightened the world at the period of the formation of our constitution, it is possible that the framers, convinced of its arguments, might have set aside the old system of exclusion, upon which the world has always proceeded till this reforming age, as illiberal, and tyrannical.’46 To Kirkland, the notion that anyone could imagine the US Constitution, the great bulwark of the people’s liberty, as ‘illiberal’ or ‘tyrannical’ seemed self-evidently absurd. Yet he himself called it as ‘an old system of exclusion’ regarding women. Even if used satirically, the phrase itself suggested a growing awareness of the potential contradiction between American principles and practice.

676 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

Despite the intellectual force of these critiques, no collective movement for women’s rights appeared in the ﬁrst decades of the new republic’s existence. Outside of New Jersey, there was little support for the cause. Not until the 1830s would a concerted movement for women’s right emerge, culminating in the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. Even then, not until 1920 would women throughout the country be allowed to vote.47 The reluctance to embrace the cause of women’s rights reﬂected deep-seated fears about disrupting the gender status quo. Allowing women to vote or hold public ofﬁce would not only challenge men’s monopoly on political power, it would also threaten the whole structure of gender relations. According to a Boston man any woman who was ‘fully skilled to comprehend, and perfectly ready to vindicate’ her rights might abandon her wifely role or seek opportunities out side the home. ‘Nothing,’ he concluded was more dangerous to the rights of man [than] when it took possession in the home department.’48 Changing women’s role would also change men’s role. ‘If once a man raises his wife to an equality with himself,’ declared ‘Ignotus’ in 1801, ‘it is all over, and he is doomed to become a subject for life to the most despotic of governments.’49 Another author was even more blunt. ‘These Rights of Woman,’ declared a Massachusetts newspaper, ‘… would become the wrongs of man.’50 Even some women were concerned. Discussions of ‘equality of right,’ worried ‘A Lady,’ might ‘excit[e] an insurrection in the female world.’51 In fact, the insurrection may have already begun. Pondering the possibility that a woman in Massachusetts might run for local ofﬁce, a female correspondent in 1822 posed the next logical question. ‘If a lady be eligible as a Register of Deeds, is she not also as a Governor, Senator, Representative, Overseer of the poor, or other public ofﬁce … . I have some curiosity, to know where we are to stop.’52 Others also feared ‘where we are to stop.’ If pursued to an extreme, ‘The Rights of Both Sexes’ might mean disaster. It would turn the world upside down, creating a nightmare society in which men would ‘reside at the tea-table, regulate the household, and rule the nursery; while all the ofﬁces of state and business of commerce should pass into the hands of the ladies’ – leading to the greatest disaster of all, men who would ‘wet-nurse’ the baby.53 Overthrowing the existing gender hierarchy did not ﬁgure in even the most radical political agendas in the United States at the time. Retrenchment seemed not only desirable, but necessary to the country’s future. Contrary to what most historians have argued, the key fact about the early national period is not that Americans rejected the proposition that women should have political rights; rather, it is that the question was widely considered and seriously debated. Moreover, contrary Mrs. Carter’s lament to Alcuin, Americans could not afford to ‘quietly discard’ the subject. Women’s exclusion from governance raised disturbing questions about the government’s commitment to justice and fairness. As a young republic, the United States was in the very process of establishing its legitimacy and securing people’s loyalty. Doubts about the government’s fairness could potentially threaten not only government’s moral authority, but also its claim to represent the people.

Women’s Rights Before Seneca Falls 677

Americans thus had to address the question of whether women should share in the quintessential privileges of a liberal polity, the right to vote and hold public ofﬁce. If they chose to reject this claim, they then faced the task of explaining the grounds for women’s exclusion. The solution, of course, did not arise quickly or systematically. In fact, its outlines were not fully apparent until the middle of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, by the early decades of that century a broad-ranging dialogue had begun among politicians, philosophers, scientists, and popular writers on both sides of the Atlantic to articulate a new rationale for women’s lack of political rights. This was not simply an academic exercise. The authority and legitimacy of the new established gender hierarchy was at stake. As Americans tried to explain women’s political marginality, they at ﬁrst turned to what seemed the most obvious justiﬁcation: custom or tradition. Because women had not been allowed to vote in the past, they should not now included in the process. Yet as the idea of women’s intellectual equality with men gained acceptance during the eighteenth century, women could not simply be dismissed because they lacked the intellectual capacity to understand political issues. As women acquired greater literacy and education, they could not be rejected primarily because they lacked knowledge of the affairs of state. As a result, the earliest American efforts to explain women’s exclusion, made during the Revolution itself, focused on the practical limitations on women’s ability to participate in government. Women’s incapacity resulted, it was said, from their attention to their duties as wives and mothers. Because of the demands of childrearing and the burdens of housekeeping, women were unable to involve themselves in the time-consuming business of governing. Women, noted a pamphlet, called the ‘Essex Result,’ written during the debate over the Massachusetts state constitution, were not prevented from voting because of ‘a deﬁciency in their mental powers.’ Rather, ‘their retired mode of life, and various domestic duties prevent that promiscuous intercourse with the world, which is necessary to qualify them for electors.’54 Similarly, John Adams admitted that while some women possessed ‘as good judgments, and as independent minds, as those men who are wholly destitute of property,’ their ‘domestic cares,’ especially ‘the necessary nurture of their children,’ rendered them ‘unﬁt for practice and experience in the great businesses of life … and the arduous cares of state.’55 Perhaps sensing the weakness of this rationale, another justiﬁcation was often added. Some weakness in women’s nature or character – what Adams and Essex Result called ‘the delicacy of [women’s] minds’ also limited them. As a critic of female suffrage in New Jersey insisted, ‘Female reserve and delicacy are incompatible with the duties of a free elector.’56 Although suggestive of biological incapacity, this notion was not fully developed or explained in detail at that time. The focus remained on the contingent factors that restricted women’s participation. The implication was that while it might be possible to pass laws allowing women to vote or hold ofﬁce, such laws would be neither desirable nor efﬁcacious. Yet arguments for women’s exclusion based on custom and tradition encountered severe criticism. At the most basic level, it was clear that if society had created

678 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

certain customs, it could also alter those customs. The ubiquitous histories of women published in England and America throughout the eighteenth century, including William Alexander’s popular History of Women, demonstrated that women were as capable as men of exercising political authority.57 Semiramis of Nineveh, Zenobia-Queen of the East, and Elizabeth of England had not let their femininity distract from their ability to voice political opinions, wage wars, or govern countries. After perusing such works, the ‘Female Advocate’ of Connecticut declared, ‘The history of women is forever intruding on our unwilling eyes, bold and ardent spirits, who no tyrant could tame, no prejudice enslave.’58 The lesson was clear. Male preeminence, insisted a female author writing in the Boston Monthly Magazine, was ‘artiﬁcial, and not natural’ and ‘there have always been instances of female intelligence and female merit to prove [it].’59 In fact, Americans’ own recent experience had demonstrated that women were willing and able political actors. Before the Revolution, John Adams had encouraged Mercy Otis Warren to use her ‘masculine genius’ to write political works attacking British tyranny.60 At the same time, many other women had put aside their domestic chores and demonstrated their support for independence through a variety of public activities, including petitioning, boycotts, and public demonstrations. In New Jersey, numerous women had overcome their ‘feminine modesty’ and actually cast ballots. The argument for women’s customary exclusion collapsed under the weight of such occurrences. As a male orator asserted in 1828, ‘Why has it been customary [to exclude women from the vote]? What is the reason this custom has always prevailed? We know of many customs that prevail, in favor of which no reason can be offered why they should prevail – and perhaps this is one of them.’61 Or as an Ohio woman advocating woman suffrage insisted in 1833, ‘If custom is to be the arbiter of laws and manners, then, all we will contend for, will be to make it customary for us to enjoy our privileges, and our object is accomplished.’62 While women’s ‘retired mode of life,’ ‘domestic duties,’ and ‘feminine reserve’ might make it difﬁcult for women to vote or hold public ofﬁce, they did not make it impossible. Casting about for a solution, Americans explored other kinds of rationales. At ﬁrst, these explanations were inchoate, inconsistent, or even contradictory. Over time, they located an rationale that rested in the seemingly more secure foundation provided by nature, science, and biology. The debate over women’s status occurred just as thinkers in western Europe were beginning to reconceptualize notions of sexual difference. By the late eighteenth century, a growing interest in empirical science, medicine, and human anatomy led to increased attention on the human body. Differences in genitalia, sexual impulses, and procreation came to be understood not as incidental distinctions between the sexes but as what historian Thomas Laqueur calls, ‘the foundation of incommensurable difference.’63 By the mid-nineteenth century, a new paradigm had emerged that attributed enormous moral and cultural signiﬁcance to biological differences between the sexes. This move, ‘from sex to gender, from body to behavior,’64 as Laqueur calls it, became the basis for judgments about each sex’s intellectual ability, emotional disposition, and social role. Women, it was argued, were different from, and

Women’s Rights Before Seneca Falls 679

inferior to, men. Not only were women physically weaker and less robust, they were thought to have less potential. While educable, they would always be more emotional and less rational than males. Feminine ‘sensibility’ would limit the range of their achievements. The female reproductive system itself – rather than the demands of childrearing – would prevent them from performing the same roles and functions as men. As Sarah Knott’s essay elsewhere in this volume shows,65 Doctor Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia was one among many Americans who transmitted biological essentialism from the medical realm to the political and cultural arena. Popular periodicals took up these ideas with enthusiasm ‘Nature,’ noted the Weekly Magazine, ‘seconded by reason and custom, had presumed to point out … the sphere of female duties and female obligations,’ leaving it beyond the capacity of people to change.66 Theology blended with science to sanction women’s subordination and inferiority. ‘There is an admirable partition of qualities between the sexes,’ noted an article called ‘Parallel of the Sexes,’ ‘which the Great Author of being has distributed to each, with a wisdom which calls for our admiration.’67 Any effort to alter the gender hierarchy thus represented not only a crime against nature but a challenge to the divine prerogative. ‘She who would invert the order of this system,’ declaimed a Philadelphia magazine, ‘not only betrays a pitiable ignorance of her own weakness but a spirit of rebellion against the ordinance of heaven.’68 Naturalized sex differences had the appearance of irrevocable fact. Although ‘natural facts,’ as historian Nancy Leys Stepan observes, ‘are always social facts, imbued with the values of the society in which they are produced, and unstable in their social meanings,’ it was much harder to resist ‘social claims made in the name of neutral science and inexorable nature.’69 If sexual differences were inscribed in nature, they could be seen as inherent, immutable, and unchangeable. Once women’s bodies became the marker not just of difference but of inferiority, their biology could be used as the basis for excluding them from particular roles and functions. This was particularly true with regard to politics and governance. A series of essays published in the Virginia Gazette in 1790 reveals an early American effort to use biological proscriptions in order to explain women’s exclusion. In 1776, a thoughtful correspondent posed a provocative question to the editor of Virginia Gazette. Why, he asked, if the Virginia constitution of 1776 declared that ‘all mankind are born equal,’ did this phrase not extend to women, allowing them to vote and hold public ofﬁce. Another author, who called himself ‘Philanthropos,’ jumped into fray. Equality, he responded, could be applied in ‘too extensive a sense,’ producing, he feared, a tendency ‘to destroy those degrees of subordination which nature seems to point out as indispensable for the regulation of society.’ Turning speciﬁcally to the question of women, the author noted that God had made the world in such a fashion that ‘woman was originally created in subordination to man.’ This subordination, he suggested, should also extend to the political realm. Like Adams and the ‘Essex Result,’ he pointed to the practical constraints on women’s ability to participate in governance. ‘The relative duties

680 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

of women in private life,’ he observed, were incompatible with ‘the perplexity and tumult of political life.’ Explaining further, it was, he said, ‘nature (the surest guide),’ that ‘has pointed out for [women] a course of duties and employments totally inconsistent with a life of political bustle and anxiety.’ Inherent biological difference between the sexes prevented women from participating. ‘In short,’ he concluded, ‘the evils to be apprehended from such an innovation in politics appear so numerous and alarming that … [the previous correspondent] will be induced to give it up.’70 Other writers and thinkers echoed this view. Men, it was said, governed not because of an accident of history, but because of their inherent biological attributes. ‘The men who were to be guardians and law-givers,’ said the Female Friend, ‘had not only the greater share of bodily strength bestowed on them, but those also of reason and resolution.’71 Women’s bodies were portrayed as inadequate for the purposes of governing. ‘Although perhaps even on the subject of law, politics or religion, [women] may form good judgment,’ said Hannah Mather Crocker, ‘… it would be morally improper and physically very incorrect, for the female character to claim the statesman’s birth, or ascend the rostrum to gain the loud applause of men.’72 Unlike customary restrictions, physical barriers were insurmountable. In Thomas Fessenden’s 1818 poem, a female character asks how it can be that men ‘esteem our sex so good and great’ while at the same time preventing women from becoming ‘female warriors,’ ‘lady-legislators,’ or ‘hold[ing] ofﬁces in Church and State?’ Mentor, the male ﬁgure, supplies a succinct, but devastating, response: Dame Nature tells us Mary’s [Wollstonecraft] rights are wrong, Her female freedom is a syren-song.73 No law could alter what ‘Dame Nature’ had decreed: women were not ﬁt political actors. ‘Female freedom’ was nothing more than a ‘syren-song’ that lured women down a fallacious path. In this context, women who dared to claim political rights opened themselves up to ridicule and abuse. ‘Evidently by the law of nature [women are] designed to stand as the chief personage of domestic life… . When a woman aspires to ambitious situations, she steps out of the sphere allotted her by nature, and assumes a character which is an outrage upon her delicacy and feminine loveliness.’74 A ‘female politician’ came to be seen as a freak, an oxymoron, a ‘manly woman.’75 One New Jersey author maligned the women who cast ballots in his home state as ‘metamorphosed witches!/Cloath’d in the dignity of state/and eke! In coat and beeches!’76. Another was even harsher, warning that women who ‘so rule … are no longer women; but abortions.’77 Naturalized gender roles not only made women’s political participation seem difﬁcult; it made it appear impossible. Although physical incapacity provided an extremely powerful argument against allowing women to vote or hold public ofﬁce, it did not, in and of itself, prove to be entirely satisfactory. Biological essentialism assumed that women were separate from, but inferior to, men. Yet Americans, under the inﬂuence of

Women’s Rights Before Seneca Falls 681

their revolutionary principles, had come to accept the proposition that women were, in important respect, men’s equals, even with regard to their standing in the polity. By raising virtuous sons and encouraging patriotism among their husbands, they contributed to the success of the republican experiment. In addition, like men, women shared certain basic rights, such as the right to petition and assemble, the right to freedom of religion, and the right to trial by jury. Women clearly did not belong in the same category as black slaves, who were completely dispossessed. For example, an 1802 ‘Plan for the Emancipation of the Fair Sex’ commented that it was necessary to ‘re-establish’ women ‘in their rights … [and] natural equality.’78 If women’s rights, like those of men, existed in a state of nature, then women were not gaining new rights; they were merely recovering rights that had been lost. The dilemma that Americans faced, then, was to explain why women’s possession of natural rights did not necessarily entitle them to political rights. The key was to show that men’s and women’s rights were equal but separate, to demonstrate that the sexes possessed fundamentally different rights when it came to politics and governance. As it happens, Americans had inherited not one but at least two different natural rights traditions. The more familiar tradition derived from John Locke’s Treatises on Government. In its original formulation, Locke’s social contract emphasized duties as well as rights, responsibilities as well as privileges. Americans, however, did a more selective reading of Locke. Their interpretation stressed property rights, individualism, and the pursuit of personal self-interest. Having minimized the importance of duties, they expanded the concept of rights. Rights became entitlements, claims that individuals made on the government to expand the scope of freedom and limit government interference in their lives. Atomistic liberty, personal autonomy, and individual choice became the hallmarks of Lockean liberalism in the United States.79 At the same time, educated Americans were also familiar with a countervailing tradition of natural rights that descended by way of the Scottish Enlightenment. Scots such as Francis Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, and others had integrated the natural law jurisprudence of Hugo Grotius and Samuel Pufendorf with the contractarian inﬂuences of Locke. In contrast to Lockean theory, the Scottish approach emphasized the centrality of duties over liberties, obligations over privileges, and the community over the individual. According to the Scots, God was ‘the ultimate obligator’80 who conferred certain beneﬁts on individuals. These beneﬁts, known as rights, consisted of the moral powers exerted over oneself and one’s property. Asserting one’s rights did not mean gaining new privileges, but rather, of performing the duties of one’s God-given station, role, or ofﬁce. Having positing markedly different conceptions of consent, freedom, and obligation, these two theories offered competing visions of society and of the possibility for social and political change. According to Locke, all individuals were equal and enjoyed certain God-given rights. When individuals or groups perceived an infringement of their rights, these individuals, as rights-bearers, had the moral authority to demand from their government redress of their

682 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

grievances. In practice, the result was to leave the deﬁnition of rights up to society. Rather than being ﬁxed and constant, rights were constantly open to change and contestation. Once a group gained sufﬁcient popular support for its claims, then a government could refuse to acknowledge those claims only at the risk of appearing unjust or unfair. As a result, marginalized groups constantly attempted to create new rights, broaden the scope of their liberties, or redeﬁne privileges as rights. Indeed, Democratic-Republicans in the United States as well as Jacobins in France immediately grasped the power of rights talk to act in this fashion, using this language to challenge the existing social order and foment radical political change.81 In contrast, the Scottish theory took social inequality and hierarchical vision of society as its starting point. Mutual obligations and the preservation of social harmony took precedence over individual prerogatives and freedom of choice. In fact, the exercise of rights was so closely bound up with the performance of duties that the two became virtually interchangeable. By deﬁning rights as duties, the Scottish approach limited, or even eliminated, the possibility for the creation of new rights. The government’s function was to reinforce the existing order, not to serve as an agent for adjudicating rights claims. Thus while the Lockean rights opened up the possibility of social upheaval and political rebellion, the Scottish rights were meant to reinforce the existing social order, insure political stability, and preserve traditional hierarchies. The Scottish theory was as conservative in its implications as the Lockean view was radical. Whether or not Americans were always aware of the intellectual sources of their ideas, they consistently applied the Lockean concept to men and the Scottish theory to women. ‘You will not consult a Wollstonecraft for a code of “Rights of Women,”’ warned a Maine orator. ‘Do not usurp the rights of man; they are essentially distinct.’82 Biological differences between the sexes provided a rationale for differentiating rights on the basis of sex. Distancing themselves from a more expansive understanding of rights, they claimed that the true vindication of women’s rights emerged from their duties as wives and mothers. An 1801 article possessing the evocative title, ‘A Second Vindication of the Rights of Women,’ noted that parents should ‘impress [their] daughters with a knowledge of the digniﬁed sphere they were intended to move in, and the performances of such duties as naturally devolve on them.’83 That ‘digniﬁed sphere’ was, of course, the domestic realm. ‘Let [girls] see that [their] very duties are the real source of all their pleasures, and the foundation of all their rights,’ urged The Charleston Spectator. ‘How engaging, how respectable are those rights! how sacred to the human heart, when a woman knows how to assert them properly.’84 When properly asserted, a woman’s ‘real rights’ became virtually synonymous with her traditional feminine duties. A different deﬁnition of rights meant that each sex would also ﬁnd a different guarantor of its rights claims. Whereas men’s rights were to be enforced by the state, women’s rights were to be guaranteed by men. The source of women’s ‘real rights,’ insisted Hannah Mather Crocker, lay in the home. As a result, she continued, ‘The surest foundation to secure the female’s right must be in family government.’85 ‘A good husband,’ assured an author in the Columbian Phenix, would

Women’s Rights Before Seneca Falls 683

have no problem acknowledging women’s rights and ‘will feel pleasure in recognizing … these, and a thousand other little rights.’86 This constraint, however, limited a woman’s ability to protest for redress of their grievances. Even within the ‘family government,’ a wife had little recourse if she suffered at the hands of a ‘tyrannical’ husband. Wives had, according to ‘A real friend to the fair sex,’ ‘the right to expostulate with temper.’ What the ‘real friend’ failed to note, however, was that women lacked the ultimate right that men had: the right to revolution. They seldom had the economic means to support themselves and usually lacked the political option of getting divorced. In fact, few commentators were willing to admit that women would ever be justiﬁed in seeking such a solution. ‘If rebellion, insurrection, or any other opposition to a just, mild, and free political government, is odious,’ declared the ‘real friend,’ ‘it is not less so to oppose good family administration.’87 The consequences were crucial. Despite apparent similarities, the scope of women’s rights was more limited than that of men. In addition, women who failed to deﬁne their rights ‘properly’ relinquished any claim on men’s protection. As long as women exercised rights consistent with their duties, men would protect those rights from usurpation or abuse. But only those prerogatives associated with women’s feminine nature would be acknowledged or protected. As ‘Morpheus’ put it in 1802, women ‘have rights to tenderness, delicate treatment, and reﬁned consideration. Men have no such rights. When women leave their character, and assume the character and rights, of men, they relinquish their own rights, and are to be regarded, and treated, as men.’88 Men had a particularly responsibility to guard women’s purity and virtue. According to Thomas Branagan, men must protect ‘the natural rights of women’ and ‘erect ramparts, in order to stop seduction in its mad, and too sucessful career; … and shelter female innocence from the innovations of libertinism.’89 Wives deserved special protection. A sermon called, The Rights of Women Vindicated declared that men owed women not only ‘the respect due to the sex in general,’90 but a duty to be good husbands who did not drink, gamble, or stray from the path of ﬁdelity. By promising to protect only those rights associated with a traditional female role, men removed political rights from table for discussion. Any attempt to use women’s rights as a vehicle for claiming political rights would be rejected or rebuffed. Yet by working within an accepted, alternative rights tradition provided by the Scots, commentators could avoid the criticism that they were inventing a new deﬁnition of rights strictly for the purposes of excluding women from governance. An 1802 poem called ‘Rights of Woman’ directly confronted and defended the divergent deﬁnitions of men’s and women’s rights. Listing what she considered women’s rights, a Miss M. Warner included items such as the right to cook delicious meals, to share in her husband’s grief, and to nurse him when he is sick. Then the author addressed those who would criticize her deﬁnition of women’s rights: These are our rights: those rights who dares dispute Let him speak now. No answer, what all mute?

684 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

But soft, methinks some discontented fair Cries, ‘These are duties, miss.’ Agreed, they are But know yet not that Woman’s proper sphere Is the domestic walk? To interfere With politics, divinity, or law, A much deserv’d ridicule would draw On Woman—.91 Women who sought a role ‘politics, divinity, or law,’ the author said, ‘interfered’ where they did not belong. By acting like men and transgressing the boundaries of their ‘proper sphere,’ they brought upon themselves ‘a much deserv’d ridicule.’ Hence the criticism of rights as duties was duly considered – and summarily dismissed. Deﬁning women’s rights as duties effectively precluded the possibility that women might claim the right to vote or hold ofﬁce. Women need not – and in fact, could not – share in the same political rights as men. In 1793, for example, ‘A real friend to the fair sex’ presented a list of twelve rights belonging to women, including: ‘[a woman’s] undoubted right to choose a husband’; ‘a right, in common with her husband, to instruct her children’; ‘a right to promote frugality, industry, and economy’; and ‘a right … to be neat and decent in her person and family.’ 92 No mention was made of political rights. Speaking to an audience of South Carolina women, William Loughton Smith waxed eloquent about women’s rights, which he explained, meant, ‘To delight, to civilize, and to ameliorate mankind – to exercise unlimited sway over obedient hearts, these are the precious rights of woman!’ 93 John Cosens Ogden of New Hampshire disposed of the question even more neatly. ‘Every man, by the constitution, is born with an equal right to be elected to the highest ofﬁce. And every woman, is born with an equal right to be the wife of the most eminent man.’ 94 While men’s rights involved liberties that allowed choices, women’s rights consisted of beneﬁts that imposed duties. Through the selective appropriation of rights traditions, Americans were able to translate the universal imperatives of equality and natural rights into sex-speciﬁc prerogatives. Despite a refusal to grant women political rights, American women were said to be better off than women anywhere else in the world. ‘Thrice blessed are we,’ commented novelist Hannah Foster, ‘the happy daughters of this land of liberty, where the female mind is unshackled by the restraints of tyrannical custom, in which many other regions conﬁnes the exertions of genius to the usurped powers of lordly man! Here, virtue, merit, and abilities are properly estimated under whatever form they appear.’95 Their standing was supposedly higher than in any other country. ‘Where shall we ﬁnd women more enlightened, than the women of America?’ asked Ebenezer French of Boston. ‘And is not the reason obvious? In some countries they are treated as slaves; in others, as inferiors, but in America as equals.’96 They did not doubt their belief in American superiority. ‘We may with safety assert,’ said a Massachusetts author, ‘that in no country on

Women’s Rights Before Seneca Falls 685

the surface of the globe, are women in a more happy condition than in these United States.’97 As if to reassure themselves, American orators and authors continually congratulated themselves on own their own beneﬁcence. ‘You are blessed with existence in a land of liberty,’ Gardner Child told a female audience in Vermont, ‘where the rights of women are understood and regarded. While the man protects, labors, and accumulates wealth, you have to preside over domestic affairs, to cultivate civilization, soften manners, and correct morals.’98 The implication was clear: American women should feel grateful for what they did have rather than focus on what they did not possess. ‘Under the mild inﬂuence of Christianity and the easy subsistence to be procured in our republican states,’ said Samuel L. Mitchill, ‘the condition of women is undoubtedly preferable to that of their sex in any part of the globe. [Women] ought to know that Fredonia [the United States] is a woman’s terrestrial Paradise. Here they are the rational companions of men, not their playthings or slaves.’99 How, then, could any woman who lived in a ‘terrestrial Paradise’ dare to demand other rights? What women would want the right to vote and hold public ofﬁce? The expansion of the white male electorate is typically portrayed as the quintessential expression of the process of democratization in the early American republic. It is now clear that white men gained while women lost – not the actual right to vote (except in New Jersey), but in terms of the popular understanding of what was possible. Universal male suffrage was increasingly deﬁned against – even predicated upon – women’s (and free blacks’) exclusion from governance. While a given individual might change his wealth status and enter the ranks of voters, a woman (or black person) could never change her sex (or race) and thus could never hope to become a full member of the polity. ‘Ascriptive’ qualities, as political scientist Rogers Smith calls them, such as race and gender, replaced property and wealth as the prerequisites for full citizenship.100 Naturalized gender roles blunted and domesticated the universalistic implications of liberal ideals. By the middle of the nineteenth century, this position had gained such widespread acceptance that any other alternative seemed incomprehensible. What historians and political theorists have missed, however, is the sense that the American Revolution had indeed opened the question of women’s political rights. The question was actively considered and seriously debated. In fact, it was the logic of liberalism, rather than demands of women themselves, that compelled Americans to address the issue. The exclusion of women was not inherent in liberal theory but a reaction to its most extreme implications. Justifying women’s exclusion required the development of a whole new mode of understanding sex roles and gender relations. Americans turned from contingent explanations based on custom or tradition to justiﬁcations grounded in the apparently immutable realm of biological nature. Women’s bodies made it not just difﬁcult, but physiologically impossible for women to participate in politics and governance. As a Virginia woman put it in 1828, ‘Even if men were disposed to admit women to an equality of rights and privileges, both the laws of nature and of God, forbid them to accept such a concession.’ 101 Even natural rights

686 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

themselves were said to ﬂow not from one’s status as a human being but from one’s maleness or femaleness. This change had profound consequences. Whereas previously women had been excluded from governance de facto, now their exclusion was explicitly mandated and legally required. To overcome such restrictions women would not only have to challenge law and custom, but nature itself. Ironically, the triumph of democracy for white males closed down the possibilities for women that the Revolution had opened up – and in some important respects, made the barriers their reentry into politics even higher than they had been before. Besides precluding women’s ability to claim political privileges, this explanation had a further utility. It deﬂected charges of a contradiction between American commitment to liberal principles and the exclusion of women from political rights. If sex roles were inscribed in nature, then no human being could alter them. As a result, according to an author writing in 1828, ‘The constitution of nature, ordained by no human conventions, recorded in no fundamental charter of government or petition of rights, but written over the face of the universe, and stamped indelibly upon the very organization of our race, has, we conceive, settled the question, whether the female sex should exercise political franchises equally with man.’ Rather than being unfair, arbitrary, or capricious, the American government was simply cognizant of a scientiﬁc ‘fact.’ In the face of the ‘constitution of nature,’ the notion of women’s political rights was nothing more than a ‘quixotic pretension.’ 102 The political system was off the hook – at least temporarily. Nature had been harnessed to constrain women’s natural rights.

Notes 1. M. B. Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Glenview, Ill., 1980); L.K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, 1980); J. Hoff-Wilson, ‘The Illusion of Change: Women and the American Revolution,’ in The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, ed. A. Young (DeKalb, Ill., 1976), 383–445. Hoff-Wilson is especially critical about the failure of the American Revolution for women. 2. C. Pateman, The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory (Stanford, 1989); N. J. Hirschmann, Rethinking Obligation: A Feminist Method for Political Theory (Ithaca, 1992); J. B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, 1988). Pateman explains: ‘The social contract story hides original political right by proclaiming sexual or conjugal right as natural. Men’s dominion over women is held to follow from the respective natures of the sexes … civil individuals have a fraternal bond because, as men, they share a common interest in upholding the contract which legitimizes their masculine patriarchal right and allows them to gain material and psychological beneﬁt from women’s subjection,’ ibid., 39, 43. She develops this idea more fully in The Sexual Contract (Stanford, 1988). Hirschmann notes, ‘Structural sexism’ means ‘the fact that [the structure of obligation] is deﬁned solely in voluntarist terms … [which] is itself reﬂective of a masculinist perspective, and automatically excludes women from obligation on an epistemological level,’ ibid., 12. Landes observes, ‘Yet the claim that the ‘modernity’ inaugurated in part by the French Revolution has ‘not yet’ exhausted its liberatory potential is equally suspect … this claim can never be redeemed, for the women’s movement cannot

Women’s Rights Before Seneca Falls 687

3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

‘take possession’ of a public sphere that has been enduringly reconstructed along masculinist lines,’ ibid., 202. See Arianne Chernock, ‘Extending the ‘Right of Election’: Men’s Arguments for Women’s Political Representation in Britain, c. 1790s;’ Anna Clark, ‘Women in Eighteenth-Century Politics: Competing Interpretations:’ and Suzanne Desan’s ‘Politics of Intimacy: Marriage and Citizenship in Revolutionary France,’ all in this volume. Norton, Liberty’s Daughters, 188–94; Kerber, Women of the Republic, 80–85; S. Skemp, ed., Judith Sargent Murray: A Brief Biography with Documents (Boston, 1998), 176–82. J. A. Klinghoffer and L. Elkis, ‘The Petticoat Electors’: Women’s Suffrage in New Jersey, 1776–1807,’ The Journal of the Early Republic, 12 (Summer 1992), 159–93; E. R. Turner, ‘Women’s Suffrage in New Jersey: 1790–1807,’ Smith College Studies in History, 1 (July 1916), 156–87; C. Prince, New Jersey’s Jeffersonian Republicans: The Genesis of an Early Party Machine, 1789–1817 (Chapel Hill, 1964), 134 n.7. It is very difﬁcult to get accurate estimates of how many women actually voted. See The Centinel of Freedom (Newark, NJ) of 18 October 1797, which states, ‘no less than seventy-ﬁve women were polled at the late election in a neighboring borough.’ Presumably, more than that voted throughout the entire state. W. Grifﬁth, Eumenes: Being a Collection of Papers written for the Purpose of Exhibiting Some of the More Prominent Errors and Omissions of the Constitution of New-Jersey (Trenton, 1799), 33. H. Ford, An Oration, Delivered in the Presbyterian Church at Morris-Town, July 4, 1806 (Morris-Town: 1806), 11. The Centinel of Freedom (Newark, NJ), Oct. 18, 1797; Trenton True American, Oct. 18, 1802. Klinghoffer and Elkis, ‘Petticoat Electors,’ 186–91; I.N. Gertzog, ‘Female Suffrage in New Jersey, 1790–1807,’ in Women, Politics and the Constitution, ed. N. B. Lynn (New York, 1990), 47–58. [Friend to the Ladies], Trenton True American (New Jersey), 18 October 1802. M. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. M. Brody (London, 1975 [orig. pub. 1792]); 12. T. Paine, Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings (Oxford, 1995 [orig. pub. 1791–92]). Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 88. Ibid., 87. Ibid., 188. Ibid., 188, 326. Ibid., 265. B. Taylor convincingly argues that Wollstonecraft condemned the exclusion of working-class men as much as that of women and denounced the whole system of representation as ‘a convenient handle for despotism.’ She also maintains that Wollstonecraft was not a systematic natural rights thinker. My point is less about Wollstonecraft and more about the way her ideas were interpreted in the United States. See Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge, 2003), 211–26. Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 328. See, for example, M.A. Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York, 1991); R. Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge, 1979); K. Haakonssen, ‘From natural law to the rights of man: a European perspective on American debates,’ in A Culture of Rights: The Bill of Rights in Philosophy, Politics, and Law – 1791 and 1991, eds M. J. Lacey and K. Haakonssen (Cambridge, 1991); D.T. Rodgers, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence (New York, 1987); and T. L. Haskell, ‘The Curious Persistence of Rights Talk in the “Age of Interpretation,”’ in The Constitution and American Life, ed. D. Thelen (Ithaca, NY, 1988), 324–52.

688 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship 20. For an early excerpt from A Vindication in an American magazine, see Ladies Magazine (Philadelphia), September 1792, 189–98. For Wollstonecraft’s reception in America, see M. Thiebaux, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft in Federalist America, 1791–1802,’in The Evidence of the Imagination: Studies of Interactions between Life and Art in English Romantic Literature, eds D. H. Reiman, M. C. Jaye, and B. T. Bennett (New York, 1978), 195–235; J. W. James, Changing Ideas about Women in the United States, 1776–1825 (New York, 1981 [orig. pub. 1954]), 100–105; D. Lundberg and H. F. May, ‘The Enlightened Reader in America,’ American Quarterly, Vol. 28 (Summer 1976), 262–71 and graphs following. 21. E. Boudinot, An Oration Delivered at Elizabeth-Town, New-Jersey, Agreeably to a Resolution of the State Society of Cincinnati on the Fourth of July DCCXCIII (Elizabethtown, 1793), 24. 22. ‘On the Rights of Woman,’ National Magazine, or, A Political, Historical, Biographical, and Literary Repository, II (1800), 206. 23. S. Miller, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1803), II: 284. 24. W. Boyd, Woman: A Poem, Delivered at a Public Exhibition, April 19, at Harvard University; in The College Chapel (Boston, 1796), 13. 25. “The Gentleman at Large, No. III, The Columbian Phenix & Boston Review (May 1800), 267. 26. [THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN], Philadelphia Repository, & Weekly Register, May 21, 1803, 165. 27. R. Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840 (Berkeley, 1969); J. R. Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis (New Haven, 1993); D. Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill, 1997); S. Elkins and E. McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic: 1788–1800 (New York, 1993); David Hackett Fischer, The Revolution of American Conservatism: The Federalist Party in the Era of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York, 1965); L. K. Kerber, Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America (Ithaca, 1970). 28. J. Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York, 1984); D. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill, 1980). 29. Rodgers, Contested Truths, 46. 30. Hofstadter, Idea of a Party System, 74–121; J. L. Pasley, ‘The Tyranny of Printers’: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville, 2001), 348–99; A. Robertson and P. Lampi, ‘The Election of 1800 Revisited,’ Paper presented at the American Historical Association annual meeting, 9 January 2000. 31. The classic formulation is L. B. Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York, 1955). 32. A. Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York, 2000), 26–52 and Tables A.1, A.2; R. M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conﬂicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, 1997), 170–73. 33. Virginia Constitutional Convention, 20 November 1829, in Democracy, Liberty, and Property: The State Constitutional Conventions of the 1820s, ed. M. D. Peterson (Indianapolis, 1966), 401. For similar arguments made at other state constitutional conventions of this era, see L. D. Ginzberg, ‘Pernicious Heresies: Female Citizenship and Sexual Respectability in the Nineteenth Century,’ in Women and the Unstable State in Nineteenth-Century America, eds A.M. Parker and S. Cole (College Station, TX, 2000), 148–56. 34. ‘Petition to the Convention in Behalf of the Ladies. By their friend and counsellor,’ Euterpeiad: Or, Musical Intelligencer, and Ladies’ Gazette (Boston), 29 Sept. 1821, 112. 35. F. B. Dexter, ed., The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, D.D., L.L.D. (New York, 1901), II: 490; III: 15; Brothers in Unity, Secretary’s Records, Yale University Archives, Book 2, Box 8,

Women’s Rights Before Seneca Falls 689

36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

54.

55. 56. 57.

pp. 64, 87, 114. For contemporaneous debates in England, see Taylor, Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, 176–78. Belles-Lettres Society, Minutes, Dickinson College Archives, Vols. I (1786–91) and II (1792–1806). Thanks to David W. Robson for providing these references. Dialectic Society, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill Archives, Ser. 1 (Minutes), Vol. 3, 22 Sept. 1803, 11 May 1804, 17 May 1804. ‘The Salutatory Oration,’ delivered by Miss Mason, in The Rise and Progress of the Young Ladies’ Academy of Philadelphia: Containing an Account of a Number of Public Examinations & Commencements; the Charter and Bye-Laws; Likewise; a Number of Orations delivered by the Young Ladies and Several by the Trustees of said Institution (Philadelphia, 1794), 93, 94–95. ‘The Ladies,’ The New-York Daily Advertiser, 19 Jan. 1790. [By a Lady], ‘On Female Talent,’ The New-York Weekly Museum, or Polite Repository, 2 Mar. 1816, 276. Quoted in J. Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, 2000), 151. C. B. Brown, Alcuin: A Dialogue, ed. L. R. Edwards (New York, 1970 [orig. publ. 1798, 1815]), 37. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 29. J. T. Kirkland, An Oration, Delivered at the Request of the Society of Phi Beta Kappa, in the Chapel of Harvard College, on the Day of their Anniversary, July 19, 1798 (Boston, 1798), 10. M. S. Wheeler, ed., One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement (Troutdale, Ore., 1995); S. Hoffert, When Hens Crow: The Woman’s Rights Movement in Antebellum America (Bloomington, Ind., 1995); N. Isenberg, Sex & Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, 1998), 15–39. ‘Hyperion,’ The Mercury and New-England Palladium (Boston), 18 Aug. 1801. [Ignotus}, ‘To “A Friend of the Fair Sex,”’ Philadelphia Repository and Weekly Register, 14 Mar. 1801, 5. ‘The Restorator – No. XII. The Rights of Woman, ‘ The Mercury and New-England Palladium (Boston), 15 Sept. 1801. [By a Lady], ‘On Female Talent,’ New-York Weekly Museum, or Polite Repository, 2 Mar. 1816, 276. [Susan Thoughtful], ‘Something New – Or, what next?’ Euterpeiad: Or, Musical Intelligencer, & Ladies’ Gazette (Boston), 2 Mar. 1822. The issue of whether Elizabeth Bartlett could hold ofﬁce was never put to the test. On 6 Mar. 1822, the Columbian Centinel (Boston) announced Bartlett’s withdrawal from the race, noting that the nomination ‘was made wholly without her knowledge or consent [and] … she utterly disclaims all pretensions to the ofﬁce.’ ‘The Rights of Both Sexes,’ The Lady’s Monitor (New York), 31 Oct. 1801, 88; reprinted in The Mercury and New-England Palladium (Boston), 17 Aug. 1802; Weekly Visitor, or, Ladies’ Miscellany (New York), 16 Oct. 1802, 12; and The Weekly Magazine, 13 Apr. 1799, 19. This was originally taken from a London publication. [T. Parsons], ‘The Essex Result,’ (Newburyport, MA, 1778) in American Political Writing during the Founding Era, 1760–1805, eds C. S. Hyneman and D. S. Lutz (Indianapolis, Ind., 1983), I: 497. John Adams to James Sullivan, 26 May 1776, in The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, ed. C. F. Adams (Boston, 1854), IX: 375–8. [A Friend to the Ladies], Trenton True American {New Jersey), 18 Oct. 1802. W. Alexander, History of Women, From the Earliest Antiquity, to the Present Time; Giving an Account of Almost Every Interesting Particular Concerning that Sex, Among All Nations, Ancient and Modern (Philadelphia, 1795), 2 vols. Alexander, a Scottish physician, ﬁrst

690 Women and Revolutionary Citizenship

58.

59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67

68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81.

issued his work in London and Dublin in 1779. At least two American editions appeared, one in 1795 and another in 1796. For other histories of women read by Americans, see J. C. Spruill, Women’s Life and Work in the Southern Colonies (New York, 1998 [orig. publ. 1972]), 227–8; K. J. Hayes, A Colonial Woman’s Bookshelf (Knoxville, Tenn., 1996), 72–3. An Oration Delivered on the Fourth Day of July 1800, by a Citizen of the United States. To Which is Added The Female Advocate, Written by a Lady (Springﬁeld, 1808), 12, 21. A previous edition of The Female Advocate was published in New Haven in 1801. [D’Anville], ‘The Natural Rights of Woman,’ Boston Monthly Magazine, I (Aug. 1825), 129. R. Zagarri, A Woman’s Dilemma: Mercy Otis Warren and the American Revolution (Wheeling, Ill., 1995), 73–7. The phrase ‘masculine genius’ was used approvingly by Warren’s husband, James. P. Brown, A Lecture Concerning Marriage: Delivered February 10 1828 at Cincinnati – Re-delivered March 29th 1829, at Kendall, with emendations (Rochester, 1830), 21. [Mary Ann]. ‘Rights of Females,’ Literary Cabinet & Western Olive Branch (St. Clairsville, Ohio), 16 Mar. 1833, 20. T. Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA, 1990), 149. Ibid., 216. See Sarah Knott, ‘Sensibility and Selfhood in Revolutionary America’ in this volume. The New-York Weekly Magazine; or, Miscellaneous Repository, 13 Apr. 1799, 19. ‘Parallel of the Sexes,’ The Boston Spectator; Devoted to Politicks and Belles Lettres (Boston), 6 Aug. 1814, 127; reprinted in The New-York Weekly Museum, or Polite Repository of Amusement and Instruction, 15 June 1816, 107. ‘Husband and Wife,’ Literary and Musical Magazine (Philadelphia), 3 May 1819, 13. N. L. Stepan, ‘Race, Gender, Science, and Citizenship,’ Gender & History, 10 (Apr. 1998), 35. [Philanthropos], The Virginia Gazette and Alexandria Advertiser, 22 Apr. 1790. [F… L…, Esq.], The Female Friend; or the Duties of Christian Virgins (Baltimore, 1809), 196. H. M. Crocker, Observations on the Real Rights of Women, with their Appropriate Duties, agreeable to Scripture, Reason and Common Sense (Boston, 1818), 15–16. T. Fessenden, The Ladies’ Monitor, A Poem (Bellows Falls, VT, 1818), 58–59. [Telescope], ‘Woman,’ Euterpeiad (Boston), 21 July 1821, 71. [Morpheus], Mercury and New-England Palladium (Boston), 2 Mar. 1802. ’The Freedom of Election. A New Song,’ Centinel of Freedom (Newark), 18 October 1797. Ibid., 11 Dec. 1798. ‘Plan for Emancipation of the Fair Sex,’ Lady’s Magazine and Musical Repository (New York), 3 (Jan.–June 1802), 43. See Rodgers, Contested Truths, 72–101; Glendon, Rights Talk; P.N. Miller, Deﬁning the Common Good (Cambridge, 1994). Haakonssen, ‘From natural law to the rights of man,’ 29. Neither the Scottish nor the Lockean tradition emerges from what has been called ‘classical republicanism.’ I provide a more detailed analysis of these issues in ‘The Rights of Man and Woman in Post-Revolutionary America,’ The William & Mary Quarterly, LV (April 1998), 203–30. In contrast, Barbara Taylor argues that interpretation of rights as duties ‘was standard for eighteenth-century moral-political thinkers’ and not necessarily conﬁned to the Scottish natural rights tradition. See Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, 217–37. Rodgers, Contested Truths, 72–101; J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Cambridge Paradigms and Scotch Philosophers: a Study of the Relations Between the Civic Humanist and Civil Jurisprudential Intepretation of Eighteenth-Century Social Thought,’ in Wealth and

Women’s Rights Before Seneca Falls 691

82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

90. 91. 92. 93.

94.

95. 96.

97. 98. 99. 100.

101. 102.

Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, eds I. Hont and M. Ignatieff (Cambridge, 1983), 235–52; A. Hook, ‘Philadelphia, Edinburgh, and the Scottish Enlightenment,’ in Scotland and America in the Age of the Enlightenment, eds R. B. Sher and J. R. Smitten (Princeton, 1990), 227–41. J. Perley, An Anniversary Oration, Delivered before the Federal Republicans of Hallowell and Its Vicinity (Augusta, ME, 1807), 23. [A Lady], ‘A Second Vindication of the Rights of Women,’ Ladies’ Monitor (New York), 10, 15 Aug. 1801, 19–20. ‘On the education of females,’ Charleston [SC] Spectator , and Ladies’ Literary Port Folio, 16 Aug 1806 (emphasis added). Crocker, Observations, 20. ‘The Gentleman at Large. No III,’ Columbian Phenix and Boston Review (May 1800), 268. [A real friend to the fair sex], Weekly Museum (New York), 16 Mar. 1793. [Morpheus], Mercury and New-England Palladium (Boston), 2 Mar. 1802. T. Branagan, The Excellency of the Female Character Vindicated; being an investigation relative to the cause and effects of the Encroachments of Men upon the Rights of Woman the too frequent degradation and consequent misfortunes of the Fair Sex (New York, 1807), ix, 139–40. Rev. J. Hanning, M.D., Rights of Women Vindicated in the Following Sermon, 2d. ed. (New York, 1807), 2. Miss M. Warner, ‘Rights of Woman,’ Boston Weekly Magazine, 30 Oct. 1802, 2. [A real friend to the fair sex], Weekly Museum (New York), 16 Mar. 1793. W. L. Smith, An Oration, Delivered in St. Philip’s Church, before the Inhabitants of Charleston, South-Carolina, on the Fourth of July, 1796, in commemoration of American Independence (Charleston, SC, 1796), 9. J. C. Ogden, The Female Guide: or, Thoughts on the Education of That Sex, Accommodated to the State of Society, Manners, and Government, in the United States (Concord, NH, 1793), 26. H. Foster, The Boarding School (Boston, 1798), 31. E. French, An Oration, Pronounced July 4 th, 1805, Before the Young Democratic Republicans of the Town of Boston in Commemoration of the Anniversary of American Independence (Boston, 1805), 20–21. Columbian Centinel (Boston), 24 Jan. 1801. G. Child, An Oration, delivered at Richmond, Vermont, on the 31st Anniversary of American Independence, July 4th, 1807 (Bennington, VT, 1807), 44. S. L. Mitchill, Address to the Fredes, or People of the Unites States on the 28th Anniversary of their Independence (New York, 1804), 7. Smith, Civic Ideals, 5; L. J. Scalia, ‘Who Deserves Political Inﬂuence? How Liberal Ideals Helped Justify Mid-Nineteenth Century Exclusionary Policies,’ American Journal of Political Science, 42 (April 1998), 349–76. Mrs. V. Cary, Letters on Female Character (Richmond, 1828), 44. Book review, North American Review, LIX (April 1828), 318.

SECTION 10

CONCLUSIONS

10.1 Women and Enlightenment: A Historiographical Conclusion John Robertson

The present volume is not the ﬁrst to address the themes of women and gender in the Enlightenment. Interest in the subject was already growing fast during the last two decades of the twentieth century. By 2000 major monographs had been devoted to the salons and salonnières of seventeenth and eighteenth-century France, and to the Cartesian conception of the female mind. Other prominent ﬁelds of study were the opportunities offered women by the emergence of a ‘public sphere’ in England and other western European societies, and, not least, the lives and thought of the radicals who seem closest to a recognisably modern ‘feminism’, Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges. But if the importance of the subject was established, there can be little doubt that the collaborative venture which has yielded Women, Gender, and Enlightenment represents a more sustained and wide-ranging exploration of the role of women in the Enlightenment than any undertaken before now. Never have so many facets of women and gender in Enlightenment thinking and practice been studied together. In the face of such riches, it would be unwise for any one scholar to predict what impact this volume may have on our understanding of the Enlightenment’s signiﬁcance for women. But provisional conclusions may perhaps be drawn by exploring some of the ways in which the essays published here relate to other ﬁndings of modern Enlightenment scholarship. What has this book, and the scholarship which preceded it, achieved for women in the Enlightenment? As late as the 1980s, a negative view of the Enlightenment’s signiﬁcance for women was common. Reviewing a quartet of books on eighteenth-century English women published in the early 1980s, Phyllis Mack (herself a contributor here) judged that women writing about women in early modern England have reached a consensus on at least one fundamental point: the Enlightenment was far from a great step forward in our history. Whatever the reason for the decline in female status – the degeneration of seventeenth-century rationalism, the ambitions of the bourgeoisie, or the simple orneriness of eighteenth-century 692

Women and Enlightenment 693

men – the fact seems to be that the intellectual, economic, and spiritual options open to women of all classes decreased during the Enlightenment.1 As a challenge to future scholars this could hardly have been sharper in its formulation: the Enlightenment did nothing to better the social condition of women, or to enlarge their intellectual opportunities. Study of women and the Enlightenment looked likely to be a dead end. One effective response to such scepticism is to adopt a much broader concept of Enlightenment than was formerly common. Such a broadening of Enlightenment has been a strong trend in recent scholarship. It has been apparent on three principal fronts. The study of Enlightenment ideas has been extended far beyond an original focus on the works of the philosophes and the small number of non-French philosophers and reformers directly associated with them. Historical writing, political economy, and, not least, natural philosophy have all been brought within the rubric of Enlightenment thought. A similar enlargement of focus has resulted from a second trend, particularly evident in anglophone scholarship, the study of the Enlightenment ‘in national context’. Not only has this encouraged a fuller appreciation of German, Italian and Scottish participation in the Enlightenment; it has also encouraged the discovery of Enlightenment in less obvious places, in Central and Eastern Europe, in England, even, most recently, in Ireland.2 Third and even more popular (perhaps because it coincides with the prevalent inclination to re-describe social history as cultural history), has been the association of Enlightenment with the emergence of a distinct ‘public sphere’ in many European societies. Adapted from its original use by Jürgen Habermas, the concept of a ‘public sphere’ has been used to capture and demarcate a social space open to the educated but independent of the institutions traditionally reserved for the ruling elite, and beyond the direct control of the governing authorities. There, it is argued, Enlightenment ideas became a new social practice or culture, the culture of ‘sociability’.3 In practical terms, there is much to be said for this enlargement of the traditional Enlightenment: a great deal of good history has been written as a result. The legitimacy of the new approaches has seemed all the stronger as scholars have been reminded that ‘the Enlightenment’ was itself less a contemporary selfdescription than a label which came into common use only some hundred years afterwards. Contemporary usages – Aufklärung, les lumières, i lumi – were either without the deﬁnite article (as in Kant’s Was ist Aufklärung?) or in the plural. It was only in the late nineteenth century that the deﬁnite article was placed before the noun in English (and subsequently in the Italian ‘l’Illuminismo’); a motive for doing so was the conviction that the Enlightenment should be understood to correspond to a deﬁnite school of philosophy.4 Realising this, later twentiethcentury historians, headed by John Pocock, have moved to repudiate the deﬁnite article, and to think explicitly of Enlightenments in the plural.5 Such a perspective makes it much easier to accommodate both new countries and new ﬁelds as subjects of Enlightenment studies. Women have beneﬁted as much as any from the new pluralism, both as the objects of Enlightenment thought and as active

694 Conclusions

participants in the movement. More than anything the present volume testiﬁes to the beneﬁts of a catholic, inter-disciplinary approach to Enlightenment, as contributors range across the several genres of women’s writing in the eighteenth-century, the subject areas in which women were now studied (by men as well as women), the shifting ways in which gender was identiﬁed and accorded value, the varieties of women’s religious experience, the opportunities women enjoyed for intellectual initiative and patronage, and the extent to which they gained – and lost – the opportunity to shape their own and their societies’ political destinies. In particular, although it does not neglect developments in Continental Europe, the volume exempliﬁes the potential of exploring women and gender within the contexts of the Scottish and English Enlightenments, both of which, but especially the latter, have themselves come into focus as a result of the new pluralism in Enlightenment studies. The new pluralism, however, also carries risks. As Dror Wahrman notes above, the wider the range of activities, intellectual, social and political, which are associated with Enlightenment, the greater the danger that the term is used simply as a descriptor of a period.6 It would be still more damaging if a benign inclusiveness were to lead scholars to overlook contradictory implications within their own ﬁndings. Pluralism and inclusiveness alone cannot answer the challenge articulated by Phyllis Mack in the 1980s. We still need to ask whether the study of women by Enlightenment historians and philosophers developed, undermined, or diverted attention from the insights of earlier thinkers, and whether the public sphere associated with Enlightenment was conducive to women’s intellectual endeavours, and enlarged the literary and social choices open to them. Closer examination of a number of the ﬁndings in this volume, and comparison of them with the ﬁndings of others not represented here, may suggest that Mack’s scepticism retains some – perhaps even much – of its original force. Among the problems to which Enlightenment thinkers devoted particular attention, the historical explanation of human sociability is now widely regarded as one of their most original achievements. Within this enquiry, women were accorded an unprecedented level of recognition as historical subjects. Here as elsewhere Enlightenment thinkers built on seventeenth-century foundations. Scholarly criticism of the text of the Bible, making it impossible seriously to deny that it was composed by a variety of authors at different times, had undermined the authority of the Book of Genesis, and removed the requirement to begin with Adam and Eve, or at least with the sons of Noah. Even more important was the shift within Natural Jurisprudence, away from contractual accounts of the origins of society, to explanations which focussed on the division of labour and the acquisition of property. By the mid-eighteenth century, it had become common for conjecturally-minded historians to think of societies developing through stages deﬁned by the ways in which property in goods was acquired and retained: these stages might include some or all of hunting and ﬁshing, herding, agriculture, and commerce, and the course of a society’s development through them could be thought of as ‘the progress of society’ from barbarism to civilisation. In this perspective, attention to the role of women became unavoidable. No

Women and Enlightenment 695

longer did Eve’s original sin need to taint the treatment of all womankind; while the devaluation of the idea of a contract as inaugurating society made it impossible to ignore the formative role of the family in socialising children. Women thus had to be studied for their contribution to the family and their part in property relations, while the moral codes to which they were subject, and their treatment by men, became crucial aspects of the ‘manners’ of a society at any given stage of development. Towards the end of the century, this interest was yielding works devoted in whole or in part speciﬁcally to women, by the Scots John Gregory, Lord Kames, John Millar, and William Alexander, and by the French Antoine Leonard Thomas. Deservedly, these works are the subject of several of the contributions above, notably those by Mary Catherine Moran and Silvia Sebastiani. As Moran and Sebastiani point out, however, conjectural history conﬁned women even as it focussed attention upon them. Its analysis of women’s contribution to sociability presupposed not only their natural difference from men, but a limited moral and political capacity. Enlightenment conjectural histories did not attribute to women the same potential for moral development as they did to men, nor did they credit women with the agency of change. Rather, it was men’s treatment of women which was the focus of historical enquiry, and the measure of a society’s progress in politeness and civilisation. Hence the recurrent interest in the historical genesis of ‘chivalry’, and its gradual evolution into the modern ideal of ‘gallantry’. It was the mark of a civilised society that men treated women with respect, conversing politely with them and acknowledging their superiority in certain sociable arts – not that women enjoyed the same opportunities as men. Moreover there was a real danger – articulated more vividly by some than by others, but acknowledged by all save those most committed to gallantry – that excessive regard for feminine values would lead to ‘effeminacy’, undermining the natural distinction between the sexes. Women too would suffer, as their ‘reﬁnement’ at the hands of men corrupted their original, ‘natural’ qualities.7 It would be a mistake to infer that conjectural history was unremittingly negative in its implications for women. As Sebastiani makes clear, the Scottish philosophers disagreed among themselves as to the beneﬁts of progress for women as well as men. Adding a fresh insight to an already much-interpreted text, she reads Ossian as portraying a society which maintained an equilibrium between the sexes, celebrating women’s contribution to both the liberty and the sociability of the ancient Scots.8 A similarly positive view might be taken of Tahitian sexual relations, whose natural freedom appeared to anticipate the freedom of modern commerce. But Ossian was myth, not history, while Diderot’s portayal of the Tahitians, analysed here by Jenny Mander, acknowledged that their natural freedom was imperilled by contact with European civilisation.9 The recourse to imaginary social worlds could not offset the limited prospects for female advancement offered by conjectural history. It is also telling that for all the new interest in women’s historical role, few women actually wrote histories, whether conjectural or more conventionally narrative. In a notably direct confrontation with the problem, Sylvana Tomaselli

696 Conclusions

attributes women writers’ avoidance of conjectural history in particular to the moral unattractiveness of its male subjects. Conjectural reconstructions of past societies were typically based on the assumption that men were driven by the self-regarding passions rather than by moral values.10 On the other hand, a major narrative history was written by a woman, Catharine Macaulay, the subject here of two important studies by Sarah Hutton and Karen O’Brien. The signiﬁcance of Hutton’s analysis of Macaulay’s moral theology will be discussed later; at this point it is O’Brien’s suggestion that Macaulay’s History gave David Hume a genuine fright which commands attention. As Hume could not but recognise, Macaulay drew radical Whig political conclusions from a story whose structure was similar to that of his own History of England. For all her intellectual achievement, however, Macaulay remained isolated as a woman who wrote history. Hostile to Hume’s moral scepticism, indifferent to irony, she preferred to celebrate the few who upheld republican virtue in the face of royal tyranny and ministerial corruption.11 O’Brien is appreciative of the recent work of Mark Phillips, who in Society and Sentiment. Genres of Historical Writing in Britain 1740–1820 argued that the subject matter of historical writing was both expanding and fragmenting in the second half of the eighteenth century, creating new opportunities for historical authorship, in memoirs and travel writing as well as narrative.12 But Macaulay herself was committed to narrative, and the extent to which women wrote in the alternative genres is not explored here. It remains to be seen whether women were able to take advantage of the opportunities which Phillips identiﬁed. Scepticism over the implications of much Enlightenment historical writing on women is likely to be reinforced by closer examination of the view of human nature on which it was based. This was the view that humans are naturally driven by their passions, whose force is regularly superior to their reason. Understandably in a project which has sought to emphasise the positive, the present volume includes no contribution devoted speciﬁcally to this unsympathetic dimension of eighteenth-century thinking. It is, however, thrown into relief by the two contributions of Siep Stuurman, exploring varieties of ‘feminism’ in the seventeenth century and earlier. Well before the Enlightenment, Stuurman suggests, main currents in European philosophy and in Catholic theology had proved themselves capable of supporting strikingly egalitarian conceptions of male and female natures, and in particular of women’s mental powers. The neo-Platonist account of the soul was one possible inspiration; another was Descartes’ separation of the mind from the body, the latter being the basis for a particularly radical statement of the proposition that ‘the mind has no sex’ by François Poulain de la Barre.13 A similar egalitarianism, Stuurman adds, might also be founded on both Stoic and Epicurean moral presuppositions. This may be – but there is little doubt that Epicurean natural and moral philosophy was the basis for a quite different, radically in-egalitarian view of women’s nature. The point matters, because arguably Epicureanism was the strongest, most persuasive current in European philosophy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Women and Enlightenment 697

The key ﬁgure was Gassendi, whose historical reconstruction of Epicurus’ philosophy in a Christian perspective was widely read across both Catholic and Protestant Europe. Not only was Descartes often read through the lens of Gassendi’s Epicureanism, weighing the body (and with it the passions) much more heavily than the mind; but Hobbes too might be assimilated within, and at least partially legitimated by the same neo-Epicurean philosophical current. Further reinforcement of the Epicurean emphasis on the materiality of the body and the passions was provided by its convergence with the Augustinian emphasis on man’s base, sinful nature, driven by bodily desires. A combination of Augustinian and Epicurean views of human nature lay at the heart of the philosophical criticism of Pierre Bayle, whose thinking vividly informed the social commentary of his Anglo-Dutch admirer, Bernard Mandeville. In turn these two were among the earliest inspirations of David Hume’s philosophy. Like Mandeville, Hume discounted sin; but his insistence on the primacy of the passions and their enslavement of reason amounted to a powerful reformulation of the Epicurean conception of human nature. The consequences of this shift in philosophical fashion were potentially devastating for women. The proposition that the mind has no sex was devalued in favour of a new interest in the apparently obvious bodily differences between men and women, and in what were assumed to be consequent differences in the nature and objects of their passions. Still more serious was the Epicurean-Hobbist denial of man’s natural sociability. For if men were by nature different from women, and driven by bodily desires, they could not originally have been sociable. The family must have been subordinate to their needs, not the ﬁrst social institution. Only self-interested exchange could have brought men together in society, while the physical inferiority of women condemned them to the position of slaves, the ﬁrst property of their men. This account of socialisation was of course vigorously contested throughout the period of its ascendancy, neo-Stoics as well as Christians of a rationalist inclination maintaining that humans were capable of a natural benevolence, moderating and socialising their self-interested tendencies. But such a critique of Epicureanism was not necessarily of beneﬁt to women. For the neo-Stoics in turn converged with the Epicureans in their emphasis on the value of ‘politeness’ as a civilising inﬂuence in modern society. Whether politeness was attributable to a natural benevolence or, as the Epicureans argued, to men’s gradual elaboration of moral conventions, it entailed a condescension by the male to the female. The consequence was the cult of ‘gallantry’, whose premises and affectations are brilliantly dissected by Barbara Taylor. The greatest devotee of the cult was David Hume himself: an advocate from his earliest essays of the beneﬁcial, softening effects of female conversation, appreciative of female readers of histories in particular, Hume’s own life exempliﬁed its values. Not even when emotionally wrong-footed by the vastly more experienced and manipulative Comtesse de Boufﬂers did he abandon his conviction that men should behave gallantly towards women. As Taylor shows, it was precisely the condescension inherent in gallantry which so infuriated Mary Wollstonecraft, and informed her allegiance to a very different, more rationalist conception of human nature, common to both sexes.14

698 Conclusions

Here as in the case of conjectural history, negative conclusions should not pass unqualiﬁed. The implications of the Epicurean philosophy were not always adverse for women. As David Wootton demonstrated, Bayle’s preoccupation with ‘obscenities’ in the Dictionary pointed to conclusions by no means favourable to male sexual conduct.15 A similar interpretation might be put on Mandeville’s treatment of prostitution in the Fable of the Bees. More positively, Mandeville may be regarded as an unusually sympathetic observer of women as consumers: the account of the negotiation between ‘a spruce mercer’ and ‘a young lady his customer’ in the closing essay of the Fable is a delightful tribute to the superior commercial acumen of the female shopper.16 By far the most imaginative analyst of the female passions, however, was Rousseau. A close reader of Mandeville, unconvinced of man’s natural sociability, Rousseau nevertheless detested what he saw as the libertine implications of Epicurean moral philosophy. In its place he offered an alternative morality of personal transparency and responsibility. As readers were quick to recognise, Rousseau’s thinking was in turn adaptable to the increasingly popular physico-moral idea of ‘sensibility’. The appeal of the resulting combination of ideas was that it provided both men and women with a defence against the corrupting pressures of self-interest which did not deny the force of the passions. Explored above in chapters by Philip Carter and Sarah Knott, ‘sensibility’ proved itself a fertile new source for the discussion of gender differences and of women’s claims to an active social role; it deserves greater recognition as a strand of moral discourse in the second half of the eighteenth century.17 Nevertheless, as Rousseau’s insistence on conﬁning women within the family underlined, it was not easy to found sexual equality on a conception of human nature which subordinated the mental to the physical, and elevated the passions above reason. For Wollstonecraft Rousseau’s writing might be an unavoidable point of reference, but it could not be the inspiration for a radically different view of moral and political relations between women and men. Like Catherine Macaulay, Wollstonecraft would fall back, perhaps had no alternative but to fall back, on a Christian concept of moral responsibility which elevated both reason and self-denial, and on a ‘republican’, classical concept of virtue. These may have been concepts ridiculed by the Epicureans, Mandeville and Hume above all, as archaic and irrelevant in the modern commercial world. But their endurance was, as we shall see, the indispensable intellectual basis of the radical, feminist politics of Wollstonecraft and her circle. Before we reach these, however, there is another respect in which the ambiguity of women’s position may be underestimated by too inclusive a view of Enlightenment: women’s participation in the public sphere. Few concepts have been more fertile in recent Enlightenment studies than that of the public sphere; but none, perhaps, has been more open to over-extension and misapplication. In its original formulation, by Habermas himself, the concept was modelled on the literary and political society of eighteenth-century England. But arguably England was untypical of eighteenth-century Europe. For England possessed a literary market, centred in London but spreading out into the provinces, in which

Women and Enlightenment 699

publishers were free of almost all governmental controls, and able to use their commercial initiative. Politicians were by no means indifferent to this market, and actively sought to direct it to partisan ends; but rather than commanding it from above, they had to enter it on its own terms, buying support by subventing writers and printers. The resulting print culture not only enabled writers to earn an income, even, in a few cases, a comfortable living, from their books. It set them at liberty to address ‘the public’ as they chose, whether to educate ‘public opinion’ or simply to satisfy popular prejudice. Nowhere on the Continent did these prerequisites of a ‘public sphere’ exist to the same extent. The only comparably commercial publishing centre was in the United Provinces. But although it had developed earlier, at the end of the seventeenth century, it had done so chieﬂy by the efforts of the immigré Huguenot community, which never fully integrated with its Dutch hosts. A vigorous clandestine publishing industry existed in Paris, defying the efforts of the police and the courts to control it, and supporting the emergence of a ‘literary low-life’ hostile to the monarchy. But this was not the open, legitimate ‘public sphere’ of the English model, and was far removed (Darnton has recently insisted anew) from the high intellectual culture of the philosophes.18 Further aﬁeld, in Germany or in Italy, publishing and public discussion were even more directly under the eye of courts and government authorities. Under these Ancien Régime conditions, the creation of a ‘public sphere’ may indeed have been an Enlightenment aspiration; it was not an established reality. It is unlikely that this distance between the English model and Continental experience was without implications for the position of women. Several contributors to this volume point to developments in Continental Europe which belie the difference of England. Carla Hesse emphasises the numbers of women going into print in the later decades of the eighteenth century, notably but not exclusively in France.19 Jean Bloch, Clarissa Campbell Orr and Monica Bolufer Peruga identify educational writing as offering women across Europe particularly good opportunities for publishing, as well as for re-iterating the Cartesian ideal of intellectual equality between the sexes.20 Outside of print, Dena Goodman and others have already shown that the role of salonnière offered women in a position to adopt it the opportunity for intellectual involvement at the highest level.21 By contrast, the possibility of women having an academic career is only beginning to be explored, as here in Paula Findlen’s study of two female natural philosophers in Bologna.22 Yet even if there were such new opportunities for women in the public sphere, there were also limits. Laura Bassi’s achievement in gaining a doctorate and then three university chairs may have been a remarkable advance on the more traditional role of private scholar and patronness adopted by Laura Bentivoglio Davia; but as Findlen’s sympathetic portrayal of the two makes clear, both were making the best of very speciﬁc contexts. And although Bassi’s academic achievements were not unique, they were rare. The salonnières too had to negotiate their role within certain conventions. They might referee conversations, and use their correspondence to arbiter disputes among the men of their circle; they do not seem to have taken the lead in discussion. Moreover their role was personal; and some at least were

700 Conclusions

in the ambivalent position of being philosophes’ mistresses. In her contribution above, Goodman explores another check on their ambitions: changing standards of orthography, which undermined the authority of women’s writing.23 For these and other reasons, the salonnières rarely ventured into print, a severe limitation on any deﬁnition of public sphere. There were limits on Englishwomen’s participation in the public sphere too. If coffee-house culture was the emblem of an open, independent public sphere in England, women had at best a marginal place within it.24 But only in England, it seems, could a group of women writers and artists meet on their own, without men, and publish independently. The Bluestocking circle and its leader Elizabeth Montagu enjoyed the benevolent encouragement of Dr Johnson; but as Elizabeth Eger shows, Montagu’s critical defence of Shakespeare was a carefully-calculated, independent intellectual initiative, challenging literary orthodoxy.25 After the Bluestockings, of course, came Mary Wollstonecraft and her circle. At some personal cost, Wollstonecraft made public independence her touchstone. She mixed with male counterparts, not set apart as a salonnière, but on equal terms, personally and intellectually. She also addressed the question of equality between the sexes directly, in print, in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Not surprisingly, many of the paths which readers may take through this volume lead eventually to Wollstonecraft and her circle. It is a testimony to the openness of the project from which the volume derives that despite the amount of scholarship already devoted to Wollstonecraft, contributors still have new things to say. Above all, they bring into focus the religious background to the thinking of Wollstonecraft and several of her contemporaries, Catharine Macaulay, Mary Hays, and Anna Barbauld. One ﬁnding in particular deserves to be underlined. It has become a commonplace – echoed here by Barbara Taylor26 – to relate Wollstonecraft, Macaulay and Hays to the religious and political culture of Rational Dissent, whose (male) intellectual leaders were Richard Price and Joseph Priestley. As traditionally understood, this was a culture distinct both from Anglicanism and from orthodox Dissent, and inclined ever more explicitly to Unitarianism. It is Sarah Hutton’s discussion of the moral theology of Catharine Macaulay which shows the mistake of drawing these distinctions too sharply. Hutton points to the roots of later eighteenth-century Dissenting theology in the Arminian, Latitudinarian Anglicanism of Samuel Clarke (to whom one might add others, such as Joseph Butler). The writings of these Anglicans were fundamental to the moral–theological thinking of James Burgh and Richard Price, who in turn provided inspiration to both Macaulay and Wollstonecraft. What the Arminian Anglicans offered was an emphasis on human free will rather than an all-determining divine will; on this the Rational Dissenters built a fresh conviction of the human capacity for virtue, and their feminist associates a new vision of a sexually egalitarian republicanism.27 Other contributions to these volumes supplement Hutton’s ﬁndings on the religious inspiration behind female agency. Daniel White suggests that Anna Barbauld was another whose allegiance to Dissent was informed by Arminian ideas. By contrast, Phyllis Mack’s female Quakers understood their agency as a surrendering to God’s purposes.28 It

Women and Enlightenment 701

seems, however, that it was Arminian Dissent (which perhaps should not be too closely identiﬁed with the later development of Unitarianism) which provided the crucial underpinning to the conviction of Macaulay and Wollstonecraft that reason might conquer the passions, and that virtue was to be expected equally of women and men. Such conclusions raise anew the question of these English feminists’ relation to the Enlightenment. On an inclusive view of Enlightenment, there is, of course, no problem. Wollstonecraft and her circle may be celebrated, as by the late Roy Porter, as the culmination of eighteenth-century England’s vibrant modernity, and hence as Enlightened by deﬁnition.29 But the new emphasis on the religious roots of their thinking raises a more intriguing possibility. If the Rational Dissent of Richard Price (as distinct, perhaps, from Joseph Priestley) was not so far removed from the Arminian Anglicanism of the early eighteenth century, it becomes possible to align the intellectual world of Macaulay and Wollstonecraft with the case for an English Enlightenment previously elaborated by John Pocock. For Pocock’s English Enlightenment was speciﬁcally an Anglican Enlightenment, the outcome of the Arminian, even Socinian, tendency within Anglican thinking since the early seventeenth century.30 True, Pocock has always characterised this Anglican Enlightenment as conservative, while Macaulay and Wollstonecraft were, by any historical deﬁnition, radical. But it seems that the underlying theology, with its emphasis on human free will and reason, was common to both; and, as Wollstonecraft realised, there were few better answers to the Epicurean insistence on the primacy of the passions, and hence to the detestable cult of gallantry, than a God-given conviction of our capacity for reason and virtue. On this basis it may not, after all, be incongruous to think of an English Enlightenment facing in both conservative and radical directions over the course of the century. Yet a problem remains. An English Enlightenment characterised in such terms appears to have very little to do with Enlightenment in most of the rest of Europe. To adapt a phrase of Pocock’s, if England is included, Enlightenment becomes a very extended family indeed. Contributors to this volume do indicate several points of contact with Enlightenment elsewhere, though more often with Scotland than with the Continent. Other connections might have been explored, notably those provided by English radicals’ interest in the works of the Italians Cesare Beccaria and Gaetano Filangieri.31 For the most part, however, (and perhaps especially in the ﬁnal section on ‘Revolutionary Citizenship’), contributors suggest comparisons rather than establish connections. For those (like the present writer) who remain sceptical of the identity of an English Enlightenment on its own, it is evidence of intellectual and political connections, or at least of sources in common, which would provide the most convincing argument in favour of English participation in the wider, European movement of Enlightenment. Until then, the suspicion remains that England was a case apart, and that the intellectual opportunities it afforded women were the exception, not the rule. An exemplary exception, certainly, but not characteristic of Enlightenment Europe at large.

702 Conclusions

One more question mark hangs over the case for the Enlightenment’s signiﬁcance for women advanced in this volume. It concerns the legacy of Wollstonecraft and her contemporaries to their successors in early nineteenth-century England. More than one contributor above observes that the radical, feminist moment had passed by 1800. Still accepted, too, is the verdict that personal scandal – Macaulay’s marriage to a much younger man, the revelations of Wollstonecraft’s life with Godwin – was fatal to the feminists’ reputation and cause. It comes as some relief to discover from Jane Rendall that at least in Scotland a group of women were able to draw inspiration from the philosophy of Dugald Stewart, and contribute to the formation of Whig reformist thinking in the ﬁrst decades of the new century.32 But participation in reform and in good works was not publication; it was not the intellectual equality which Macaulay and Wollstonecraft had held out for. Women after 1800, it seems, continued to be conﬁned to educational writing (now including political economy made simple) and to novels; the ﬁelds of history, philosophy, political economy and political theory remained beyond them.33 Why this should have been so lies beyond the remit of the present work: the rise of the originally Epicurean, now overtly utilitarian discipline of political economy may be one explanation; the triumph of anti-intellectual Evangelicalism, infecting even Unitarianism, another. Whatever the reason, the prospects for women’s intellectual achievement other than in the novel – an important exception – had grown bleak. The contributors to this volume may fairly claim to have made it impossible simply to repeat Mack’s assertion of 1986 that the intellectual and spiritual options open to women decreased during the Enlightenment. But if the outcomes of Enlightenment are measured against the aspirations of the late eighteenth-century feminist radicals – those who sought an intellectual world unmarred by ‘sexual distinctions’ – then much remained to be achieved.

Notes 1. Phyllis Mack, ‘The history of women in early modern Britain. A Review Article’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 28 (1986), p. 722. 2. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (eds), The Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge, 1981). The Irish Enlightenment arrived too late for inclusion in that volume, but grandiose claims for its signiﬁcance are made by D. Berman and P. O’Riordan as editors of The Irish Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, a collection of texts in six volumes, (Bristol, 2002). 3. Dena Goodman, ‘Public sphere and private life: towards a synthesis of current historiographical approaches to the Old Regime’, History and Theory, 31 (1992), 1-20; Margaret C. Jacob, ‘The mental landscape of the public sphere: a European perspective’, EighteenthCentury Studies 28 (1994), 95–113; Daniel Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty. Equality and sociability in French thought 1670–1789 (Princeton, 1994); more recently, the valuable synthesis by James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge, 2001). 4. For a historiography of the Enlightenment as concept and as subject of study, Daniel Roche and Vincenzo Ferrone, ‘Postfazione’ to their L’Illuminismo. Dizionario storico (Rome and Bari, 1997), pp. 513–92; also in French translation as Le Monde des Lumières (Paris, 1999), pp. 497–569.

Women and Enlightenment 703 5. John G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion. I The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 5–10, 13, for a clear statement of the case for plural Enlightenments, without the deﬁnite article. Pocock ﬁrst adopted this approach in the early 1980s. Another to object to the deﬁnite article, in his case from a literary critical standpoint, was P. N. Furbank, in Diderot. A critical biography (London, 1992), pp. 450–1. 6. Wahrman, Introduction to Part III, ‘Sex and sensibility’, above, pp. 136–9. 7. Moran, ‘Between the savage and the civil: Dr John Gregory’s Natural History of Femininity’, above pp. 8–29; Sebastiani. ‘Women, race and progress in the late Scottish Enlightenment’, pp. 75–96. See also Mary Catherine Moran, ‘“The commerce of the sexes”. Gender and social sphere in Scottish Enlightenment accounts of Civil Society’, in Frank Trentmann (ed.), Paradoxes of Civil Society. New perspectives on modern German and British history (2nd revised edition, New York and Oxford, 2003), pp. 61–84. 8. Sebastiani, ‘Women, race and progress’, above pp. 85–6; for a fuller analysis of Ossian in particular, see her doctoral thesis: ‘Razze, donne, progresso: tensione ideologiche nel dibattito dell’Illuminismo Scozzese’, (European University Institute, Florence, 2003), pp. 274–94; forthcoming in print by the publisher Franco Angeli. 9. Mander, ‘No woman is an island’, above pp. 97–116. 10. Tomaselli, ‘Civilisation, Patriotism and the quest for origins’, above pp. 117–35. 11. O’Brien, ‘Catharine Macaulay’s Histories of England: a female perspective on the history of liberty’, above pp. 523–37. 12. Mark Phillips, Society and Sentiment. Genres of Historical Writing in Britain 1740-1820 (Princeton, 2000). 13. Stuurman, ‘Deconstruction of Gender’, and ‘The Soul Has No Sex’, above, pp. 371–88; pp. 416–33. 14. Taylor, ‘Feminists versus Gallants: manners and morals in Enlightenment Britain’, above pp. 30–52. 15. David Wootton, ‘Pierre Bayle, Libertine?’, in M. A. Stewart (ed.), Studies in EighteenthCentury European Philosophy (Oxford, 1997), pp. 197–226. 16. Bernard Mandeville, ‘A Search into the Nature of Society’, The Fable of the Bees, ed. F. B. Kaye, 2 vols (Oxford 1924, repr. Indianapolis, 1988), I, pp. 349–53. 17. Carter, ‘Tears and the man’; Knott, ‘Sensibility, gender and selfhood in Revolutionary America’, above pp. 156–73, 649–66. 18. Robert Darnton, George Washington’s False Teeth. An unconventional guide to the eighteenth century (New York and London, 2003): see especially the title essay, originally in The New York Review of Books (27 March 1997), pp. 34–38. 19. Hesse, ‘Introduction to Section V: Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters’. 20. Bloch, ‘Discourses of female education’; Campbell Orr, ‘Aristocratic feminism’; Bolufer Peruga, ‘Neither male nor female’, above pp. 243–58, 306–25, 389–409. 21. Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: a cultural history of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca and London, 1994); and on the seventeenth-century predecessors of Enlightenment Salons, Carolyn Lougee, Le Paradis des Femmes: Women, Salons and Social Stratiﬁcation in Seventeenth-Century France (Princeton, 1976), and Erica Harth, Cartesian Women. Versions and subversions of rational discourse in the Old Regime (Ithaca and London, 1992). 22. Findlen, ‘Women on the verge of science’, above pp. 265–87. 23. Goodman, ‘L’Ortografe des Dames: gender and language in the Old Regime’, pp. 195–223. 24. Brian Cowan, ‘What was masculine about the public sphere? Gender and the coffeehouse milieu in post-Restoration England’, History Workshop Journal, 51 (2001), 127–57, assesses the debate on the issue. 25. Eger, ‘“Out rushed a female to protect our Bard”: Elizabeth Montagu, Voltaire and Shakespeare’, above, pp. 288–305; on the circle, Norma Clarke, Dr Johnson’s Women (London, 2000).

704 Conclusions 26. In her Introduction to Section VII: ‘Feminism and Enlightened religious discourses’, pp. 410–15. 27. Hutton, ‘Liberty. Equality and God. The religious roots of Catherine Macaulay’s feminism’, above, pp. 538–50. For the seriousness of Wollstonecraft’s religious commitments, see the extended discussion in Barbara Taylor’s Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 95–142. 28. White, ‘Dissenting Heritage’; Mack, ‘Feminism and the problem of agency’, above pp. 474–92; pp. 434–59. 29. Roy Porter, Enlightenment. Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London, 2000), esp. pp. 334–6, 476–84. 30. Pocock’ case was ﬁrst advanced in ‘Clergy and commerce. The conservative Enlightenment in England’, in R. Ajello and others, L’età dei lumi. Studi storici sul settecento europeo in onore di Franco Venturi, 2 vols (Naples, 1985), pp. 523–62. It is developed at greater length in The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon. As the latter title makes clear, Pocock’s interpretation of England’s as an Anglican, Arminian Enlightenment is geared to a particular interpretation of the historical thinking of Gibbon. An aspect of this interpretation is that Pocock makes much of Gibbon’s eventual quarrel with Joseph Priestley, a central ﬁgure in Rational Dissent and late eighteenth-century political radicalism. But the implication that Rational Dissent as a whole was opposed to Arminian Anglicanism assumes that Priestley stood on the same theological ground as Richard Price, an assumption which may be mistaken. It was Price who was closest to Wollstonecraft. It is only fair to add that not all proponents of an Anglican Enlightenment accord such importance to the Arminian, Socinian tendency within it: see Brian Young, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1997). 31. On possible Italian roots of late eighteenth-century English republicanism, see David Wootton’s remarks in his introduction to David Wootton (ed.), Republicanism, Liberty and Commercial Society 1649–1776 (Stanford, 1994), pp. 36–41. 32. Rendall, ‘“Women that would plague me with rational conversation”: aspiring women and Scottish Whigs c. 1790–1830’, above. 33. At least until Owenite feminists took up the challenge in the 1830s, a story ﬁrst told by Barbara Taylor in Eve and the New Jerusalem. Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth century (London, 1983).

10.2 Feminism and Enlightenment Legacies Kate Soper

Much of what contemporary feminist philosophy and critical theory has had to say about Enlightenment – whether positive or negative – has been over-simple to the point of caricature. Historians of the period have long been aware of this, yet even they, one suspects, will be surprised by the complexity of the connections between ‘feminism’ and ‘Enlightenment’ that emerge from this volume. The ﬁndings assembled here will surely make it difﬁcult for feminist theorists ever again to refer to ‘the Enlightenment’ in gestural mode, whether to endorse it as a culturally seamless movement of progress; or (as has been more usual in recent times) to dismiss it as an obvious bugbear of feminism, more or less synonymous with everything white, male, middle-class and heterosexual. Legacies will have to be reconsidered. Twenty-ﬁrst century feminists who see themselves as inheriting an essentially uniform tradition of thinking about the emancipation of women will need to recognise that eighteenth-century pro-women thinking was differently inﬂuenced and inﬂected than their own; while postmodernist critics, for their part, will discover that the reviled Enlightenment is an altogether more convoluted and in certain respects congenial affair than hitherto conceded. But there is some constancy amidst these revisions. What has not disappeared from the feminism/Enlightenment connection, even with the new light shed on it through these studies, is the overall sense of tension or dialectic between endorsement and opposition, constitution and resistance. The ‘feminist’ voice is both centrally at work in the making of Enlightenment culture, and speaks in critical reaction to it. And this is true whatever view we take of the chronology of the Enlightenment, whether we conﬁne its ‘moment’ to the eighteenth century or see it as still in process: the dialectic, in other words, is at work in the eighteenth century discourses themselves, and it surfaces again today in the more or less hostile responses to those discourses and their defendants by contemporary feminist scholars. Modern feminism, then and now, has constituted itself in and through the critique of Enlightenment and its ongoing feminist reception. But the concerns of this critique, and even its main targets, have shifted considerably over time. This becomes clearer in the light of a broad-brush distinction one may draw between immanent and dismissive modes of critique: between objections to the sexual exclusivity of Enlightenment humanism, on the one 705

706 Conclusions

hand, and rejection, on the other, of the humanism of its very conceptions and aspirations. In its primary, and most important and pervasive form, the feminist critique of Enlightenment has indeed been immanent, and is ﬁrst developed in the eighteenth century itself, especially by Wollstonecraft. At its heart is a demand that women be included as equally deserving subjects for the application of Enlightenment rights and principles. Even as she exposes the partial, and therefore hypocritical, interpretation placed in her society on the Enlightenment commitment to the equality of persons and universality of rights, Wollstonecraft subscribes to those commitments herself and her essential request, therefore, is that practice conform to principle. An equally immanent form of critique is at work in the related argument of those – both men and women in the Enlightenment period itself and subsequent feminists – who have objected that the Enlightenment has espoused a conception of the individual as independent and self-directing while systematically denying women the means to develop autonomy and the forms of self-realisation associated with it. In these and similar demands for parity of treatment, the feminist response to Enlightenment may be said to be doing no more than observing the self-critical, constantly revisionist spirit of the movement itself. As Peter Hulme and Ludmilla Jordanova have put it, in an assessment of obvious relevance to this form of criticism, ‘since the Enlightenment was, in many of its aspects, highly critical, it was inevitable that, even as its identity emerged, it was subverted.’1 Very much in contrast to these responses, however, are the dismissive critiques associated with the postmodernist turn in our own time, since they object not so much to women’s exclusion from ‘common humanity’, as to the concept of the universally human itself. The problem from this point of view is not (as Wollstonecraft supposed) that women have been irrationally and unfairly excluded from the claims that are made about the ‘human’ subject, its ‘nature’ and its ‘rights’, but rather that these notions themselves are the dangerous ﬁctions of an inherently masculine and imperialising mindset. From this perspective, those who invoke the idea of a universal humanity, or ‘naked human nature’, lend themselves to an anti-democratic impulse to overlook cultural and personal difference, and the very demand that women should be included within the remit of the so-called ‘rights of man’ is seen to be colluding in the maintenance of patriarchal culture.2 Similarly on the issue of autonomy, the objection is not that Enlightenment culture placed obstacles in the way of women attaining independence, but that it made a fetish of the idea itself, promoting in the process an ideology through which all individuals were encouraged to overlook their actual ties of dependency on others, and men, in particular enabled to justify their detachment from the sphere of domesticity and reproduction. Individuals, it has been argued in countering this, are not only culturally embedded and embodied to an extent and depth that Enlightenment ideals of selfhood fail to appreciate, they are, in virtue of being so, fragmented selves. The uniﬁed subject of Enlightenment is a ﬁction as well as a masculine fetish. Hence the charge laid against modernist feminists from de Beauvoir onwards that they

Feminism and Enlightenment Legacies 707

have perpetuated an ‘Enlightenment’ – and so it is implied, an inherently ‘masculine’ cultural perspective.3 Indeed, as Pauline Johnson has pointed out, the overall presumption of the postmodernists is that their critique of the claims of transcendent reason has ‘established modern feminism on the path of counterEnlightenment’, and that feminism now requires a ‘fundamental break from the Enlightenment cause of reason and truth, which is exposed as nothing more than a distorted and disguised will-to-power.’4 At issue in the distinction between immanent and dismissive critiques, and the oppositional discourses associated with it, are fundamental differences of ontological outlook, with all their repercussions for the ways in which we think about truth, reason, selfhood, progress and emancipation. At this level, it remains perfectly appropriate for defendants of a broadly ‘Enlightenment’ theoretical approach to challenge what they regard as the inconsistencies and politically problematic implications of the postmodernist position.5 But thanks to the information supplied in this volume we are now in a much better position to appreciate the high level of abstraction at which these theoretical polemics have been conducted. What has become clear is that the scope and quality of Enlightenment thinking even within a single nation – let alone across Europe (and into America) – is more varied and uneven in its development than can be properly captured in the idea of a single position or philosophy that forms the object of critique. Everything in this volume tends, in fact, to conﬁrm Dorinda Outram’s ‘capsule’ conception of Enlightenment as containing sets of debates, stresses and concerns rather than representing a single, uniﬁed value-system.6 What has also now been provided is a much fuller and more nuanced sense of the way that intellectuals in the Enlightenment period were themselves wrestling with the central values and concepts invoked in the contemporary debates, especially those of rationality, autonomy and sexual difference. At the same time, it would be a pity if in exploring the complexity of the Enlightenment we lost sight of any messages it may have for our own time, and I myself have been struck in this respect by a sense of the ongoing relevance and normative importance of key aspects of the proto-feminist discourse of the eighteenth century, notably its argument on republicanism, and on the nature of the self and self-realisation. One consequence of the fuller picture now provided, which several contributors have noted, is the need to qualify any straightforward presentation of Enlightenment and the French Revolution as a defeat for women. In her Habermasian defence of the Enlightenment against those stressing the dominance within it of an exclusively masculine reason, Margaret Jacobs had already argued as much, and denied that there was any increasing ‘masculinisation’ of the ‘public sphere’ in any of the main centres of Enlightenment. Rather than imagining the French movement towards egalitarianism, leading to the contestations of the 1790s, as the signal of women’s ﬁrst defeat in modern democratic politics, the evidence, when seen comparatively, suggests quite the opposite. The emergence of the public sphere put women’s rights

708 Conclusions

on the Western agenda just as it augured all the other struggles about the meaning and truthfulness of democratic practices with which we still live.7 Some may still regard this as an overly positive. But certainly, many of the papers here lend qualiﬁed support to Jacob’s view, and the collection in general allows more informed debate on what aspects of the Revolution may be said to be positive for women, and why. As Lynn Hunt has put it in her introduction to Section 9, one might now more reasonably view the legacy of Revolution and Enlightenment to feminism as a ‘glass half full’ in a reversal of the ‘half empty’ verdict that has dominated writings on women and revolutionary citizenship in the 1980s and 1990s.8 What has also been brought into clearer focus is the extent to which the intellectual complexities of the period, especially for feminism, relate to the conjoining of a new – essentially anthropological and psychological – set of interests in sexual difference with a more distinctively philosophical, and in certain respects democratically accented, abstraction from embodiment and cultural formation. The age is at once obsessed with difference, especially of sex, but also of cultures, and at the same time driven by a philosophical – and in many ways progressive, though not entirely novel – impulse to think only in terms of a collectively shared human nature and human history, and to present reason, the deﬁning attribute of humanity, as, at least in principle, a universal endowment common in its form to everyone. On the anthropological side, it has been maintained that it is only in the period of the Enlightenment that the issues of feminine difference – both corporeal and mental – begin in any serious sense to be addressed, and hence only in the Enlightenment, when women are recognised as possessed of a distinct and sui generis sexuality, that the sex-gender distinction, with its acknowledgement of the distinction between what is given by nature and what is socially cultivated, is seen as having application. ‘No longer would those who think about such matters,’ writes Thomas Laqueur of the eighteenth century, ‘regard women as a lesser version of man along a vertical axis of inﬁnite gradations, but rather as an altogether different creature along a horizontal axis whose middle ground was largely empty.’9 Correlatively, he argues that it was only then that sex was invented, that science ‘ﬂeshed out, in terms presentable to the new epistemology, the categories of “male” and “female” as opposite and incommensurable biological sexes.’10 Philosophically, on the other hand, the inﬂuence tends in the opposite direction towards the endorsement of an abstracted and gender-neutral sense of the rational self. And it is this dynamic which is at work in the development of the ‘feminist’ opposition to the prevailing anthropological sexism of the time. We thus ﬁnd – paradoxical though it is, in view of the emphasis on ‘difference’ of many feminists today – that it tended to be the more progressive and ‘feminist’ elements in the eighteenth century who were most resistant to recognising any major natural, as opposed to culturally induced, divergences between the sexes. Also well charted in the current collection is the extent to which this

Feminism and Enlightenment Legacies 709

‘feminist’ protest is indebted to pre-Enlightenment traditions of thinking. What we ﬁnd, at least in some pockets of Enlightenment, is that the new thinking on female equality and accountability harks back to Renaissance forms of opposition to Aristotelian orthodoxy as much as or more than it draws on new scientiﬁc and secular sources of inspiration. 11 As several of the essays here make clear, the idea – so important to this new thinking – that the spirit is not sexspeciﬁc invoked a Platonist – Christian tradition of thinking of the soul as sexless, and this then ﬁnds further resources in Descartes’ mind–body dualism and his trust in God to guarantee personal clarity of thought. In Siep Stuurman’s account of the Cartesian underpinnings of Paulain de Barre’s feminism, and other essays in Sections 6 and 7, new light is shed on the sympathetic resources of a range of philosophical positions more usually dismissed by contemporary feminists as overtly hostile to the cause of gender parity. In deploying these preEnlightenment arguments for sexual equality, the ‘feminists’ of the period were also at odds with what have often been deemed the more progressively atheistic tendencies of their own day. In the argument of Clarissa Campbell Orr, ‘European intellectual life during the Enlightenment should be seen as a perpetual series of major and minor culture wars and skirmishes, with no neat alignment between feminist sympathy and political and religious conﬁgurations.’12 As Barbara Taylor and others have revealed, this is an assessment of particular pertinence to Catherine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, and some of their followers. Wollstonecraft’s stricture that ‘it be not philosophical to speak of sex when the soul is mentioned’13 is a clear echo of earlier arguments on the ‘sexless’ soul, and her case for parity took much of its colouring from its commitment to the idea that since in the eyes of God both men and women were equally endowed with reason, both sexes were similarly bound to exercise it in the pursuit of goodness, and hence salvation. In this sense, female redemption would only be possible if women were freed from the shackling and disabling effects of subservience to mortal men.14 Even, then, as they formulate some of the more radically dissenting and pro-feminist positions of their time, the allegiance of these women is not, as Wollstonecraft herself puts it, to mere male ‘satellites’, but to the ‘fountain of light’ emanating from divine authority.15 However uncomfortable contemporary feminists may feel about it, it is God who legitimates the resistance to patriarchal patronage of these founding ﬁgures of the women’s movement. (Or at least for those in Britain: Monica Bolufer Peruga, has suggested that the argument for intellectual equality did have a more secular basis in Catholic countries.)16 The mind-body dualism associated with the Platonic-Christian-Cartesian tradition of thought on the ‘sex-less soul’ was, of course, a doubled-edged legacy. On the one hand, as noted, it could be used to issue a general, and not necessarily religiously rooted, challenge to sexual discrimination, since if sex difference were solely a matter of the body, then there could be no social grounds to maintain it. Condorcet, to his credit, was to insist that natural differences should not, in any case, have any bearing on female rights to citizenship: why deny to women on grounds of pregnancy what no one dreamt of denying to men cooped

710 Conclusions

up for half the year with the gout ?17 For the most part, however, the emphasis on bodily difference was (as we know) used to justify sustaining a difference of treatment through appeal to an inevitable deﬁciency or enfeeblement of mental faculties. Mind-body dualism is in this sense hugely problematic from any feminist point of view, since the neutral spirit has its earthly existence only within a sexually differentiated body, with all the consequences for the disparagement of women that have followed from that. The encouragement it gave to women to seek emancipation in celibacy and the life of the intellect at the expense of emotional and sexual fulﬁlment has also proved painful – and the record of feminist argument from the Renaissance to Simone de Beauvoir bears witness to the frustrations and humiliating sexual asymmetries of this form of erotic denial or abjection. But against the tendency of contemporary ‘difference’ feminism to dwell so exclusively on bodily and sensual differentiation, need and desire, and to emphasise the always situated and culturally constructed nature of self-hood, the ideas of a sexually transcendent self, of the formal equality of persons, and of the a priori injustice of patriarchal privileging of the male remain an important bequest of Enlightenment ‘feminist’ thinking. (It is interesting that there appears to have been no comparable use made of the transcendentalism of Kantian philosophy – also condemned today, of course, for its allegedly disembedded and disembodied perspective – as a potential ally in the gender disencumbering of mental life). The research papers, however, have also revealed the need to qualify this overall picture in certain respects. We must recognise the extent to which the interest of the period in sexual difference is also an interest in the instability of sexual identity, its dissembling and masquerade. Citing much evidence to this effect, including Elizabeth Montagu’s striking remark that ‘it is the ton of the times to confound all distinctions of age, sex and rank’,18 the essays in Section 3, ‘Sexuality and Sensibility’, reveal the intricate dialectic of dissimulation and authenticity at work in the ‘culture of sensibility’ – a culture as compelled, it seems, by the erotics of a performative approach to gender and identity, as by the urge to forsake artiﬁce and false appearance and to reclaim ‘nature’ as the ultimate truth of the self. We must also recognise the resistance of Enlightenment culture to an arid rationalism. It is certainly true that reason remained the sovereign court of appeal, and that most key thinkers of the age, male and female, viewed it as of critical importance in controlling the excesses of the imagination. Yet there is much in the culture and argument of the period which contradicts any presentation of Enlightenment as inaugurating the privileging of the type of reason which modern critics frequently refer to as ‘masculine’, meaning by that a narrowly instrumental, overly logical and abstracted mode of cognition. We have only to consider the attention paid by theorists of the late seventeenth century onwards to the role of sensory experience, to the imagination, to the possession and development of ‘sensibility’, to the analysis of taste and aesthetic judgement, and to the aesthetic as mediator between reason and the senses, to realise how much

Feminism and Enlightenment Legacies 711

more there was to the Enlightenment discourses of the self. To equate Enlightenment with the exercise of a ‘masculine reason’ is to abstract from the many nuanced discourses that went into its intellectual ferment. It is also to ignore the voice of those (Hume, Addison, Hucheson, Shaftesbury, Burke, Adam Smith, Elizabeth Carter…) who openly challenged the exclusive endorsement of reason, and defended the importance of the imagination as a source of empathy with others and the need to strengthen what Hutcheson had called the ‘sympathetick sense’.19 Already in the early1960s, E.L.Tuveson was protesting that, ‘ “The Age of Reason” distrusted Reason, as it had been understood for many centuries far more deeply than did any preceding period’; and this is a judgement echoed more recently by Sylvana Tomaselli when she argues that it would be mistaken to think of reason as the rallying cry of the Enlightenment thinkers except in so far as it was opposed to faith, and the Age of Reason opposed to the Age of Superstition. If one’s gaze shifts away from the battles with l’Infame, then the ‘Age of Sentiments’, ‘Sentimentality’, ‘Feelings’, ‘Passions’, ‘Pleasure’, ‘love’ or ‘Imagination’ are apter titles for the movement of ideas in the eighteenth century.20 These appraisals ﬁnd further support throughout the current volume. But the essays here also make clear how important it is for contemporary feminist reﬂection on the Enlightenment legacy to avoid any straightforward reading of its commitment to ‘sentiment’ as if that were a register of a ‘feminist’ dimension of its argument. At least for the pro-feminist women of the Enlightenment themselves, this would not automatically have been the case. If anything, educated women were more wary, if not of sentiment itself, certainly of the slide towards sentimentality and emotional effusiveness than many of their male counterparts. And certainly they were often ﬁerce in their condemnations of feminine frivolity and enervation. Not only did they subscribe to the importance of ‘masculine’ virtues and deride ‘effeminacy’ in both men and women, they were also guilty – from the standpoint of much contemporary feminism – of a dereliction of selfinterest and attention to the speciﬁcity of femininity and feminine ‘difference’. Equally in the case of female ‘autonomy’ we can now see that there is no simple story to be told. It was indeed a commonplace of eighteenth century thought to depict women as by nature more capricious and emotional creatures incapable of attaining to a fully rational autonomy. Enlarging in his essay on Enlightenment on the need for autonomous thought (sapere aude), Kant referred to the ‘entire fair sex’ as lacking the competence for this, and feminists have rebuked him accordingly. Yet a careful reading of Kant’s text suggests that he saw the female deﬁcit as brought about by lack of education and inappropriate patronage rather than by ‘nature’. When he tells us, for example, that women have been deterred from acquiring any such ‘competence’ by ‘those guardians who have so kindly assumed superintendence over them,’ 21 his irony would seem to complement the argument of Mary Wollstonecraft and other writers of the period concerned to rescue women from the constraints of male tutelage. 22

712 Conclusions

But Kant does mislead us when he speaks of the ‘entire’ female sex as lacking mental autonomy. For educated women of the period, it seems clear that the main problem was not so much the lack of things to say, or fear of saying them, but the resistance of their culture to allowing them access to the means of expression available to their male counterparts. Their particular message is of the frustration of their mental autonomy rather than its under-development. As many essays here show, it is a persistent theme of the proliﬁc writings by women in this period on education that at least in the ‘life of the mind’, if nowhere else, women could ﬁnd some relief for their pent up cognitive energy. As the Spanish writer Josefa Amar put it, gratiﬁcation of the female need for autonomy (and solitude) could always be found in ‘the noble exercise of study’.23 Often enough, moreover, it is the women who are challenging the yes-men of their own society. Take the case of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, insisting in 1793 that it is incumbent on private individuals to remonstrate with government ‘against a ruinous war, an unequal tax, or an edict of persecution,’ as ‘the only way reformations can ever be brought about, or government can enjoy the advantage of general opinion’;24 or that of Catherine Macaulay, complaining to her countrymen that their resistance to the commonwealth ‘ﬁxes an indelible stain on the character of the English, as a people basely and incorrigibly attached to the sovereignty of individuals, and of natures too ignoble to endure an empire of equal laws’.25 Here we have women (and there are many others who could be cited) who are not only daring to think, but doing so in the boldest manner, and in direct challenge to a feeble conformism and its emotional attachments. We ﬁnd, too, that it is the proto-feminist voices who are inverting the normal gender aligning of ‘public’ and ‘private’ realms in their insistence on the importance of public spiritedness and republican virtue against the familial and sentimental tendencies of the Burkean defence of the establishment. This brings us to a further and ﬁnal set of considerations on the nature of ‘autonomy’ and the responsibilities of the ‘autonomous self’. Theorists in our own time, as we have seen, often depict the Enlightenment as encouraging a false individualism: a sense of self as living in detachment from the social whole and failing to recognise dependencies upon it. Yet to project such a liberal conception of the ‘autonomous’ individual is to overlook the often strongly republican quality of the argument of those exercising their independence of judgement. For the Enlightenment, autonomy had less to do with a private retreat from the social than with using one’s critical powers to improve the condition of society. Indeed, in the argument of Catherine Macaulay dedication to the public good is the basis for independence of thought, and opposed to Burke’s self-interested patriotism.26 Phyllis Mack and Barbara Taylor have drawn attention to the self-distancing and self-surrendering conception of personal agency that underpinned a religiously motivated feminist zeal or republican commitment. Freedom for a woman of this kind, they argue, ‘was not the ability to do whatever she wanted, but the capacity to do what was right, as divinely ordained and rationally apprehended.’ 27

Feminism and Enlightenment Legacies 713

To most contemporary feminists, anything that smacks of religious piety or self-effacement is anathema – and with good reason. Yet when considering which, if any, aspects of the ‘feminism’ of the eighteenth century Enlightenment one might wish to see resuscitated, one might be inclined to argue that it would be its republican vein – albeit in an appropriately revised and secularised form. To suggest this is, of course, to confront the questions and tensions signalled by Vivien Jones in her mid-point reﬂections on the Feminism and Enlightenment project: what, after all, are we counting as feminist, and why, and how are we to respond to the fact that differing conceptions of the feminist agenda in our own time will produce different readings of women’s histories, with more or less positive spins upon them? Very reasonably, she left the questions open, suggesting that the historical parameters of the project would make it probable, in any case, that more attention would be paid to deﬁnitions of Enlightenment than to deﬁnitions of feminism. But she also made the point that ‘since all histories are also histories of the present, the question of where we, as feminist intellectuals of the twenty-ﬁrst century, locate our aims and practices in relation to the “unﬁnished cultural project” of Enlightenment is one that can always bear fuller articulation.’ 28 I would agree with this, and in the light of it would not want any comments here to be taken as representative. But my personal sense is that despite the immense gains made by women in Western society since the eighteenth century (and we surely cannot today address the future of feminism without registering the extent of its cultural revolution in our times), there are aspects of the agenda still to be completed, and questions to be addressed about the very quality of its progress. Even within Western societies there remains much shocking and systematic abuse of women, and formal recognition of gender parity still demands immanent critique in the light of continuing differences of status, role and power between the sexes. There are also limitations and contradictions in the very forms of freedom and self-realisation enjoyed by emancipated women within contemporary society. Greater gender parity there certainly is, but it is the parity of competing individuals often caught up in transient and narcissistic forms of sexual fulﬁlment and expression, and the overall context remains that of the market with its commodiﬁed and consumerist – and ecologically disastrous – perceptions of personal well-being and success. The headier, and more transcendent promises of feminism: that it might take us beyond those homogenising and market-driven conceptions of personal fulﬁlment and the ‘good life’; that it would challenge a sexual division of labour in ways that undermined rather than reinforced the dominance of the work-ethic in our culture; and that it would issue in more reciprocal and impassioned forms of relating: these promises have not been realised, or only very patchily so. It is in this context that even as we recognise the incomparably different status of women today, especially within the geographical areas of the original Enlightenment, we might ﬁnd some inspiration for these more socially oriented and globally directed aims in the magnanimity and republican ardour that ﬁred the feminist imagination of our eighteenth century predecessors. This is not to deny the more

714 Conclusions

politically naive and complacent aspects of Enlightenment ‘feminism’, nor the extent to which its hectoring mode of address and puritanical, even misogynistic, argument can grate on modern ears. But what is also there throughout is a sense that redressing the injustice done to women is integral to the larger public agenda of Enlightenment emancipation. It is this conception of feminism as a vehicle for goals which transcend the more immediately personal forms of satisfaction – and indeed as opening up a less domestic and self-focussed understanding of what it is to be ‘self-realised’ – that still seems of value and pertinence to us today.

Notes 1. Peter Hulme & Ludmilla Jordanova, The Enlightenment and Its Shadows, Routledge, London, 1990, p. 2. 2. See Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Conﬁgurations of Women and Modernity, Ithaca, New York, 1985; cf. also the dispute between Timothy Reiss and Frances Ferguson in L. Kauffman (ed.), Gender and Theory, Oxford 1989 (where Ferguson defends Wollstonecraft against Reiss’ claim that her assertion of the rights of women was bound to prove ineffective because so immersed in the dominant discourse of Enlightenment). See also the survey by Pauline Johnson, ‘Feminism and the Enlightenment’, Radical Philosophy, no. 63, Summer 1993, pp. 3–12. 3. See, for example, Mary Evans, Simone de Beauvoir: a Feminist Mandarin, Tavistock, London, 1985; Genevieve Lloyd, Man of Reason, Methuen, London, 1984, ch. 6. 4. Pauline Johnson, art. cit. pp. 3–4. 5. See, for example, Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference, Routledge, New York, 1989; Kate Soper, ‘Feminism, Humanism, Postmodernism’ in Troubled Pleasures, Verso, 1990; Kate Soper, ‘Postmodernism, Subjectivity and the Question of Value’, in Judith Squires (ed.), Principled Positions, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1993; Sabina Lovibond, ‘Feminism and Postmodernism’, New Left Review, no. 178, November–December, 1989, and ‘Feminist Reasoning’, New Left Review, no. 207, September–October, 1994; Martha Nussbaum, ‘Human Functioning and Social Justice’, Public Theory, vol. 2, no. 2, May 1992, pp. 202–246. 6. Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995, ch. 1. 7. Margaret Jacobs, ‘The Mental Landscape of the Public Sphere: A European Perspective’, Eighteenth Century Studies, vol. 28, no. 4, 1994, pp. 106–7. (The argument for increasing masculinisation was developed inﬂuentially in Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution, Ithaca, New York, 1988). 8. Cit. in this volume, p. 568 9. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass., 1990, p. 148. See also Outram, op. cit., ch. 5, who also stresses the concern with female difference – and its contradictory implications in view of the Enlightenment emphasis on a universal human nature and human history, both validated by the possession of a single human form of rationality. See also the discussion of the concept of the ‘individual’ in Joan Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass., 1996, pp. 5–14. 10. Thomas Laqueur, op. cit., 149–50. 11. See sections 6 and 7 of this volume. 12. Cit in this volume, p. 356. 13. Mary Wollstonecraft, in Janet Todd & Marilyn Butler (eds), The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Pickering and Chatto, London, 1989, Vol.5, p. 103; cf. Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 2003, p. 98.

Feminism and Enlightenment Legacies 715 14. Cf. Barbara Taylor, op. cit., p. 106, and ch.3 passim. See also her Introduction to Section 7 of this volume. 15. Cit. in this volume, p. 410; and see below for further discussion. 16. See her contribution to ‘Considering Feminism and Enlightenment’, Women: A Cultural Review, vol 12. no. 2, 2001, p. 239. 17. See Joan Scott, op.cit., p. 12. 18. Cit. in Dror Wahrman’s introduction to this section in this volume, p. 138. 19. See, for example, E.L.Tuveson, Imagination as a Means of Grace, University of California Press, Berkeley & LA, 1960; J.Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass., 1982; C. Taylor, Sources of the Self, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989, Parts II,IV; Terry Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, Blackwell, Oxford, 1990, chps 2–4. For Elizabeth Carter’s views, see her letter of 1765 in Letters from Elizabeth Carter to Mrs Montagu, ed. Montagu Pennington, London, 1819, vol.III, 40–41; cit. El.Tuveson, op.cit., p. 163. 20. Blackwell Companion to Enlightenment, Blackwell, Oxford, 1991, p. 446. 21. Kant, ‘What is Enlightenment ?’ , in Lewis White Beck (ed.), Kant on History, New York, 1963, p. 3 22. In a rather barbarous formulation, not helped by the English translation, Kant writes, ‘… that the step to competence is held to be very dangerous by the far greater portion of mankind (and by the entire fair sex) – quite apart from it being arduous – is seen to by those guardians who have so kindly assumed superintendence over them.’ The sequel to this reinforces my imputation of irony: ‘After the guardians have ﬁrst made their domestic cattle dumb, and have made sure that these placid creature will not dare take a single step without the harness of the car to which they are tethered, the guardians show them the dangers which threaten them if they go alone,’ ibid. 23. Cit in this volume p. 191. 24. Cit. in this volume, p. 519. 25. Cit. in this vopkume, p. 526. 26. See essays by Karen O’Brien, Sarah Hutton and Caroline Franklin in Section 8 of this volume. 27. Barbara Taylor, introduction to Section 7, p. 413. 28. Vivien Jones, contribution to ‘Considering Feminism and Enlightenment’, art.cit., p. 245.

Enlightenment Biographies John Anderson (1726–96) A Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, John Anderson dedicated himself to promoting women’s higher education. Born in Dumbartonshire, the son of devout Presbyterians (both his father and grandfather were ministers), Anderson demonstrated an early and persistent belief that women – contra popular theories of the period – were ‘rational beings’ and deserved every opportunity to ‘cultivate’ their understanding. This commitment culminated in a deathbed wish to found a coeducational technical university. In a detailed will, Anderson outlined a plan whereby ‘the ladies of Glasgow’ might be provided with ‘such a stock of general knowledge’ as to make them the ‘most cultivated in all of Europe’. His school would offer a ‘Ladies Course’ in Natural Philosophy where women, ‘for a small fee,’ would be introduced to a range of scientiﬁc subjects. Although Anderson did not live to see his dream realized, the school, aptly named Anderson’s Institution, was successfully established in 1796. As Anderson had requested, the Institution offered women courses in astronomy, electricity, magnetism, hydrostatics, hydraulics and optics. Thomas Garnett, one of the school’s early instructors, praised Anderson for his recognition that providing women with a better education was a necessary part of the ‘civilizing’ process. As Garnett wrote in his 1800 Observations on a Tour through the Highlands, ‘The ladies of this city are undoubtedly much indebted to the founder [Anderson], as being the ﬁrst person in this island who set on foot a plan of rational education for them, which affords the means of acquiring knowledge, not only useful to themselves in various circumstances of life, and capable of always supplying a rational amusement, without the necessity of seeking it elsewhere; but which ﬁts them for companions for the other sex, and puts them on a footing of equality in conversation.’ Arianne Chernock

Mary Astell (1666–?) Mary Astell, a feminist avant la lettre and a philosopher, published eight polemical works in the service of women, conservative Tory politics, and the church of England; she also planned and raised the funds for a girls’ school in Chelsea, where she lived most of her life. Born into a family of coal hostmen in Newcastle in 1666, she was educated by her clergyman uncle, Ralph Astell, who had been inﬂuenced by the ‘so-called ‘Cambridge Platonists’ with whom he attended university. The Astell family fortunes declined when her father died, and sometime in 1689 or 1690, this remarkable, intellectual young woman went to London to seek patronage. Her philosophical correspondence with John Norris of Bemerton so affected him that he asked her if he might publish their correspondence. She agreed on the condition of her anonymity and that the volume of their letters (Letters Concerning the Love of God [1695]) be dedicated to Lady Catherine Jones, her lifelong friend and patron. Meanwhile, Astell published her ﬁrst and most popular feminist tract, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694), arguing for women’s intellectual equality and the necessity for their education; she proposed a retreat where women might pursue intellectual lives. In 1697 she published A Serious Proposal to the Ladies Part II, continuing several philosophical threads of her previous work, and in 1700 Some Reﬂections Upon Marriage, about how marriage subordinated women to men. Thus Astell published her three most feminist works by 1700, and was satirized by Swift, plagiarized by Berkeley, and imitated by Defoe. 716

Enlightenment Biographies 717 In 1704 she opposed occasional conformity in Moderation truly Stated and A Fair Way with the Dissenters and their Patrons, much admired by George Hickes and other non-jurors, and published the high church tract An Impartial Enquiry Into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War In This Kingdom. Her The Christian Religion As Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England (1705) was a philosophical rejoinder to Locke’s materialism and Bart’lemy Fair: Or, An Enquiry after Wit (1709) a response to Shafesbury’s Letter Concerning Enthusiasm. Astell was a feminist philosopher of the Enlightenment who championed women and published responses to the major thinkers of her day. She was supported ﬁnancially and psychologically by a coterie of aristocratic women who admired her mind and spirit. Ruth Perry

Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743–1825) Although often remembered simply as ‘Mrs. Barbauld’ the writer for children, Anna Letitia Barbauld (née Aikin) was a woman of letters who earned renown as a poet, essayist, hymnist, political and religious pamphleteer, children’s author, reviewer, and editor. Her brother, John Aikin (1747–1822), a practicing physician and popular author in his own right, collaborated with her on a volume of prose pieces and on well-known works for children. In 1758 their father, Dr John Aikin, accepted a post at the Warrington Academy, which became the leading college for Dissenters. Among the tutors there were Joseph Priestley, Gilbert Wakeﬁeld, and William Enﬁeld. Barbauld spent the most intensely productive period of her poetic career, between the ages of 22 and 31, at Warrington, culminating in her inﬂuential Poems (1773; reissued in expanded form in 1792). After her marriage in 1774 to Rochemont Barbauld, a French Protestant educated at Warrington, the couple moved to Palgrave, where Rochemont had been offered a Dissenting ministry. They lived there until 1785, sharing the management of a boarding school for boys. Following their resignation of the school and a tour of France, the Barbaulds settled in Hampstead, where they would remain until 1802. During these years Anna Barbauld engaged in the major political debates of the period: the movement to repeal the Corporation and Test Acts, the attempt to abolish the slave trade, and the debate over the French Revolution. The remainder of her life was spent in Stoke Newington, where her professional work continued unabated: she wrote for the new Annual Review; edited Richardson’s Correspondence (1804), Selections from the Spectator, Tatler, Guardian, and Freeholder (1805), and The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside (1807); edited and produced prefaces for the 50-volume collection The British Novelists (1810); and published her last major poem, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812). Daniel White

Laura Bassi (1711–78) Laura Bassi spent over forty-ﬁve years teaching physics at the University of Bologna. She might be described as the ﬁrst woman to pursue a paid scientiﬁc career. The daughter of a lawyer, Bassi was initially tutored at home by the family physician, Gaetano Tacconi. She subsequently met other members of Bologna’s scholarly community who were equally impressed with her intellectual abilities. The archbishop of Bologna, Prospero Lambertini, encouraged Bassi’s patrons to propose her as a candidate for a university degree in philosophy. On 17 April 1732, Bassi publicly defended forty-nine philosophical theses; she received her laurea on 12 May – the second woman whose graduation we can document from any university. After the success of her degree, her supporters agreed to create a paid professorship at the University of Bologna, which Bassi accepted on 29 October 1732. She taught philosophy, mathematics, and physics at the university until her death in 1778, and subsequently held two other professorships – an appointment at the Collegio Montalto

718 Enlightenment Biographies and, as of 1776, a professorship in experimental physics at the Academy of the Institute for Sciences in Bologna. Bassi married the physician Giuseppe Veratti (1707–1793) in 1738. In addition to producing a household of eight children (ﬁve of whom survived infancy), they created an experimental household with an impressive physics cabinet. Bassi routinely taught students and visitors in their home. Celebrated throughout Europe for her accomplishments, she enjoyed a cameo appearance in Francesco Algarotti’s Newtonianism for Ladies (1737), and corresponded with such leading experimenters as the abbé Nollet, the physicist Alessandro Volta, and her cousin, the naturalist Lazzaro Spallanzani, who claimed he never would have become an experimenter if he had not studied with her. Paula Findlen

Mme LePrince de Beaumont (1711–80) A teacher and proliﬁc authoress, Jeanne-Marie LePrince was born in Rouen, Normandy, to a family of craftsmen specialising in ecclesiastical ornament. At 12 she entered an Ursuline convent near Rouen specialising in preparing girls to teach. In 1735 she went to Luneville, the court-city of the Duke of Lorraine, obtaining patronage from the Duchess-Regent Elisabeth-Charlotte d’Orléans. She taught music and dancing to the duchess’ daughter, and in court circles. Gaining a pension in 1743 made her the target of a mercenary marriage proposal from Antoine Grimard de Beaumont, another patron’s rafﬁsh godson, which produced a daughter, Elisabeth. She annulled the marriage two years later, and began to write criticisms of natural religion and the libertine morality she believed to be its consequence, beginning with The Triumph of Truth (1748). The keynote of her books was a blending of austere Christian piety with modern rationalism, possibly inspired by Poulain de la Barre. She came to London in 1750 and successfully combined writing and running a school in London for young ladies, using contacts close to Frederick and Augusta, Prince and Princess of Wales. Her books include the series of dialogues and fables entitled in English The Young Misses Magazine (1759), The Young Ladies Magazine (1760), and Instructions for Young Ladies on their Entering into Life, Their Duties in the Married-State, and Towards their Children (1764). Civan, King of Bungo (1754) is an oriental conduct book for princes; later conduct ﬁctions are Letters of Mme de Montier (1767) and Moral Tales (1776). In London she had an association, possibly a secret marriage, with Thomas Pichon, a Frenchman who had spied in Canada for the English, but left in 1763 with her daughter, who married an army surgeon serving in Savoy. The French remember her as the great-grand-mother of Prosper Merimée. Clarissa Campbell Orr

Eliza Berkeley (1734–1800) Eliza Berkeley, née Frinsham, inherited a love of scholarship from her father, the Rev. Henry Frinsham, who encouraged her to learn Hebrew, Spanish and French. When he died in 1746 her attendance at Mrs Sheele’s school in Queen Square, London, came to an end, her mother believing that women should not be too learned if they were to ﬁnd husbands. In 1761 Eliza married the Reverend George Berkeley, son of the philosopher Bishop Berkeley and Ann (Forster) Berkeley, mystic and intellectual. Eliza and George had two sons, George Monck (1763–1793) and George Robert (1767–1775), to whose education they devoted themselves with zealous enthusiasm. Both sons predeceased their parents. The fullest source of biographical information available for Eliza Berkeley is her own extensive ‘Preface’ (630 pages) to her edition of her late son’s Poems (170 pages), which she edited for publication in 1797. This eccentric text is arguably more revealing of its author than its subject, the life and rather indifferent poetry of George Monck. Contemporary reviewers praised her anecdotal, if garrulous, style, placing her work in the context of the new and increasingly popular genre of biography. Like many women of her time, Berkeley deﬁned herself through her relationships with men, particularly her father, husband and

Enlightenment Biographies 719 sons. However, her voluminous ‘Preface’ suggests a degree of resistance to her subordinate situation. After her husband’s death in 1795 she gathered his Sermons for publication in 1799. She also contributed several articles to the Gentleman’s Magazine, including ‘A Singular Tale of Love in High Life’ (August, 1796) which described her husband’s youthful courtship with bluestocking Catherine Talbot. Eliza Berkeley died at Kensington in 1800, aged 66. According to her wishes, her body was buried in Cheltenham, in the same tomb as her son George Monck. Elizabeth Eger

Inés Joyes y Blake (1731–1806) Information about Inés Joyes y Blake is very scarce, as her life is still being researched. She was born in Madrid in 1731 to Gregorio Joyes and Inés Joyes, both members of Irish merchant dynasties established in Spain. She belonged to the middle class, with commercial, ﬁnancial, bureaucratic and military connections. Her family seems to have been a cultured one, connected with Enlightenment circles (her reﬁned home was praised by English travellers, while one of her sons, Joaquín, and her grandson José played signiﬁcant intellectual and political roles in the period of liberal revolution in early nineteenth-century Spain). She married another Irishman, Agustín Blake, in 1752, and lived all her adult life in Málaga, a ﬂourishing sea-port, and in Vélez-Málaga, a small provincial town. She had nine children, for whom she had to provide after her husband’s banckruptcy and death in 1782. Her name appeared in the world of letters with a 1798 translation of Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, followed by an Apology of women, which seems to have gone rather unnoticed in her time.. The fact that the Irish in Spain were a compact community, inclined to maintaining their language and customs, accounts for endogamy and also explains her rather unusual mastery of the English language. Her decision to translate a philosophical novel – written by a defender of the talents of women and friend to many women writers, a novel which was sceptical about matrimony and had a heroine with a singular personality – rather than one of the sentimental plots then in vogue, is an indication of her leanings. Inés Joyes’ ideas are further developed in her Apology, a vehement plea for women’s intellectual aptitudes, moral responsibilities and emotional autonomy, with obvious connections to the work of Josefa Amar and more intriguing parallels with that of Mary Wollstonecraft. Monica Bolufer

Josefa Amar y Borbón (1749–?) Borbon was an enlightened Spanish woman. Her date of death is uncertain, but it was not before 1808. Descended on both sides from families of a certain intellectual renown and social standing (both her father and grandfather were distinguished physicians), she lived at the court as a young woman. Later, she married a lawyer, Joaquín Fuertes Piquer, had one son and spent most of her adult life in Zaragoza, a provincial town whose reformist and Enlightened circles she and her husband joined. Her education was rather uncommon for a non-aristocratic woman of the day. She learnt Latin, Greek, and several modern languages; and she gained considerable knowledge of the Classics, of Spanish moralistic and pedagogical writing of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, of eighteenth-century educational works, and, most particularly, of ancient and modern medical texts. Her writings include translations of agronomic, literary, erudite and pedagogical works from the English, French and Italian. However, her most relevant publications are her Discourse in Defense of the Talents of Women (Discurso en defensa del talento de las mujeres, 1786), written as a contribution to the debate concerning women’s admission to the Economic Society of Madrid, and her Discourse on women’s physical and moral education (Discurso sobre la educación física y moral de las mujeres, 1790), the most comprehensive pedagogical treatise for

720 Enlightenment Biographies women in eighteenth-century Spain. She enjoyed considerable prestige in her time. She was admitted to the Economic Society of Aragón in 1782, to the Junta de Damas (Ladies’ Committee) of the Economic Society of Madrid in 1787, and to the Royal Medical Society of Barcelona, in recognition of her contribution to the popularization of medical knowledge. Monica Bolufer

Frances Evelyn Boscawen (1719–1805) Frances Evelyn (née Glanville), was the great-niece, on her mother’s side, of the diarist John Evelyn, whose literary skill and love of nature she inherited. She married Edward Boscawen in 1742. The union was marked by long periods of separation while Edward was engaged in naval battles overseas. Frances oversaw the building of their ﬁne country mansion, Hatchlands in Surrey, designed by the architect Robert Adam. The Admiral died in 1761 after a distinguished career in North America and in the Seven Years War against France. Together they had ﬁve children, three of whom predeceased Frances. While her long widowhood was marked by much personal sorrow, it was also the most sociable period of her life. Frances acted as a muse and patron to several writers, including Edward Young, who dedicated his poem ‘Resignation’ (1761) to her, aiming to console her on her husband’s death. She hosted popular assemblies at her London house – her guests included Elizabeth Montagu, Dr. Johnson, James Boswell, Joshua and Frances Reynolds, Elizabeth Carter and Hannah More. She was widely known as a model letterwriter, prized for her wit, elegance and warm heart. More compared her to Madame Sévigné and eulogized her social virtues in her poem ‘Sensibility’ (1782). She also praised Boscawen alongside Elizabeth Vesey and Elizabeth Montagu in her poem ‘Bas Bleu, or Conversation’ (1786), which celebrates the intellectual values of the bluestocking community. Frances died in London on 26 February, 1805. At her request, she was laid in her husband’s tomb in the church of St. Michael Pinkivel, Cornwall. While her copious correspondence remains in family hands, some of her letters have been published in collections of bluestocking correspondence. Elizabeth Eger

Edmund Burke (1729–97) Edmund Burke was a parliamentary politician and philosopher. He was born in Ireland of a Protestant father and Catholic mother, but himself identiﬁed as Protestant, although sympathetic to Catholic claims. Upon moving to England, his political and intellectual talents attracted the patronage of inﬂuential men such as the Marquis of Rockingham. In 1757, he published A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, which identiﬁed the sublime as masculine and the beautiful as feminine. Although Burke is now thought of as the father of modern conservatism, for most of his political career he sided with the Rockingham Whigs, who criticized what they saw as the overweening power of the King, and wished to strengthen the power of Parliament. In 1770 he published Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents to address this issue. Burke believed that George III was unconstitutionally advised by a secret cabinet, including his mother, which deprived the Parliament of its due voice. Because of his suspicion of royal power, Burke feared the supposed secret inﬂuence of the king’s mother, and later, in the Regency Crisis of 1788, of his wife the queen. The Whigs identiﬁed with the heritage of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, but they still believed that the descendents of the old aristocratic families who led that revolution were the natural leaders of society. As a Whig, Edmund Burke was not sympathetic to calls for expanding the parliamentary franchise. When the French revolution broke out in 1789, Burke turned against his former Whig allies and wrote his famous Reﬂections on the Revolution in France against it. Featuring most

Enlightenment Biographies 721 prominently was the dazzling vision of Marie Antoinette and the call for chivalry, but Burke squarely based his political philosophy on inherited traditions, family patrimonies and natural subordination. Anna Clark

Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis (1757–1808) Cabanis, a French physician and social theorist, was born in Cosnac in 1757 and died in Rueil in 1808. After serving in his youth as secretary to prince-bishop Massalski of Vilna, Cabanis moved to Paris in 1775, where he studied medicine with the Royal physician J-B-Léon Dubreuil while also cultivating letters; over the course of his life, he translated fragments of the Iliad and works by Meissner, Goethe, and Gray. In 1778, Cabanis settled in Auteuil and soon became the protégé of Mme Helvétius, who oversaw an intellectually vibrant salon where Cabanis made the acquaintance of numerous philosophes, writers and political ﬁgures – including Mirabeau, who employed Cabanis as both speechwriter and physician. Cabanis was politically active in the Revolutionary era: he advocated hospital reforms, universal primary education, national public assistance, and standards for the medical profession. During the violence of the Terror, Cabanis prepared poison for his friends (including the vial which Condorcet consumed to avoid execution) and conﬁned himself to Auteuil. After Thermidor, he assumed a leading role in the reconstruction of France’s cultural and educational institutions, serving as deputy in the Council of Five Hundred, conspirator in Bonaparte’s coup of Brumaire (November 1799), and a professor of clinical medicine, legal medicine and history of medicine at the Paris School of Medicine (although it is doubtful that Cabanis actually taught). On May 14 1796, he married Charlotte-Félicité de Grouchy, Condorcet’s sister-in-law. That same year, he entered the French National Institute, where he was reunited with fellow ‘Ideologues’ who seconded his effort to produce a ‘science of man’ that clearly articulated the links between physiology, psychology and intelligence. It was there, from 1796 to 1800, that Cabanis read the twelve Memoirs that constituted his major work, Les Rapports du physique et moral de l’homme (1802). In the Rapports, Cabanis posited that physical sensitivity is the simple, generative principle not just of physiology but also of man’s moral and intellectual life; he then proceeded to analyse this principle in all its ﬁxed and variable aspects – including that of sex, which Cabanis described as exerting a profound inﬂuence on the character of ideas and moral affections. After his death from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1808, Cabanis was buried in the Pantheon. Anne Vila

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–74). Margaret Cavendish was born in Colchester, the daughter of Sir Thomas Lucas. In 1642 she became a maid of honour at the court of Queen Henrietta Maria, whom she accompanied into exile in 1644. During her exile in France, she met and married William, Earl of Newcastle. Thereafter she lived with her husband in France and the Netherlands. When she returned to England at the Restoration, her intellectual proﬁle and highly colourful public persona gave her a reputation for eccentricity which haunts her memory to this day. Margaret Cavendish was a proliﬁc writer whose wide-ranging interests extended from drama and poetry to philosophy and science. She was one of the ﬁrst English women to publish in these areas. Her pursuit of philosophy in particular was a major achievement at a time when very few women had the opportunity to develop an interest in the subject. Through her husband and his brother, Sir Charles Cavendish, she had contact with some of the leading thinkers of her time, including Huygens, Hobbes, Descartes, Sir Kenelm Digby and Walter Charleton. In 1667 she received recognition of a sort when she was

722 Enlightenment Biographies invited to visit the Royal Society. Nevertheless , as a woman, she was not permitted to join the society. Initially Cavendish’s preferred medium was verse – Poems and Fancies (1654) and Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1654). But she subsequently adopted a more systematic mode for setting out her philosophy especially in Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668), where she proposed a vitalistic and materialist account of nature. She asserted the distinctiveness of her position by critiquing contemporary thinkers in several writings: Philosophical Letters (1664) is a series of epistolary essays addressed to an imaginary female correspondent which argue against Hobbes, Descartes, Jan Baptiste van Helmont and Henry More; Observations on Experimental Philosophy (1666) attacks the experimental science of the Royal Society; and A Description of a New World Called the Blazing World, published with the latter, is a ﬁctional utopia in which she satirises contemporary science and philosophy. She also published collections of plays (1662 and 1668), and semi-discursive prose writings – The World’s Olio (1655), Orations (1662), and Sociable Letters (1664) – and a Life of her husband (1667). Sarah Hutton

Mme du Châtelet (1706–49) Gabrielle Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil was born into a well-connected noble family; both parents maintained a Paris salon. Her father taught her Italian; she was also tutored in mathematics, science, English and Latin. At nineteen she married Florent Claude, Marquis de Châtelet, from an ancient military noble family. Their main estate was at Cirey in Champagne, near the duchy of Lorraine whose ruler, Stanislas, the former king of Poland, was Louis XV’s father-in-law. Mme du Châtelet always combined her intellectual pursuits with an intense social life at the courts of Nancy and Versailles, including private theatricals and gambling. She loved dress and jewels, and with Voltaire’s help redecorated parts of Cirey in rococo taste combined with modern luxury. In the ﬁrst seven years of her marriage the marquise combined bearing three children with the life of a salonnière; in keeping with elite mores she had several liaisons, including one with the statesman, the duc de Richelieu, and the scientist Maupertuis, who also tutored her in advanced mathematics. After 1734 she and Voltaire became acknowledged partners, a situation accepted by her husband; at Cirey they wrote, studied, acted, and negotiated the complex literary quarrels which reﬂected the cultural politics and personal animosities of the era. As a philosophe she mediated both English and German thought into French. Her most signiﬁcant achievement were the translation of Newton’s Principia Mathematica, with a commentary assisted by the mathematicians A.-C. Clairaut and D. Bernouilli, (1759); and her synthesis of Leibniz and Newton, in Les Institutions physiques (1740, in the form of letters to her son). She deepened Voltaire’s interest in science and inﬂuenced his Eléments de la Philosophie de Newton. Her translation of Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, was prefaced with her advocacy of feminist possibilities in the arts and sciences. Clarissa Campbell Orr

Marquis de Condorcet (1743–94) Mathematician, philosopher, feminist, and revolutionary activist, Marie-Jean-AntoineNicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet was born into a noble family in Picardy in 1743. As a young protégé of Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Condorcet did innovative work on calculus that won him entry into the Academy of Sciences by 1769. He became a Physiocrat and supporter of Turgot’s reforms, served as Inspector-General of the Mint, and wrote pamphlets backing free trade, praising American political innovations, and criticizing the political disenfranchisement of women (in Letters from a Bourgeois of New Haven to a Citizen of Virginia, 1787). Well known for his éloges of fellow philosophes, he also made his name by

Enlightenment Biographies 723 developing a “social arithmetic” that attempted to apply the science of probability to social problems (Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions, 1785). He and his wife, Sophie de Grouchy, ran one of Paris’s most prominent salons. During the French Revolution, he became a deputy to the Legislative Assembly and the Convention. A prominent advocate of humanitarian causes, he argued for the abolition of slavery, opposed the death penalty, and drafted an inﬂuential proposal for a national, secular education system. His controversial work, On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship (1790), lobbied for political rights and educational opportunities for women. As a republican deputy, he authored the Girondin proposal for the Constitution of 1793. Denounced for his connections with the Girondins, Condorcet ﬂed Paris and was eventually arrested. In hiding and in prison, he wrote his most well-known work, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795), which examined the stages of human progress in language and knowledge and predicted the perfectibility of humankind in a tenth and ﬁnal stage. Still in prison in late March 1794, he committed suicide. Suzanne Desan

Thomas Cooper (1759–1840) Thomas Cooper, physician and activist, was a man with keen democratic instincts. Committee member of the ‘Society for the Purpose of Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade,’ leader in Dissenting circles and active member of both the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society and Manchester Constitutional Society, Cooper publicized his strong pro-Woman views during an ardent political exchange with the conservative M.P. Edmund Burke regarding the course of the French Revolution. In his 1792 A Reply to Mr. Burke’s Invective, written in response to a particularly nasty speech delivered by Burke in the House of Commons, in which Burke had chastised Cooper for traveling to France on behalf of the Manchester Constitutional Society, Cooper argued that all those capable of ‘self-direction’ – women included – had a right to the basic liberties advocated by the French revolutionaries. ‘I have repeatedly considered the subject of the Rights of Women,’ Cooper wrote, ‘and I am perfectly unable to suggest any Argument in support of the political Superiority so generally arrogated by the Male Sex, which will not equally apply to any System of Despotism of Man over Man.’ Cooper’s statement attracted considerable attention, and was reprinted in the essays of British writers Thomas Starling Norgate and John Bristed, as well as in an American article entitled ‘On the Rights of Woman’, published in the National Magazine in 1800. In 1794, Cooper followed Joseph Priestley to America, where he lobbied against John Adams’ administration and taught mineralogy and chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, eventually becoming President of South Carolina College in 1820. Arianne Chernock

Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) Erasmus Darwin was a physician, botanist and poet who played a central role in the formation of the Lunar Society of Birmingham. The Society, whose members included Joseph Priestley, Thomas Day, Robert Bage and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, took a strong interest in improving female education – at least 11 of its members wrote pro-Woman educational treatises – and Darwin himself was the author of A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools (1797), written to support his two illegitimate daughters who had recently opened a boarding school in Derbyshire. In the plan, Darwin chastised parents of the ‘last half century’ for not taking enough pains to educate their daughters: ‘Hence it happens, that female education has not yet been reduced to a perfect system.’ To create this ‘perfect system’, Darwin recommended that young women be instructed not only in ‘grammar, languages, and common arithmetic’, but also in ‘geography, civil history, and

724 Enlightenment Biographies natural history’, as well as in botany and chemistry. He also encouraged teachers to engage their female students in regular physical activity. The Plan was generally well-received, although John Aikin complained in The Monthly Review that Darwin had ‘done no more than slightly touch on a few leading ideas’. Female education, however, was only one of Darwin’s many causes. Overweight and sybaritic, this wide-ranging thinker (who fathered fourteen children) was also deeply committed to liberating eros. His poem The Botanic Garden (1791), which publicized the Linnaean system of classiﬁcation, cited the polygamous practices of plants as a means of legitimating sexual freedoms for both men and women. As Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin, once observed, love was ‘the purest source of human felicity, the cordial drop in the otherwise vapid cup of life’. Arianne Chernock

Laura Bentivoglio Davia (1689–1761) Laura Bentivoglio Davia was one of many aristocratic women engaged in the pursuit of knowledge in eighteenth-century Italy. She is noteworthy primarily for her relationships with leading natural philosophers associated with the University of Bologna and the Istituto delle Scienze in the ﬁrst half of the eighteenth century. The last direct descendant, along with her sister, of the Bentivoglio family that ruled the city of Bologna prior to its annexation by the Papal States, Bentivoglio married Francesco Davia in 1708. Marital difﬁculties lead to a lengthy separation between 1715 and 1726. For the majority of this period, she lived with her husband’s uncle, cardinal Giovan Antonio Davia, in his bishopric in Rimini. There she developed a serious interest in scientiﬁc and philosophical pursuits by participating in cardinal Davia’s scientiﬁc academy and being educated in modern philosophy by the Riminese physician Giovanni Bianchi. In 1723 Francesco Maria Zanotti, the secretary of the Istituto delle Scienze, called her the bella Cartesiana (beautiful Cartesian) in recognition of her prominent social role in the cardinal’s academy as its sole female member. In the decades following her return to Bologna, Bentivoglio Davia continued to perfect her scientiﬁc and mathematical education; she also played an important role as a patron of local scientiﬁc ﬁgures such as Zanotti, Bianchi, and even the young Francesco Algarotti whose Newtonianism for Ladies (1737) she eagerly read. While she initially disapproved of the idea of Laura Bassi taking up a university professorship in 1732, she eventually became a patron and supporter of this younger woman physicist. Like many women of her generation, Bentivoglio Davia left behind no published writings in relation to her scientiﬁc interests. She was primarily a consumer of the knowledge of her time, albeit a very interesting and opinionated one judging by her extant correspondence. Paula Findlen

Thomas Day (1748–89) Thomas Day was one of the most respected Rousseauian theorists and social reformers of the late British Enlightenment, whose didactic children’s book The History of Sandford and Merton (1783–89) was praised by Mary Wollstonecraft in the pages of the Analytical Review for its pro-Woman content. In her review, Wollstonecraft cited Day’s eagerness to see women treated as ‘rational creatures’ rather than as ‘polished playthings’ and commended his efforts to promote ‘a very different mode of education for females, from that which some late writers on the subject, have adopted’. Day’s attitude towards women, however, was by no means straightforward, and this ‘studiously unkempt’ philosopher’s personal life at times suggests a far more complicated relationship to the opposite sex. After conducting an unsuccessful search for a British ‘Sophie’ – a woman who might favor the ‘natural’ over the ‘artiﬁcial’ – Day adopted two young girls and raised them along Rousseauist lines in hopes of transforming them into ideal wifely material. The project failed. One of the girls proved ‘invincibly stupid’. The other, Sabrina Sidney, though beautiful, also lacked

Enlightenment Biographies 725 ‘strength of mind’. As the Lichﬁeld poet Anna Seward reported of the affair, Day disliked the way that Sidney responded to his experiments, particularly the fact that she screamed when ‘melted-sealing wax’ was dropped on her arms and jumped when pistols were ﬁred at her petticoats. In the end, Day and Sidney parted ways – she heading off to a boarding school and becoming the wife of one Mr. Bicknel (a barrister who had been with Day when he ﬁrst selected his orphans) and he marrying Miss Esther Milnes, a woman who, in the words of Day’s good friend Richard Lovell Edgeworth, combined ‘in an unusual manner, independence of sentiment, and the most complete matrimonial obedience’. Arianne Chernock

Denis Diderot (1713–84) Denis Diderot, philosopher, novelist, and editor of the Encyclopédie, was one of the central ﬁgures of the French Enlightenment. Educated at a Jesuit College in Langres and at the Catholic Collège d’Harcourt in Paris, he was destined for the priesthood. In 1732, however he renounced the religious life thereafter subsisting on a hand-to-mouth existence in Paris by tutoring in history and mathematics and writing sermons to order. In 1743, Diderot married, against his father’s strong opposition, a seamstress and lace-maker, AnneAntoinette Champion, by whom he had several children, but only one, a daughter to whom he was devoted, surviving into adult-hood. His marriage, intellectually less than compatible, was not happy. Engaging in a number of extra-marital affairs, Diderot’s long relationship with his mistress, Sophie de Volland, is notable for the fascinating correspondence to which it gave rise. Diderot was at the centre of the philosophes circle, a friend of Voltaire, Rousseau, d’Alembert and Grimm. In 1746 he and d’Alembert began work on the vast Encyclopédie, which given strict French censorship, had a chequered and protracted publishing history. In 1749 Diderot’s writings on natural religion and materialism, as well as his pornographic novel, Les Bijoux indiscrets led to his imprisonment at Vincennes for several months. As well as the Encyclopédie, he wrote widely on art criticism, in his Salons, and on the theatre, developing an important theory of naturalistic acting. His stage plays, Le Père de famille (1758), Le Fils naturel (1757) were dramas of sentiment based on family affections. His letters to the actress Marie Madeleine Jodin, who became his protégée, expound his theories on acting also developed in Le Paradoxe sur le comédien (The Actor’s Paradox, 1773). In same year he undertook a trip to Russia, to visit his patroness, Catherine II, who had made him her librarian and who gave him a generous pension. A polymath and an enormously fertile mind, interested in everything, he combined enormous erudition with wit and lightness of touch. Many of his most daring and speculative writings such as Le rêve d’Alembert and Jaques le fataliste were not published in his lifetime. A convinced materialist, Diderot anticipated theories of evolution. He was one of the most brilliant and engaging of Enlightenment philosophes. Felicia Gordon

William Enﬁeld (1741–97) William Enﬁeld served alternately as an instructor and rector at the Dissenting Warrington Academy, minister at the Octagon Chapel in Norwich, and essayist for various left-leaning periodicals. Throughout his varied career as a teacher, preacher and writer, he channeled much of his energy into ﬁghting for sexual equality. In book reviews written for The Monthly Magazine and The Monthly Review, he touted Woman’s abilities, encouraging Man to treat her as his intellectual equal. Perhaps Enﬁeld’s most intriguing assertion, however, was that a new term was needed to describe the human species in toto. Assessing Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, he noted that he disliked the terms ‘man’ and ‘woman’, feeling that they were designations that emphasized the differences between the sexes, rather than their overwhelming commonalities: ‘Both men and women

726 Enlightenment Biographies should certainly, in the ﬁrst place, regard themselves, and should be treated by each other, as human beings. It might, perhaps, in some measure, contribute to this end, if, beside the sexual appellations of man and woman, we had some general term to denote the species, like… Homo in the Greek and Roman languages. The want of such a general term is a material defect in our language.’ Yes, there were biological distinctions, he explained, but most of the perceived differences stemmed less from physiology than from cultural context. It was his aim, he noted, as an enlightened subject, to minimize the gap between the sexes (though not in such a way, he insisted, as to completely ‘confound’ difference). Enﬁeld himself was no doubt working in this spirit when he decided – likely playfully – to use the pseudonym ‘Homo’ in the essays he wrote for the radical Norwich periodical The Cabinet. Arianne Chernock

Louise-Florence-Pétronille Tardieu d’Esclavelles de la Live d’Épinay (1726–83) Though she married for love, Louise d’Épinay soon discovered that she had made a disastrous marriage to her proﬂigate tax-farmer cousin, La Live d’Épinay. Best known for her association with the philosophes, in particular Diderot, Grimm (who was her lover) and the abbé Galiani, with whom she corresponded extensively after his return to Naples in 1769, she was herself a distinguished member of the intellectual society in which she moved. She contributed anonymously to Grimm’s Correspondance littéraire, taking charge of its production for lengthy periods when he was away. She was also closely acquainted with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with whom she famously quarrelled. She wrote up her version of events in the Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant, often referred to as her Pseudo-Mémoires, which was published for the ﬁrst time in 1818. Her pedagogical work, Les Conversations d’Émilie (1774, augmented and corrected in 1782) demonstrates the inﬂuence of Rousseau, while at the same time criticising him in the area of the education of women. Written for her grand-daughter, Émilie de Belzunce, Les Conversations d’Émilie was awarded the Prix Montyon (a newly established prize offered by the Académie française for the book of the year judged to be the most useful to society) in January 1783. She was in competition for this with Mme de Genlis, who clearly considered that her own pedagogical novel Adèle et Théodore deserved to win. It was suggested at the time that Genlis’s known antiphilosophe stance spoiled her chances. Mme d’Épinay’s educational theory designated three developmental stages: (i) up to ten, (ii) from ten till fourteen or ﬁfteen, (iii) from ﬁfteen till marriage. The published work covers only education up to ten. Jean Bloch

Father Benito Jerónimo Feijoo (1676–1764) Feijoo was a Benedictine monk, the eldest son of a family of the lesser nobility, and a Theology professor at the University of Oviedo for almost half a century (1710–59). He was one of the most popular Spanish writers of the eighteenth century, and an energetic advocate of Enlightenment principles. He opposed defenders of traditional scholasticism and was an admirer of modern European philosophy. For a long time, he has been presented by historians as an exceptional ﬁgure, heroically standing alone in a landscape of mediocrity and backwardness. Recent research offers a more nuanced version of enlightened change, pointing to its origins in the last third of the seventeenth century, and reassessing Feijoo’s signiﬁcance instead as the most relevant representative of the early Spanish Enlightenment, given his wide range of interests and his determination to reach a large audience. His most important works – two collections of essays entitled Critical Theater of Common Errors and Prejudices (Teatro Crítico de Errores Comunes) and Erudite Letters (Cartas Eruditas) – attained an unprecedented popularity in the rather bleak outlook of Spanish editorial industry. They

Enlightenment Biographies 727 went through, respectively, twenty and eleven full or partial editions between 1725 and 1787, as well as dozens of reprints. At the moment of Feijoo’s death, almost 500,000 copies had been sold, and dictionaries and indexes of his work had been published to help quick browsing. He was also one of the Spanish intellectuals most famous abroad, with translations into ﬁve languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, German and English.) His Defense of women (essay XVI of his Critical Theater) aroused intense and longlasting polemics and had a strong inﬂuence on eighteenth-century Spanish culture. Monica Bolufer

Mme de la Fite (1737–94) Marie Elisabeth de la Fite, author, translator and governess, belonged to the sector of northern European Republic of Letters which was moderate, Protestant, Enlightened, and pursued the Baconian and Newtonian goal of demonstrating the compatibility of theology and natural philosophy. She was born in Hamburg (or Altona), possibly of French Huguenot stock. She married a Dutch Huguenot pastor, Jean-Daniel La Fite, who was also a Chaplain to the House of Orange in The Hague; both were involved in educating the royal children. She also collaborated with him in the Bibliothèque des Sciences et des Beaux Arts, an explicitly anti-Deistic journal, also devoted to the advancement of the arts and sciences. After being widowed she joined the household of Queen Charlotte in Britain in 1781, as a Reader, and instructress to the princesses in German and French. She also helped Sarah Trimmer with the Queen’s charity schools in Windsor. Her educational works, written with the royal princesses in mind, include Eugénie et ses élèves,(1787) dedicated to Princess Elizabeth, and Entretiens, Drames, et Contes Moraux à l’usage des femmes,(1801) dedicated to Queen Charlotte. These were modelled on similar works by Mme LePrince de Beaumont, and as well as dialogues on natural history include playlets by progressive continental educators such as Armand Berquin, C. F. Weisse, C. G. Salzmann and J.H. Campe, many of whom were inﬂuenced by English moral writers. (Mary Wollstonecraft in turn translated Salzmann). She cherished her literary friendship with Mme de Genlis. Her moral themes include the need to override passion with reason, to cultivate rural simplicity rather than metropolitan sophistication, and enjoy the pleasures of philanthropy. She also translated Lady Sophia Sternheim, by Sophie von La Roche, Thoughts on the Manners of the Great by Hannah More and two works by Lavater, the founder of physiognomy. Clarissa Campbell Orr

Eliza Fletcher (1770–1858) Eliza Fletcher, née Eliza Dawson, was the daughter of Elizabeth Hill, from a Yorkshire gentry family, who died at her birth, and Miles Dawson, a surveyor and small landowner. Educated at the Manor School, York, in July 1791 she married the Scottish advocate Archibald Fletcher, a Gaelic speaker and burgh reformer, made Edinburgh her home. From then until her husband’s death in 1828 she remained close to the reforming politics of Edinburgh Whiggism, and her autobiography is an outstanding account of early nineteenth-century Edinburgh literary and reforming circles. She shared and celebrated her husband’s political sympathies with the early principles of the French Revolution, though not with more radical revolutionary politics, and she wrote of the strength of Tory prejudice against reformers in Edinburgh in the 1790s. Her attractive personality and political interests allowed her to play a lively role in the circles surrounding the Edinburgh Review, founded in 1802. With Elizabeth Hamilton and Anne Grant of Laggan, she helped to provide the sociable and conversational contexts in which men such as Francis Jeffrey, Henry Brougham, Dugald Stewart and many others ﬂourished. Her autobiography also identiﬁes the close connections between a network of literary women which included Hamilton, Grant, Joanna Baillie, Margaret Cullen, Mary Brunton, and the English

728 Enlightenment Biographies dissenters Anna Barbauld and Catherine Cappe. Their common interests included the education of women, and philanthropic activities, especially in Edinburgh. After 1828 she spent less time in Scotland, but still celebrated the passing of the Reform Act for Scotland in Edinburgh in 1832. Most of her later years were spent in the English Lake District, but throughout her long life she maintained active political interests, notably in the politics of European nationalism; she corresponded with Mazzini until 1853. She had four daughters, two sons and many grandchildren. Her daughter Mary, Lady Richardson (1802–80) edited her autobiography, most of which was written between 1838 and 1844, with additional correspondence, privately printed at ﬁrst, in 1874. Jane Rendall

William Frend (1757–1841) William Frend was the son of an Anglican wine merchant who sent him to North America to learn the trade at the outbreak of the American rebellion. Frend was drafted into and served in the British army. On his return to England he refused either a mercantile or a military career, determined to prepare for the ministry. He took a degree at Christ’s College, Cambridge, where William Paley (1743–1805) inﬂuenced him. Frend became Tutor in Mathematics at Jesus College; Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Robert Malthus were among his students. He renounced his prospects as an Anglican by confessing Unitarianism in 1787, and resigned his livings. In 1788 he published two provocative texts, Thoughts on Subscription to Religious Tests and An Address to the Inhabitants of Cambridge and its Neighbourhood, exhorting them to turn from the false worship of Three Persons to the worship of One True God, then left to tour the Continent, although he retained his tutorship with a stipend of £150 per annum. On his return to Cambridge, Frend resumed his duties as a tutor; he also collaborated with Joseph Priestley on a new translation of the Scriptures, and Robert Robinson’s researches for his History of Baptism (1790) by securing manuscripts for him from the University libraries. Frend published Peace and Union recommended to the Associated Bodies of Republicans and Anti-Republicans in February 1793, in which he attacked the ‘Church of England [as] a political institution’. He was tried by the University and banished on grounds that his judges knew were without statutory basis, and so kept his stipend. He moved to London in 1794 where he worked as a freelance tutor in Mathematics while continuing radical activities with other Unitarians and political progressives; later, he participated in the agitation for the Reform Bill of 1832. In 1807, Frend accepted a regular position as actuary at the newly formed Rock Life Assurance Company. Frend demonstrated a lifelong interest in education, including for women. He encouraged his frail halfsister in her studies, supported Mary Hays in her intellectual ambitions, tutored Annabella Milbanke, later the unhappy wife of Lord Byron, in Latin and Mathematics; after his marriage to Sara Blackburne, the granddaughter of Archdeacon Francis Blackburne, in 1808, he served as mentor to the ﬁrst of their seven children, Sophia, teaching her reading, writing, Hebrew, philosophy, and taking her with him everywhere. Gina Luria Walker

Mme de Genlis (1747–1830) Stéphanie-Félicité Ducrest de Saint-Aubin came from an old but not wealthy aristocratic family in Burgundy, and married the well-connected soldier Charles-Alexis, Comte de Genlis, in 1763. She was educated at a convent, followed by self-education with the help of salon friends. Through family connections she became lady-in-waiting to the duchesse d’Orléans, whose husband was a cousin of Louis XVI, and heir to the throne, until Louis produced children. She had a brief liaison with the duc; her adopted daughter Pamela, later wife of the Irish rebel Lord Edward Fitzgerald, was widely, but almost certainly erroneously, believed to be their daughter. In 1779 she became Gouvernante to the Orléans’ sons and

Enlightenment Biographies 729 daughters. As an educator she imitated Mme Maintenon, Louis XIV’s morganatic wife, by writing children’s plays. A proliﬁc author, her two most inﬂuential books, read and translated across Europe, were Adèle et Théodore ou Lettres sur l’éducation, (1782), in which a virtuous couple retire to the country to educate their children, and exchange letters with friends including one who is educating a prince; and the anthology of stories, Les Veillées du Château (Evenings at the Castle,1784), including ‘Alphonse and Dalinda’, where the marvels of science surpass folklore magic. De Genlis believed religion was the foundation of morality, though religion in a benevolent and social rather than a doctrinal and sacramental sense; this put her at odds with philosophes such as D’Alembert and Rousseau. Her educational philosophy included science, history, geography and modern languages for both sexes. Her inﬂuence over the duc’s politics in the French Revolution was overestimated. She spent 1791–1800 abroad, supporting herself by writing, and in 1800 made her accommodation with Napoleon. Always a constitutional monarchist, she remained socially conservative. Her great ambition for her pupil Louis-Philippe to become king was realised in 1830. Clarissa Campbell Orr

Marie-Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin (1699–1777) Born in Paris and orphaned young, she was married off at fourteen with a substantial dowry to the wealthy director of the royal glassworks at Saint-Gobain. Although she had been pious in her childhood and youth, she became less so in her twenties, when her intellectual curiosity developed. She began to frequent the salon of her neighbour Mme de Tencin, where she became a regular until the death of her mentor (and of her own husband) in 1749. Before that time she had already begun her own salons: one on Mondays for artists and amateurs of art, the other on Wednesdays for men of letters. She was an important patron of artists and men of letters, known for her generosity to both. She was not a writer and published nothing. Her correspondence with Stanislas Poniatowski, king of Poland, whom she considered her adopted son, has been published. Dena Goodman

William Godwin (1756–1836) William Godwin was born in Suffolk, into a family steeped in religious dissent. His paternal grandfather, father and uncle were all dissenting ministers, and in 1767 Godwin followed them, beginning his training with a Norwich Independent, and then moving on to the Hoxton Academy from which he graduated in 1778. He practised as a minister for several years, in Suffolk and London, until his religious views became too heterodox for his congregations and he turned to writing instead. His early years as a literary professional were precarious, generating so little income that he often had difﬁculty feeding himself; but in the mid-1780s he gained a post on the New Annual Register that afforded him a modicum of economic security. He held this post for seven years, during which time he became a ﬁxture on the London literary scene, and thus was well positioned to join the debate that broke out following the publication of Edmund Burke’s Reﬂections on the Revolution in France (1790). His contribution to this debate, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) – a weighty statement of anarcho-individualist principles – won him great renown, and brought him to the centre of the ﬁerce political conﬂicts of the day. His next major work, Things as They Are – or the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), an extraordinary exploration of the psychological effects of injustice and inequality, heightened his reputation further. In 1794 he published Cursory Strictures on the Charge Delivered by Lord Chief Justice Eyre to the Grand Jury (1794), a very effective attack on the charge of High Treason directed against his friend Thomas Holcroft and other leading radicals of the day. In 1796 he became Mary Wollstonecraft’s lover and then–following her pregnancy with the future Mary Shelley – her husband. Wollstonecraft’s death in childbirth left him desolate, and his remarriage – to

730 Enlightenment Biographies Jane Clairmont in 1801 – was not emotionally successful. In 1798 he published a very revealing memoir of Wollstonecraft which badly tarnished both her and his public status, and from this point on his reputation went steadily downhill. None of his succeeding works brought him much success, and his ﬁnances – despite the assistance of his son-in-law, Percy Bysshe Shelley – became increasingly precarious. Several personal tragedies darkened his life further. In 1833 the reformed Parliament gave him a stipendiary post, which he held until his death in 1836. Barbara Taylor

Olympe de Gouges (1748–93) Born Marie Gouze in Montauban in 1748, Olympe de Gouges became one of the most prominent feminist author-activists of the French revolutionary era. After the death of her husband Pierre Aubry in the late 1760s, she moved to Paris with her son. In the 1780s and 90s she published more than sixty political texts, including plays, pamphlets, and posters plastered across the walls of Paris. Her most well known text, the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen (1791), proclaimed that women shared natural rights with men, demanded a public political role for women, and exposed contradictions within the meaning and practice of universal rights. This manifesto also argued for replacing women’s marital subjection with a new ‘social contract between man and woman’ that would guarantee shared control over property and protect woman’s right to name and raise her child. Olympe de Gouges’s plays outlined programs for social reform, such as the abolition of slavery, an end to forced religious vows, and the legalization of divorce. During the Revolution, she became a prominent ﬁgure in the legislative galleries and Parisian political clubs. Initially, she supported the creation of the constitutional monarchy and even offered to defend King Louis XVI when he was put on trial in 1792. She became increasingly allied with the Girondins and produced a series of controversial political pamphlets. Her support for a possible federalist alternative to the Jacobin republic landed her in prison in July 1793 and she was guillotined in November 1793. In reporting her death, the newspaper, the Courrier républicain announced, ‘Remember this virago, this woman-man, the impudent Olympe de Gouges, who ﬁrst instituted women’s societies, wanted to engage in politics, and committed crimes.’ Although she was executed for her Girondin political stance, her feminist activism aggravated contemporary resentments against her. Over the longer term, various post-revolutionary feminists drew inspiration from her probing writings and activism. Suzanne Desan

Marie le Jars de Gournay (1565–1645) Marie de Gournay grew up in a moderately prosperous noblesse de robe family. Her father died early (1577), but her mother took good care of the family, though she did not approve of Marie’s intellectual ambitions. Marie, however, read everything she could lay her hands on, and taught herself Latin by comparing original texts with French translations. She steadfastly refused an arranged marriage, and remained single to the end of her life. In 1584, Gournay read Montaigne’s Essais: she was instantly electriﬁed, and henceforth ardently desired to carve out a place for herself in the world of letters. In 1588 she met Montaigne in Paris. He became ‘a second father’ to her, offering her friendship and an entrance to the world of writers and philosophers. Marie corresponded with Montaigne until his death in 1592. She became his literary executor: in 1595 she edited the ﬁrst complete publication of the Essais with a long introduction by herself in which she defended Montaigne against accusations of heresy. After 1600 Gournay slowly made her own literary reputation, publishing poetry, prose and comments on the French language. She frequented the salon of Madame des Loges

Enlightenment Biographies 731 where she met prominent ﬁgures from the literary world, such as Voiture, Balzac and Vaugelas. As a female author, however, she had to suffer much slander and abuse. It only strengthened her feminist convictions, culminating in her defense of the equality of the sexes in Egalité des hommes et des femmes (1622). In the 1620s and 1630s Gournay was a proliﬁc author, publishing large collections of her work in 1626, 1634,and 1641, as well as a new edition of Montaigne’s Essais (1635). She contributed to the founding of the Académie Française, and in 1635 she was the only female author included in the Parnasse Royal, published in honour of Louis XIII. She died in 1645, at the age of 79. Siep Stuurman

John Gregory (1724–73) John Gregory, professor of medicine at the University of Edinburgh and author of several popular works, belonged to the literary circles that characterized the Enlightenment in Scotland. The son of James Gregory, professor of medicine at King’s College, Aberdeen, and Anne Chalmers (whose father George Chalmers was Principal of King’s College, Aberdeen), he was born at Aberdeen into a family of distinguished physicians and mathematicians. He studied at King’s College, Aberdeen before pursuing medical studies ﬁrst at the University of Edinburgh and then at Leyden (1745–76). From 1746 to 1749 he held a professorship at Aberdeen, where he lectured on mathematics and natural and moral philosophy. In 1752 he married Elizabeth Forbes (d. 1761), daughter of Lord Forbes, with whom he had three sons and three daughters (the youngest daughter, Elizabeth, died in 1771). In 1754 he moved to London to set up a successful medical practice, returning to Aberdeen in 1755 to take up the position of professor of medicine at King’s College. In 1764 he moved to Edinburgh, where he combined his teaching duties with a practice that would earn him the title of physician to the king in Scotland. A member of the Royal Society and one of the founders of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society, Gregory enjoyed the friendship of such ﬁgures as David Hume, Lord Monboddo, and James Beattie, and engaged in a close correspondence with the Bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu, whose patronage of Gregory’s eldest daughter came to an abrupt end when Dorothea Gregory refused to marry Montagu’s nephew (she married Archibald Alison in 1781). To contemporaries, Gregory’s literary status rested on his Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man (1765, with numerous reprints in Britain and America), a combination of medicine, ethics, and natural history which sought to defend the common sense philosophy of his cousin Thomas Reid against the scepticism of his friend David Hume. He is now best remembered for his posthumously published A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (1774), which ran through numerous editions and reprints in Britain and America and which was translated into French, German and Russian. He also published several works in medicine, and his Duties of a Physician (1770) is now seen as a signiﬁcant contribution to the development of modern medical ethics. Mary Catherine Moran

Elizabeth Grifﬁth (1727–93) Elizabeth Grifﬁth was born in Wales and brought up in Dublin, where she acted in Thomas Sheridan’s theatre company from 1749. She secretly married the aristocratic but penniless Richard Grifﬁth in 1751, after a long correspondence, which she later transformed into A Series of Genuine Letters between Henry and Frances (1757) – an immediate literary sensation. As a model of sentimental romance blended with witty exchange and moral bite, the letters established the fame but not the fortune of their authors. Elizabeth Grifﬁth’s ﬁrst play, the tragedy Theodorick, King of Denmark, recently discovered by Betty Rizzo, was published in Dublin in 1752. It was never produced but probably raised £25

732 Enlightenment Biographies in subscriptions. After moving to London in 1753 to join the Covent Garden theatre company, Elizabeth began to write comedies: The Platonic Wife (1765), adapted from Marmontel, The Double Mistake (1766); A Wife in the Right (1772); The Times (1779), adapted from Goldoni,; and a revision of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1800). She dedicated The Morals of Shakespeare Illustrated (1775) to David Garrick, her long-term employer, and cites Elizabeth Montagu’s Essay on Shakespeare (1769) as inspirational. ‘Shakespeare is not only my Poet, but my Philosopher also’, declared Grifﬁth, extending Johnson’s concern with Shakespeare’s ‘purely ethic’ morals to highlight his ‘general economy of life … domestic ties, ofﬁces and obligations’, and showing particular interest in his heroines. She edited A Collection of Novels (1777) which included work by Aubin, Heywood and Behn – an unusual attempt to reassess novelists who were at that time synonymous with sexual immorality. Her last works were spirited epistolary novels, The History of Lady Barton (1771) and The Story of Juliana Harvey (1776). The return of a wealthy son from India removed the need to write. Elizabeth Eger

Elizabeth Hamilton (1758–1816) Elizabeth Hamilton was the daughter of Katherine Mackay of Dublin, and Charles Hamilton, a Scottish merchant in Belfast. The youngest of three children, she was sent in 1762 to live with her Scottish uncle and aunt near Stirling, and from the age of 13 was educated at home mainly by her aunt. She was greatly inﬂuenced by her brother Charles, an orientalist scholar, and in 1786 she joined him in London, where he introduced her into literary and political circles, until his death in 1792. His inspiration was evident in her Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), which used the perspective of a visiting Hindu Rajah from northern India to mock the follies of British society. She wrote in an anti-jacobin spirit against the ideas of the French Revolution, yet also with a progressive concern to improve women’s education. Her Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800) satirised radical ideas, but at the same time supported Mary Wollstonecraft’s educational views, and female philanthropy. Her major interest lay in education and in her Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education (1801–02) she suggested to her women readers that they should be acquainted with the philosophy of the human mind. In this she was inﬂuenced by Dugald Stewart, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University. With his encouragement she took up residence in Edinburgh from 1804 and with Eliza Fletcher played an active role in literary society there. Her later works included Memoirs of Agrippina (1804), a semi-ﬁctional didactic biography, much less successful than The Cottagers of Glenburnie (1808), which humorously related the education, cleansing and civilizing of the McClarty family of Perthshire. After a period in 1804–05 as governess to the daughters of Lord Lucan, she published Letters Addressed to the Daughters of a Nobleman (1806) and the Series of Popular Essays (1813), both on the philosophy and practice of education. She did not marry but lived mainly in her later years with her widowed sister, Katherine Blake. Jane Rendall

Mary Hays (1759–1843) Mary Hays (1759–1843) was the most purposefully intellectual woman among the ‘Gallic philosophesses’ in the 1790s. Her earliest text was the ‘book’ of their love letters she constructed after the sudden death of her Dissenting lover, John Eccles, in 1780. She came under the inﬂuence of Robert Robinson (1735–1790), radical proponent of the ‘the right to private judgment’, who gave Hays access to advanced Huguenot notions of ‘universal toleration’ which Hays applied to women. Hays acted on the Dissenting mandate to inquire, even into areas such as love and sex. She sought training in the new science of mind by

Enlightenment Biographies 733 participating on the periphery of the ﬁnal ﬂowering of Unitarian pedagogy at New College Hackney as ‘proto-coed’, reading and discussing faculty publications at her demi-salon in her mother’s home in Southwark. In 1791, Hays entered the controversy over ‘public or social worship’ as ‘Eusebia’ (the pious woman), when former New College classicist, Gilbert Wakeﬁeld, attacked the practices of his Dissenting colleagues. She was an intimate of Mary Wollstonecraft; when they met in 1792, Wollstonecraft was mentor to Hays as one of ‘a new genus’ of professional women writers, advising her on Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous (1793) in which Hays broke new ground by interpreting Enlightenment concepts for a female audience. After Wollstonecraft returned to London in autumn 1795, Hays proved her staunch defender, and famously reintroduced Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. She was publicly excoriated for explicit expressions of female sexual and intellectual passion in her ‘ﬁction’, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) that incorporated correspondence with Godwin, and with the Unitarian mathematician William Frend, the object of her desire. Hays’s ‘memoirs’ of Wollstonecraft after her death was the ﬁrst of an imagined continuum of women represented in her Female Biography (1803), reinventing the genre by including reformers, courtesans, and the British historian Catharine Macaulay Graham. In Memoirs of Queens (1821), her last published work, Hays identiﬁed a unique historical moment when British women of all classes coalesced as a political force in public support for the uncrowned Queen Caroline of Brunswick during the spectacular ‘Queen’s Trial’. With women’s civic participation, Hays predicted, ‘all things will become new’. Hays’s equivocal reputation as controversialist in her own time continued well into the twentieth century. Gina Luria Walker

Thomas Holcroft (1745–1809) Thomas Holcroft, dramatist, novelist and translator, was the son of a shoemaker who worked as a stable-boy before launching a career in writing. A string of early successes in the 1780s made him a ﬁxture in the London literary scene, where he soon distinguished himself for his radical political positions. (Holcroft has been described as the ‘ﬁrst revolutionary novelist’.) A member of the Society for Constitutional Information, Holcroft was put on trial for high treason in 1794 – charged, among other things, with trying to establish a national convention in England and with circulating the works of Thomas Paine. Eventually acquitted, Holcroft continued to agitate for reform long after Jacobin sympathizing fell out of favour. Holcroft’s radicalism extended to his ideas regarding male–female relations. In his 1792 novel Anna St. Ives, Holcroft drew on the philosophical arguments of his close friend William Godwin to imagine a world in which men and women might reject civil marriage and join themselves together instead in what Mary Wollstonecraft, in her review of the work, described as ‘democratic sentiments’. ‘Of all the regulations which were ever suggested to the mistaken tyranny of selﬁshness’, Holcroft wrote, ‘none perhaps to this day have surpassed the despotism of those which undertake to bind not only body to body but soul to soul, to all futurity, in despite of every possible change which our vices and our virtues might effect, or however numerous the secret corporal or mental imperfections might prove which a more intimate acquaintance should bring to light!’ Though Holcroft’s arguments opened him to charges of libertinism, the testimonies of his many mixed-sex friends and acquaintances make clear that he was ultimately interested in promoting human happiness. As Wollstonecraft observed, summing up Anna St. Ives, ‘Some of the characters are rather over-charged, but the moral is assuredly a good one. It is calculated to strengthen despairing virtue, to give fresh energy to the cause of humanity, to repress the pride and insolence of birth, and to shew [sic] that true nobility which can alone proceed from the head and the heart, claims genius and virtue for its armorial bearings, and possessed of these, despises all the foppery of either ancient or modern heraldry.’ Arianne Chernock

734 Enlightenment Biographies

Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782) Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782) was an inﬂuential Scottish judge and author, and one of the leading ﬁgures of the Enlightenment in Scotland. The son of minor landed gentry at Eccles in the eastern borders borough of Berwickshire, Henry Home was educated at home before pursuing legal studies in Edinburgh, and was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in 1723. In 1741 he inherited the Kames estate and married Agatha Drummond, who would inherit her family’s estate at Blair Drummond in Stirlingshire in 1766. He became ‘Lord Kames’ when he was appointed to the Court of Sessions (Scotland’s highest civil court) in 1752, and was appointed to the High Court of the Justiciary (Scotland’s highest criminal court) in 1763. Kames is often viewed as the quintessential Scottish Enlightenment ﬁgure, a practical man of affairs who also achieved prominence as a man of letters. In addition to his legal career, Kames sat on the boards of two governmental agencies, belonged to a number of the important clubs and societies, and served as patron to the generation of literati who are associated with the high point of the Enlightenment in Scotland. Among those who beneﬁted from his patronage were Adam Smith, whose public lectures at Edinburgh in 1748-51 were sponsored by Kames, and Smith’s student John Millar, who lived at the Kames household while qualifying as an advocate and who owed his chair in civil law at the University of Glasgow to the inﬂuence of Kames and Smith. While he published on a wide variety of topics, from legal history to ﬂax-husbandry to education, Kames is now best remembered for his Elements of Criticism (1762), which is considered a classic in the history of aesthetics, and his Sketches of the History of Man (1774), a progressive account of the history of the human species and a typical example of Scottish conjectural history. He also made a signiﬁcant contribution to the development of Scottish Moral Sense philosophy with his Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (1759), a response to Humean scepticism which sought to vindicate the veracity of our common moral intuitions and of our common sense perceptions. Mary Catherine Moran

David Hume (1711–76) David Hume, philosopher, historian and man of letters, was a central ﬁgure in the Scottish Enlightenment and one of the most important thinkers in modern philosophy. Born into a family of Scottish gentry in the eastern borders borough of Berwickshire, he was the younger son of Joseph Home (1681–1713) and Katherine Falconer (1683–1745). From 1723 to 1725 or 1726, he attended Edinburgh University, but left without taking a degree. Though his family intended him to pursue the law, in his autobiographical essay ‘My Own Life’ (published posthumously in 1777 in accordance with the instructions Hume left to his close friend Adam Smith) he recorded that by age eighteen he had determined to become a philosopher and scholar. After ﬁve years of study at home, he spent three years in France (1734–37), where he wrote A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40). For the next three decades, Hume published in a wide variety of areas, while variously holding positions as tutor to the Marquess of Annandale (1745), as Keeper of the Advocate’s Library in Edinburgh (1752–57), as Secretary to Lord Hertford (1763–65, at Paris) and as UnderSecretary of State, Northern Department (1767–68). His two attempts to secure a university position (ﬁrst at Edinburgh University in 1744–45, then at Glasgow Univeristy in 1752) both ended in failure, due to the vehement opposition of the Scottish clergy. He settled at Edinburgh in 1768, where he died in 1776. Lionized in the French salons as ‘le bon David’ and excoriated by evangelical Scottish ministers as a dangerous inﬁdel, Hume made signiﬁcant contributions to epistemology, ethics, social theory and historiography. After his Treatise of Human Nature ‘fell dead-born from the press’, Hume determined to present his philosophy in a more accessible form, rewriting Part I of his Treatise as An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (ﬁrst pub-

Enlightenment Biographies 735 lished as Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding in 1748), and revising Part III of his Treatise to produce An Enquiry concering the Principles of Morals (1751). While Hume’s fame now rests on his achievements in philosophy, contemporaries knew him as the author of the six-volume History of England (1754–62), which secured his reputation as one of Britain’s greatest historians. His Essays Moral, Politcal and Literary were ﬁrst published in 1741, and his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion was published posthumously in 1779. Mary Catherine Moran

Alexander Jardine (1739?– 99) Born in Applegirth, Dumfriesshire, a captain of the royal invalid artillery, Alexander Jardine may at ﬁrst seem an unlikely candidate for the feminist pantheon. But this close friend of the philosopher William Godwin developed strong pro-Woman views during his travels through Europe and North Africa during the 1770s and 1780s, where he encountered women in a range of unconventional social roles. In his Letters from Barbary, France, Spain, Portugal, & c , published in 1788, Jardine offered up an extended meditation on the similarities between the sexes, paving the way for the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman four years later. ‘The talents or abilities of the sexes are probably nearly equal, when equally cultivated’, he observed. ‘[O]r, if some mental constitutional differences exist, these are not greater than between individuals of the same sex, and not beyond the power of habit and education to assimilate and equalize.’ Jardine further elaborated this position in his edition of An Essay on Civil Government, or Society Restored, translated from the Italian of ‘A.D.R.S’ in 1793, in which he argued for co-education and marriage reform. In her ‘Advertisement to the Reader’ in An Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women, published in 1798, Mary Hays would cite the work of both Jardine and Wollstonecraft in explaining why she had waited so long to publish her own views on the subject. Hays’ pairing of these two ﬁgures in her preface suggests that Jardine’s argument in support of women’s rights circulated quite extensively during the 1790s. Arianne Chernock

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Kant lived his whole life in the city of Königsberg, then part of East Prussia. His father was a saddle maker whose Pietism exerted a lasting inﬂuence on his son. Kant attended the University of Königsberg where he focused on philosophy, mathematics, and physics. He spent his entire career at this university, starting as a lecturer, and ultimately becoming its rector. At the same time, he achieved a Europe-wide reputation as a philosopher through his published writings. Around 1769 Kant experienced what he called a great ‘upheaval’ in his thinking, possibly from reading Hume’s works of Philosophical skepticism. His most important works of philosophy were the result of this ‘critical turn’: Critique of pure Reason(1781), Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics(1783); Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason(1788) and Critique of Judgment(1790). Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason established the basic of knowledge claims now associated with the Enlightenment and modernity by working out a position that avoided both skepticism and determinism, but assumed universal human reason. Between 1784 and 1786, Kant’s interventions in several public debates, including his response to the question, ‘What is Enlightenment’, made him a prominent representative of the German Englightenment. By the 1790s, however, a backlash against the Enlightenment developed in Germany, and Kant’s ability to publish freely was constrained by the order of this king. Thereafter Kant avoided the subject of religion but published on other topics until his death in 1804. Dena Goodman

736 Enlightenment Biographies

Marie-Madeleine Jodin (1741–90) Marie-Madeleine Jodin was the daughter of Jean Jodin, a Genevan watchmaker and a friend of the philosopher Diderot, who consulted him on watch-making for the Encyclopédie. As the daughter of Swiss Protestants living in Paris, she converted to Catholicism, apparently unwillingly, at the age of nine. From the ages of nine to ﬁfteen, she was sent to and ejected from ﬁve convents and when returned to her parents, was alleged to have a violent nature and to have led a disorderly life. Her father dead, in 1761 she was denounced by her relations and imprisoned by lettres de cachet in La Salpêtrière Prison for prostitutes. Released in 1763-64, she was licensed as an actress with the Comédie Française and subsequently played in court and provincial theatres in Warsaw, Dresden, Bordeaux and Angers. While engaged by the Saxon Court in Dresden, she became the mistress of Count Werner von der Schulenburg, Danish Envoy to Saxony. Their relationship was so public and considered so scandalous that she was imprisoned brieﬂy by the Saxon authorities. Schulenburg abandoned his diplomatic post in a gesture of outrage. Jodin retained her rebellious temperament throughout her acting career, as is evidenced by various lawsuits and libels. In spite of her disastrous educational experiences, she was widely read in literature, philosophy and history and was enthusiastic for the materialist theories of philosophers like Helvétius. From 1765 to 1769 she was in correspondence with Diderot whose 21 letters to her develop his theories about drama as well as offering ﬁnancial and moral advice. In the last year of her life and in the early stages of the French Revolution she published the ﬁrst signed, woman-authored, feminist pamphlet of the Revolutionary period, Vues législatives pour les femmes (Legislative Views for Women). Part of her surviving estate was left to Mme Diderot. Felicia Gordon

Vicesimus Knox (1752–1821) Vicesimus Knox (1752–1821) was a schoolmaster and Anglican cleric whose treatise Liberal Education (1781) was one of the most popular works on education in his time. Knox was born in Newington Green, Middlesex, and educated at home till he was fourteen. He was then sent to Merchant Taylors School where his father was master. At the age of nineteen, he was elected fellow of St John’s College Oxford, where he soon acquired such a high reputation for his Latin verse that he was elected one of the speakers for the Encoenia when Lord North was installed as Chancellor. In 1778, he resigned his fellowship to become headmaster of Tunbridge school, against the wishes of Dr Dennis, President of St John’s College and of Mrs Montague. They feared the responsibilities of the post would interfere with the development of his already outstanding literary talents. As he had decided to marry, his determination remained ﬁxed. In 1812, he resigned from the school and moved to a house in Adelphi Terrace, the Strand, in London. He continued as minister of the parochial chapelry of Shipbourn in Kent, having been ordained priest by Bishop Louth in 1777. Knox is an interesting ﬁgure, combining an enlightened perspective on a variety of issues with a staunch support of traditional values. An educational reformer, his plan to regenerate boys’ public schools was based on reviving the most conservative classical curriculum. He was at the same time a strong advocate of female education. Liberal Education includes a chapter on the education of women, as do Essays Moral and Literary (1778) written when he was at Oxford. In 1793, he preached a sermon in Brighton on the ‘Unlawfulness of Offensive War’, which made him the object of a riot a few days later. His lifelong commitment to the discipline of the classics and to the social system it upheld is evident in the pamphlet he wrote, towards the end of his life, opposing a Parliamentary Bill to educate the poor in grammar schools, in a parallel stream to that of classical scholars. Knox argued this would inevitably degrade the schools and dilute their liberal education. The Bill was withdrawn.

Enlightenment Biographies 737 Knox knew the most prominent literary ﬁgures of his day. He had developed a friendship with Oliver Goldsmith while still at school, and knew Johnson, Boswell and James Beattie as well as Charles Dilly, the bookseller who ﬁrst published the Essays. Winter Evenings, another collection of miscellaneous papers, came out in 1787, Personal Nobility, an educational and conduct manual, in 1793; Knox also edited expurgated versions of Horace and Juvenal for schools and wrote a variety of theological texts. His Essays were translated into most European languages, and he was awarded a Doctor’s degree by the University of Philadelphia as expression of the esteem in which his work was held in America. Michèle Cohen

Anne-Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles, marquise de Lambert (1647–1733) The talented Anne-Thérèse is said to have proﬁted intellectually from the inﬂuence of her literary step-father, François de Bachaumont and his Epicurean circle of friends, though she was later to become involved in a protracted legal battle with him over her father’s inheritance (the latter had died when she was three). Well-educated and well-read, with a command of the art of conversation that beﬁtted a member of the enlightened aristocracy, Lambert was to become a celebrated salonnière and writer, though she opened her salon only when she was over sixty and was reluctant to have her works published during her lifetime. Married at eighteen to Henri de Lambert (lieutenant-général and governor of Luxemburg), she had four children, two of whom survived into adulthood. It was for each of these surviving children that she wrote her famous letters of advice to her son and her daughter. She was widowed in 1686. When some of her works were published in 1726 and 1727, she was said to have felt ‘dishonoured’ by exposure to the public eye. Yet, although she felt that it was compromising for a woman of her rank to publish, she seems to have desired publication after her death. Her writings were well viewed, especially for the way in which she allegedly made the practice of virtue seem desirable. Her salon in the Hôtel de Nevers (rue de Richelieu) became the most famous in Paris and was seen as the heir to the famous ‘chambre bleue’ of the marquise de Rambouillet, which had dominated Paris society in its long life from 1610 to 1665. Set up to counter the prevailing fashion for dissipation and gambling, Lambert’s salon was seen as bestowing respectability on its regular visitors. When she died, one of these, the writer and scientist, Fontenelle (who was both a member of the Académie française and permanent secretary to the Académie des Sciences) wrote an éloge for her, celebrating her character, learning and literary discernment. Jean Bloch

James Henry Lawrence (1773–1840) Born in Jamaica, educated at Eton and in Germany, James Henry Lawrence was an enthusiastic advocate of ‘Nairism’ – the radical idea, loosely modeled on the cultural practices of the Nairs of southwest India, that all societies should ban marriage, encourage casual sexual relationships, and replace the patriarchal family with a matrilineal system of inheritance. In several essays, novels, songs and poems, including his most famous ‘utopian romance’, The Empire of the Nairs, or The Rights of Women (published in German in 1800 and translated into English by the author in 1811), Lawrence waxed philosophic on the beneﬁts of Nairism, celebrating its promotion of love, truth, and equality between men and women. Although Lawrence identiﬁed himself as a disciple of Mary Wollstonecraft, however, his arguments weren’t always clearly egalitarian. In attacking prevailing attitudes towards marriage, education, property, and morality, Lawrence was perhaps more interested in liberating men than in liberating women. What Lawrence hoped to achieve, in implementing the Nair system, was a nation in which men – lacking both wife and children – could commit

738 Enlightenment Biographies themselves to ‘masculine’ pursuits. ‘What a race of politicians, generals, and philosophers, might be expected in a nation where every lofty goal were unimpeded, by the care of providing for its offspring, from following any grand object in contemplation!’, Lawrence ecstatically noted in his ‘An Essay on the Nair System of Gallantry and Inheritance’. ‘This consideration has detained the ﬁeld; has deadened the curiosity of the philosophers, and stopped the voice of the patriot’. Arianne Chernock

Catherine Macaulay (1731–91) Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay Graham was born in Kent into a wealthy whig family, and was privately educated. She lived subsequently in London, where the Sawbridges were active in City of London politics, moving to Bath in 1774. She was twice married: ﬁrst, in 1760 to Dr George Macaulay (d. 1766), the father of her only daughter, also called Catharine. In 1778 she married William Graham, a man 26 years younger than herself – an age difference which attracted adverse comment at the time. After her second marriage she lived in Leicestershire. Known in her own day as ‘Mrs Macaulay’, she achieved contemporary fame as an historian. The ﬁrst volume of her History of England was published in 1763. The ﬁnal, eighth volume, appeared in 1781. She subsequently embarked on a separate history from the 1688 revolution to her own day, but only completed one volume. Her History, whose chronological scope 1603–1721 reﬂects her republican views and offers a whig interpretation of the events surrounding and ensuing the English Civil war. In politics she was a supporter of Wilkes and took an active part as a pamphleteer. She wrote against Edmund Burke and defended Richard Price’s defence of the French Revolution. Following the international fame brought by History, she visited France in 1777, and Boston and New York in 1784. Catharine Macaulay’s reputation as a feminist rests on her Letters on Education (1790) in which she champions the education of women as the equals of men. She also wrote a work on ethics entitled A Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth (1783), some of which was incorporated in her Letters on Education. Sarah Hutton

John Millar (1735–1801) John Millar was professor of civil law at the University of Glasgow, student and friend of Adam Smith, author of two important works of historiography, and a central ﬁgure in the Scottish Enlightenment. Born at Blantyre, near Glasgow, the eldest son of James Millar, a Church of Scotland minister, and Anne Hamilton, he entered the Old College at Glasgow at age eleven. Though initially intended for the church, he chose to pursue the law. In 1751 he attended Adam Smith’s lectures on rhetoric and moral philosophy, which had an enormous inﬂuence on his subsequent intellectual development. While studying to qualify as an advocate, Millar spent two years in the Kames household, where he served as tutor to Lord Kames’s son. In 1759 he married Margaret Craig, with whom he had eight daughters and ﬁve sons (with one girl and one boy dying in infancy). He was admitted to the bar in 1760. Thanks to the patronage of Kames and Smith, he was appointed Chair of Civil Law at the University of Glasgow in 1761, a position he held until shortly before his death. Millar is best known for his Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1779; ﬁrst published in 1771 as Observations Concerning the Distinction of Ranks in Society), a central contribution to Scottish ‘conjectural’ or philosophical history and a key text in the development of sociology. With its lengthy opening chapter on ‘the Rank and Condition of Women in Different Ages’, the Origin is also a notable example of Enlightenment interest in the history of women. In his other major historical work, the Historical View of the English Government

Enlightenment Biographies 739 (1787), Millar opposed what he saw as the monarchical and authoritarian sympathies of Hume’s History of England. A staunch Whig with republican sympathies, Millar was a supporter of the American Revolution, a vocal opponent of the slave trade, and an early supporter (at least in its initial phases) of the French Revolution. Two anonymously published pamphlets opposing the war against France have been attributed to Millar: he was almost certainly the author of Letters on Crito (1796) and has also been suggested as author of Letters on Sydney (1796), which may have been the work of his nephew and biographer, John Craig. Mary Catherine Moran

Elizabeth Montagu (1720–1800) Elizabeth Montagu (née Robinson) was born in Yorkshire, elder daughter of Elizabeth Drake and Matthew Robinson, landowner. Her younger sister was the novelist Sarah Scott, author of the 1762 novel Millenium Hall [sic], a utopian tale of a female community based upon the ideals of learning, economy, charity and friendship. She was brought up in Cambridge, where she frequented the literary meetings of her grandfather, the classicist Conyers Middleton, author of the celebrated Life of Cicero (1741) and a fellow of Trinity College. Her youthful letters to her friend the Duchess of Portland, which she signed ‘Fidget’, convey a lively and often mischievous intellect. In 1742 she married the wealthy Edward Montagu, nearly thirty years her senior. Their only child, ‘Punch’, died when still a baby. Montagu was perhaps most famous in her lifetime as the leader of bluestocking society, ﬁrst in her Hill Street home and later in Montagu House, the palatial mansion she built in Portman Square after her husband’s death in 1775. Her guests included Samuel Johnson, who dubbed her ‘Queen of the Blues’, Edmund Burke, Elizabeth Carter, David Garrick, Fanny Burney and Hannah More. Originally referring to mixed society, the term ‘bluestocking’ came to refer to women only from the 1760s, due to Montagu’s particular support of female learning and writing. She published three dialogues anonymously at the end of George Lyttelton’s Dialogues of the Dead (1760) and later An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare, with some remarks on the Misrepresentations of Msr Voltaire (1769). This work proved extremely popular, celebrating Shakespeare as national poet of the vernacular and daring to refute Voltaire’s criticisms directly. Only by the time of the fourth edition, published in 1777, did Montagu’s name appear on the title page. Her letters were gathered together after her death in 1800 by her nephew, Matthew Robinson, who published them in 1810. Elizabeth Eger

Montesquieu (1689–1755) Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, was a gentleman writer, jurist, historian and philosopher, who might be considered the father of political science. He was born into a family which had long held high legal posts in the Bordeaux parlement or law-courts. He studied law with the Oratorians, spending the years 1709–13 in Paris, and married in 1715. Elected to the Bordeaux Academy in the same year, his ﬁrst contributions were on natural science and on ancient Rome. Under the relatively permissive regime of the Regency (1715–23) he composed and published (anonymously and abroad) the Persian Letters, which were a huge and scandalous success. Attributed to imaginary Persian visitors to Paris, this pot-pourri of observations and reﬂections on social practices and values (Oriental and Western) blended satire with philosophical ideas, playfulness with critique, and libertinism with a certain ‘feminism’. It set the agenda for much French Enlightenment writing of the next forty years. Montesquieu contrived to live down this work, and the mildly erotic Temple of Cnidus (1725), sufﬁciently to be elected to the Académie Française in 1728. He

740 Enlightenment Biographies then embarked on three years of European travels (Austria, Hungary, Italy, Germany, Holland and chieﬂy England). In 1734 his Considerations on the Causes of Roman Greatness and Decline appeared. His major achievement, published abroad in 1748, was The Spirit of the Laws. Here he tried to establish a science of elements (from climate to economics), and of general principles, underlying different forms of government. These forms broadly into republican (inspired by virtue), monarchic (by honour) and despotic (by fear). He argued for humane values and some separation of powers. The work and its author were denounced in France and Montesquieu produced a Defense (1750). In 1754 he published an expanded version of the Persian Letters (1754), emphasising its qualities as an epistolary novel. Montesquieu died in 1755 in Paris. Robin Howells

Lady Morgan (1776 –1859) Sydney Owenson (later Lady Morgan) was born on 25 December, 1776; the daughter of Irish-speaking actor Robert, originally MacOwen, (d.1812) and Englishwoman Jane Hill (d. 1789). She resided in Dublin, attending Madame Terson’s Academy, Clontarf. Though raised a Protestant, family visits to Connaught familiarized her with native Irish culture. The 1798 rebellion and 1800 Act of Union spelled decline for the theatre and Owenson became a governess and professional writer to help family ﬁnances. Her ﬁrst publication Poems (1801), was followed by novels St Clair; or, the Heiress of Desmond (1802) and The Novice of Saint Dominick (1805). Owenson corresponded with the antiquarians Joseph Walker, and Charlotte Brooke, whose Reliques of Irish Poetry appeared in 1789. She pioneered a nostalgic Romantic nationalism, publishing in 1805 Twelve Original Hibernian Melodies: translated traditonal airs which inspired Thomas Moore. Her bestselling novel The Wild Irish Girl, a National Tale (1806) was followed in 1807 by more verse, The Lay of an Irish Harp and Patriotic Sketches of Ireland. Her comic opera The First Attempt, or Whim of a Moment (1807) starring her father, was performed in the Theatre Royal, Dublin. Advocacy of Catholic emancipation earned her the emnity of Dublin Castle, speciﬁcally of John Wilson Coker, who regularly savaged her in the Quarterly Review. Novels Woman, or Ida of Athens (1809) and The Missionary (1811) extended her critique of colonialism to the East and incorporated gender issues. In 1812 she married the freethinking surgeon Sir Charles Morgan (d.1843) and held a regular salon. O’Donnel, a National Tale (1814) was the ﬁrst novel with a governess heroine. Florence Macarthy (1818) also had autobiographical elements; The O’Briens and the O’Flaherties (1827), explored the state of Ireland. Travelogues France (1817) and Italy (1821) were politically radical, the latter admired by Byron. Other publications included The Life and Times of Salvator Rosa (1824), the autobiographical Book of the Boudoir (1829), last novel The Princess, or The Beguine (1835); and a feminist history, Woman and her Master (1840). In 1837 the ﬁrst woman to receive a literary pension from the British government, she died on 16 April, 1859. Caroline Franklin

Judith Sargent Murray (1751–1820) Born into an elite mercantile family, Judith Sargent became an essayist, playwright, and perhaps the most politically outspoken of late eighteenth-century American women writers. She spent her entire sixty-nine years in New England, ﬁrst in Gloucester and later in Boston. Her intellectual talents recognised by her family, she was educated by a tutor alongside her Harvard-destined brother. Her ﬁrst marriage, in 1769, to sea captain and trader John Stevens ended with his death in the West Indies. Her second marriage in 1788 was to Universalist preacher John Murray, and Universalist religious preoccupations run through much of her writing. ‘On the Equality of the Sexes’ (1790) used that supposition

Enlightenment Biographies 741 to argue for better education for girls and the encouragement of female self-worth, and revised the biblical story of Adam and Eve. Murray sought to be independent as a writer – an unusual ambition for any American in this period – and was a frequent contributor, like Mercy Otis Warren, to the Massachusetts Magazine. The Gleaner is her best-known publication: it included a novel, “The Story of Margaretta”, and a history of female genius from the ancient past to her present day. Together with her earlier essay, this has prompted historians to identify Murray as one of the principal architects of ‘republican motherhood’. ‘Sketch of the Present Situation of America’ (1794) is her most high political writing and exposes a Federalist stance in the turbulent party debates that followed the French Revolution. Murray’s ﬁnal years were spent editing her husband’s papers and adding several chapters to the end of his autobiography. Sarah Knott

Suzanne Curchod Necker (1739–94) Her father was a Calvinist pastor who died when she was young. She moved with her mother to the nearby city of Lausanne. There she was active in a women’s literary academy, the Académie de la Poivrière. When her mother died, she took a position as governess with a family that was moving to Paris. She arrived there in 1764, and through her employer she met Jacques Necker, a banker from Geneva who went on to distinguish himself in the administration of the French monarchy and to contribute to the Republic of Letters. They married in 1765. The next year she gave birth to a daughter, Anne-Louise Germaine, and began a salon. The daughter grew up to be the writer Germaine de Staël; the salon met weekly on Friday afternoons and continued until the departure of the Neckers from France for Switzerland in 1790. Suzanne Necker published virtually nothing during her lifetime. After her death her husband published a pamphlet she had been completing against divorce (1794), and ﬁve volumes of Mélanges (1798) and Nouveaux mélanges (1801) culled from the notebooks in which she had been writing down thoughts, essays, portraits, and éloges for nearly thirty years. Dena Goodman

Thomas Starling Norgate (1772–1859) The pro-Woman essayist Thomas Starling Norgate came from a family of Norwich radicals – his father, the surgeon Elias Norgate, was a Unitarian Dissenter and Whig who was very active in local politics during the 1770s and 1780s. As one of the leading writers for the Cabinet, a pro-democratic publication printed in Norwich by John March from 1794–5, the younger Norgate provided one of the most sustained late-eighteenthcentury arguments in support of women’s rights. In a two-part essay, aptly titled ‘On the Rights of Woman’, he emphatically insisted that ‘the mind knows no difference of sex,’ and proceeded to explain why it was necessary to provide women with a better education and employment opportunities, as well as political and legal rights. ‘It has been urged by the tyrannical opposers of female rights,’ Norgate wrote, ‘that women have occupations of a domestic kind, in which they are much better employed than in exercising any political ofﬁce, or in wielding a massy argument in favour of any political hypothesis; it is true that they have domestic occupation; but … what man is there disengaged from domestic concerns? we all, whether male or female, have a part, and none, whether male or female, have the whole of our time so necessarily employed as not to admit leisure for investigating a subject of such paramount importance to everyone, as that of politics.’ In older age, Norgate would revise his feminist beliefs – chalking them up to the radicalism of his youth – although he continued to insist that some of the more ‘sober hints’ were still ‘worthy of attention.’ Arianne Chernock

742 Enlightenment Biographies

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) Tom Paine was a political theorist and activist who challenged the traditional institutions of his day on the basis of reason. He was born in Thetford, Norfok and came from a Quaker background. He emigrated to America in 1774 and published Common Sense (1776), an inﬂuential pamphlet which argued for American independence. In 1787 he returned to England. He had corresponded and met with Edmund Burke, but when Burke published his Reﬂections on the Revolution in France in 1790, Paine wrote the Rights of Man in response (published 1791 and 1792). This was not the ﬁrst reply to Burke; Catherine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft had also penned replies, but Paine’s was the most inﬂuential. Paine attacked Burke’s argument that political institutions should be founded on tradition, insisting instead that they should derive from human reason. All individuals, Paine argued, possess natural political rights – an idea with obvious feminist implications. Although Paine himself did not apply his ideas to women, his philosophy represented a signiﬁcant move away from the classical republican tradition, which had based political citizenship on the masculine qualiﬁcations of military service, property ownership, and being head of household. The second part of his Rights of Man presented the germ of the idea of the welfare state, for Paine saw the government as obliged to provide for wider rights of citizenship beyond the franchise, such as help for families with children. Paine was prosecuted for treason for his criticisms of the British constitution and ﬂed to Paris, where he became active in French revolutionary politics, although the Jacobins eventually imprisoned him. Paine also criticized conventional religion in his Age of Reason, published in 1794–95. Anna Clark

François Poulain de la Barre (1647–1723) Born to a prosperous bourgeois family, Poulain studied theology at the Sorbonne. After his bachelors degree (1666), he turned to Cartesianism, and in the 1670s he published three feminist treatises: The Equality of the Two Sexes (1673), The Education of the Ladies (1674), and The Excellence of the Men: Against the Equality of the Sexes (1675). The last title is ironical: the preface discusses the Scriptural objections to equality, in the middle part a sexist straw man is set up, and the ﬁnal part is devoted to the gleeful demolition of the sexist reasoning of the middle part. Taken together, the three books contain the outline of an Enlightenment social philosophy. Poulain did not obtain patronage. To make a living, he opted for the priesthood. In 1680 he became a curé de village in northern France. Poulain, a tolerant man, became a Catholic priest shortly before the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, when a veritable state terror was unleashed on the French Calvinists. In the end, he got in trouble, probably over the doctrine of transubstantiation, possibly because he helped the Protestants. In 1688, he left his charge, went to Paris, secretly converted to Calvinism, and shortly thereafter left France for Geneva (1689). There, he married Marie Ravier, a daughter of a prominent patrician family. They had a daughter, Charlotte, and a son, Jean Jacques. In 1696 Poulain was suspected of Unitarian ideas. He was not found guilty, but the affair thoroughly frightened him. In 1708, he ﬁnally got a tenured post as teacher at the Genevan college. In 1720 he published a treatise on biblical criticism that can be seen as his ‘theological autobiography’ and also as his last word on the religious issues that he had ﬁrst grappled with in his feminist treatises in the 1670s. Poulain died in 1723, at the age of seventy-ﬁve. Siep Stuurman

Richard Price (1723–91) The son of a Calvinist Dissenting minister, Richard Price became one of the most inﬂuential nonconformist writers of the late eighteenth century, producing important works of

Enlightenment Biographies 743 theology, moral philosophy, economics, and political science. Educated at a series of nonconformist academies, Price turned away from his father’s Calvinism to a liberal belief typical of the ‘rational’ Dissenters who came to think of themselves as ‘Unitarians’. In 1757, the same year in which he married Sarah Blundell (d. 1786), Price rose to national attention with A Review of the Principal Questions and Difﬁculties in Morals (revised in 1787 and now seen as a forerunner of Kantian ethics). Having settled in Newington Green, where he ministered to a Dissenting congregation, during the 1760s and 1770s Price wrote tracts on the British population and economy, inﬂuencing the development of actuarial science and advocating the elimination of the national debt. Opposed to the War with the American colonies, in 1776 Price published Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, which earned him a considerable degree of fervent admiration as well as viliﬁcation and which inspired the American Declaration of Independence. In 1778 Price entered a public debate with his friend Joseph Priestley concerning materialism and necessity, with Price maintaining the immateriality of the soul and the free agency of the human will. After 1784 Price became a close friend and mentor of Mary Wollstonecraft, who, although raised an Anglican, attended Price’s sermons. Two years before his death, Price enthusiastically welcomed the French Revolution in the belief that France was embracing and reﬁning the principles of the English Revolution of a hundred years earlier. Price’s sermon A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789) provoked Edmund Burke to respond in Reﬂections on the Revolution in France (1790), thus instigating the French Revolution debate in England. Daniel White

Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) A Dissenting polymath, Joseph Priestley shaped late-eighteenth-century religion, philosophy, politics, and science. Born in Yorkshire and raised a Calvinist, he was educated at the Daventry Academy, where he began to reject orthodoxy. Priestley would ultimately become the leading spokesman for Unitarianism, his beliefs centering upon the Arminian rejection of original sin, the Socinian denial of Christ’s divinity and atonement, the materialist position that the soul is not distinct from the body, and the necessarian doctrine (consequent upon materialism and Hartleian associationism) that all human actions are ﬁxed by a natural succession of causes and effects. After Daventry he held a series of ministerial positions, eventually joining the faculty of the Warrington Academy. At Warrington (1761–67) he married Mary Wilkinson (d. 1796), befriended Anna Letitia Barbauld, pursued theological and scientiﬁc researches, and wrote An Essay on the First Principles of Government (1768). Having assumed a ministry in Leeds, in 1773 he became librarian to the Earl of Shelburne. Priestley’s Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion (1772–74) defended rational Dissenting theology, and in 1774 he made the scientiﬁc advance for which he is usually remembered, the isolation of ‘dephlogisticated air’, often described as the discovery of oxygen. Quitting Shelburne’s employ in 1780, he moved to Birmingham, where he served as minister, associated with the Lunar Society, defended Unitarianism in debates with Samuel Horsley, and agitated for the repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (earning the nickname ‘Gunpowder Priestley’). On 14 July 1791, the Constitutional Society of Birmingham commemorated the fall of the Bastille. A mob responded by rioting, and Priestley’s house was destroyed. He left Birmingham soon afterwards for Hackney. Having become a citizen of France and declined election to the National Convention, he emigrated to America in 1794, where he passed the remaining years of his life in Northumberland, Pennsylvania. Daniel White

Madeleine Darsant de Puisieux (1720–98) Born in Paris in 1720, Madeleine Darsant is said to have shown signs of literary talent from an early age. Following her marriage to Philippe-Florent de Puisieux, she became a successful

744 Enlightenment Biographies writer, publishing proliﬁcally between 1749 and 1768. He was an avocat at the Parlement de Paris, who worked as a translator more than he practised at the bar. Amongst his many translations from the English is, supposedly, a feminist tract: La Femme n’est pas inférieure à l’homme, ﬁrst published in French in 1750 and republished in 1751 as Le Triomphe des dames. For some time the actual authorship of this work was attributed to him but, more recently, it has been suggested that either he co-authored it with Madeleine or that Madeleine herself was the author. What is not disputed is her authorship of a number of novels, the occasional comedy and a history of the reign of Charles VII, as well as the moral and satirical writings for which she was best known: Conseils à une amie (1749), Les Caractères (1750) and Réﬂexions et Avis sur les ridicules à la mode (1761). The Conseils, which offer advice to a young woman about to leave her convent school for the world outside, were particularly successful but much of her work received hostile criticism. In 1795, however, the Convention required her to pay a tax of 2,000 livres on income received from her publications, which suggests that they had sold well. From 1745 to 1748 she had an affair with Diderot. The cynical views of upper-class society and of the difﬁculties facing women in the mid-18th-century expressed in the Conseils may well owe something to her discussions with the philosophe. They certainly mark her out from other women writing on female education and conduct in that period. Jean Bloch

Guillaume-Thomas Raynal (1711–96) The son of minor nobility from the Aveyron, Raynal was educated by the Jesuits in Rodez and became a priest. He left the Company of Jesus in 1747 and went to Paris where he frequented the salons, notably that of Mme Geoffrin, and made inﬂuential friends in philosophical and political circles, including Diderot, Voltaire and Choiseul, Minister of Foreign Affairs under Louis XV. Through his contacts he became editor of the Mercure de France and worked on Grimm’s Correspondance Littéraire. In 1762 Choiseul commissioned him to write his ﬁrst big work, L’Ecole Militaire, a manual on modern military practice. He devoted the next two decades of his life to compiling the Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes for which he employed a team of anonymous collaborators including the Baron d’Holbach, the distinguished botanist, de Jussieu and Diderot. He also exploited a vast network of correspondants and informers – diplomats, slave-traders, soldiers, businessmen and travellers – from whom he acquired extensive up-to-date information. One of the bestsellers of the book trade prior to the Revolution, the ﬁrst edition appeared in 1770, followed by some 50 editions over the next 20 years, many reprints of particular sections of the work, and an impressive number of translations. Described by Jules Michelet as the ‘Bible of the Revolution’, the work denounced slavery, colonialism and the abuses of the crown and the Church. It was widely read throughout Europe by statesmen, political thinkers, creative writers and ordinary people and was very inﬂuential in purveying ideals of liberty to the general public. It generated an enormous pamphlet literature, including, amongst other writers, Thomas Paine; it was central, at a slightly later date, in the political debate surrounding the bid for independence of the colonies in Latin America. The work was banned in 1772, put on the Index in 1774 and burnt in public in 1781. To avoid incarceration Raynal left France and travelled around Europe appearing at the major courts as a martyr of free speech. He returned to France in 1784 and settled in Marseille from where he followed the events of the Revolution. To begin with he was venerated by the revolutionaries as a benefactor of humanity and an ‘ardent apostle of liberty’, and was offered a post as Deputy in the Estates General, which he turned down on account of his age. The events of the Terror, however, horriﬁed him and in 1791 he denounced the excesses of the Revolution in a letter to the Assembly. His prestige and his great age enabled him to escape the guillotine but his reputation was ruined. Accused of senility, he spent the ﬁnal years of his life in oblivion. Jenny Mander

Enlightenment Biographies 745

Mary Darby Robinson (1758–1800) Mary Robinson was the daughter of an impoverished Bristol sea captain. She had a highly successful though brief acting career. Married to the ne’er-do-well Thomas Robinson by whom she had two daughters, she made her debut at Drury Lane with the encouragement of Garrick and Sheridan in 1776. In 1779 she began an affair with the Prince of Wales. The notoriety which ensued obliged her to leave the stage in the summer of 1780 and to separate from the Prince, in return for a lump payment and the promise of an annuity. Robinson, one of the most beautiful women of her day, was painted by Gainsborough, Hopner and Reynolds. She subsequently had affairs with other notables of the period: among them Sheridan, the Earl of Cholmondeley, Charles James Fox and Colonel Banastre Tarleton. After giving up the stage, she became a successful author, publishing poetry under the inﬂuence of Robert Merry of the Della Cruscian School. In politics she took up ideas of the radical Enlightenment, welcoming the French Revolution in her poem ‘Ainsi va le monde’ (‘So goes the world’). In spite of her radical sympathies, she mourned the fate of Marie Antoinette in a pamphlet, ‘Impartial Reﬂections on the situation of the Queen of France’ (1791) and a poem ‘Monody to the Memory of the Queen of France’ (1793). Aside from her voluminous poetry, she published a number of novels celebrating sentiment and the natural affections. Partly paralysed through much of her adult life by a rheumatic complaint, she continued to support herself and her daughter through her writing. In 1799 she published a feminist treatise, ‘A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental subordination’. She died on 26 December 1800 at the age of 42. Felicia Gordon

Robert Robinson (1735–90) Robert Robinson was a theologically independent Baptist whose advanced views on freedom of conscience kept him mired in controversy. He left school at fourteen, although he demonstrated prodigious intellectual ability; his mother’s poverty caused him to apprentice with a London peruke maker, then a bridle maker. He became a country preacher after completing his apprenticeship, ﬁrst to a group of Methodists, then as an Independent, and, from 1760 to 1790, as minister at St. Andrew’s Street Baptist Church in Cambridge. He maintained a thriving farm in nearby Chesterton with his wife and twelve children, and established a beachhead of radical thought, independent of Cambridge University, although he used its libraries through faculty who were his parishioners. Robinson was a self-taught, iconoclastic apostle of the Christian Enlightenment, who was also grassroots activist, proto-socialist, reformist historian, early abolitionist, and mentor to younger Cambridge radicals, including William Frend and George Dyer. He founded the Cambridge Constitutional Society in 1780 to promote parliamentary reform, a free press, and unlimited toleration, and exerted striking inﬂuence in local electoral politics. He achieved notoriety for his efforts on behalf of repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts; in an address to Parliament in March 1790 Burke singled out Robinson’s A Political Catechism (1782) for severe censure, condemning it as ‘one continued invective against Kings and Bishops’. Robinson produced ﬁfty published works that contributed to the emergence of non-sectarian ‘Dissent’ as a new and ﬂuid identity. Between 1770-77 he translated and provided commentary on the sermons of Jacques Saurin (1677-1730) and Jean Claude (1619–87), Huguenot theologians, victims of Le Refuge and participants in the dissident Republic of Letters after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Robinson’s translations attested to the alienation of English Dissenters from British establishment culture, by linking this with Huguenot resistance to Catholic censorship and persecution in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Robinson educated his daughters and sons equally; at his funeral, Joseph Priestley commended him for acting on the understanding that ‘the minds of women are capable of the same improvement, and the same furniture as that of men’.

746 Enlightenment Biographies Robinson was Mary Hays’s ﬁrst and most important mentor, whom, in the last year of her life, she acknowledged as the ‘awakener of my mind.’ Gina Luria Walker

Mme Roland de la Platière (1754–93) Born into the artistic bourgeoisie of Paris, Manon Phlipon was the daughter of an engraver and painter. She wrote appealingly about her childhood and upbringing in the autobiographical section of her memoirs. Reportedly a brilliant pupil, she received an aboveaverage education for a girl of her class, thanks to instruction (including Latin) from a clerical uncle and encouragement in music, drawing and engraving from her father. In 1777, at the age of twenty-three, she competed for the annual essay competition of the Besançon academy on the subject of how the better education of women might improve the conduct of men. No prize was awarded that year. In 1775 she had been introduced to Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière (1734–93) who was to become Minister of the Interior in 1792. Her father opposed her marriage to Roland, with whom she set about studying Greek and Roman literature, the writings of Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau and works of political economy, before she was ﬁnally free to marry him in 1780. The couple moved back to Paris from the provinces early in the Revolution and Mme Roland opened a salon which became the meeting place for a group of Revolutionary deputies, later known as the Girondins or Brissotins. She took an active part in the political struggles of the Revolution and was an open opponent of Danton and Robespierre. With the fall of the Girondins in June 1793, her husband escaped but she was arrested. When he learnt of her execution (15 November 1793) he committed suicide. In addition to her political activities, she is remembered for her memoirs, which were written in prison and cover both the private and political sides of her life. She presented her account of recent political events as an attempt to rescue her husband’s reputation, apparently seeking to underplay her own role, but it is claimed that it was she who was the real inspiration of the Girondins, that she ran her husband’s political affairs once he became Interior Minister, and that she was responsible for drawing up political documents to which he merely signed his name. Jean Bloch

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born into a respectable but modest family in the Calvinist republic of Geneva. His mother died just after his birth, and he was raised till the age of ten by his father, a watchmaker of unstable character. After two years boarding with a pastor who tutored him, he was apprenticed to an engraver. Unhappy with his situation, at the age of 16 he ran away. His Wanderjahre saw him converted to Catholicism in Turin, mothered by Mme de Warens in Annecy then Chambery (‘Les Charmettes’) where he also educated himself, then turned itinerant music teacher and tutor in Lyon. In 1742 he went to Paris, and after a year with Louis XV’s ambassador in Venice he established himself in the capital of the French monarchy, where he mixed with bright young provincials like Diderot and Condillac. Secretary to a tax-farmer, he set up household with the servant Thérèse Levasseur, whose successive offspring were consigned at birth to the orphanage (a not uncommon practice) and who became his lifelong companion. On the way to visit his close friend Diderot in jail at Vincennes in 1749, he had – he later afﬁrms – a vision of how mankind could recover virtue and happiness. He wrote the Discourse on Sciences and Arts. His eloquent denunciation of high civilisation and progressive Enlightenment values, as the source of individual and social corruption, brought him suddenly into prominence. He followed it with his ﬁrst major philosophical work, the Discourse on Inequality (1755). Despite writing for the Encyclopedia, and success at court as a composer (The Village Soothsayer), in 1756 Rousseau withdrew from Paris. His Letter to d’Alembert on Theatre (1758)

Enlightenment Biographies 747 cemented his quarrel with the ‘philosophes’, who treated him henceforth as a traitor. In the late 1750s, living on the estates of noble patrons, he composed three great works. His epistolary novel of love and regeneration Julie, or The New Heloise (1761) was an enormous success. His treatise The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right (1762) was banned in France. But it is the theism of ‘The Savoyard Vicar’ in Emile, or On Education (1762) that prompted the authorities in both Paris and Geneva to order his arrest. He became a kind of refugee (including ﬁfteen months in 1766–67 in England as the guest of Hume, with whom he quarreled, and receiving a pension from George III). Increasingly celebrated as the martyr of virtue, he became increasingly paranoid. He published justiﬁcations of his philosophy, drafts political projects for Corsican and Polish patriots, completed his Dictionary of Music (1768), and wrote defences of himself. His much-anticipated Confessions, the Dialogues and his intimate ﬁnal work The Reveries of the Solitary Walker were published posthumously in the 1780s. Robin Howells

Pierre Roussel (1742–1802) Born in Ax in 1742, Roussel is best known as the author of the Système physique et moral de la femme (1775), the most widely read medical treatise on women in eighteenth-century France. After receiving his training at the University of Medicine of Montpellier, Roussel moved to Paris and became a disciple of Théophile de Bordeu, a celebrated high-society practitioner and theorist of medical vitalism. Like Bordeu, Roussel tailored his medical practice to the ills and the temperament deemed peculiar to the ‘sensitive’ women of the social elite. After his own delicate health forced him to abandon his practice, Roussel devoted himself to writing book reviews for various scientiﬁc and literary journals (Le Journal des beaux-arts, La Clef du cabinet des souverains, Le Mercure de France, Le Journal des savants, La Décade philosophique, politique et littéraire). Roussel never married, but he did frequent Parisian salons like that held by Mme Helvétius, where he met Cabanis and other thinkers intent on making medicine an integral part of ‘anthropology’, or the sciences of man. Although keenly interested in politics, Roussel was too timid to engage actively in the events of the French Revolution; he was nonetheless subsidized under the Convention and named associate member of the French National Institute upon its creation in 1795. Roussel’s Système, a medico-philosophical inquiry into women’s nature that adopted a vitalist approach to the human persona, did much to popularize both anthropological perspectives on women and the radical view of sex difference which would mark French medical discourse for decades afterward. In addition to the Syste`me, Roussel wrote important essays on sensibility and sympathy. His three volume work Médecine domestique (1805) was published after his death as part of the Bibliothèque Universelle des dames. Anne Vila

Benjamin Rush (1746–1813) The controversial leading physician of the early American republic, Benjamin Rush was a proliﬁc literary and medical writer and commentator, not least on matters of sex and gender. He was born to a farming family but married exceptionally well into the New Jersey political and intellectual elite. Judith Stockton was daughter of poet Annis Boudinot and politician Richard Stockton, and the physician’s wife (and mother to nine living children) from 1776 to his death. Rush’s medical training was in Edinburgh and the legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment, as well as a fervent religiosity, can be seen through all his activities. His medical career spanned practice as a physician from 1769 to 1813, service in the Continental Army and numerous philanthropic institutions, and teaching at the College of Philadelphia. Though a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and the man who arranged the publication and suggested the title for Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, his

748 Enlightenment Biographies radical political career was short and disillusioning. In the young nation, the doctor continued his pre-revolutionary reformist efforts for temperance and the abolition of slavery. To these social concerns, he added women’s education (for their republican role in the home), prison reform and the abolition of public and capital punishments. Increasingly conservative in his maturity, Rush developed an American medical theory of mind and body that placed inordinate emphasis on sensibility and sympathy but–unlike his Scottish mentors, and in explicit reaction to Mary Wollstonecraft–highly elaborated woman’s inferiority and biological distinctiveness. Sarah Knott

Adam Smith (1723–90) Born at Kirkcaldy, son of the comptroller of customs there, Adam Smith was educated at Kirkcaldy grammar school and at Glasgow University, from 1737-40, after which he went to Balliol College Oxford, for seven years. In 1748, in Edinburgh, he gave lectures on jurisprudence and rhetoric, under the patronage of Lord Kames. In 1751 he won the Chair of Logic at Glasgow, and in 1755 moved to the Chair of Moral Philosophy. He spent much time in Edinburgh, where, with David Hume, he founded the Select Society, helped to write the ﬁrst Edinburgh Review in 1755, and joined the Poker Club. In 1764 he left his University position and became tutor to the young Duke of Buccleuch, with whom he visited France, meeting some of the leading philosophes there, Quesnay, D’Alembert, Turgot and Necker. After settling in Kirkcaldy in 1766, on a pension from Buccleuch, he devoted himself to the writing of the Wealth of Nations (1776) Throughout his life his intellectual interests were wide-ranging, engaging with the scientiﬁc study of man across present disciplinary boundaries. His Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) elaborated on David Hume’s concept of sympathy, sometimes in explicitly gendered ways, and proposed the idea of the ‘impartial spectator’, or the internalised conscience. The political economy of his Wealth of Nations has to be placed in the broader context of his sense of philosophical history, and his rejection of an older republicanism. His study of the workings of a commercial society identiﬁed the ‘public good’ as best achieved through the pursuit of individual self-interest, harmonized through the ‘invisible hand’ of Providence. Student notes on his lectures on jurisprudence and history, and also on rhetoric, have survived. He also wrote essays on the evolution of language and on the history of astronomy, posthumously published as Philosophical Essays (1795). In 1778 he accepted an appointment as one of the Commissioners of Customs for Scotland, and spent the remaining period of his life in Edinburgh society. Jane Rendall

Mme de Stae¨l (1766–1817) Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker was born on 22 April 1766 in Paris. Her Genevan father, Jacques, was ﬁnance minister, and her mother, Suzanne (née Curchod), a salonnière. In 1786 she was married to Baron Eric de Staël-Holstein (d.1802), the Swedish ambassador and instituted her own powerful salon. In 1787 she gave birth to the ﬁrst of ﬁve children, the only one certainly her husband’s. Her many lovers included Talleyrand, Narbonne and Benjamin Constant. An inﬂuential political activist for the moderates throughout the revolutionary period, she was also a groundbreaking cultural theorist and novelist. Early publications included Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractère de Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1788), Réﬂexions sur le procès de la reine (1793), the novel Zulma and Réﬂexions sur la paix (1794). In 1792 she retreated to Coppet, the Genevan family home, and in 1793 visited England. Staël returned Paris under the Directory, but she and Constant aroused the enmity of Napoleon for their critical stance. Important literary-philosophical publications were Recueil de morceaux détachés (1795); De l’inﬂuence des passions (1796); and De La Littérature (1800). The

Enlightenment Biographies 749 latter and the novel Delphine (1802) aroused hostility for their political implications. Constant was now expelled from the Tribunate and Staël banished from Paris. From 1803 to 1805 she visited ﬁrst Germany then Italy, meeting Goethe, Schiller and August Wilhelm von Schlegel. The latter became tutor to her children at Coppet. Her bestselling noveltravelogue Corinne, ou L’Italie (1807) protested against Napoleonic imperialism whilst mythologizing the woman artist as tragic heroine. In 1810 her principal work, De l’Allemagne, which analysed German Romanticism, was printed but pulped by Napoleon who judged it ‘anti-French’. Exiled from France, she visited Austria, Russia, Sweden and England, where she was lionized when De l’Allemagne was published there in 1813. Réﬂexions sur le suicide (1813) followed. After the fall of Napoleon, she visited Italy again. Byron was amongst the vistors to Coppet in 1816, the year when she secretly married the young John Rocca. However, she died in Paris on 14 July the following year. Posthumous publications included Considérations sur les principaux èvénements de la Révolution française (1818), Oeuvres complètes (1820), and the autobiographical Dix années d’exil. Caroline Franklin

Voltaire (1694–1778) François-Marie Arouet was born in 1694, the third child of a Parisian legal family. Educated at the elite Jesuit college of Louis le Grand, he quickly became known for his wit and impertinence. Aiming for the top in the realm of letters, he wrote a classical tragedy, Œdipus, which was a huge hit in 1718 (when he adopted the name ‘de Voltaire’), then a national epic, The Henriad. The famous quarrel with the aristocrat Rohan resulted in his banishment and sojourn in England (1726–28), where he developed a wide acquaintance and assiduously acquired the language. His Philosophical Letters (English 1733, French 1734), celebrating English toleration and mixed government as well as trade and science, got him into serious trouble in France. He retreated to live at Cirey in Champagne with Mme du Châtelet, turning with her to the physical sciences and publishing in 1737 his Elements of Newton’s Philosophy. A period of relatively good conduct enabled him to gain entry to the Académie Française in 1746. In 1749 Mme du Châtelet died in childbirth, and Voltaire spent three years at the court of his admirer Frederick of Prussia. He published his major histories, The Century of Louis XIV (1751) and the Essay on Manners and the Spirit of Nations (1756), and contributed articles to Diderot’s great Encyclopedia. In the later 1750s he established himself at ‘Les Délices’ (where he wrote much of Candide (1759)), and acquired the estate of Ferney near Geneva, where he set about practical improvements of every kind. In his seventh decade, and still inexhaustibly productive, he became the champion of individual victims of judicial or sectarian injustice (Calas, Sirven, La Barre), and campaigner for humanitarian and social reforms. The doyen of the Enlightenment became both ‘the sage of Ferney’ and in effect the ﬁrst modern intellectual. He was ﬁnally allowed to visit Paris (after 30 years absence) in 1778, where he was hugely acclaimed, and died in the same year. Robin Howells

Mercy Otis Warren (1728–1814) Mercy Otis Warren was one of the ﬁrst American women to publish works on traditional male subjects such as war, politics, and history. Born in Barnstable, Massachusetts, she came of age in the politically active Otis family which included James Otis, one of the earliest leaders of colonial resistance against Britain. In 1754 she married James Warren, with whom she had ﬁve children. As the patriot movement grew, family and friends encouraged her to use her considerable literary talents to serve the American cause. Publishing her work anonymously, she issued a series of political satires, poems, and plays, including The Adulateur (1772), The Defeat (1773), and The Group (1775), that attacked British corruption and urged Americans to defend their liberties through force of arms, if necessary.

750 Enlightenment Biographies Later, during the debate over the ratiﬁcation of the U.S. Constitution, she wrote a pamphlet under the pseudonymn, ‘A Columbian Patriot’ (1788), that criticized the proposed government for lacking a bill of rights and removing important powers from local control. In 1790 an edition of Warren’s collected poems and plays appeared under her own name and received great public acclaim. During this time, she continued to work on her magnum opus, a three-volume history of the revolutionary era. By 1805, when she ﬁnally published the History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, her contrarian view of American society, fear of moral decline, and critical treatment of the policies of former Presidents George Washington and John Adams, no longer found a receptive audience. In fact, Adams, who had originally encouraged her to write the work, dismissed the project, saying, ‘History is not the Province of the Ladies’. Only in retrospect does the full scope and impact of Warren’s vision appear in plain view. Rosemarie Zagarri

Helen Maria Williams (1761–1827) Helen Maria Williams was born in London, the daughter of a Welsh army ofﬁcer father, Charles and a Scottish mother, Helen (née Hays). Her widowed mother moved to Berwickon-Tweed, returning to London in 1781. A Presbyterian, Williams became inﬂuenced by Unitarian radicalism and the Enlightenment debate on the moral value of the emotions. Prominent Dissenter Andrew Kippis saw her verse tale Edwin and Eltruda through the press when it appeared anonymously in 1782. Guests such as novelist Henry Mackenzie, playwright Joanna Baillie, and writer Dr John Moore frequented the Williams sisters’ literary parties. Her Poems were published in a subscription edition in 1786 (2nd edit. 1791), after An Ode on the Peace (1783) and Peru (1784), the latter dedicated to Elizabeth Montagu, ‘the queen of the Bluestockings’. In 1788 she published A Poem on the Bill Lately Passed for Regulating the Slave Trade. Her sentimentalist poetry argued for paciﬁcism and humanitarian reform, and led to a revival of the sonnet. In 1790 she published Julia, A Novel; interspersed with Some Poetical Pieces. That summer a visit to France produced the ﬁrst of four volumes of her popular Letters from France (1790–93), personal impressions of the revolution. Publishing A Farewell, for Two Years, to England in 1791, Williams returned to France, eventually settling there. Her affair with the married Unitarian businessman, John Hurford Stone, and her liberal politics scandalized the Tory press. Her salon became one of the chief meeting places for the Girondins and British revolutionaries such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine. Friends included Alexander Humboldt, whose travels she translated in 1814, the Countess de Genlis, Madame de Helvetius, and Manon Roland. Initially an enthusiastic supporter of the revolution, she later recounted the tragic downfall of her Girondin friends, her own spell in prison and escape to Switzerland. In 1795 Williams translated Paul et Virginie by J.H. Bernadin de Saint-Pierre, and published a second series of four volumes of Letters from France concluding the following year. 1798 saw her Tour in Switzerland, and she continued publishing poetry, translations and reﬂections on French affairs until her death on 15 December, 1827. Caroline Franklin

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, was born into a middle-class London family which over the course of her childhood descended into nearpenury. The eldest girl of seven children, Wollstonecraft sought employment at a young age, scrabbling a living from jobs typical of women of her class: lady’s companion, needlewoman, teacher, governess. In the mid 1780s, while running a girls’ school at Newington Green, north of London, she became attached to a community of leftwing

Enlightenment Biographies 751 Protestants – Rational Dissenters, or Unitarians as they were later known – whose radical Enlightenment ideals strongly inﬂuenced her. About this time, she also turned to writing for an income. Her ﬁrst book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), was conventionally didactic, but her next, a novel titled Mary, A Fiction (1788), contained strong intimations of her feminism. The outbreak of the French Revolution excited her politically, as it did so many in Britain, but it also presented her with a golden opportunity. In 1788 she had begun working for the radical publisher Joseph Johnson, writing regularly for his Analytical Review. In 1790 Edmund Burke published his attack on the Revolution, Reﬂections on the Revolution in France. Wollstonecraft, encouraged by Johnson, replied to Burke with A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), following that up with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). With these two political works she became very famous, possibly the best-known woman writer in the world. At this time she was in a romantic liaison with the painter Henry Fuseli, which ended unhappily in 1792. She went to Paris, to witness the Revolution ﬁrst-hand, and there wrote An Historical and Moral View … of the French Revolution (1794). She also became the lover of an American army captain, Gilbert Imlay, with whom she had a child, Fanny. The relationship foundered and Wollstonecraft attempted suicide. Imlay then persuaded her to undertake a business trip to Scandinavia for him: a journey that resulted in her Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796). On returning, Wollstonecraft found Imlay living with a new mistress and again attempted suicide. Finally reconciled to the separation from him, she settled into writing and tending Fanny until, in 1796, she acquired a new lover, the radical philosopher William Godwin. Pregnant by Godwin, she married him in March 1797, and died seven months later, shortly after giving birth to her second daughter, the future Mary Shelley. In 1798 her ﬁnal, unﬁnished novel, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria, was published posthumously by Godwin, along with a memoir of his wife which revealed her unorthodox sexual history. Wollstonecraft’s image was badly tarnished, and remained so until her rehabilitation by women’s suffrage activists in the late nineteenth century. Barbara Taylor

Index Aberdeen Philosophical Society, 15, 16 academic institutions, women in, 383 actresses, 610–29 Adams, Abigail, 668 Adams, John, 668, 678 Addison, Joseph, 34, 292 Address to the People of England (Macaulay), 540–1 Adèle et Théodore (Genlis), 252, 317 Advice to the Female Sex in General (Grigg), 149 Advice to Young Ladies (LePrince de Beaumont), 315 Aeneid (Virgil), 180 agency, 434, 435–6 and evangelicalism, 450–5 and Quaker women, 439 without autonomy, 438–43 Aitkin, Lucy, Epistles on Women, 7 Alcuin (Brown), 675 Alexander, William, 82 History of Women, 36, 71, 79, 118, 678 Algarotti, Francesco, Newtonianism for Ladies, 272 Allestree, Richard, The Ladies Calling, 144 Amar y Borbón, Josefa biography, 719–20 Discourse in Defense of the Talent of Women, 403 ‘Amazonianism’, 42 Amazons, 420 American Philosophical Society, 652, 660 American Revolution, 655, 667–8 Analytical Review, 503, 552 Ancient Society (Morgan), 129 Anderson, John, 594 biography, 716 Année merveilleuse (Coyer), 247 anthropology, 98 anti-feminist ideas, 47 Anti-Jacobin Review, 57, 551–2, 554 anti-slavery activism, 576 Apologie de la science des dames, 375–6 Apology of Women (Joyes y Blake), 404 Appeal to the Men of Great Britain (Hays), 506, 577 Arar y Borbón, Josefa, Discourse of women’s physical and moral education, 191

aristocracy, 193, 306–25 aristocratic women, 622 political inﬂuence, 570, 571–2, 574–5, 577, 579, 580 Aristotle, 397–8 Aristotle’s Complete Master-piece, 140, 147–8, 149 artiﬁce, 137–8 versus nature, 10–15 Association Movement, 573–4 Astell, Mary, 42, 312, 355–6, 357–70 biography, 716–17 critique of Shaftesbury’s liberal permissiveness, 363–4 early life, 358 on education, 359–60, 361 on Enlightenment principles, 366 feminist works, 359, 363 inﬂuence of, 366–7 Letters concerning the Love of God, 361 in London, 358–9, 367–8 on marriage, 312, 362–3 patrons and supporters, 360 as a philosopher, 364–5 published works, 359 reading, 368 and religion, 361, 363 Serious Proposal, 143, 312, 313, 359, 360, 361 Serious Proposal Part II, 361–2, 542 attachment between the sexes, 21–2 Augustine, Saint, The Trinity, 412, 419 ‘Aura seminalis’, 54 Austen, Jane, education, 231 authenticity, 137 autonomy, 435, 436, 706–7, 711–12 Avantcoureur (weekly), 211 Avis d’une mere á sa ﬁlle (Lambert), 245 Ayala, López de, 403 Baillie, Joanna, 329, 336 Ballard, George, 463 Barbapiccola, Giuseppa Eleonora, 270–1 Barbauld, Anna Letitia, 414, 474–92, 712 biography, 717 Devotional Pieces, 483 devotional theory, 482–3 Poems, 477 752

Index 753 on pubic worship, 486–7 recent work on, 475 on religion, 484–5 religious background, 476–8 Sins of Government, 519 on the Wakeﬁeldian controversy, 485–6 on women writers, 475 Barthelemy, Louis de, 212, 213 Bassi, Laura, 261, 265–70, 279 biography, 717–18 Battersby, Christine, 55 Battle of the Sexes, 126 Bayle, Pierre, 507 Dictionnaire historique et critique, 372 Beattie, James, 23 Elements of Moral Science, 36 Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, 12 letter to Elizabeth Montagu, 23 ‘Beauty and the Beast’, 308–11 Beauzeé, Nicolas, 208–9 The Bee (Buchan), 329, 336–7 Bell, Margaret, 452 Bellaigue, Christina de, 230 Bennett, John, 35, 39 Letters, 230 Strictures on Female Education, 228–9 Bentham, Jeremy, 168, 169, 591, 594–5, 600 Bentivoglio Davia, Laura, 260, 261, 265–7, 268–9, 272, 275, 279–81 ailments, 281–2 biography, 724 marriage, 273–4 and Zanotti, 275–8 Berkeley, Eliza, biography, 718–19 Bewell, Alan, 151 Bianchi, Giovanni, 266, 275, 278, 281–2 Brief History of the Life of Catterina Vizzani, 279 Bible, feminine symbols, 429 Biblical criticism, 429 biological essentialism, 679 Biron, Duc de, 161 Black Dwarf, 601 Blair, Hugh, 159, 164, 166 Critical Dissertation, 85 ‘Blas Bleu, or conversation’ (More), 288 ‘bluestockings’, 262, 288–305, 337–8, 358, 414, 463–4, 700 conversation, 290–7, 301 and didactic literature, 471 and education, 297–301 literary dialogue, 301 and philosophy, 292

boarding schools, 228–30 Book of the City of Ladies (Pizan), 417 Borromeo, Clelia Grillo, 271 Boscawen, Frances Evelyn, biography, 720 Boswell, James, 161 The Botanic Garden (Darwin), 150 botany, and sex education, 150–1 Boudier de Villemert, Pierre-Joseph, 213 bourgeois public sphere, 610 Brant, Clare, 301 Brief History of the Life of Catterina Vizzani (Bianchi), 279 Briquet, Fortunée, Dictionnaire historique, 259 Britain after 1688, 355–6 education of girls, 224–42 feminism, 42 Broughan, Henry, 337 Brown, Charles Brockdenè, Alcuin, 675 Brunot, Ferdinand, 195 Brunton, Mary, 328 Buchan, Lord, The Bee, 329, 336–7 Buffer, Pére, 206 Buffet, Marguerite, Nouvelles observations sur la langue Franc[,]oisè, 378 Buffon, 84, 124 De L’homme, 19 Burke, Edmund, 156, 167, 170 biography, 720–1 Catherine Macaulay on, 521 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 124 Reﬂections on the Revolution in France, 32, 552 Burney, Frances, 139, 231 on Elizabeth Vesey, 294 Butler, George, 595 Cabanis, Pierre-Jean-Georges, biography, 721 Caledonian culture, 86–8 Calidore, 593, 594, 596–7 Cambis, Madame de, 642 Campbell, Peter Robert, 308 Campomanes, Pedro Rodriguez, 401 Cappe, Catherine, 338 Cappe, Newcome, 329 Carlyle, Alexander, 8 Carter, Elizabeth, 231, 233, 466, 467 as a classical scholar, 291 letter to Elizabeth Montagu, 291 letters from Elizabeth Montagu, 292, 293

754 Index Carter, Philip, 137 Carteret, Sophia, 309–10 Cartesian moment, 351, 354, 371, 378–80 ‘Cartesian women’, 262, 265–70 Castiglione, Il Cortegiano, 372 Castle, Terry, 138 Catholicism, 416–33 and feminism, 417–21, 429–30 and French education, 243–4 Catrach, Nina, 206 Cavaignac, Madame de, 197 Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, 721–2 celibacy, 427–8 Chalus, Elaine, 571 Chapone, Hester on conversation, 295, 299–300 on Elizabeth Rowe, 468 Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, 8, 14, 143, 468, 469–70 on marriage, 470 Chappuzeau, Samuel, 381 Charpentier, C.A.T. Essai sur la mélancolie, 57 on Rousseau, 57 chastity, 143 conduct book deﬁnition, 144 Châtelet, Emilie Gabrielle du, 246 biography, 722 Che le donne siano della spezie degli uomini (Tarabotti), 425–7 Chernock, Arianne, 567 Chesterﬁeld, Lord, Letters to His Son, 8, 37, 168 Child, Gardner, 685 chivalry, 6–7, 33, 35, 40, 72, 82, 695 Ferguson on, 79 Stuart on, 80 The Christian Hero (Steele), 165 Christian Platonism, 352, 478 Christianity, 423–4 Christina, Queen of Sweden, 127, 270–1 Churchill, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, 308 citizenship, 570, 573, 587–609, 612–13 in the French Revolution, 630–48 and marriage, 630–48 Citton, Yves, 201 The Civilising Process (Elias), 73 civility, deﬁnitions of, 121–2 civilization, 9–10, 19, 43, 70–2, 73, 117–35 and virtue, 119–25 and women’s writing, 71 civilizing inﬂuence of women, 77–8, 103, 106

Claeys, Gregory, 73 Clark, Anna, The Struggle for the Breeches, 599 classics, teaching of, 233–4 Clement , Elisabeth Marie, Dialogue de la Princess Sc[,]avante, 376–8 Clément, Pierre-Paul, 176 Cobbett, William, 656 Cockburn, Catherine, 463, 464 Coelebs in Search of a Wife (More), 320 Cohen, Michele, 163, 192 Coleman, Deidre, 47 Collins, Anthony, 500 colonial period, suffrage during, 62 Colwill, Elizabeth, 638 commercial society, 101, 102–3 Common Sense (Paine), 668 communication networks, 351 comparative history, 72–3 Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with Those of the Animal World (Gregory), 9, 15–23 Complaints of the Poor People of England (Dyer), 592 Condorcet, Marquis de, biography, 722–3 conduct books, 5, 8, 13, 144, 247, 291, 307, 308 Madame de la Fite, 316 Confessions (Rousseau), 137, 166, 169, 174, 178, 179, 180, 182 conjectural history, 131, 695–6 and women writers, 117–20, 129 conjugal love, 637, 640 Conseils a une amie (Puisieux), 249 Constantini, Guiseppe Antonio, 272 Constitutional Politics (Williams), 599–600 convergence, between the sexes, 3 conversation, 77, 83, 190, 211–12, 288, 289 and the ‘bluestockings’, 290–7, 301 Chapone on, 295 and spelling, 208 Conversations d’Emilie (d’Épinay), 251–2 Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (Fontenelle), 271 Cooper, Thomas biography, 723 Reply to Mr. Burke’s invective, 590 Corinne (Staël), 4, 56, 59, 60–4, 555, 559–62 melancholy in, 62–4 Cornara, Elena Lucrezia, 383, 429 cosmopolitanism, 108, 109, 112 Cotin, Charles, 210 Cottagers of Glenburnie (Hamilton), 338–9 Courcelles, Anne-Théresè see Lambert, Marquise de

Index 755 Cours complet d’instruction (Miremont), 247–8 Coyer, Année merveilleuse, 247 Creech, Gregory, 8 Critical Dissertation (Blair), 85 The Critical Review, 578 Crocker, Hannah Mather, 682 Cromwell, Oliver, 169 Cullen family, 327–8, 331–2 and the Millar family, 347 Cullen, Margaret, 328 Home, 331–4 on marriage, 331–4 Cullen, William, 327, 331, 650, 652 Currie, William, 651 Dacier, Anne Lefevre, 269 Darby, Abiah, 449 Darsant, Madeleine see Puisieux, Madeleine de Darwin, Erasmus biography, 723–4 The Botanic Garden, 150 Loves of the Plants, 150 Davia, Giovanni Antonio, 274 Day, Thomas, 166 biography, 724–5 De la Littérature (Staël), 57 De la santé des gend de lettres (Roussel), 55 De L’Allemagne (Staël), 118 De l’excellence des hommes (Poulain de la Barre), 247 De L’homme (Buffon), 19 debating societies, 567, 574, 578 Declaration of Independence, 668 Declaration of the rights of man, 656 Defense of women (Feijoo)., 390 Defoe, 366 Delphine (Staël), 555 d’Épinay, Louise biography, 726 Conversations d’Emilie, 251–2 Desan, Suzanne, 568 Descartes, 354, 378 Meditations, 270 Principles of Philosophy, 270 d’Espinassy, Mlle, Essai sur l’éducation des demoiselles, 251 d’Este, Aurelia, 270 determinism, 71 Deverell, Mary, 461 Devonshire, Georgiana, Duchess of, 574–5, 614 Devotional Pieces (Barbauld), 483 devotional writings, 461, 479

Dialogue de la Princess Sc[,]avante (Clement), 276–8 Dialogues Concerning Education (Fordyce), 38 Dialogues of the Dead (Montagu), 301 dictionaries, 202, 204, 206 Dictionnaire historique (Briquet), 259 Dictionnaire historique et critique (Bayle), 372 didactic literature, 469 and the bluestockings, 471 Diderot, Denis, 97, 248 biography, 725 on gallantry, 103 Jacques le Fataliste, 97 La Religieuse, 97 Le Fils Naturel, 54 Le Neveude Rameau, 250 and religion, 100 review of Thomas’ Essai, 124 on ‘savages’, 101 Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville, 72, 79, 109–11, 112 Sur les Femmes, 71, 97, 98–107 women as ‘thermometers’, 98 dimorphism, 55 Discours sur l’Origine et les Fondements de l’onégalité (Rousseau), 129 Discourse in Defense of the Talent of Women (Amar), 403 A discourse on the Love of our country (Price), 538 Discourse on the Origin … of Inequality (Rousseau), 43 Discourse of women’s physical and moral education (Arar y Borbón), 191 disembodied mind, 404 Dissenters, 480, 481, 482, 487, 494–5, 539, 542, 588 Dissenting tradition, 233 dissimulation, 11 ‘distinction of sex’, 3, 6 division of labour, 81 Dodd, William, 166–7 d’Oliver, Abbé, 206 domestic (home) education, 225–31 domesticity, 36–7, 101–2, 193 Dotoli, Giovanni, 424 Du célibat volontaire (Suchon), 427–8 Du Pont, Nicolas, 205–6 DuChatelet, Madame, 260 Duchet, Michéle, 84, 98 Duclos, Charles Pinot, 208, 210 Dunbar, James, 89 Duncombe, John, The Feminiad, 462 Dundas, Henry, 330 Dupin, Madame, 117, 126, 246

756 Index Dupont, Félicité, 196 Dwyer, John, 161 Dyer, George, 597–8 Complaints of the Poor People of England, 592 Earle, Rebecca, 504 Eccles, John, 495–6 Edgeworth, Maria, 474, 555 Edgeworth, R.L., 236, 474 Edinburgh New Town Female Friendly Society, 338 Edinburgh Review, 330, 335 education, 142, 189–92, 541–2 and the ‘bluestockings’, 297–301 female education in Britain, 224–42 female education in France, 243–58 female education, and spelling, 197–9 gender difference and equality, 234–5 Latin in, 199–201, 202–3, 207, 232, 233–4, 236–7 male, 225 method in, 231–4 method and ‘modern’ education, 236–7 Poulain de la Barre on, 379 public/private debate, 225–31 ‘system’, 237 teaching of the classics, 233–4 and virtue, 226, 232 and women’s cultural roles, 190 writing on, 190–1 effeminacy, 75, 85, 125 and sensibility, 158 Égalité des hommes et des femmes (Gournay), 423–6 Eger, Elizabeth, 261 Elements of Moral Science (Beattie), 36 Elements of Morality (Wollstonecraft), 145 Elias, Norbert, The Civilising Process, 73 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 594 Emile (Rousseau), 54, 137 Encyclopédie, 208, 209 Enﬁeld, William, biography, 725–6 Engels, Frederick, 129–33 The Origin of the Family, 129–33 England Enlightenment, 357 stage, 618 English Review, 503 Enlightenment broadening of concept, 693 inﬂuence, 47–8 as a value system, 707 The Enlightenment in National Context (Porter and Teich), 356

An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (Godwin), 503 Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (Gisborne), 9 Entretiens sur l’orthographe franc[,]oise (Roche), 213–14 Epicurean philosophy, 421, 696–8 Epistles on Women (Wollstonecraft), 7 Epstein, James, Radical Expression, 592 equality, 43, 126 Gournay on, 373–4 intellectual, 389 Macaulay on, 538 in the public sphere, 400–404 Spain, 401 spiritual, 391 Suchon on, 427 ‘equality of the sexes’, 371 Essai sur la mélancolie (Charpentier), 57 Essai sur le caracter, les moeurs et l’esprit des femmes (Thomas), 76, 78 Essai sur l’éducation des demoiselles (d’Espinassy), 251 Essay on a course of liberal education (Priestly), 500 Essay on the Government of Children (Nelson), 147 Essay on the History of Civil Society (Ferguson), 13, 78, 166 Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (Beattie), 12 An Essay on the Origin of Evil (King), 547 Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare (Montagu), 291 ‘Essex Result’, 677 European Magazine, 527 evangelicalism, and agency, 450–5 Exemplary novels (Zayas), 391–2 Fable of the Bees (Mandeville), 698 family, 129, 695 A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (Gregory), 5, 8–13, 31 Wollstonecraft on, 31 Feijoo, Benito J. background and writings, 395 biography, 726–7 compared to Poulain de la Barre, 394, 396–7, 398–9 defense of gender equality, 395–6, 398 Defense of women, 390, 392 inﬂuences on, 392–3 on Malebranche’s theory, 398 rhetorical construction, 393

Index 757 on women’s intellectual equality, 393–4 Fell, Margaret, 447 Female Biography (Hays), 506–7 Female Friend, 680 female intellectuals, 54 female nature Gregory on, 12, 13 as human nature, 23–7 The Female Quixote (Lennox), 224, 462 The Female Reader (Wollstonecraft), 10 Female Restoration (Haley), 574 female solidarity, 249, 250, 254 female submission, 242, 640 The Feminiad (Duncombe), 462 feminine goodness, 413 feminine inﬂuence, 76, 81 The Feminine Mystique (Friedan), 438 feminine symbols, in the Bible, 429 femininity, 54 Gregory on, 11 feminism, 389–90, 705–15 backlash against, 578 Britain, 42 and Catholicism, 417–21 prior to the Enlightenment, 390 feminist discourse, 385 feminist writing, and learning, 375 feminists, male, 567 Feminists Rethink the Self, 435 ‘feminization’, 75, 79, 82 Femme savante, 53 Fénelon, 191, 313 on female education, 244 Telemachus, 180, 313–14 Traité de l’éducation des ﬁlles, 244, 245, 313 Ferguson, Adam on chivalry, 79 Essay on the History of Civil Society, 13, 78, 166 Fessenden, Thomas, 680 feudalism, 80, 82 Findlen, Paula, 261 Fite, Marie Elisabeth de la biography, 727 conduct books, 316 as governess, 316 Fletcher, Eliza, 326, 468–9 on Anne Grant, 341–2 biography, 727–8 Edinburgh New Town Female Friendly Society, 338 memoir of her daughter, 334–5 network of friends, 328–30

on Reform Bill 1832, 341 social life, 335–6 ﬂow, in Rousseau’s works, 183–4 Fontana, Biancamaria, 330, 331 Fontenelle, Bernard de, 277 Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, 271 foppery, 40, 41 Fordyce, David, 6, 39 Dialogues Concerning Education, 38 Fordyce, James, 33, 158, 160 on marriage, 36 Sermons to Young Women, 8–9, 31 Foronda, Valentin de, 401 Fothergill, Samuel, 449, 450, 451 Foulke, John, 651 ‘four stages theory’, 13 Fox, Charles James, 164, 167, 574–5 France, 73, 572–3 effeminacy, 82 female education, 243–58 female writers, 259 learned women, 3, 53 Louis XIV, 355 reform of orthography (spelling), 193, 196, 201–6 stage, 617–18 Francis, Sir Philip, 156, 170 Franklin, Caroline, 521 French Revolution, 128, 707 citizenship in, 630–48 and female rights, 553–4, 565, 576, 612 marriage in, 630–48 Frend, William, 499–500, 502 biography, 728 and Mary Hays, 505 Fréron, 215 Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique, 438 Fumaroli, 200 Gale Jones, John, 596 gallantry, 5–7, 30, 31, 33–47, 82, 102, 695, 697 Diderot on, 103 enlightened British, 33–4 French inﬂuence, 33–4 Shaftesbury on, 34 Wollstonecraft on, 44–5 and women writers, 6 Gassendi, 697 Gay, Peter, 404, 649 gender as a contested concept, 371 in the pubic sphere, 380–4

758 Index gender differences and equal education, 234–5 nervous system, 54 gender divisions, 41 gender equality, 353 Feijoo on, 395–6 gender functionalism, 5 gender relations, 70 gender roles, 101–2 gendered subjectivity, 136 gendering of genre, 175 genius, 4, 55–6, 59, 62 Genlis, Felicité de, 198, 212 Adèle et Théodore, 252, 317 biography, 728–9 as governess, 317–19 on marriage, 318 genre, gendering of, 175 Geoffrin, Marie-Thérèse, 195 biography, 729 George III, King, 315–16 Germania (Tacitus), 87 Germany, 87, 132 Gibbon, 224 Gisborne, Thomas, Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex, 9 Glazebrook, James, 480 Gleadle, Kathryn, 326 Glorious Revolution, Macaulay on, 530–1 Glorious Revolution Society, 128 Godwin, William biography, 729–30 An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 503, 553 and Mary Hays, 504 Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 30, 43–4, 47, 331, 551 Gohier, 637 Goldsmith, Oliver, 159 Gonda, Caroline, 623 Goodman, Dena, 193, 290, 623 Gouges, Olympe de, 612, 656 biography, 730 Gournay, Marie de, 372 biography, 730–1 Égalité des hommes et des femmes, 423–6 on equality, 373–5 references to, 375 religious attitude, 423, 424 governesses, 26, 230, 247, 309–10, 314–16 de la Fite, 316 Genlis, 317–19 LePrince de Beaumont, 314–15 More, 319–20

Grafton, Anthony, 231 Grant, Anne, 329, 331 on Eliza Fletcher, 341–2 Grassi, Marie-Claire, 7, 196 Graves, Richard, The Spiritual Quixote, 462 Gregory, John, 5, 77–8, 653 biography, 731 Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with Those of the Animal World, 9, 15–23, 86 A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters, 8–15, 31 Grifﬁth, Elizabeth, biography, 731–2 Grigg, John, Advice to the Female Sex in General, 149 Grimm, Friedrich-Melchior, 97 Grubb, Sarah, 454 Guest, Harriet, 119, 157, 535 Haakonssen, Lisbeth, 16 Habermas, Jurgen, 290, 610, 698 Haley, E., Female restoration, 574 Hamilton, Cicely, 47 Hamilton, Elizabeth biography, 732 Cottagers of Glenburnie, 338–9 Letters of a Hindoo Rajah, 577 Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, 338–9 Harth, Erica, 262 Hartley, David, Theory of the Human Mind, 500 Hayley, William, The Triumphs of Temper, 472 Hays, Mary, 31, 42, 237, 493–518 Appeal to the Men of Great Britain, 506, 577 biography, 732–3 and Dissent, 494–5, 501 early life, 494 Female Biography, 506–7 and Franco-British revolutionary politics, 494 and Frend, 505 and Gilbert Wakeﬁeld, 498–9 and Godwin, 504 and Hugh Worthington, 501 Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous, 501–3 letters to John Eccles, 495–6 and Mary Wollstonecraft, 46–7, 503 Memoirs of Emma Courtney, 504–6 Memoirs of Queens, 507 novels, 496 and religion, 494–5 and Robert Robinson, 496–8

Index 759 Southey on, 493 The Victim of Prejudice, 577 Haywood, Eliza, Love in Excess, 462 Helvétius, Anne Catherine, 656 Hickey, Margarita, 404 Hillsborough, Mary, 310 Hints on the Education of a Princess (More), 31 Histoire des deux Indies (Raynal), 71, 72, 104–8 women in, 106 historians, female, 260, 695 historical discourse, women in, 76–9 Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (Wollstonecraft), 31 An Historical View of the English Government (Millar), 83 historical writing, 523, 555 history and liberty, 539–40 study of, 254 History of America (Robertson), 78 History of England (Hume), 525 History of England (Macaulay), 519, 520, 524–31, 539–40, 552, 696 history of women, 70, 76–7 limits of progress in, 79–83 History of Women (Alexander), 36 Hitchcock, Tim, 147, 148 Hodgson, William, 589 Holcroft, Thomas, 733 home birth movement, 442 Home (Cullen), 331–4 Home, Henry see Kames, Lord homo-eroticism, in Rousseau’s works, 179–81 Hubert de Sevrac (Robinson), 619 human nature, 12 female nature as, 23–7 humanitarianism, 575–6, 579 Hume, David biography, 734–5 compared to Macaulay, 525 on gallantry, 6 History of England, 525 on male sensibility, 163 on modesty, 37 On the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences, 30 Treatise of Human Nature, 12 on women, 76–7 Hunt, Margaret, 10 Hutcheson, Francis, 81 Hutton, Sarah, 520 hysteria, 99–100, 651, 653

Il Cortegiano (Castiglione), 372 independence, 591 individual, and nation, 633 inﬁdelity, 36 and religion, 25 inheritance, 130 intellectual equality, 389 Feijoo on, 393–4 intellectuals, 54–5 female, 54, 55, 576–7 Introduction to Botany (Wakeﬁeld), 150 Introduction to the History of Great Britain and Ireland (Macpherson), 86 Ireland, 556–9 Italy, 265–87 aristocratic women and science, 270–2 women in academic institutions, 383 Jacobs, Margaret, 434, 707 Jacques le Fataliste (Diderot), 97 Janowitz, Anne, 475 Jardine, Alexander, 39, 227, 234, 589–90 biography, 735 Jardine, Lisa, 231 Jefferson, Thomas, 16, 655, 667 Jeffrey, Francis, 336 Jerome, Saint, 424 Jerusalem Delivered (Tasso), 180 Jesuits, 54, 248 Jodin, Marie-Madeleine, 610 autobiography, 615 biography, 736 early life, 612 feminist writing, 618 imprisonment, 614 love affairs, 614 on marriage, 622 and Schulenberg, 614, 616 temperament, 615–16 Vues legislatives pour les femmes, 613, 614, 618, 619–20 Johnson, Claudia L., 157 Johnson, Joseph, 145 Johnson, Pauline, 707 Johnson, Samuel, 22, 139, 234 The Rambler, 460 Jones, Lady Catherine, 360 Jones, Vivien, 9, 13, 309 Jordan, Constance, 374 Joyes y Blake, Inés Apology of Women, 404 biography, 719 Julie (Rousseau), 166, 174, 182–3, 192, 250–1, 478

760 Index Kames, Lord biography, 734 Sketches of the History of Man, Book I, 14, 78, 86 on women, 81 Kant, Immanuel, 711–12 biography, 735 Kelly, Gary, 73 kenosis, 438 Kerber, Linda, 658 Kindersley, Jemima, 71, 78 King, William, An Essay on the Origin of Evil, 547 Kingsborough family, 306 Kirkland, John Thornton, 675 Knott, Sarah, 566 Knox, Vicesimus, 39, 160, 162, 163–4, 225, 229 biography, 736–7 Liberal Education, 226–7, 232–3 La Femme n’est past inférieure à l’homme (Puisieux), 248 La nobilità et excelenza delle donne (Marinella), 421–3 La Religieuse (Diderot), 97 La Roche, Sophie von, 262 The Sorrows of Lady Sophia Sternheim, 316 labour, and women, 131–2 Laclos, Choderlos de, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, 192 The Ladies Calling (Allestree), 144 The Ladies Dispensatory, 149 laissez-faire economics, 120 Lamb, Frederick, 327 Lambert, Anne-Théresè Marquise de Avis d’une mere à sa ﬁlle, 245–6 biography, 737 on female education, 245 Landes, Joan B., 565 Langford, Paul, 233 Laqueur, Thomas, 99 Lartigaut, Antoine, 202 Latin, 198, 199–201, 202–3, 204, 207, 232, 233–4, 236–7 Lawrence, James Henry, 737–8 Le Doeuff, Michele, 434 Le Fils Naturel (Diderot), 54 Le Masson le Golft, Mlle, 248 Lettres relatives à l’éducation, 248 Le Neveude Rameau (Diderot), 250 leadership, 462, 472 The Learned Ladies (Molière), 53 learned women, 39, 225

17th century, 357–8 France, 3, 53 Marinella on, 373 learning and feminist writing, 375 and women, 380–1 Lectures on Education (Williams), 232 Lekain, 417 Lennox, Charlotte, The Female Quixote, 224, 462 LePrince de Beaumont, Jeanne-Marie, 191, 247 Advice to Young Ladies, 315 biography, 718 as governess, 314–15 Magasins, 247 The Young Ladies Magazine, 110, 310 Triumph of Truth, 314 Young Misses Magazine, 308, 310 Les Femmes Savantes (Molière), 53 Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Laclos), 192 Les Moeurs (Toussaint), 315 L’Esclache, Louis de, 202, 203–4 Lespinasse, Julie de, 262 L’Esprit des Lois (Montesquieu), 133 Letter to the Women of England (Robinson), 613 letters, 542 Letters (Bennett), 230 Letters concerning the Love of God (Astell), 361 Letters on Education (Macaulay), 143–4, 519, 534, 538, 541–2, 544, 546, 577 Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous (Hays), 501–3 Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (Hamilton), 577 Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (Chapone), 8, 14 Letters to his Kinsfolk (Lockhart), 337 Letters to his son (Chesterﬁeld), 8, 37 Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractére de JeanJacques Rousseau (de Staël), 57, 58–9 Levite of Ephraim (Rousseau), 181 Lewis, Judith, 580 Liberal Education (Knox), 226–7 liberalism, 667 libertinism, 313, 315, 317 liberty, 525–6 and history, 539–40 Macaulay on, 538 Lindsey, Theophilus, 495, 500 literary dialogue, and the ‘bluestockings’, 301 ‘literary intemperance’, 55

Index 761 literary society, 698–700 literature review, 692–3 Lives of Illustrious Men (Plutarch), 174, 180 Lock, Frederica, 316 Locke, John, 362 on education, 146 inﬂuence of, 528–9 Reasonableness of Christianity, 365 Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 158, 226 Two Treatises of Government, 528, 681 Lockhart, John Gibson, Letters to his Kinsfolk, 337 Lofft, Capel, on Mary Hays, 493 Logan, George, 650 London, 367 London Corresponding Society, 587–8, 589 Louis XIV, 355 Lounger (periodical), 160, 162 love physical and moral, 124–5, 132 and power, 102 Love in Excess (Haywood), 462 Loves of the Plants (Darwin), 150 Lucretius, 421 Macaulay, Catherine, 118, 119, 309, 523–37, 538–50, 712 Address to the People of England, 540–1 biography, 738 compared to Hume, 525–6 on education, 541–2, 546–8 education of, 231 on equality, 538, 541–2, 546–8 gender-neutrality of work, 533 on the Glorious Revolution, 530–1 historical writing, 523–4 History of England, 519, 520, 524–31, 539–40, 552, 696 Letters on Education, 143–4, 519, 534, 538, 541–2, 544, 546, 577 on liberty, 538, 539–40 marriage, 524 millenarian perfectionism, 543 Observations on the Reﬂections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, 521, 538 patriotism, 521, 523–4 on political priority of the individual, 531 on politics, 540–1 religion, 538–50, 539, 542–6, 546–8 theology of, 532 Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth, 519, 538, 546, 547–8

McCarthy, William, 474 Mack, Phyllis, 692, 694 Mackenzie, Henry, The Man of Feeling, 57 McLaughlin, Blandine, 97 Macmahon, Thomas, 168 Macpherson, James, Introduction to the History of Great Britain and Ireland, 86 Maese, Sarah, 291 Magasins (LePrince de Beaumont), 247 Magné, Bernard, 197, 199 Mahmood, Saba, 440 Maintenon, Madame de, 313 Major, Emma, 293 male feminists, 567, 587–609 male sensibility, Hume on, 163 male superiority, 680 male writers, 18th century France, 3–4 Malebranche’s theory, 398 The Man of Feeling (Mackenzie), 57 Mancini, Hortense, 312 Mander, Jenny, 71 Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, 698 manhood, and sensibility, 161 Manzolini, Anna Morandi, 278 ‘Marginality, Melancholy and the Learned Woman’, 3 Marie Antoinette, 621–2 Marinella, Lucrezia, 372–3 inﬂuence on Feijoo, 392 La nobilità et excelenza delle donne, 421–3 on learned women, 373 marriage, 36, 79, 110 Astell on, 312, 362–3 Chapone on, 470 and citizenship, 630–48 as a civil contract, 636 companionship within, 132–3 Cullen on, 331–4 Engels on, 130 in the French Revolution, 630–48 Genlis on, 318 Gregory on, 11 Hutcheson on, 81 Jodin on, 622 and regeneration, 637 Robinson on, 622 as a social and civil contract, 632–6 as a social and political obligation, 633–4 Wollstonecraft on, 133 Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminine Imagination (Taylor), 494 masochism, in Rousseau’s work, 179 Mason, Priscilla, 674 masquerade, 138

762 Index maternity, 18–19, 72, 100 Mede, Joseph, 543 medical literature, 148–9 medicine, 649–66 female difference in, 659, 661 nervous physiology, 650 and sensibility, 650, 654, 660–1 vascular system, 652 Meditations (Descartes), 270 Mee, Jon, 475 melancholy, 56–7, 60 in Corinne, 62–3 de Staël on, 62–4 and Rousseau, 57–9 Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Godwin), 30, 43–4, 47, 331, 551 Memoirs of Emma Courtney (Hays), 504–6 Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (Hamilton), 338–9 Memoirs of Queens (Hays), 507 menopause, 100 mental illness, 58, 59–60 method in education, 231–4 and ‘modern’ education, 236–7 Midgely, Clare, 576 Mill, J.S., The Subjection of Women, 132 Millar family, and the Cullen family, 347 Millar, John, 37, 327 biography, 738–9 family, 327 An Historical View of the English Government, 83 Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, 34, 36, 73, 78, 82, 327 Millar, Margaret, 328 Millar, Robina, 328, 329 and Benjamin Rush, 660 millenarian perfectionism, 543 Millenium Hall (Scott), 300 mind-body dualism, 709–10 Miremont, Comtesse de Cours complet d’instruction, 247–8 Traité de l’education des femmes, 247–8 The Missionary (Owenson), 556 mistress system, 307–8 modernity, 40, 120 modesty, 109, 144, 440 Hume on, 37 Molière, 354 Les Femmes savantes, 53, 381 Montagu, Elizabeth, 23, 288, 296, 470 biography, 739

Dialogues of the Dead, 301 Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare, 291 Hester Thrale on, 294 letter from Elizabeth Carter, 291 letter to Hannah More, 138 letters to Elizabeth Carter, 292, 293 Wraxall on, 297–8 Montbart, Madame de, Sophie, ou l’éducation, 251 Montesquieu, 5 biography, 739–40 L’Esprit des Lois, 133 moral separation, 611 The Moral Sex (Steinbrugge), 4 Moran, Mary Catherine, 5, 32, 289, 326, 649 on Origin of the Distinction of Ranks, 73 More, Hannah, 138, 143, 228, 234, 294–5, 296, 579–80 ‘Blas Bleu, of conversation’, 288 Coelebs in Search of a Wife, 320 on Elizabeth Vesey, 294 on goals of the bluestockings, 298–9 as governess, 319–20 Hints on the Education of a Princess, 31 and religion, 319 on social diversity, 296–7 Strictures on Female Education, 319, 579 Thoughts on the manners of the Great, 320 on women’s education, 235, 2334 Morgan, Lady Sydney see Owenson, Sydney Morgan, Lewis H., Ancient Society, 129 Muraire, 635 mythology, 417, 429 Namierite school, 571 Napoleon, 554, 555 Narcisse (Rousseau), 176 Nash, Richard ‘Beau’, 159 nation, and the individual, 633 National Magazine, 671 national politics, 519 nationalism, 551 USA, 661 ‘nations’, 89–90 Native Americans, 657–8 The Natural Daughter (Robinson), 578 natural history of man, and women, 15–23 natural law, 13 natural rights theories, 560, 588–9, 592, 681–2 ‘natural’ state of society, 5 nature, 9–10, 19–20 Gregory on, 22

Index 763 of men and women, 380 versus artiﬁce, 10–15 Necker, Suzanne, 118, 120, 207, 212 biography, 741 Nelson, Horatio, 554 Nelson, James, Essay on the Government of Children, 147 nervous disorders, 651, 652–3 nervous system, 650 gender differences, 54–5 networks, 351 ‘New Lights’, 451 New-York Daily Advertiser, 674 New-York Weekly Museum, 67 Newlyn, Lucy, 475 Newton, Isaac Optics, 266 Principia, 266 Newtonianism for Ladies (Algarotti), 272 Norgate, Thomas Starling, 591, 592, 593–4 biography, 741 Norris, 362, 364 Nouvelles observations sur la langue franc[,]oise (Buffet), 378 novels, 13, 462, 471, 579 of Mary Hays, 496 Observations on the Reﬂections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (Macaulay), 521 ‘oceanic interculture’, 649 O’Gorman, Frank, 571 On the Duty of Man and Citizen (Pufendorf), 13 On the Equality of the Sexes (Poulain de la Barre), 379 On Germany (Staël), 555 On Literature (Staël), 4, 555 On the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences (Hume), 30 Optics (Newton), 266 Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (Millar), 34, 36, 73, 78, 82, 327 Moran on, 73 The Origin of the Family (Engels), 129–33 Origins of British Feminism (Rendall), 14 Orsi, Robert, 439, 440 Ossian, 17–18, 85–6, 87, 90, 695 Outram, Dorinda, 707 Ovid, 138 Owenson, Sydney, 555–6 biography, 740 The Missionary, 556 The Wild Irish Girl, 556–9 Woman, 556

Paine, Thomas biography, 742 Common Sense, 668 The Rights of Man, 588, 669 Pamela (Richardson), 469 Parsons, James, 159 Pascoe, Judith, 621 passivity, in Rousseau’s work, 175–9 paternalism, 11 patriarchy, 130, 706 patriotism, 125–7, 551–64, 637–9, 641 Pauw, Cornelius de, Recherches Philosophiques sur les Américains, 85 Payton, Catherine, 49, 448, 449–50 pedagogical enlightenment, and spelling, 206–10 pedantry, 213 Peisley, Mary, 448–9 Pennsylvania Gazette, 651 Percy, Carol, 230 Perry, Ruth, 125 Petty, William, 310 philanthropic activism, 338–40, 580 philosophers Astell as, 364–5 women as, 272–7, 693 philosophes, 53–4 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (Burke), 124 Philosophical Nosography (Pinel), 57 philosophy, 42 and ‘bluestockings’, 292 Phlipon, Manon see Roland de la Platière, Manon phonetic spelling, 207, 209 Voltaire on, 208 physical differences in gender, 678–80, 708 Pignatelli, Faustina, 271 Pinel, Philippe, Philosophical Nosography, 57 Pizan, Christine de, 417–21 Book of the City of Ladies, 417–21 playwrights, women as, 463 pleasure, Wollstonecraft on, 141–2 plebeian women, 581 pluralism, 694 Plutarch, Lives of Illustrious Men, 174, 180 Pocock, J.G.A., on Macaulay, 523–4 Pocock, John, 40, 413 Poems (Barbauld), 477 poets, female, 261 politeness, 14, 30, 40, 71, 190 deﬁnition of, 123 Wollstonecraft on, 43

764 Index political rights of women, 600–2 politics and sensibility, 495–6 women in, 567–8, 570–86 The Politician’s Creed (Thornton), 590 Polwhele, Richard, 137 The Unsex’d Females, 145, 150, 551, 588 and Wollstonecraft, 145 polygenists, 84, 86, 87, 88 Porter, Roy, 356 Poulain de la Barre, Franc[,]ois, 244, 379–80 compared to Feijoo, 394 De l’excellence des hommes, 247 on education, 379 on female education, 244–5 feminism of, 379–80 On the Equality of the Sexes, 379 power, 131 centralisation, 89 in European history, 80 and love, 102 power-turned-polite principle, 40 Prevóst, Manon Lescaut, 98 Price, Richard, 128 A discourse on the Love of our country, 538, 552 biography, 742–3 Priestley, Joseph biography, 743 Essay on a course of liberal education, 500 Principia (Newton), 266 Principles of Philosophy (Descartes), 270 private education, 225–31 private property, 129 ‘proper lady’, 144 prostitution, 610, 620, 698 Provoking Agents, 435 Prunay, 211–12 psychiatry, 57, 58 public (boarding) schools, 225–31 public sphere, 571–80, 623, 693, 698, 700 equality in, 400–4 Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen, 13 Puisieux, Madeleine de, 198, 248–9 biography, 743–4 Conseils à une amie, 249–50 La Femme n’est past inférieure à l’homme, 248 Puritans, 464–5, 485 Quaker women, 439, 443–50 and agency, 439 ministers, 447–9

Quakerism, 434–59 reform, 453, 454 quietism, 444, 451 ‘race’, 75, 76, 84, 88, 89–90 and sexuality, 84–5 Radical Expression (Epstein), 592 radical intellectuals, 46 Radicals, 572 Raftery, Deirdre, 225 Rambaud, Honorat, 201 The Rambler (Johnson), 460 Ramsay, John, 16 ‘rational discourse’, 41 Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas biography, 744 Histoire des deux Indies, 71, 72, 97, 98–9, 103 reading, informal, 224–5 reason, 20–1, 190, 246, 357, 378, 403, 417, 483, 546, 590–1, 659, 711 Reasonableness of Christianity (Locke), 365 Recherches Philosophiques sur les Américains (Pauw), 85 Reeve, Clara, 142, 227 Reﬂections on the Revolution in France (Burke), 32 Reﬂections on the Seven Days of the Week (Talbot), 460–1, 465–6 Reform Bill 1832, 341 Regnier, Francois Séraphim, 204–5, 208 Relational Autonomy, 435 religion, 22, 306, 307, 311 and Astell, 361 Barbauld on, 484, 484–5 Catholicism, 416–33 Christian attitudes to women, 412 Christianity, 423–4 Christ’s suffering, 437 and Diderot, 100 empirical studies, 441–2 and the Enlightenment, 410–12 Genlis on, 318 Gregory on, 24–6 and Hays, 494–5 and inﬁdelity, 25 and language, 203–4 and Macaulay, 538–50 and More, 319 Quakerism, 434–59 and science, 435 Spain, 391 women writers on, 119 Renaissance, 351, 352, 372–5

Index 765 Rendall, Jane, 6, 263 Origins of British Feminism, 14 Reply to Mr. Burke’s invective (Cooper), 590 Republic of Letters, 254, 259, 267, 306 ‘republican motherhood’, 658 Rèveries du promeneur solitaire (Rousseau), 58 Reyre, Abbé, 197 Richardson, Pamela, 469 Richesource, Jean de, 381 Richey, Russell, 477 Ridgeway, Mary, 446 The Rights of Man (Paine), 588 Rivet, André, debate with van Schurman, 375 Rizzeti, Giovanni, 266 Rizzo, Betty, 11 Roach, Joseph, 649 Robertson, William, 80 History of America, 78 Robinson, Mary Darby, 577, 610 autobiography, 615 biography, 745 early life, 612, 614 feminist writing, 618–19 Hubert de Sevrac, 619 Letter to the Women of England, 613, 619, 620–1 love affairs, 614–15 on Marie Antoinette, 621–2 on marriage, 622 The Natural Daughter, 578 and the Prince of Wales, 616 stage career, 616 writing, 616–17 Robinson, Robert, 496–8 biography, 745–6 Roche, J.B., Entretiens sur l’orthographe franc[,]oise, 213–14 Roland de la Platière, Manon, 252, 253, 262 biography, 746 Rollin, Charles, 235, 246 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 5, 117, 126, 698 biography, 746–7 Charpentier on, 57 childhood, 174, 175, 176, 179–80 Confessions, 137, 166, 169, 174, 175, 178, 179, 180, 182 Discours sur l’Origine et les Fondements de l’onégalité, 129 Discourse on the Origin … of Inequality, 43 on education, 248, 250 Emile, 54, 137, 174, 175, 248, 250, 252 family situation, 177–8 ﬂow, 183–4

homo-eroticism, 179–81 inﬂuence of Calvinism on, 177 inﬂuence on de Staël, 56 inﬂuence of, 250–52 inﬂuence on Wollstonecraft, 31 Julie, 166, 174, 181–3, 192, 250–51, 478 on language, 207–8, 213 Levite of Ephraim, 181 masochism, 179, 180 and melancholy, 57–8 and Madame de Warens, 178 Narcisse, 176 passivity, 175–9 Rèveries du promeneur solitaire, 58, 177, 181 sexuality, 174–88 theory of woman, 251 on women’s emancipation, 611 Roussel, Pierre biography, 747 De la santé des gend de lettres, 55 Rowe, Elizabeth, 466–7 Chapone on, 468 Ruether, Rosemary, 438 Rush, Benjamin, 164, 566, 652–66, 679 biography, 747–8 and ‘republican motherhood’, 658 on rights, 657 and Robina Millar, 660 on slavery, 658 on women, 659–60 Russell, William, 78 Salzmann, Christian Gotthilf, 145 Sargent Murray, Judith, biography, 740–1 sati, 71 ‘savages’, 76, 77, 78, 79, 84, 88, 98 Diderot on, 101 and politeness, 123 Saxon attitudes to women’s political inclusion, 593, 597 Schiller, Friedrich, 259 Schulenberg, 614, 616 Schurman, Anna Maria van, debate with Rivet, 375 science and religion, 435 and women, 382–3 scientists, female, 265–70 Scotland, 6 Enlightenment, 13, 75–91, 326–47 and gallantry, 34–5 historians on women, 14, 72 stadial approach to Enlightenment, 83–4

766 Index Scott, Sarah, Millenium Hall, 300 Scott, Walter, 555 secularisation, 444 self control, 465 Senaca Falls convention, 667, 676 sensibility, 137–8, 157, 252, 566–7, 698 and effeminacy, 158 and manhood, 161 in medicine, 650, 654, 660–1 and politics, 495–6 ‘sensitive men’, 157 sentiment, 478, 711 sentimental culture, tears, 137–8, 156–73 Serious Proposal (Astell), 143, 313 sermons, 461, 464, 479–82 Sermons to Young Women (Fordyce), 8–9 Sévigne, Madame de, 198, 212 sex education botany, 150 literature, 147–8 and Wollstonecraft, 140–55 sexual liaisons, 249 sexuality, 140–1 and ‘race’, 84–5 Rousseau’s, 174–88 Shaftesbury, Lord, on gallantry, 34 shame, 109 Shaw, Peter, 159 Sheridan, 618 Simmonds, Martha, 449 Sins of Government (Barbauld), 519 Skedd, Susan, 230 Sketch from the Dead (Thelwall), 159 Sketches of the History of Man, Book I (Kames), 14, 78 slavery, 76, 630 movement for abolition, 454, 576 Rush on, 658 Smith, Adam, 40 biography, 748 on John Millar’s family, 327 Theory of Moral Sentiments, 161–2 Smith, Hilda, 589 sociability, 694–5 social connectedness, 436 social contract, 13 social reform movements, 444 ‘social sympathy’, 40 Society for the Suppression of Beggars, 339–40 Socrates, 161 Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Locke), 158 Sonnet, Martine, 197

Sophie, ou l’éducation (Montbart), 251 The Sorrows of Lady Sophia Sternheim (La Roche), 316 soul, absence of sex, 416–17, 419, 423, 427 spa towns, 651 Spain, 572 Enlightenment, 356, 389–409 equality, 401, 404 religion, 391 women and the Economic Society, 402 women writers, 392, 400, 402 works on women, 390–1 Spectator, 34 spelling books on, 21–13 and education of girls, 197–9 and pedagogical enlightenment, 206–10 phonetic, 207 reform in France, 201–6 teaching of, 210–17 women writers, 195–7 Spence, Thomas, 598–600 Spensonia, 598 The Spiritual Quixote (Graves), 462 spiritual equality, 391 Springborg, Patricia, 362 stadial approach to Enlightenment, 83–4 stadial history, 88 Staël, Germaine de, 4, 56–7, 252–3 biography, 748–9 Corinne, 4, 56, 59, 60–4, 555, 559–62 De la Littérature, 57, 555 De L’Allemagne, 118, 555 Delphine, 555 exile, 555 inﬂuence of Rousseau on, 56, 252 Lettres sur les ouvrages et le caractére de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 57, 58, 252 on melancholy, 62–4 Starobinski, Jean, 176 Steele, Richard, 158, 159 The Christian Hero, 165 Steinrugge, Lieselotte, 4 Stepan, Nancy Leys, 679 Stillingﬂeet, Benjamin, 289 Strahan, William, 8 Strictures on Female Education (Bennett), 228–9 Strictures on Female Education (More), 319 The Struggle for the Breeches (Clark), 599 Strugnell, Anthony, 99, 107 on women in Histoire, 106, 108 Stuart, Gilbert, 88–9 A View of Society in Europe, 79–80

Index 767 Stuart Mill, John, 6 studious women, 463 Stuurman, Siep, 390, 404, 411 The Subjection of Women (Mill), 132 Suchon, Gabrielle Du célibat volontaire, 427–8 on equality, 427 Traité de la morale et de la politique, 427 Sur les femmes (Diderot), 71, 97, 98–107 tabula rasa doctrine, 365 Tacitus, Germania, 87 Tahiti, 109–11 Talbot, Catherine, 460, 463, 464, 467–8, 471 Reﬂections on the Seven Days of the Week, 460–1, 465–6 sermons, 464 Tarabotti, Arcangela Che le donne siano della spezie degli uomini, 425–7 La tirannia paterna, 426 Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, 177, 180 Taylor, Barbara, 5–6, 234, 237, 478, 697 Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminine Imagination, 494 tears, 137–8, 156–73 of Christ, 164–5 as communication, 159 Teich, Mikulas, 356 Telemachus (Fénelon), 180, 313–14 Thelwall, Robert Carter, Sketch from the Dead, 159 Theory of the Human Mind (Hartley), 500 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 161 thinking dangers of, 56 gender differences, 99 traditions of, 708–9 Thomas, Antoine Essai sur le caracter, les moeurs et l’esprit des femmes, 71, 76, 118, 124, 127 on Madame Necker, 120–1 Thompson, William, 602 Thornton, John, The Politician’s Creed, 590 Thoughts on the Manners of the Great (More), 320 Thrale, Hester, 294 Tissot, Samuel-Auguste, 55 Todd, Janet, 8 Tomaselli, Sylvana, 70, 71 Tone Wilson, Matilda, 329 Tournon, Antoine, 215 Toussaint, Les Moeurs, 315

Traité de la morale et de la politique (Suchon), 427 Traité de l’education des femmes (Miremont), 247–8 Traité de l’éducation des ﬁlles (Fénelon), 244 travel, 104 travel writing, by women, 118–19 A Treatise on Education (Williams), 232 Treatise of Human nature (Hume), 12 Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth (Macaulay), 519, 538, 546, 547–8 Trenard, Louis, 199 The Trinity (St Augustine), 412, 419 Triumph of Truth (LePrince de Beaumont), 314 The Triumphs of Temper (Hayley), 472 truth, 137 Tuke, Esther, 453, 454 Turgot, 661 Tuveson, E.L., 711 Two Treatises of Government (Locke), 528 UK, women in 18th century politics, 570–86 Unitarianism, 476–7, 494 universal suffrage, 587, 589, 593–4, 598, 669 male, 673, 685 The Unsex’d Females (Polwhele), 145 USA American Revolution, 655, 667–8 Democratic-Republican party, 667, 671–2 Federal Constitution, 657 medicine, 649–66 nationalism, 661 Native Americans, 657–8 New Jersey, equality, 668–9 political rights of women, 674–84 qualiﬁcations for voting, 672–3 universal suffrage, 673 Vindication of the Rights of Women (Wollstonecraft), 667, 669, 670 women, 656 women’s rights, 667–91 Vallisneri, Antonio, 271 van Krieken, Robert, 73 vascular system, 652 Vaudelin, Pére, 203 Vaugelas, 200 Veratti, Guiseppe, 268 Vergniaud, 634–5 Vesey, Elizabeth, 288, 293 Burney on, 294 More on, 294

768 Index Vickery, Amanda, 519, 611 The Victim of Prejudice (Hays), 577 A View of Society in Europe (Stuart), 79–80 Vila, Anne, C., 3, 4 Vindication of the Rights of Men (Wollstonecraft), 31 Vindication of the Rights of Women (Wollstonecraft), 5, 10 political implications, 670 and the USA, 667, 669, 670 Virgil, Aeneid, 180 Virginia Gazette, 679 virtue, 126, 289, 384, 660 and civilization, 119–25 and education, 226, 232 and mental improvement, 463 nature of, 121 Voltaire biography, 749 on learned women, 53 on phonetic spelling, 208 Vues legislatives pour les femmes (Jodin), 613 Waddington, Samuel Ferrand, 601, 602 Wade, Ira O., 246 Wahrman, Dror, 573 Wailly, Nöel-Franc[,]ois, 209 Wakeﬁeld, Gilbert, 483 and Mary Hays, 498–9 Wakeﬁeld, Priscilla, Introduction to Botany, 150 Warburton, William, 462 Warens, Madame de, and Rousseau, 178 Warren, Mercy Otis, 678 biography, 749–50 Webster, Noah, 653 weeping, 137–8, 156–73 West, Jane, 15 Whigs, 328, 330–1 and political reform, 340–1 views on women, 336–7 White, T.H., Age of Scandal, 156 The Wild Irish Girl (Owenson), 556 Wilkes, Wetenhall, 144 Williams, David Lectures on Education, 232, 233 A Treatise on Education, 232 Williams, Helen Maria, 46, 553–4 biography, 750 Williams, Thomas, Constitutional Politics, 599–600 Wilson, Kathleen, 519 Wise Club, Aberdeen, 77, 89 Wiseman, Susan, 533

Wolfe, James, 166 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 3, 127–9, 552, 700–1, 706 on the aristocracy, 306 biography, 750–1 on boarding schools, 227 death, 506 education, 225 Elements of Morality, 145 Epistles on Women, 7 on equality in education, 235 The Female Reader, 10 on gallantry, 44–5 Hays on, 46–7 Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, 31 on marriage, 133 and Mary Hays, 503 on patriotism, 553 on pleasure, 141–2, 152 on politeness, 43 on political inﬂuence of aristocratic women, 577 Polwhele on, 145 posthumous reputation, 551–2 on Reﬂections on the Revolution in France, 32 and religion, 410, 413 reviews of, 331 and Rousseau, 31–2 and sex education, 140–55 status, 30–1 Vindication of the Rights of Men, 31, 33 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 5, 10, 30, 118, 119, 127–8, 137, 141–2, 144, 146, 148, 149, 150–1, 553, 656, 667 The Wrong of Woman, or Maria, 31, 140, 141, 152 Woman (Owenson), 556 women in academic institutions, Italy, 383 in historical discourse, 76–9 and labour, 131–2 and learning, 380–1 and the natural history of man, 15–23, 76 as philosophers, 272–7 playwrights, 463 plebeian, 581 in politics, 567–8 and science, 382–3 teaching of Latin, 233 teaching of spelling, 210–17 as ‘thermometers’, 98

Index 769 travel writing by, 118–19 USA, 656 women intellectuals, 193 women writers, 41–2, 73, 119 Barbauld on, 475 and conjectural history, 117–20 on education, 191 France, 259 on religion, 119 Spain, 392, 400 spelling, 195–6, 210–11 women’s role, dialogues on, 354–5 women’s writing and civilization, 71 on education, 253–4, 255 pedagogical works, 247 as a physical skill, 216 Wood, Paul, 16 Worthington, Hugh, and Mary Hays, 501 Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary, 367 education, 231

Wraxall, Nathanial, on Elizabeth Montagu, 297–8 Wray, Mary, 227 The Wrong of Woman, or Maria (Wollstonecraft), 31 Wyss, André, 201 Wythey, Lynne, 543 Yorkshire Association, 573 Young, Brian, 461 Young, Edward, 138 Young, Iris Marion, 216 The Young Ladies Magazine (LePrince de Beaumont), 110, 310, 314, 315 Young Misses Magazine (Le Prince de Beaumont), 308, 312 Young, William, 651 Zanotti, Francesco Maria, 266, 271, 275 and Bentivoglio, 275–8 Zayas, Maria de, Exemplary Novels, 391–2