Women's History, Britain 1700-1850

An Introduction

Hannah Barker, Elaine Chalus, Hannah Barker, Elaine Chalus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134436279
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Placing women's experiences in the context of the major social, economic and cultural shifts that accompanied the industrial and commercial transformations of this period, Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus paint a fascinating picture of the change, revolution, and continuity that were encountered by women of this time.

A thorough and well-balanced selection of individual chapters by leading field experts and dynamic new scholars, combine original research with a discussion of current secondary literature, and the contributors examine areas as diverse as the Enlightenment, politics, religion, education, sexuality, family, work, poverty, and consumption. The authors most importantly realise that female historical experience is not generic, and that it can be significantly affected by factors such as social status, location, age, race and religion.

Providing a captivating overview of women and their lives, this book is an essential purchase for the study of women's history, and, providing delightful little gems of knowledge and insight, it will also appeal to any reader with an interest in this fascinating topic.

Chapter One
Women and the Enlightenment in Britain c.1690–1800

Jane Rendall

Our understanding of the nature of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment has changed significantly over the past twenty years. The image of what once appeared, in Eric Hobsbawm’s words, as an elitist ‘conspiracy of dead white men in periwigs’, of small and exclusive groups of philosophers, has been transformed by cultural-historical approaches.¹ New ideas have remained important but have been located in the context of much broader shifts in mood, in language, and in practice. Enlightened philosophies have been relocated within a rapidly expanding print culture, including newspapers, novels, and poetry, as well as theology, history, metaphysics, and science. The diffusion of ideas has been traced through circulating libraries and popular debating societies, as well as universities, salons and academies. The practitioners of Enlightenment are understood to be not only the philosophes of Paris or the literati of Edinburgh, but also novelists, poets, medical men, salon hostesses, utopian thinkers, and itinerant lecturers.² These changes have been influenced by an interest in women’s and gender history, and offer opportunities for reassessing women’s relationship to enlightened sociability and practice, and the significance of the Enlightenment in reshaping concepts of femininity and desired forms of gender relations.

These views of the Enlightenment have developed simultaneously with new questions about gender relations in this period. The debates among women’s historians about the gendering of ‘public’ and ‘private’ worlds have actively contributed to the reinterpretation of the meaning of the ‘public sphere’ in the eighteenth-century culture of the Enlightenment. The interest after 1989 in Jürgen Habermas’ notion of a bourgeois public sphere stimulated women’s historians and historians of the Enlightenment to re-examine their assumptions, even if often to criticize Habermas’ thesis, as well as to adapt and appropriate it.³ In Britain, the concept of the ‘urban renaissance’ rooted in the growth of the social and cultural life of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English towns recovered many forms of mixed sociability, in assembly rooms, walks, and public spaces, and was accompanied by an understanding of the forms of ‘politeness’ appropriate to both sexes.⁴ A new interest in the history of the book and its production began a much more precise mapping of the contribution of women as printers, publishers, and especially, writers to the development of a consumer-oriented print culture.⁵

These reinterpretations remain controversial, and there are still significant differences between historians about the consequences of the Enlightenment for women and for gender relations. Some have argued that writers of the Enlightenment, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who elaborated a view of women’s nature as governed more by sensibility and feeling than by reason, left an oppressive, class-bound, and restraining legacy to subsequent generations of women.⁶ Others have suggested that Habermas’ thesis, however flawed and gender-blind, offered a way of understanding some women’s sociability, and their written interventions, and allowed them a broader and sometimes political awareness, even occasionally across class boundaries.⁷ Recent writing has tried to look away from such polarities towards the overlapping and fluidity of public and private worlds, and minor shifts, in degree rather than kind. Lawrence Klein identified the variety of meanings which these words could carry in different contexts, whether civic, economic, or social.⁸ Harriet Guest, while recognizing the importance of the continuities in the lives of middle-class women, has suggested the possibility of ‘small changes’ in the positions and political awareness of such women in the course of the eighteenth century.⁹

In addition to these possibilities, historians of the Enlightenment have increasingly come to question the notion of a homogeneous Enlightenment, and to signal a different and much more pluralist world of European Enlightenments whose intellectual and social boundaries were shaped accordingly to regional and national configurations, and the social and intellectual location of different intelligentsias.¹⁰ In trying to understand the relationships of women of different classes to the history of the Enlightenment in Britain, we have to take into account these configurations and others overlapping them–including those of the metropolis and the provinces, and of established and dissenting forms of religious belief.

The Enlightenment in England came early and its history from the late seventeenth century onwards influenced that of Europe more generally. The works of John Locke and Isaac Newton, establishing the importance of experience and empiricism in the understanding of the mental and physical worlds in the late seventeenth century, were fundamental to all later developments. The polite, urbane, and aspirational London culture of Lord Shaftesbury and of periodicals such as the Tatler and the Spectator provided another kind of model.¹¹ And the size, variety, and relative freedom of London intellectual life allowed such different institutions as the Royal Society, the Society of Arts, the Robin Hood Debating Society, the bluestocking salons, and the dinner table of the radical William Godwin all to function, in their own way, as centres of enlightened debate.¹² But the intellectual productions of such different circles inevitably lacked coherence. This diversity perhaps helps to explain why the English Enlightenment figures less frequently in the textbooks of the period than the Scottish Enlightenment. In the much smaller society of Lowland Scotland, where aristocracy and gentry united with important sections of the professional intelligentsia in the goals of rational social improvement, the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, and the Church of Scotland, provided a more homogeneous social and intellectual setting. The moral philosophy, the histories of civil society, and the scientific achievements of the Scottish Enlightenment had their roots in that milieu.

The consequences of such differences for the role of women have not yet been explored. Speculatively, the more fragmented character of intellectual debate and the strength of print culture in England from an early date may have allowed a greater degree of activity and agency to English women than the masculine institutions which so effectively underpinned the Enlightenment in Scotland. The consciousness with which the goal of improvement was pursued in Scotland, as well as the moral concerns expressed in relation to such growth, may have helped to generate the particular focus on the place of women in histories of the progress of civil society which was such a feature of Scottish historical writing by the end of the eighteenth century. At the same time, women shared in forms of patriotism which were British, English, and Scottish, especially through the imaginative literature, prose, and poetry written and read by eighteenth-century women–and men.

These differences were national, and also provincial and regional. Amanda Vickery has demonstrated how polite sociability and an engagement with print culture were characteristic not only of such towns as Bristol, Bath, and York in this period, but accessible through newspapers, circulating libraries, and reading networks from the relatively remote country homes of the women of the gentry.¹³ Some enclaves had an even more clearly defined identity, whether conservative or radical, Anglican or dissenting. In Birmingham, the middle-class entrepreneurs and inventors of the Lunar Society, self-consciously committed to economic progress and rational reform, mostly sympathetic to dissent and political opposition, shared their ideas with their sisters, wives, and children, as Richard Lovell Edgeworth did with his daughter, Maria. In Warrington, the dissenting academy allowed families associated with the academy a small but effective share in its educational provision. The influential Anna Aikin, later Anna Barbauld, grew up there and helped to contribute to the distinctive position of radical dissenters who were outside the established Church, and at the forefront of educational innovation and political opposition.¹⁴

Even within such different settings, the relationship of women to the Enlightenment cannot be understood through a focus on particular genres, such as political writing or imaginative literature, viewed in isolation. Changing attitudes to the situation of women and to femininity could be expressed across genres and in settings which are often unexpected, and not necessarily identical with those of the canonical literature of the Enlightenment. For women writers, the novel might be the most appropriate form for comment on the politics of the French Revolution, just as the autobiography might contribute to the prescriptive literature on women’s education.

In this chapter, perspectives on the condition of women will be considered through some of the characteristic discourses of Enlightenment, with a particular focus on the contribution of women themselves. The emergence of a polite, sociable, and urbane culture and, along with it, the appearance of philosophies of sentiment, sympathy, and sensibility, provide an important starting point. But an earlier rationalism, which provided a basis for the claim for intellectual equality and the celebration of women’s learning, remained of considerable importance and was given new inflections. Another view of gender relations was found in the histories of civil society so characteristic of the Enlightenment in Scotland from the 1760s, histories which examined the shaping of commercial civil societies, their political economy, and their gender relations from a comparative historical perspective. They also offered a way of expressing national, racial, and cultural differences in terms of European progress. They posed a direct challenge to utopian and republican visions of transformation, visions which had their roots within civic humanism, but which took on new meaning after the Revolutions in France and America. More broadly, throughout the Enlightenment in Britain, the possibilities of education for women remained a significant and recurring theme, engaging women writers of very different religious and political perspectives.

One element of enlightened thinking across Britain lay in the associations between philosophy, politeness, and sociability. Writers from John Locke onward sought to chart more closely the relationship between reason, belief, and feeling, and offered a methodology for doing this in the empirical study of human behaviour, individually and in social interaction. Locke had, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), stressed the blankness of the human mind at birth and the origins of ideas in the sensations received from the external world, ideas which could be reflected upon and combined. Locke’s pupil, Lord Shaftesbury, who shared his emphasis on the importance of environmental forces, developed an optimistic philosophy which assumed that the pursuit of virtue, which he compared to the aesthetic pursuit of beauty, would be undertaken as an enlightened, polite, and sociable enterprise by men of taste. In Glasgow, Francis Hutcheson explored the workings of the moral sense and emphasized the sociable and benevolent side of human nature, for which the starting point was to be found in the domestic affections of the human family, which might encourage and inspire a higher spirit of benevolence directed to the public good, the highest of aspirations. Hutcheson’s interesting discussion assumed a division of labour between men and women, with citizenship remaining entirely masculine, but questioned the existence of any natural basis for male authority in marriage.¹⁵

Such ideas of sociable politeness were popularized in the essay periodicals founded by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele at the beginning of the eighteenth century–the Tatler and the Spectator–as well as through the club and coffee-house culture of London. This socially defined form of politeness assumed urbanity and prosperity for the well-bred and the propertied man. It attempted to define the responsibilities and lifestyle of a self-consciously modern and benevolent élite, who used the public media of a consuming society to exchange and debate its ideas. But these aspirations could be adapted. The Female Tatler of 1709–10, ostensibly edited by Phoebe Crackenthorpe and later a ‘Society of Ladies’ whose identities are unclear, was partly a scandal sheet and partly a political response to the Whiggish Tatler, though it also addressed issues of interest to women. More importantly, in 1744–6, Eliza Haywood, as editor of the Female Spectator, adopted the form of the earlier male periodical. The Female Spectator was less interested in stories of scandal or political intrigue than in guiding women towards right moral conduct and improving women’s education. It created an imaginary audience of female readers. In its interest in defining ‘the province of a Female Spectator’, it differentiated itself sharply from the public interests of the earlier masculine periodical. It emphasized the significance of a female audience for such magazines, an audience which steadily expanded throughout the century, helping later to create the demand for such a long-running and successful periodical as the Lady’s Magazine (1770–1830).¹⁶

By mid-century,...