Susannah Gibson

The problem with 18th-century women, for the feminist public historian, is that they just won’t fit the narrative. We all know about the Suffragettes, so the thinking goes, and we are fairly sure that their forerunner Mary Wollstonecraft can be called a proto-feminist. Surely, a generation or two before Wollstonecraft, there were also brilliant women organising to topple the patriarchy?

Such a narrative underpins Susannah Gibson’s Bluestockings. The book argues exactly what its title suggests: that the group of female intellectuals loosely associated with the metropolitan salons of Elizabeth Montagu made up, collectively, ‘the first women’s liberation movement’. Across an interlinked series of biographical case studies, Gibson attempts to cast women writers ranging from Elizabeth Carter and Hannah More to Frances Burney and Hester Thrale Piozzi as proto-feminists who ‘laid the foundations for a whole new worldview’. While many full-length biographies of the key individuals are already available, an accessible group study such as this one is long overdue. Gibson is an engaging writer, with a good eye for entertaining detail. I am grateful, for example, to learn that Hannah More’s cats were named Passive Obedience and Non-Resistance.

But Gibson’s core aim – to present her subjects as a grouping both progressive and cohesive – is only credible if one takes a very selective approach. The problem with characterising the Bluestockings as a new beacon of feminist progressivism is apparent from the first few pages when, in order for her story to make sense, Gibson needs to show that the society upon which the Bluestockings exploded was entirely unenlightened on questions of women’s capabilities. ‘Women were held in low regard in the eighteenth century’, she informs us. Well, yes, by some people, such as the author of the 1739 pamphlet ‘MAN SUPERIOR TO WOMAN’, one of three sources cited as evidence of universal low regard. It is not mentioned, however, that the author was responding to an earlier pamphlet by ‘Sophia, a Person of Quality’ entitled ‘WOMAN NOT INFERIOR TO MAN’, and that his sally was quickly matched by another called ‘WOMAN’S SUPERIOR EXCELLENCE OVER MAN’. Such a curious omission prompts reflection on the many works published by both men and women before or around this time which celebrate female learning, virtue and skill. But to acknowledge such works would complicate the narrative: and so they go unacknowledged.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Sophie Coulombeau is Senior Lecturer in 18th-century English Literature at the University of York.… (altro)