Bloody Brilliant Women: The Pioneers, Revolutionaries and Geniuses Your History Teacher Forgot to Mention. Cathy Newman

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СКАЧАТЬ put a man above the World, & in a condition to be feared and worshipped, a Woman that possesses them must be always courting the World, and asking pardon, as it were, for uncommon excellence,’ wrote the aristocratic social-reformer Elizabeth Montagu to a friend in 1763. To help level the playing field, Montagu and like-minded ladies such as Mary Monckton turned their houses into salons where women and men could meet and mix as intellectual equals. The salon was a French import and the point was conversation, not debauchery – no drink was allowed, or card playing. Montagu’s function as hostess was to encourage and bestow patronage on writers she liked.

      Salonieres became known as ‘bluestockings’ – not, at this stage, a pejorative term for a studious woman – after a male guest, Benjamin Stillingfleet, turned up to one wearing blue worsted stockings because he hadn’t been able to afford black silk ones. Exactly how the term came, by the late eighteenth century, to apply only to women isn’t clear – possibly because it was two women, Monckton and Elizabeth Vesey, who decided to ‘own’ it by calling their salon the Blue Stockings Society. James Boswell, biographer of Samuel Johnson (he of the Dictionary) went along to one of Monckton’s salons and noted that ‘her vivacity enchanted the Sage [i.e. Johnson], and they used to talk together with all imaginable ease.’ The novelist Fanny Burney was sceptical, describing Monckton in 1782 as ‘between thirty and forty, very short, very fat … [and] palpably desirous of gaining notice and admiration’, and Montagu as having ‘the air and manner of a woman accustomed to being distinguished, and of great parts’. So much for the sisterhood.

      If Johnson was happy to drink tea and chat with educated women, he still thought of them as essentially decorative; still believed, like most of his kind, that ‘a man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table than when his wife speaks Greek. My old friend Mrs Carter [a celebrated female linguist, who tutored her brother so that he, unlike her, could have the privilege of going to Cambridge] could make a pudding as well as translate Epictetus from the Greek and work a handkerchief as well as compose a poem.’

      Some feminist historians go so far as to argue that the Enlightenment – the period from the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries when intellectual discourse was dominated by thinking about human reason, science and our relationship to the natural world – didn’t benefit women at all: ‘Just as there was no Renaissance or Scientific Revolution for women, in the sense that the goals and ideas of those movements were perceived as applicable only to men, so there was no Enlightenment for women.’9

      Certainly, its defining philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his people-power bible The Social Contract (1762), declared that educated women were ‘unpleasing and unnecessary’. His influential novel Emile (1762) promoted his belief in biologically determined difference between the sexes, even recasting wit, the salonieres’ stock-in-trade, as a harmful vice: ‘A female wit is a scourge to her husband, her children, her friends, her servants, to everybody.’ Even if timidity, chastity and modesty were not innate female attributes, he argued in Letter to D’Alembert (1758) that ‘it is in society’s interest that women acquire these qualities; they must be cultivated in women, and any woman who disdains them offends good morals.’

      Passages such as this infuriated the English feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft – that ‘hyena in petticoats’, as the politician Horace Walpole called her. In just six weeks she bashed out the scrappy but momentous manifesto Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), its key goal the demolition of Rousseau’s arguments. ‘The first object of laudable ambition,’ she wrote, ‘is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex.’ Once women were given the same education as men, they could go on to be doctors and lawyers or run complex businesses, just as men did. Why, she thought, liberating women in this way would even make them nicer to be around! As she put it: ‘Would men but generously snap our chains, and be content with rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience, they would find us more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers – in a word, better citizens.’

      The process of intellectual stunting began in childhood, Wollstonecraft argued. Gender stereotyping had the effect of returning grown, mature women ‘back to childhood when they ought to leave the go-cart for ever’:

      Every thing that they see or hear serves to fix impressions, call forth emotions, and associate ideas, that give a sexual character to the mind. False notions of beauty and delicacy stop the growth of their limbs and produce a sickly soreness, rather than delicacy of organs; and thus weakened by being employed in unfolding instead of examining the first associations, forced on them by every surrounding object, how can they attain the vigour necessary to enable them to throw off their factitious character?

      By the 1790s, when Wollstonecraft was writing this, ‘bluestocking’ had become an insult and the fledgling women’s movement fatally associated with the ‘Jacobin’ values of revolutionary France. On 10 September 1797, at the age of just thirty-seven, Wollstonecraft’s chaotic, itinerant life ended after she gave birth to her daughter Mary, future author of Frankenstein, and developed septicaemia.

      The light of progress flickered only dimly. Some dedicated girls’ schools had been founded in the early eighteenth century, endowed by merchants and livery companies, but as a rule they focused on ‘accomplishments’ such as needlework rather than the kind of learning laid on for boys. Between 1785 and 1786 (when the money ran out), Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra studied at the Abbey School in Reading, a boarding school run by a Mrs La Tournelle who had a cork leg and a passion for theatre.

      It was probably similar to Mrs Goddard’s school as described in Austen’s 1815 novel Emma – ‘a real, honest, old-fashioned Boarding-school, where a reasonable quantity of accomplishments were sold at a reasonable price, and where girls might be sent to be out of the way and scramble themselves into a little education without any danger of coming back prodigies.’

      The loss of ground in the mid to late eighteenth century was a real blow for women. Even if she had acquired a smattering of education, the most an intelligent, independent-minded woman could hope for was to be a governess or a teacher or a ladies’ companion. As their husbands ventured out into the world and were rewarded for their thrusting virility, they would stay at home being chaste and docile, reading the sort of novels Jane Austen would later parody in her mock-gothic Northanger Abbey. This so-called ‘cult of sensibility’ seems to have been a very British phenomenon. As the critic and historian Janet Todd remarks: ‘Foreigners marvelled at the idleness thrust on English women, whose business was little more than coquetry in youth and motherhood or fashion in later years.’10

      For feminist academics Bonnie Anderson and Judith Zinsser, the early nineteenth century ‘marked the nadir of European women’s options and possibilities’.11 Paradoxically, though, by embracing the most traditional female virtues, women acquired a moral authority as the ‘consciences of society’ that they later put to radical use.

      The tradition of female radicalism and dissent ushered in by Mary Wollstonecraft would bear fruit in the new century – eventually. First, though, the relationship between men and women would have to become more equal as part of a broader process of social reform. Women would have to stop being virtuous and passive simply because it was expected of them. They would have to be able to divorce their husbands and seek legal redress in cases of abuse and rape.

      This started to happen as early as 1837 when a woman called Caroline Norton fought for the right to have access to (though not custody of – that would be a crazy idea!) her three young sons after walking out on her drunken, abusive husband, the MP and failed barrister George Chapple Norton. Her fastidiously detailed list of the obstacles married women encountered in existing law makes for grim reading:

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