Feminists versus gallants: Manners and morals in enlightenment Britain

Representations

Volumn 87, Issue , 2004, Pages 125-148

  Taylor, Barbara ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 43249185703     PISSN: 07346018     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rep.2004.87.1.125     Document Type: Article

References (115)

1. David Hume, "Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences," in Essays: Moral, Political and Literary (1741-52; Indianapolis, 1985), 133.
2. William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798; Harmondsworth, 1987), 231.
3. Mary Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794; hereafter French Revolution), in M. Butler and J. Todd, eds. , The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft (hereafter Works), 7 vols. (London, 1989), 6:6-7.
4. Eric Hobsbawm, On History (1997; London, 1998), 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, 1989)
6. 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, 1991), 6-128.
7. For more positive accounts, see Pauline Johnson, "Feminism and the Enlightenment," Radical Philosophy 63 (1993)
8. Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London, 2000)
9. Kate Soper, "Naked Human Nature and the Draperies of Custom," in Eileen Yeo, ed. , Mary Wollstonecraft and 200 Years of Feminism (London, 1997), 207-21.
10. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792; Cambridge, 1995), 74 (hereafter VRW).
11. For the complexities of Enlightenment ideas about gender, see Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor, eds. , Women, Gender, and Enlightenment (New York, forthcoming).
12. For a brief but illuminating discussion of the issues, see also Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1995).
13. Mary Hays, quoted in William St. Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family (London, 1989), 146.
14. Wollstonecraft, French Revolution, 15-23, 7.
15. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790; Cambridge, 1995), 64 (hereafter VRM).
16. Mary Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (1798), in Works, 1:115-16.
17. Wollstonecraft, VRW, 90.
18. For this, see Mary Catherine Moran, "Between the Savage and the Civil: Dr John Gregory's Natural History of Femininity," in Knott and Taylor, Women, Gender, and Enlightenment.
19. See my Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge, 2003), 98-110, for a discussion of the prowoman dimension of British Protestantism.
20. Moran, "Between the Savage and the Civil. " In VRW, Wollstonecraft is much gentler in her handling of John Gregory than of James Fordyce, acknowledging with "affectionate respect" the "paternal solicitude" that pervades Gregory's Legacy while insisting that she cannot "speciously support" his bad opinions (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.
21. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790; Indianapolis, 1987) 67.
22. Wollstonecraft, VRM, 25.
23. Wollstonecraft, VRW, 179.
24. John Dwyer, The Age of the Passions: An Interpretation of Adam Smith and Scottish Enlightenment Culture (East Linton, Scotland, 1999), 127.
25. Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, N. Y. , 1994), chap. 2.
26. 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, 1993), 106
27. [Judith Drake?], An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex, 4th ed. (London, 1721), 130.
28. The Spectator, ed. Gregory Smith, 4 vols. (London, 1958-1961, 1956), 1:33, 9.
29. Anthony A. Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711; Cambridge, 1999), 237.
30. Hume, "Arts and Sciences," 131.
31. The focus on chivalry was not confined to Scottish Enlightenment writings but was also to be found in literary criticism: e. g. , Thomas Walton, A History of English Poetry (1774-1781)
32. Richard Hurd, Letters on Chivalry and Romance (1762)
33. Thomas Percy Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765).
34. On this, see Lionel Gossman, Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment (Baltimore, 1968).
35. John Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (London, 1779), 78-79.
36. While virtually all Scottish historians concerned themselves with the impact of the civilizing process on women, their views on the matter were complex and diverse. For this see Silvia Sebastiani, "'Races': Women and Progress in the Scottish Enlightenment," in Knott and Taylor, Women, Gender, and Enlightenment
37. and also Sylvana Tomaselli, "The Enlightenment Debate on Women," History Workshop Journal 20 (1985): 101-24
38. J. Rendall, introduction to W. Alexander, History of Women, reprint of the 3rd ed. (Bath, 1994)
39. J. Rendall, "Tacitus Engendered: 'Gothic Feminism' and British Histories, c. 1750-1800," in G. Cubitt, ed. , Imagining Nations (Manchester, U. K. , 1998) 57-74.
40. A Clergyman of the Church of England [John Bennett], Strictures on Female Education (London, 1787), 33-34.
41. Shaftesbury correspondence; quoted in Brian Cowan, "Reasonable Ecstasies: Shaftesbury and the Languages of Libertinism," Journal of British Studies 37 (April 1998): 118.
42. James Fordyce, The Character and Conduct of the Female Sex, 2nd ed. (London, 1776), 7-8.
43. Millar, Origin of Ranks, 89.
44. Siep Stuurman, François Poulain de la Barre and the Invention of Modern Equality (Cambridge, Mass. , 2004).
45. William Alexander, The History of Women (London, 1779), 2:41, 36.
46. Alexander Jardine, Letters from Barbary, France, Spain, Portugal. (London, 1788), 1:320.
47. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40; Harmondsworth, 1987), 620-24. Pinning down what Enlightenment theorists mean by "female nature" is difficult, not least because - as Mary Catherine Moran pointed out to me in a personal communication - "nature" and "natural" had two meanings in Enlightenment narratives of civilization: "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 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 one meaning to another as it suits their purposes. "
48. Alexander, History (1779), 40.
49. Fordyce, Character of Female Sex, 24.
50. [Bennett], Female Education, 21-22
51. David Hume, "Of Refinement in the Arts" (1748), in Essays, 271.
52. Hume, "Arts and Sciences," 134.
53. For opposition to Lord Chesterfield, see Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society in Britain, 1660-1800 (Harlow, 2001), 78-80, 128-129
54. Michèle Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1996), 43-46.
55. Smith, Spectator, 3:191. In an unpublished paper, Michèle Cohen makes a related argument, tracing a shift from politeness to chivalry in the late eighteenth century: I am grateful to her for sharing these ideas with me.
56. Hume, "Refinement in the Arts," 271.
57. Millar, Origins of Ranks, 101-3.
58. Hume, "Arts and Sciences," 131-33.
59. David Fordyce, Dialogues Concerning Education (London, 1760), 87.
60. For an illuminating discussion of this work, see Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity, 46-50.
61. Vicesimus Knox, Essays, Moral and Literary (London, 1779), 2:362.
62. Fordyce, Dialogues, 107.
63. Jardine, Letters from Barbary, 1:323.
64. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751; New York, 1969), 221.
65. Moran, "Between the Savage and the Civil. "
66. Amanda Vickery The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England (London, 1998), 217.
67. See also Carter, Men and Polite Society, chap. 4
68. G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 1992), chap. 3.
69. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; Indianapolis, 1982), 209.
70. J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History (Cambridge, 1985), 114-18
71. Carol Kay "Canon, Ideology, and Gender: Mary Wollstonecraft's Critique of Adam Smith," New Political Science 15 (1986)
72. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, 1990).
73. See also John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1988).
74. Pocock, Virtue, 115.
75. Alexander, History (1779), 1:325.
76. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (London, 1992), 250.
77. See Vickery Gentleman's Daughter
78. Margaret Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680-1780 (Berkeley 1996)
79. Olwen Hufton, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe (London, 1995).
80. Dror Wahrman, "Percy's Prologue: From Gender Play to Gender Panic in Eighteenth Century England," Past and Present 159 (May 1998): 113-60.
81. For this, see Hunt, Middling Sort, 166-71
82. John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1997), 76-83.
83. Jane Rendall, "'Women that would plague me with rational conversation': Aspiring Women and Scottish Whigs, c 1790-1830," in Knott and Taylor, Women, Gender, and Enlightenment. Rendall discusses in detail the controversies aroused by women's involvement in Edinburgh Whig society.
84. Samuel Johnson, The Adventurer 115, Dec. 1753, in Works (London, 1958), 2:458.
85. 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, 1992)
86. Catherine Gallagher, Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820 (Berkeley, 1994)
87. Norma Clarke, The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters (London, 2004).
88. For "Amazonian" as an eighteenth-century "code word for female pride and gender crossing," see Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, 351-52, 377-80.
89. Shaftesbury correspondence, quoted in Cowan, "Reasonable Ecstasies," 118.
90. For an alternative view, emphasizing 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" (PhD diss. , University of California, Berkeley, 2004). Chernock's excellent thesis focuses on the minority feminist tendency of British Enlightenment.
91. Mary Hays, Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of Women (London, 1798), 116-17.
92. 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, 1986), 100.
93. Laura Runge, "Beauty and Gallantry: A Model of Polite Conversation Revisited," Eighteenth-Century Life 25 (2001): 43-63.
94. Karen O'Brien points out, however, that in the later part of the eighteenth century the word "chivalry" unlike "gallantry," elicited a positive response from some literary women, including Elizabeth Montagu, Clara Reeve, and Hannah More, who saw it as "embed[ding] respect for women within a wider system of morality public responsibility and philanthropy. " Wollstonecraft's cynicism about such usages was later echoed by John Stuart Mill, who in 1826 dismissed chivalry as "nine tenths" gallantry, and argued that such "fopperies" indicated no real "solicitude for [women's] welfare"; Karen O'Brien, "Introduction: Sexual Distinctions and Prescriptions," in Knott and Taylor, Women, Gender, and Enlightenment.
95. Anne Frances Randall [Mary Robinson], A Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Mental Subordination (London, 1799), 1.
96. Wollstonecraft, VRM, 16.
97. Wollstonecraft, French Revolution, 61.
98. Wollstonecraft, VRM, 39.
99. Wollstonecraft, French Revolution, 183, 220.
100. General Magazine and Impartial Review 4 (1791): 26
101. Wollstonecraft, VRW, 240.
102. Godwin, Memoirs, 231.
103. For a discussion of this, see Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft, introduction and chaps. 5 and 7.
104. Wollstonecraft, VRW, 133.
105. Wollstonecraft, VRW, 188.
106. Gerald P. Tyson, Joseph Johnson: A Liberal Publisher (Iowa City, 1979), 118.
107. Mary Wollstonecraft, Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796), in Works, 6:248.
108. Quoted in Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstoncraft (Basingstoke, U. K. , 1992), 147.
109. George Dyer, letter to Mary Hays, n. d. , in A. F. Wedd, The Love Letters of Mary Hays (London, 1925), 238.
110. Recalling good times spent at Joseph Johnson's home, Anna Barbauld described her fellow radical literati as "a chosen knot of lettered equals"
111. Anne Janowitz, "Amiable and Radical Sociability: Anna Barbauld's 'Free Familiar Conversation,'" in G. Russell and C. Tuite, eds, Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770-1840 (Cambridge, 2002), 71.
112. Mary Hays, "Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft," in The Annual Necrology, 1797-1798 (London, 1800), 411.
113. For a discussion of this, see Taylor, Wollstonecraft, epilogue.
114. 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, 1983), xxiii.
115. Cicely Hamilton, Marriage as a Trade (1909; London, 1981), 23.