Bluestockings (4 page)

Stillingfleet’s tendency to eccentricity was shared by other members of the group. The very idea of a female’s opinion actually mattering to the intelligentsia was unconventional, for a start. The historian Catherine Macaulay (1731–91) was one of the highest-profile members of the coterie (or ‘petticoterie’, as one wit put it); she was definitely strange, inviting Samuel
Johnson’s footman to dine with her, and marrying a man nearly half her age. But she was famous, well connected, and indisputably clever; her idiosyncrasies spiced the image of the whole circle. At least she
did
marry: a reputation for ostensible moral virtue was still a
sine qua non
in English high society, and the true Bluestockings always held that dear. Polymath writer Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806) was another member of the group, with essayists Catherine Talbot and Hester Chapone; later the playwright Hannah More joined, novelist Fanny Burney, and – a little jealously on the periphery – poet and diarist Hester Thrale.
³

Macaulay and More were largely responsible for allying the Bluestockings’ image to applied education. Though neither woman experienced extensive schooling herself, both strongly advocated reforms in the teaching of girls, and the establishment of more and better schools. Supported by the ‘Colledge’ tag, the implication that Mrs Montagu’s Mayfair mansion had become an exclusive, if rather perverse, academic institution quickly took root.

A correspondence emerged in the literary press about how far this university idea should go. In March 1773, a new Vice-Chancellor was installed at Oxford (the Prime Minister, Lord North), and as part of the celebrations honorary degrees were awarded to Sir Joshua Reynolds and Hester Thrale’s first husband, Henry. It was reported that a saboteur had also been present during the ceremony: a
woman
, dressed as a man, had outrageously got herself awarded a degree. This apocryphal incident caused much merriment in the papers, but also sparked off a serious debate about whether or not ‘Academical Ladies’ like the Bluestockings should formally be recognized. ‘Learning is not confined to Sex,’ decided one commentator in the
Westminster Magazine
, ‘nor have the men, in my opinion, any exclusive right to those honorary distinctions in Literature,
which they so insolently arrogate to themselves.’ The writer went on to urge Oxford and Cambridge – the only English universities at the time – to ‘make an innovation in their academical Laws in favour of… ingenious and learned Ladies, whom custom excludes from a College education’, and to make them ‘Mistresses of Arts’.
⁴

These ‘ingenious and learned Ladies’ (‘ingenious’ meaning witty) certainly worked hard enough; harder than most real undergraduates at the time. Elizabeth Carter’s studies, for example, sound like some ghastly never-ending essay crisis. She was a Kentish girl, the daughter of a clergyman with a love of languages. He passed this on to Elizabeth, and though she was eager to learn, and teach her younger siblings, she never found it easy. But learning was her sacred vocation, she insisted. She would work obsessively to overcome what she perceived to be her slowness, to achieve God’s bizarre purpose for her. In her anxiety to acquire French, German, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and an understanding of mathematics, music, and natural science, she drove herself dangerously hard on a few hours’ sleep a night. This gave her sickening migraines, which she would feverishly try to soothe by binding wet cloths around her head and stomach. She chewed green tea leaves and sucked raw coffee beans to avoid drifting off when the headaches subsided. She even began snorting powdered tobacco, or snuff, on which she quickly became dependent (to her father’s horror), not only to work, but to function at all.

The journalist Dilys Powell talked of wrapping her head in a wet towel to keep awake for work while an undergraduate at Oxford in the 1920s; caffeine is still a student’s staple, and it is every parent’s nightmare that their son or daughter should sink under academic pressure into addiction. The pressure Elizabeth Carter faced was entirely self-inflicted. Yet it bore
fruit and she did become a famous intellectual, her career crowned by the publication in 1758 of Epictetus’
Complete Works
in translation. She wrote poetry, too, and – significantly – a version of Francesco Algarotti’s Italian edition of Sir Isaac Newton’s
Philosophy Explain’d for the Use of the Ladies
(1739). All her life it mattered overwhelmingly that she should fulfil her own academic potential – but sadly, it only mattered to her. By the time she died in 1806, she was publicly remembered as ‘very learned, very excellent, and very tiresome’.
⁵

There may have been solidarity among Bluestockings, but once the novelty of listening to clever female celebrities had worn off by the beginning of the nineteenth century, public respect turned to ridicule. The suggestion that they be awarded honorary degrees was a step too far. Performing intellectual tricks was fine, but infiltrating the Establishment was not acceptable. Regency frothiness began to suffuse polite society, and revolution first in America and then France bred distrust of anything too radical at home. Jane Austen tried a gentle voice in educating her readership about intelligent women, but few noticed the message.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) was more strident. In her
Vindication of the Rights of Woman
, published in 1792, she wrote passionately about the state of political, cultural, and moral degradation to which her sex had been reduced. According to her, women were wilfully imbued by society with a warped, ignorant sense of duty designed to corrupt their emotional and intellectual potential. They were more like cats than sentient beings, trained to purr at men in return for the odd stroke and a saucer of cream. Give them
education
, she pleaded. Let them learn for themselves what is true and good. Emancipate them. Real wisdom and virtue are rooted in intellectual liberty (since God is good); when
women’s minds are properly developed, their souls will flourish too. So will men’s, ‘for the improvement must be mutual, or the injustice which one-half of the human race are obliged to submit to retorting on their oppressors, the virtue of man will be worm-eaten by the insect whom he keeps under his feet’.
⁶

Perhaps, had Wollstonecraft been more subtle, her arguments might have carried more clout. They were certainly well founded. In fact, the main objection to her theories stemmed not from her politics, but from her probity. Piety in a woman excused much, as the Bluestockings realized. Everyone knew (since she hardly bothered to hide it) that Mistress Wollstonecraft was living with a man not her husband and had a bastard daughter. What is more, she had once tried to commit suicide: the ultimate sin. And witty ladies were fine as long as they limited themselves to cultural pursuits. A clever woman with a cause was dangerous. What could the
Vindication
be but the meretricious rantings of a fallen woman? In retrospect, Wollstonecraft’s brave book appears a feminist masterpiece, well ahead of its time. She was regarded by her contemporary audience, however, as a dangerous iconoclast apt, if taken seriously, to set the world aflame.

Despite the indulgence given to the Bluestockings, and the lone voices of their intellectual predecessors, it seems that by the beginning of the nineteenth century while learning and ingenuity in a man were popularly taken to be assets, in a true woman, or ‘lady’, they were seen as flaws. The author Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Elizabeth Montagu’s cousin by marriage), famous for her almost freakish intelligence, had said as much in the 1750s when offering bitter advice on the education of a daughter. Under no circumstances, she warned, should the girl ever admit to intellectual curiosity. Instead, she must

conceal whatever learning she attains, with as much solicitude as she would hide crookedness or lameness: the parade of it can only serve to draw on her the envy, and consequently the most inveterate hatred, of all he and she fools, which will certainly be at least three parts in four of her acquaintance.
⁷

So what was the ideal, the goal of a girl’s so-called education? Almost the same in 1800, depressingly, as it had been for centuries. According to the Bible’s blueprint, in Proverbs 31, the true, womanly woman was principally an instrument of influence, a conduit of modesty and simplicity of heart for her husband and children. She readily aroused her husband, but no one else; spun and cooked, day and night, to save money; was meek yet strong, silent yet wise, utterly submissive, yet the cornerstone of the household.

Not surprisingly, a woman like this was rarer than rare; her price ‘far above rubies’. It made sense to commentators on religion and teaching before the Renaissance for men not to waste energy searching for the gems, but concentrate on avoiding the dross: the toxic majority of womankind.

After the first creation of man the first wife of the first Adam sated the first hunger by the first sin, against God’s command. The sin was the child of Disobedience, which will never cease before the end of the world to drive women tirelessly to pass on to the future what they learned from their mother. My friend, a disobedient wife is dishonour to a man: beware.
⁸

There was no discussion of formally educating women. Why bother? It would be like pouring God’s precious gift of knowledge into a cracked vessel. That is not to say that no women
were
educated. Certain local heroines were excused Eve’s inheritance. Abbess Egeria produced the earliest piece
of autobiography by a woman in a series of letters home to her Pyrenean convent from the Holy Land in the 380s: her writing is witty, well informed, and beautifully descriptive. The Christian convert Fabiola opened a hospital in Ostia in 390, where she practised surgery. Hypatia of Alexandria (
c.
355–415) lectured on maths and astronomy at the university there. There are several outstanding scholars like these, remembered now for their wisdom as well as their learning, and allowed then to shine in small worlds still free from the inky stain of misogyny that grew – ironically – with the spread of (male) literacy.

In England, the leading light was Hild (614–80). Still considered the unofficial patron saint of women’s education, Hild, deeply eligible and of royal descent, was baptized in 627, and preferred to become a nun than to marry. This was not an unusual choice, since convents were rich in young ladies deposited by wealthy families as moral investments. It was a convenient arrangement. Perhaps there were too many daughters in the family and the local marriage market was flooded, or maybe some were less obviously attractive or more wayward than others and so unlikely to make an advantageous match. Convents benefited from the dowries such girls brought with them; their families secured a constant stream of prayers on their behalf, and the girls themselves acquired (if they were lucky) an education.

Even so, it took some strength of character for a king’s niece to opt out of the world. Hild had a genuine vocation; her religious conviction together with a graceful intellectualism and political awareness brought her to the attention of Bishop Aidan, who commissioned her to run a convent and adjoining monastery in Hartlepool in Northumbria. Thus, remarkably, Hild was in charge of the minds and souls of men as well as women. After her transfer to Whitby, at the request
of King Oswy she hosted the first ever synod of English bishops. She was responsible for the education of five future bishops at the school attached to her convent, and for the education of hundreds of nuns, too, in arts as well as sciences.

It was people like Hild, quietly working away in religious houses throughout Europe, who inspired those calling for women’s education so eloquently during the Renaissance. In a Europe-wide literary debate, the
Querelle des Femmes
(the ‘Woman Question’), which spanned several decades of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, men of letters (and the odd lady) fired arguments at each other about the nature of woman. Did she have a soul? Any sort of intellect? The Latin for woman is
mulieris
, which means soft-minded, and the old guard – scholars like Jean de Meun and Giovanni Boccaccio – followed the teachings of Aristotle and Ovid on the matter, assuming women feeble and treacherous, biologically deformed and morally corrupt. An idealized lady might be an interesting literary or artistic device, but apart from procreation, she had no worthwhile purpose.

The new Humanists, on the other hand, allowed women more potential. Erasmus and his sympathizers were more Platonic; they saw in women a chance to improve mankind as a whole, and argued that the first teachers of men’s sons – their mothers – should be better equipped for the job.

Real-life role models of feminine scholarship began to emerge during the Renaissance, celebrated for their virtue and dignity as well as their intelligence. Novella d’Andrea (d. 1333) lectured in law at her father’s university in Bologna (while meekly sitting behind a screen so as not to distract the students). Her compatriot Christine de Pizan (
c.
1364–
c.
1430) is acknowledged as the first professional woman writer in Europe, and was an ardent, sensitive feminist. She took part in the
Querelle
herself in
The Book of the City of Ladies
(1405), a long allegorical argument for women’s freedom, and
The Book of Three Virtues
(also 1405), about how a woman should behave in order to do herself and others justice. Intelligence, in women as well as men, merited careful husbandry, she advised, and should be cherished.

Sometimes it was. The medieval and early Tudor period in England was rife with businesswomen, tradeswomen, and female estate managers. They were taught (or picked up) literacy, numeracy, and the habit of independent thought, usually within the family. There was no system of formal education for girls outside convent walls until the late sixteenth century. By then, personal tutors were occasionally engaged by wealthy and progressive fathers for their daughters. Thomas More’s girls were famously ‘ingenious’ and learned; so was Queen Elizabeth in her youth. The princess remained fond of her tutor, Roger Ascham, all his life. ‘I would rather have cast ten thousand pounds into the sea than be parted from my Ascham,’ she wrote on his death in 1568, and he genuinely admired her princely talent for improvement, marvelling at her masculine ‘constitution of mind’ and capacity for languages, including French, Italian, Latin, and Greek.