ScottiSh
hiStorical
review
Monograph
Gender and
Enlightenment Culture
in Eighteenth-Century
Scotland
Rosalind Carr
GENDER AND ENLIGHTENMENT CULTURE IN
EIGHTEENTH-­­CENTURY SCOTLAND
SCOTTISH HISTORICAL REVIEW
MONOGRAPHS SERIES
No. 22
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Physicians, Surgeons and Apothecaries: Medicine in
Seventeenth-­Century Edinburgh
Land for the People? The British Government and the
Scottish Highlands, c. 1880–1923
Herds and Hinds: Farm Labour in Lowland Scotland,
1900–1939
The Kingdom of the Isles: Scotland’s Western Seaboard,
c. 1100–1336
Church and Theology in Enlightenment Scotland: The
Evangelical Party, 1740–1800
Unionist-­Nationalism: Governing Urban Scotland,
1830–1860
The Radical Thread: Political Change in Scotland. Paisley
Politics, 1885–1924
The Second Disruption: The Free Church in Victorian
Scotland and the Origins of the Free Presbyterian Church
Men of Law in Pre-­Reformation Scotland
‘Rebellious and Contrary’: The Glasgow Dockers,
c. 1853–1932
Labour in Glasgow, 1896–1936, Socialism, Suffrage,
Sectarianism
The Late Medieval Scottish Parliament: Politics and the
Three Estates, 1424–1488
‘Shaken Together in the Bag of Affliction’: Scottish Exiles
in the Netherlands, 1660–1690
Land, Faith and the Crofting Community: Christianity
and Social Criticism in the Highlands of Scotland,
1843–1893
Ireland, Radicalism and the Scottish Highlands,
c. 1870–1912
Famine in Scotland: The ‘Ill Years’ of the 1690s
Gender and Political Identities in Scotland, 1919–1939
The Sutherland Estate, 1850–1920: Aristocratic Decline,
Estate Management and Land Reform
Scottish Ethnicity and the Making of New Zealand Society,
1850–1930
‘Of Laws of Ships and Shipmen’: Medieval Maritime Law
and its Practice in Urban Northern Europe
The Scots in Victorian and Edwardian Belfast: A Study in
Elite Migration
Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-­Century
Scotland
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GENDER AND ENLIGHTENMENT
CULTURE IN EIGHTEENTH-­
CENTURY SCOTLAND
ROSALIND CARR
© Rosalind Carr, 2014
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
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Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
Contents
Acknowledgementsvi
List of Abbreviationsviii
1
2
3
4
Introduction: Gender and Scottish Enlightenment Culture
Masculinity, Homosociality and Intellectual Culture
Women and Intellectual Culture
Urbane and Urban Sociability in Enlightenment Edinburgh
Enlightened Violence? Elite Manhood and the Duel
Conclusion
1
36
73
102
142
175
Bibliography180
Index197
2
Women and Intellectual Culture
A partial presence
Women were neither entirely absent nor fully present in Scottish
Enlightenment culture. It would be ludicrous to suggest that women
existed in a cloistered domestic sphere, but it is also incorrect to assume
that women’s public presence equated to a sort of liberation. Women
were never invisible in the Enlightenment, but their participation was
constrained by gender. Significantly, their inclusion was dependent upon
the performance of a femininity that acted to limit the extent of their
participation. In Capital of the Mind (2003), a popular history of eighteenth-­
century Edinburgh, James Buchan asserts that ‘the eighteenth century was
the women’s century in Scotland’, citing the decline in religious superstition, improvements in public health, increased economic prosperity, and
the emergence of domesticity.1 It is undeniable that certain aspects of
eighteenth-­
century improvement benefited women, but it is a massive
leap to claim that it was ‘the women’s century’. As the previous chapter
illustrated, Scottish Enlightenment intellectual culture was largely a male
culture. Whatever the changes to a woman’s social position in eighteenth-­
century Scotland, these did not empower her to fully participate in the
century’s epistemological revolution.
Complex analyses of the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment on
women have been developed by feminist historians, and this chapter
follows the groundbreaking work of scholars such as Jane Rendall, who
has written extensively on women in Scottish Enlightenment ideology
and women’s place in intellectual and political life.2 In the last few years,
1
2
John Buchan, Capital of the Mind: How Edinburgh Changed the World (London: John Murray,
2003), 241.
See, for example, Jane Rendall, ‘Virtue and commerce in the making of Adam Smith’s
political economy’, in Ellen Kennedy and Susan Mendus (eds), Women in Western Political
Philosophy: Kant to Nietzsche (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1987), 53–71; Jane Rendall, ‘Clio, Mars
and Minerva: the Scottish Enlightenment and the writing of women’s history’, in Tom
Devine and John Young (eds), Eighteenth Century Scotland: New Perspectives (East Linton:
Tuckwell, 1999), 134–51; Jane Rendall, ‘“Women that would plague me with rational
conversation”: aspiring women and Scottish Whigs, c. 1790–1830’, in Sarah Knott and
Barbara Taylor (eds), Women, Gender and Enlightenment (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2005), 326–42; Jane Rendall and Sue Innes, ‘Women, gender, politics’, in Lynn Abrams,
74
Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
Rendall’s work has been followed by a proliferation of scholarship on
women, Enlightenment, and Scottish society, including studies of women’s
reading practices, women’s writing, women’s position in Scottish polite
society, and analysis of their negotiation of enlightened patriarchal domesticity.3 Building upon this scholarship, this chapter examines women’s
limited participation in the public intellectual culture of Enlightenment; it
will explore the obscurity surrounding women’s participation and address
the distinctive character of gendered intellectual culture in Scotland,
­particularly in comparison with England.
As discussed in the Introduction, many historians of women and the
Enlightenment emphasise the ways in which this period created a space for
female intellectual endeavour, and Sylvana Tomaselli and Karen O’Brien
both make strong arguments for the British Enlightenment as a significant
precursor to nineteenth-­century feminism.4 However, if we consider the
Scottish experience as distinct from the English, a different and more
complicated picture emerges. Tomaselli and O’Brien both convincingly
argue that Scottish Enlightenment historiography attributed a cultural
role to women by depicting them as symbols of social progress, and from
this women were eventually able to claim cultural and political agency.
However, the British women who obtained a voice in the Enlightenment,
and especially those who forged a feminist voice, were English women.
In this context, a key issue remains to be addressed in the historiography
of gender and the British Enlightenment, namely, the impact of Scottish
Enlightenment ideology on women’s access to intellectual culture in
Scotland itself. This has been a long neglected topic, and has led to unwarranted similarities being drawn with experiences of women elsewhere in
the European Enlightenment, with Margaret Jacob citing both Paris and
Edinburgh as evidence of the Enlightenment’s long-­term positive impact
on women, despite the very different political and religious contexts of
the French and Scottish enlightenments, and their differently gendered
compositions.5 To combat the predominant disregard in historiography
of Scottish women’s experience of Enlightenment intellectual culture, this
chapter will address the reasons as to why women’s presence in Scotland
was a partial one.
3
4
5
Eleanor Gordon, Debbi Simonton, and Eileen J. Yeo (eds), Gender in Scottish History since
1700 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 43–83.
Pam Perkins, Women Writers and the Scottish Enlightenment (Rodopi: Amsterdam, 2010);
Katharine Glover, Elite Women and Polite Society in Eighteenth-­Century Scotland (Woodbridge:
Boydell, 2011); Mark Towsey, ‘“Observe her heedfully”: Elizabeth Rose on women writers’,
Women Writers 18(1) (2011) 15–33; Katie Barclay, Love, Intimacy and Power: Marriage and
Patriarchy in Scotland (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011).
Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘The Enlightenment debate on women’, History Workshop Journal 20(1)
(1985) 101–24; Karen O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-­
Century Britain
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Margaret C. Jacob, ‘The mental landscape of the public sphere: a European perspective’,
Eighteenth Century Studies 28(1) (1994) 95–113.
­
Women and Intellectual Culture
75
To begin, I will explore two manifestations of women’s involvement in
public intellectual culture, examining changes and continuities between
the Fair Intellectual Club, formed in 1717, and the Pantheon and Dundee
public debating societies that operated during the 1770s. Placing these
associations in the broader context of women’s access to knowledge, I
then discuss women’s education and their participation in Enlightenment
through reading and writing. This participation rarely extended to publishing, and the final section of this chapter will consider the importance of
place as well as space with an examination of female authors Jean Marishall
and Joanna Baillie. Chronologically this chapter encompasses the early
eighteenth century through to the early nineteenth century. Between 1750
and 1790, decades commonly viewed as the era during which the Scottish
Enlightenment was at its height, there is little evidence of public female
intellectual engagement beyond women’s attendance at public debating
societies and the notable but atypical example of Marishall’s published
interventions. After 1800, there was a rapid expansion in women’s publishing, with this late Enlightenment development exemplified by the career
of Baillie.
In her illuminating study of women writers in Edinburgh during the
late Enlightenment, Pam Perkins represents women’s publishing in the
early nineteenth century as evidence of a continuation of an eighteenth-­
century public female role.6 I present an alternative chronology; rather
than continuity, women’s publishing in the early nineteenth century
indicates a significant transformation of Scottish intellectual culture. In
the eighteenth century, and especially between 1750 and 1800, Scottish
intellectual culture was manifestly male. Women were involved in informal, tea-­
party intellectual conversation, but they were excluded from
intellectual clubs and their contribution to print culture was negligible.
Women published work such as poetry during these decades, but as
Perkins herself points out there was ‘no outpouring of fiction by Scottish
women in the second half of the eighteenth century compared to that
by Englishwomen’.7 Only in the early 1800s did female writers such as
Elizabeth Hamilton orientate themselves towards the Scottish capital, and
this orientation suggests a major cultural shift as Scotland entered the
nineteenth century.
The Enlightenment public sphere that is examined in this book was
an urban public sphere comprising people from the upper and middling
ranks of society. Women’s predominant exclusion from elite intellectual
associational culture examined in the previous chapter, did not equate
to their exclusion from the public sphere broadly defined. Women have
always been active in some sort of public space, whether that was the
Church, the royal court, the marketplace, or elsewhere. The clearest
6
7
Perkins, Women Writers, 22–36.
Ibid., 21.
76
Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
example of an historical continuity of women’s public participation in
Scotland, at least from the sixteenth century, is women’s economic participation. They worked as shopkeepers, innkeepers, or traders; in the textile
industry, in agriculture, and coal mining; as midwives, and as lodging-­house
keepers, washerwomen, and brewers.8
In eighteenth-­century Edinburgh many houses and shops were joined,
and so there was no clear demarcation between home and public life. In
addition, many jobs brought women out of even this semi-­public space; for
example, merchant women often traded at markets.9 For women of the
social elite, urban improvement provided new spaces for participation in
public culture. Indeed, time spent in Edinburgh or London participating
in the social circuits of visiting, balls, and promenading was deemed to
be an essential component of the education of elite young Scotswomen.10
In the next chapter I will investigate the gendering of urban sociability,
including a study of assemblies and the theatre, two spaces in which women
were prominent actors. In this chapter I consider why, if women were not
­closeted in a domestic sphere, they were not able to access most public
intellectual space. In doing so, I address the impact of feminine gender
identity in limiting women’s participation in intellectual culture, where
throughout the century their presence remained largely rhetorical.
Female associations
In 1720, a pamphlet was published in Edinburgh entitled An Account of
the Fair Intellectual Club in Edinburgh: In a Letter to a Honourable Member of the
Athenian Society there. By a young Lady, the Secretary of the Club. This had been
published after men belonging to the Athenian Society requested that the
members of the Fair Intellectual Club give a public account of their club. In
the resulting pamphlet the Fair Intellectual Club is represented as similar
to many male clubs: their membership was secret; they had an initiation
ritual (the requirement that new members, ‘shall entertain the club with
a written Harangue’); they charged a membership fee of 10 shillings; and
had a limited membership of nine.11 Men were excluded from the club and
only unmarried women were welcome to join, with marriage ­mentioned
8
9
10
11
Christopher A. Whatley, ‘Women and the economic transformation of Scotland c. 1740–
1830’, Scottish Economic and Social History 14 (1994) 25–31; R. A. Houston, ‘Women in the
economy and society of Scotland 1500–1800’, in R. A. Houston and I. D. Whyte (eds),
Scottish Society 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 122; Rosalind
K. Marshall, Virgins and Viragos: A History of Women in Scotland from 1080–1980 (London:
Collins, 1983), 148–54.
Elizabeth Sanderson, Women and Work in Eighteenth-­
Century Edinburgh (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1996), 14, 40, 101.
Glover, Elite Women, 33–44.
Anon., An Account of the Fair Intellectual Club in Edinburgh: In a Letter to a Honourable Member
of the Athenian Society there. By a young Lady, the Secretary of the Club (Edinburgh: J. McEuen,
1720), 8.
­
Women and Intellectual Culture
77
alongside death as something that could act to ‘remove any member from
our club’.12
In this pamphlet, the Fair Intellectual Club is represented as an organisation that recognised a clear gender division with regard to intellectual pursuits. The author herself (although it is anonymous I am assuming female
authorship) is self-­deprecating on the basis of her gender, writing: ‘Without
troubling you or my self with any other Apology for the Rudeness that must
certainly appear in the Composure of a Woman, so little accustomed to
write, I shall proceed directly to the purpose in hand.’13 That women may
not be as skilled at writing as men is here claimed to be a result of their lack
of experience, suggesting that gender inequalities, whilst accepted, were
considered by the author to be socially constructed.
It was women’s lack of knowledge and experience in intellectual matters
that the Club hoped to address. The women’s motivation in forming the
group is summed up in the statement:
We thought it a great Pity, that Women, who excell a great many others
in Birth and Fortune, should not also be more eminent in Virtue and
good Sense, which we might attain unto, if we were as industrious to
cultivate our Minds, as we are to adorn our Bodies.14
In this text, women’s lack of intellectual engagement is not blamed on
men’s exclusion of women from the world of letters, but upon women’s
focus on fashion and beauty instead of virtuous intellectual pursuits.15
In the pamphlet, the group is depicted not only through the author’s
narration, but also through the reproduction of the initiation speeches of
two members, Mrs M— H— and Mrs M— B—. Although listed as Mrs they
would have been unmarried, as marriage would have barred them from
membership. In the speech of Mrs M— H— the intellectual achievements
of the members are celebrated, and linked to the practice of female virtue.
The achievement of virtue through learning was obtained by the members
of the Fair Intellectual Club via the study of religious literature, primarily
the New Testament, and the reading of ‘proper books’, which included
George Halifax’s Advice to a Daughter (1688), Richard Lucas’s An Enquiry
After Happiness (1685–96) and Bishop John Tillotson’s Sermons (1682).
They also read periodicals including the Tatler, Spectator, and Guardian.16
According to Mrs M— H—, the members’ sociable reading and other
12
13
14
15
16
Ibid., 9.
Ibid., 2.
Ibid., 3.
This argument is similar to that expressed by Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the
Rights of Women (1792). Catherine Macaulay in Letters on Education (1790) also emphasised
that women’s vices were due to education and environment, and argued for equal moral
education for men and women. See Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in
Britain, France and the United States, 1780–1860 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985).
Anon., Fair Intellectual Club, 16–18.
78
Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
intellectual pursuits resulted in them learning history, geography, and
arithmetic.17
The members of the Fair Intellectual Club aimed to increase women’s
knowledge, but they did not aim to usurp men or attain gender equality.
As the author stated, ‘we neither go out of our Sphere, nor have acted
inconsistently in what we have done’.18 By inconsistent she appears to be
referring to actions that may have been considered as incompatible with
the member’s feminine gender. In Mrs M— H—’s speech, when she refers
to the members’ practice of reading ‘proper books’ she qualifies this with
the statement:
Tho’ the Circumstances of Life make these less our Study, than of the
Male sex, yet the Propensity we find in our Natures to read, and the
Improvements some of our kind have made by Study, may satisfy us
that it is an Injustice to deprive us of those Means of Knowledge.19
This statement suggests an acceptance of the gendered division of social
roles, while challenging the assumption that this division meant that
women should not engage in rigorous intellectual activity. Instead, this
activity is represented as necessary to their role in life as ‘Women and
Christians’.20 In depicting womanhood in this way, Mrs M— H— negates
the connection between femininity and irrationality. Although women’s
femininity is assumed, women are also referred to as possessing the ‘Light
of natural Reason’.21 In this text, femininity is inclusive of rationality.
Despite her argument for women’s natural rational abilities and the
necessity of female intellectual engagement, Mrs M— H— also employs the
notion of a clear gender differentiation with regard to intellectual pursuits.
As she states: ‘A great many Things may be studied by the Male Sex, which
tho’ we may also be capable to pursue them, don’t properly concern us.’22
The gender differentiation accepted by Mrs M— H— is depicted as one
based upon socially constructed roles, rather than on an innate difference
in the intellectual abilities of men and women. Women have the ability
to study the same subjects as men, but their role in life means that there
is no need for them to pursue these subjects, thus rendering the subjects
masculine.
The women of ‘birth and fortune’ discussed in the Fair Intellectual Club
pamphlet were of elite status and would have existed within the culture
of politeness.23 That the pamphlet was written at the request of members
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
Ibid., 19.
Ibid., 4.
Ibid., 17.
Ibid., 18.
Ibid., 13.
Ibid.,14.
Their social position was similar to that of women later in the century who partook of
Enlightenment culture via polite society. See Katharine Glover, ‘The female mind: Scottish
­
Women and Intellectual Culture
79
of the Athenian Society indicates that the women of the Fair Intellectual
Club were involved in a shared culture with the male intellectual elite. The
domestic and social performance expected of these women within the
culture of politeness required them not only to have a basic level of education and skills in household management, but also to be able to converse
at a certain intellectual level in a mixed-­sex social setting.24 Although the
importance of femininity to men’s development of refinement resulted in
women’s predominant exclusion from the intellectual-­political sphere, it
also allowed limited access to Scottish Enlightenment intellectual culture
to women of the social elite.
The intellectual engagement of the women of the Fair Intellectual Club
is represented in the pamphlet as allowing them to assert their role in the
processes of improvement. Like the homosocial societies and clubs examined in the previous chapter, the members of the Fair Intellectual Club
sought improvement through sociable intellectual interaction. According
to the narrator, the club was established in 1717 by ‘three young ladies’
who proposed that ‘we should enter into a Society, for Improvement of
one another in the Study and Practice of such Things, as might contribute
most effectively to our Accomplishment’.25 This self-­improvement appears
to have been the means by which the members both claimed and asserted
their place within the culture of politeness. As it did for men, inclusion
within this culture provided a means to assert their ‘civilised’ North
Britishness. As Mrs M— H— asserted at the beginning of her speech, ‘I
appear before a Club of the most polite Ladies in North Britain.’26
Women formed informal intellectual networks across the eighteenth
century, but I have found no evidence of any club or society similar to the
Fair Intellectual Club operating during the mid-­to late eighteenth century.
In fact, there appears to be a chasm with regard to women’s organised
intellectual engagement between the 1720s and 1800s. However, this idea
of a gap may not be wholly accurate; it may be that women were excluded
from the associational culture in eighteenth-­century Scotland from its early
emergence. It is quite possible that the Fair Intellectual Club is a literary
invention.
It is unclear as to whether the pamphlet An Account of the Fair Intellectual
Club is an account of what was in fact a real club, or is instead using the
concept of a female club to present an argument for women’s inclusion
in the emerging intellectual culture of urban Scotland. Davis D. McElroy
includes the Fair Intellectual Club in his history of eighteenth-­century
24
25
26
Enlightenment femininity and the world of letters. A case study of the Fletcher of Saltoun
family in the mid-­eighteenth century’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 25(1) (2005)
1–20.
For Scottish moralists on this issue, see John Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse: Sensibility and
Community in Late Eighteenth Century Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1987), 119–24.
Anon., Fair Intellectual Club, 3.
Ibid., 12 (original emphasis).
80
Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
Scottish clubs, and cites an essay written in 1724 by Aaron Hill that refers
to the club, and which was published Hill’s periodical The Plain Dealer.27
The 28 August 1724 edition of The Plain Dealer includes a letter sent to
Hill by Fergus Bruce. This letter conveyed an image of Edinburgh’s polite
intellectual society for Hill’s (mainly) English readers. In it Bruce discusses
Edinburgh’s coffeehouse culture, writing that ‘Our Coffee-­Houses take in
your Papers, and I observe, with Pleasure, the Welcome which our politest
People receive them with. Not the men alone of all Ranks, but the Ladies
also, make them their Entertainment.’28 Bruce’s letter presents an image of
Edinburgh polite society in the 1720s as one where women of the elite were
actively engaged in intellectual culture. That he is referring to elite women
is suggested by the emphasis that men ‘of all Ranks’ are engaged in coffeehouse culture, whilst women are referred to only as ‘Ladies’. Whether
he is suggesting that women were present in the coffeehouses, or only that
they were reading the texts available in coffeehouses, is unclear. It does,
however, suggest a climate in which a club such as the Fair Intellectual
Club could exist. This is supported by Hill’s response to Bruce, in which he
announced:
Not the Gentlemen alone, but the very Ladies, of Edinburgh, form
themselves into select, and voluntary, Societies, for the Improvement
of their Knowledge, instead of the Entertainment of their Fancy: And
go on, at the same Time, to refine their Conversation, inrich [sic]
their Understanding, and polish and render amiable, their Personal
Deportment.29
Hill’s observation of women’s participation in intellectual culture was
based on Bruce’s letter and information he had received about the Fair
Intellectual Club. On this club he writes that they are, ‘A Club of Ladies, at
Edinburgh, who set a pattern to Female Excellence.’ He then announces that
he has the rules and constitution of the club, with the ‘Address of Mistress
Speaker, to the lovely Sisterhood; and the admissory Speech, of one of the
Ladies.’30 This is almost certainly the pamphlet published in Edinburgh
in 1720 and discussed above. Therefore, Hill’s comments cannot be used
to verify the club’s existence. They do, however, depict a world in which
women’s participation was notable, but not abnormal.
Whether the Fair Intellectual Club existed or not, it remains evidence of
women’s participation in the early stages of the eighteenth-­century printing revolution. This is not only due to an assumption of female authorship
of the pamphlet, but also to the publication of poems by women in The
27
28
29
30
Davis D. McElroy, Scotland’s Age of Improvement: A Survey of Eighteenth Century Literary Clubs
and Societies (Pullman, WA: Washington State University Press, 1969), 21.
Aaron Hill, The Plain Dealer, Being Select Essays on Several Curious Subjects, . . ., Published
Originally in the Year 1724, 2 vols (London: J. Osborn, 1724), i, 391.
Ibid., 393 (original emphasis).
Ibid., 396 (original emphasis).
­
Women and Intellectual Culture
81
Edinburgh Miscellany published by the Athenian Society in 1720, one or
more of whom identified themselves pseudonymously as a member of the
Fair Intellectual Club.31 These poems could suggest that the club did in
fact exist, or it may just be that they were written by the same author(s) who
wrote An Account of the Fair Intellectual Club.
The Edinburgh Miscellany, a publication of poetry and literary and other
essays, contained seven poems by women, none of whom gave their
name.32 Although a number of men publishing in the Miscellany also did so
anonymously, the fact that none of the women gave their names suggests
that access to print culture in the emerging public sphere was gendered.
Women were obviously recognised by some men as having intellectual
ability, and some of these men, including the members of the Athenian
Society, believed that women’s writings should be published. However, the
practice of publishing anonymously suggests a culture that was hostile to
women’s public writing. Many eighteenth-­century Scottish women would
write pieces, such as biographical memoirs that were intended as public
pieces, but were not intended for publication, and manuscripts would often
be passed between friends. The avoidance of printed publication of work
by women extended to women such as Alison Cockburn, who was engaged
in correspondence and social interaction with leading figures of the literati, and in addition had a close friendship with David Hume.33 Although
Cockburn formed and expressed her opinions through ­correspondence,
she only published a few of her songs and poems.34
Three of the seven works by women in the Miscellany were published
by two women using the respective designations ‘a young Lady of the Fair
Intellectual Club’ and ‘a Member of the Fair Intellectual Club’, and the use
of this designation can be read as an attempt by these women to assert
their intellectual credentials.35 Two of the poems were written by ‘a young
Lady’, and are essentially romantic works, the first on the subject of a marriage between a lord and a lady.36 The poem by ‘a Member’ is also a romantic piece, being a lament for the loss of innocence and freedom of love, and
an argument for people’s natural inclination to assert their freedom with
regard to love and desire.37
Whether it existed in reality or only in text, the Fair Intellectual Club
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
McElroy, Age of Improvement, 20.
W.C., The Edinburgh Miscellany: consisting of original poems, translations, &c., By various hands,
Vol. 1 (Edinburgh: J. McEuen & Co., 1720).
Dorothy McMillan, ‘Selves and others: non-­fiction writing in the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries’, in Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan (eds), A History of Scottish
Women’s Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 72, 78–81.
John Dwyer, ‘Cockburn, Alison (1712–1794)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
(Oxford University Press, September 2004; online edition January 2008), available at:
http://www.oxforddnb.com/index/101005766/Alison-­Cockburn, accessed 1 June 2012.
Edinburgh Miscellany, 158, 187 (original emphasis).
Ibid., 158–61.
Ibid., 187–8.
82
Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
suggests that during the early decades of the eighteenth century women
were claiming a space within the emerging intellectual public sphere in
Scotland. By the mid-­eighteenth century, when institutions such as the
Select Society and the Literary Society were operating, women are almost
entirely absent from intellectual associational culture. I can find no evidence of intellectual clubs or societies in Scotland that accepted women as
members or participants in the decades between the 1720s and the 1770s.
This absence must be recognised as a fundamental feature of the development of Scottish Enlightenment culture. In intellectual societies women
were present as objects of discussion, but not as subjects in the debate.
Yet women did not remain entirely excluded for long. In the 1770s, the
formation of public debating societies provided an opportunity for female
participation in public discussion of popular philosophical and political
questions. Women did not speak in these debates, however.
Public debating societies
The formation of public debating societies in the 1770s represents a
democratisation of intellectual culture in Scotland. They were democratic
spaces because they were accessible to anyone who could afford to purchase a ticket of entry. This accessibility meant that they became a popular
form of entertainment.38 Their democratic nature also made them more
accessible to women. Female participation in this heterosocial intellectual
culture is illuminated in a series of letters about the Dundee Speculative
Society published in the Weekly Magazine.39 The first letter, published on
27 January 1774, consists of a glowing account of the Society, stating that:
‘Amongst the various entertainments of this place, the Speculative Society
claims pre-­eminence.’40 Casting the Society as a benefit to the town of
Dundee, the author states that ‘it hath become the resort of great numbers
who feast on the knowledge and ingenuity of the speakers’.41 Representing
the Society in this way, the author specifies distinct roles and benefits for
female and male participants. On women’s attendance he writes: ‘Tribes
of females, deserting the card table, flock thither, and acknowledge the
­superiority of philosophy.’42
Significantly, women are depicted as learning from men, but they are
never described as participants who actively contribute to the debates. The
positioning of women as able to understand and benefit from exposure to
38
39
40
41
42
McElroy, Age of Improvement, 87–9; Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800: The
Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 119.
The Weekly Magazine, or Edinburgh Amusement. Containing the Essence of all the Magazines,
Reviews &c. With a Variety of Original Pieces (Edinburgh: Wal & Tho Ruddiman, 1774), vol.
23.
Ibid., 159.
Ibid.,159.
Ibid., 159.
­
Women and Intellectual Culture
83
philosophy, but incapable of full participation is achieved by the author
through his emphasis on the inferior nature of female sociability. Women
who have been occupied with cards cannot hope to engage with men on
the same intellectual level, but the fact that they are ‘deserting the card
table’ holds open the possibility that they can improve their intellectual
capabilities.
In the author’s illustration, male participation in the Speculative Society
is figured very differently to women’s. Men are depicted as taking an active
role, and this role is, in turn, represented as bringing them a benefit
directly related to their expected public role in society at large. As the
author declared: ‘Here the young men are trained up in oratory and graceful deliverance, and afterwards become an ornament to the great council
of the nation.’43 Young men’s participation in the debates of the Society
is portrayed as a means by which they can learn the art of public speaking,
a skill necessary for many of the professions in Scotland, such as law or
the Church. It also enabled them to perform gentility. A crucial aspect of
men’s development of public-­speaking skills was their adoption of a manly
‘graceful deliverance’. This development of refinement is also represented
as a patriotic act. By developing skills in public speaking, the men of the
Dundee Speculative Society could become useful members of the nation.
That women’s and men’s participation in mixed-­sex debating societies
was highly gendered is illustrated by the specific social norms enforced
within these societies. The meetings of the Speculative Society were
self-­consciously respectable events. As the author of the letter describes:
‘Drinking entereth not the walls of this society, and Harmony and Good Order
keep the porch.’44 Homosocial institutions such as the Select Society
also enforced similar strict rules of behaviour, intended to encourage the
performance of male refinement. However, the emphasis on decorum
and rules regarding things such as alcohol consumption in mixed-­
sex
societies also needs to be read in the context of a general social discourse
of politeness in which men’s performance of refinement was considered
necessary to uphold feminine virtue. Perceptions of female delicacy, and
ideas regarding the homosocial nature of drinking and combative intellectual interaction, meant that heterosocial intellectual institutions in urban
Scotland were self-­consciously spaces for polite interaction, which may have
more closely resembled assemblies than they did homosocial institutions.
The Weekly Magazine letter discussed above drew an excessively positive
picture of the Dundee Speculative Society, and it elicited a condescending response from a man writing as B.C., who accused the members of the
Society of authoring the previous letter (which was probably true) and then
attacked the intellectual abilities of the Society’s members, writing:
43
44
Ibid.
Ibid., 159 (original emphasis).
84
Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
this speculative body consists of men without education, and even
without that natural vigour of understanding that might make their
want of education a subject of regret – whose reading has been confined to the perusal of an invoice – and whose compositions have not
extended beyond the drawing out of an account.45
This attack on the credentials of the members of the Dundee Speculative
Society was founded upon the idea that they were all merchants, and as
such they did not have the appropriate educational background to properly
engage in intellectual debate. The democratisation of intellectual culture
through public debating societies challenged the ownership of this culture
by the highly educated metropolitan elite. In the case of the Dundee
Speculative Society, in addition to class, their peripheral geographical location was a factor in their unequal place in Scottish Enlightenment culture.
The membership of the Society, listed in the 1783 Dundee Register, is less
illustrious than that of more exclusive intellectual societies in Edinburgh,
but does include two esquires and the city’s provost, John Pitcairn. Three
reverends of the Church are also listed as members. The social and occupational background of these men makes it likely that they had obtained
a university education, and thus cannot be easily cast as operating outwith
B.C.’s narrowly defined learned world.46 All the other members are designated only as ‘Mr’, making it difficult to ascribe them to a specific social
class or profession. That B.C. chose to depict the members as merchants
highlights a discourse that excluded the merchant class from intellectual
culture. Until an earlier membership list is found, it is difficult to ascertain whether landed gentleman and clergymen were always included as
members, or whether their inclusion was a response to criticisms such as
those levelled by B.C.
Rather than forming an alternative intellectual sphere, the questions
debated in Dundee’s Speculative Society illustrate a desire to claim a space
in the same culture as that occupied by organisations such as the Select
Society of Edinburgh. This is just one example of the process of emulation of the metropolis by peripheral urban centres towards the end of the
eighteenth century.47 Yet B.C.’s letter suggests that this was not always a
welcome development. B.C. depicts the men of the Speculative Society
as having knowledge of money only, while he identifies himself as a man
of status, possibly of the gentry or the learned professions. This is made
explicit at the end of the letter when B.C. addresses them in Latin, and
assuming that they will not understand it, apologises for doing so.48 B.C.’s
letter demonstrates that the boundaries of public intellectual culture were
45
46
47
48
Ibid., 223.
Dundee Register (1783), pp. 41-­42.
Bob Harris, ‘Cultural change in provincial Scottish towns, c. 1700–1820’, Historical Journal
54(1) (2011) 105–41.
The Weekly Magazine, 223.
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Women and Intellectual Culture
85
determined not only by gender, but by status also. B.C. denied that the
Speculative Society members had a legitimate place in Scottish intellectual
culture because they were merchants who lacked the classical education of
gentlemen. This class-­based argument was deeply intertwined with B.C.’s
gender prejudice, and he claimed:
The disputes of such untutored rhetoricians may afford entertainment
to the tribes of females who have honoured them with their presence, but
can scarcely be regarded as a model for those whose eloquence has a
more important destination.49
The debate in The Weekly Magazine did not end with B.C.’s letter. On 24
February 1774, a man calling himself D.M. issued a reply defending the
popular nature of the Dundee Speculative Society. D.M. claimed that B.C.’s
letter was: ‘An ungenteel, an [sic] malicious and virulent attack on a body
of men in this place, equally destitute of truth or wit.’50 This debate was not
only a contestation of the social boundaries of public intellectual culture,
but also the boundaries of gentility. Rather than based on socioeconomic
status, gentility is to be proven by knowledge and conversation; D.M. thus
adopts B.C.’s emphasis on learning as a marker of status and turns it against
him. Gentility becomes not so much a matter of socioeconomic status, but
of wit. By accusing B.C. of launching an ‘ungenteel attack’, D.M. is claiming
gentility on behalf of the Speculative Society. Considered in this context,
it is likely that the presence of women at the debates was intended as a
marker of civility, rather than as a signal of intellectual insignificance, as
depicted by B.C.
As in England, women’s participation in public debating societies was
assisted by the discourse of women’s civilising influence, which in turn led
to an increased acceptance of women in public spaces.51 Yet this access
to public debating societies for women was not automatic. In Edinburgh,
women gained access to the Pantheon Society only after they demanded it.
McElroy writes that the Pantheon was the first society in Scotland to hold
debates as a form of public entertainment, and audiences often numbered
between 100 and 300.52 The first meeting was held on 23 December 1773,
and the Society met fortnightly at St Giles Lodge.53 In the ‘Laws of the
Pantheon’ it was stated that each member ‘may introduce to the Meeting
of the Society for public Debate four Gentlemen’.54 This law implied that
women were excluded from attending the debates. Although more publicly
49
50
51
52
53
54
Ibid. (original emphasis)
Ibid., 278 (original emphasis).
Anna Clark, ‘Women in eighteenth-­century British politics’, in Knott and Taylor (eds),
Women, Gender and Enlightenment, 573; Mary Thale, ‘Women in London debating societies
in the 1780s’, Gender & History 7 (1995) 7–9.
McElroy, Age of Improvement, 87–94.
‘Pantheon Debating Society Minutes’, GUL Sp Coll MS Gen. 1283.
Ibid., 1.
86
Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
accessible than formal and elite institutions such as the Select Society,
the Pantheon Society’s initial exclusion of women casts them as a similar
type to the homosocial societies discussed in previous chapter. However,
unlike those elite societies, women demanded admittance to the Pantheon
Society.
This demand occurred publicly in The Weekly Magazine in the form of
a poem by a woman calling herself Miss J.S., and entitled On hearing the
Members of the pantheon had resolved to admit no Ladies into their Society:
The eastern prophet did exclude
All women from his heaven;
And in our time a dread concord
By Pantheonites is given,
“That now no fair shall entrance find
“Into the learned hall”
As Sallique law precludes the sex
From ruling over Gaul
But, gods! beware, perhaps ere long
You sorely will repent;
We can debar you access too;
’Tis time then to relent.55
By referencing Salic law, J.S. places the Pantheon Society’s exclusion of
women in the context of an historical denial of women’s access to power.
She warns the Society’s ‘gods’ (an obvious reference to the members’
use of the word Pantheon) that if they do not repent and allow female
access, women will cease to engage with them.56 Probably referencing
Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (411 bc), this appears to be a thinly veiled threat
that women will cease to have sexual relations with men if they continue to
exclude them from public intellectual culture. Also, the publication of the
poem indicates some fluidity in the gendered boundaries of Enlightenment
culture, demonstrating female incursion into the printed public sphere.
This printed incursion led to physical female access. J.S.’s demand for
women’s attendance at the debates of the Pantheon Society was heeded by
the Society’s members, and at a General Meeting of the Society on 3 January
1775 it was ‘Unanimously agreed to admit Ladies to hear the debates of the
Society.’57 At the following meeting 200 people were present, including
an unspecified number of women. The question of debate was ‘Whether is
the Prodigal or the Miser the most pernicious to Society?’ Women’s presence was considered to be an occasion of importance; prior to the debate’s
start, ‘Mr Tait rose up and delivered an address to the Ladies in Verse.’58
55
56
57
58
Weekly Magazine, vol. 23, 306.
Ibid., 306.
‘Pantheon Debating Society Minutes’, 3 January 1775.
Ibid., 12 January 1775.
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Women and Intellectual Culture
87
The manuscript minutes show that from 1775 onwards, women were always
present at the fortnightly public meetings of the Society, their numbers
varying from less than a third to almost half the audience. At each of these
meetings women voted alongside men on the night’s question.59
Membership of the Pantheon Society gave a person the right to distribute tickets, to attend the members’ meetings following the debates, and
to propose and vote on motions relating to the Society. Membership in
the society was exclusively male, and this both created and maintained the
dominance of the male voice in the Society. The ‘Laws of the Pantheon’
ruled that to become a member a man needed to have ‘delivered his
Sentiments publicly in the Society on three Questions which have been
debated’. Once admitted to membership of the Society, the member was
required to ‘at least once a month deliver his Sentiments Publickly upon
the Questions in Debate’.60 Women did not speak publicly in the debates of
the Pantheon. There was no rule against women speaking, but their silence
demonstrates the power of gendered discourse over women’s participation
in public space; women did not speak because the performance of femininity precluded it.
The successful demand for female access to the intellectual-­political
public sphere in the context of female inclusion in the Pantheon Society
supports arguments regarding the positive impact of Enlightenment discourse and culture on women’s status in society.61 Yet the cultural and
institutional restrictions placed on women’s participation should not be
downplayed. Here it is important to interpret women’s limited participation in the intellectual culture of the Scottish Enlightenment in the context
of a longer history of women’s political participation. Women of wealth and
status could participate in the debates over the Act of Union at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and some, such as Anne Hamilton, duchess
of Hamilton, had influence in the Scottish Parliament despite being physically absent from it.62 Although lacking a parliament as a focus of female
political influence after 1707, noblewomen’s public role continued across
the eighteenth century. As I have discussed elsewhere, Jane Maxwell,
duchess of Gordon developed close relationships with male literati such as
Lord Kames. As a landed woman, Gordon was able to participate directly in
the material project of agricultural improvement, and her reputation as an
improver gained her inclusion in Enlightenment social circles.63
The example of the Duchess of Gordon illustrates the impact of social
59
60
61
62
63
Ibid.
Ibid., ‘Laws of the Pantheon’.
Margaret C. Jacob, ‘The mental landscape of the public sphere: a European perspective’,
Eighteenth-­Century Studies 28(1) (1994) 106.
Rosalind Carr, ‘Female correspondence and Early Modern Scottish political history: a case
study of the Anglo-­Scottish Union’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 37(2) (2011)
39–57.
Rosalind Carr, ‘Women, land and power: a case for continuity’, in Katie Barclay and
88
Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
rank on women’s participation in Enlightenment culture. For middling
women it was through the public sphere of debating societies and published texts that they were able to participate in intellectual and political
culture. Peter Clark asserts that a major impact of the development of clubs
and societies was the role of these institutions in allowing people access
to regular political experience, either within organisations, for example,
gaining experience in administration, or via the organisation in the wider
political sphere, such as lobbying activity.64 In Scotland, this avenue of
political agency was open to men to a much greater extent than it was to
women. It remains the fact that women did not speak at the debates of
the Dundee Speculative Society and the Pantheon Society. The impact
of their participation can therefore be considered as less than that of the
women who participated in London debating societies of the 1780s. In
London societies women publicly spoke alongside men, and a number of
female only debating societies were formed, such as La Belle Assemblée.65
However, although they did not speak, women at the Pantheon Society did
vote upon each meeting’s question of debate. This act of voting in a period
of extremely limited franchise for both men and women can be read as
an act that asserted the participants’ political agency. The minutes of the
Pantheon Society record the results of each meeting’s vote upon the question taken at the end of the debates. Sometimes the exact number of votes
in favour or against is recorded and very occasionally women and men’s
votes are listed separately.66
In a letter published in The Weekly Magazine on 10 August 1775, seven
months after the admission of women to the Pantheon Society, the author
discusses the society and women’s participation in it.67 Ostensibly written
to transmit information from Edinburgh about the Pantheon Society to
the author’s friends in a populous country town, as ‘it was intended to
institute one or more of the same kind [debating society] in our town’, the
letter provides a useful first-­hand account of the Society.68 In this letter
the author describes the functions of the society, and emphasises its democratic character, writing that ‘visitors have an equal right with members to
speak and vote upon every question that is proposed to be publicly debated
in that society’.69 Discussing access to the Society’s debates, the author
writes that ‘two hundred tickets are divided amongst the members to give
to their acquaintances, as well ladies as gentlemen, for their admission as
64
65
66
67
68
69
Deborah Simonton (eds), Women in Eighteenth-­Century Scotland: Intimate, Intellectual and
Public Lives (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013).
Clark, Clubs and Societies, 465.
Thale, ‘Debating societies’, 10–17.
‘Pantheon Debating Society Minutes’.
Weekly Magazine, vol. 29, 203–5.
Ibid., 203.
Ibid., 204.
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Women and Intellectual Culture
89
visitors’.’70 Attendance at the Pantheon often exceeded 200, particularly
towards the end of the 1770s. The minutes state that in January 1775 the
Society had determined that the popularity of the debates and the distribution of an indefinite number of tickets meant that: ‘the house was so
crowded as to render it disagreeable to the Speakers & dangerous to the
health; Therefore it was unanimously agreed to by the Society that the
tickets (including Ladies tickets) should never exceed 200’.71
The reference to ‘Ladies tickets’ in the above excerpt reveals differences
in the admittance of men and women. This is supported by the August
1775 Weekly Magazine letter, in which the author records that after paying
six pence to the waiter for a ‘mutchkin of rum and a glass’, a gentleman
‘may take his seat in any place of the room he pleases, except the seats allotted for the ladies, who pay nothing and are also treated by the members
with fruits in season’.72 According to the minutes, in June 1779 the Society
decided its funds were sufficient enough that it could supply fruit to all
visitors, but this was quickly rescinded on 1 July 1779, when members
agreed ‘that to prevent the Society’s Expenses exceeding their Income the
Oranges should in future be given to the Ladies only’.73 The practice of
giving women fruit when men were given rum is symbolic of the adoption
of a discourse of gender dichotomy. Oranges were an expensive product,
and so the giving of them to women can be read as a celebration of their
presence. It also ascribes a greater gentility to women than to men, something that is compounded by the simultaneous practice of giving men rum,
a rougher product deemed to be unsuitable for female consumption. Here
in miniature is the broader social process by which feminine women were
placed on a pedestal. This celebration of sexual difference acted to deny
women’s equal participation not just in the Pantheon Society, but in the
public sphere overall.
Despite the gendering of participation, the women attending the
Pantheon Society are depicted in the Weekly Magazine letter as active participants. Describing the 20 January 1775 debate on the question, ‘Whether
lenient or coercive measures would be the most effective method of terminating the differences betwixt Great Britain and her colonies?’, the author
discusses the arguments put forward by the speakers. These included the
idea that ‘Britain has been at an enormous expense of blood and treasure
in supporting the colonies against their enemies’, thus the colonies would
be ungrateful ‘to refuse subjection to the Parliament of Great Britain.’
Opposing arguments are also discussed, such as ‘that the dignity of the
crown was indeed at stake by endeavouring to change the government
of the colonies’, and that coercive measures ‘only served to embitter the
70
71
72
73
Ibid., 203–4.
‘Pantheon Debating Society Minutes’, 26 January 1775.
Weekly Magazine, vol. 29, 204.
‘Pantheon Debating Society Minutes’, 1 July 1779.
90
Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
minds of the people past all hopes of reconciliation’.74 Discussing the result
of the vote at the end of the debate, the author wrote:
it was carried by a majority of nine, that coercive measures were the
most prudent means of terminating the differences between Great
Britain and her colonies. It was remarkable that most of the ladies, a
very genteel company of near forty of whom were present, voted for
coercive measures: so fond are the fair sex of power.75
This comment on women’s voting employs a notion of gender difference, and draws on gender stereotypes concerning women’s passion and
tendency towards unreasonable, undemocratic power. Yet it also serves
to highlight women’s autonomous intellectual and political action when
voting at Pantheon Society debates.
Further information on women’s voting patterns can be gleaned from
the Society’s minute book. For example, on 26 January 1775, the second
meeting to which women were admitted, the Society debated the question
‘Whether is a nation in a state of Barbarity, or a nation in a state of Luxury
and refined manners the happiest?’. Although the majority attending voted
for ‘Barbarity’, it is recorded that ‘Ten Ladies were present who appeared to
listen with unusual attention to the debates & when their votes were called
they voted unanimously for a state of Refinement.’76 This suggests not only
a willingness on the part of female participants to form their own opinions
and go against majority opinion, but also hints at the adoption by women
of Scottish Enlightenment discourse regarding gender and progress. As
discussed in the Introduction, the discourse of progress emphasised that
only in a society governed by the social norms of refinement could women
become the companions of men rather than their slaves or idols. These
ideas are likely to have encouraged the women attending the Pantheon
Society debate to vote for ‘refinement’. That the majority of men present
voted for ‘barbarity’ reminds us that Scottish Enlightenment ­discourse,
however dominant, was always contested.
Like elite intellectual societies, the Pantheon Society was concerned
with philosophical questions regarding society and the nation; questions
of this nature included, ‘Can the principle of virtue be long preserved
in a Commercial State?’ (debated 23 March 1775, majority yes) and ‘Has
real patriotism or Self Interest produced the Greatest number of public
spirited & heroic nations’ (debated 13 December 1776, majority for
‘real patriotism’).77 Similarly to the Select Society, ideas of gender were
central to these debates. For example, the question, ‘Whether is youth,
manhood or old age the happiest period of life?’ (debated 21 June 1775),
74
75
76
77
Weekly Magazine, vol. 29, 204.
Ibid., 205.
‘Pantheon Debating Society Minutes’, 26 January 1775.
Ibid., 23 March 1775, 13 December 1776.
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Women and Intellectual Culture
91
suggests an intellectual engagement with the stages of the male life cycle.
The acceptance of manhood, the full acquirement of masculine identity,
as a stage of life rather than as a life-­long bodily identity demonstrates a
continuity with early modern ideas of manhood.78 Exactly what constituted manhood was also debated in the Society; on 6 February 1777, they
discussed the question, ‘Is courage natural to man or can it be acquired
by Experience or length of time?’. According to the minutes: ‘A greater
number of speakers delivered their sentiments on this Question than on
any former and it carried that Courage was natural to man.’79 The popularity of this question shows an active intellectual engagement with issues of
the inherent, learnt, and socially constructed nature of manhood. That the
majority voted in favour of courage being natural to man reflects the dominant ideology that certain aspects of masculinity, and by extension gender
difference, were natural.
The importance of mixed-­sex sociability was also a subject of debate
at the Pantheon Society. On 14 January 1779, they asked ‘Whether the
company of learned men, or that of the Ladies tends most to the improvement of youth?’ The records state that although at least nine out of twelve
speakers were in favour of the company of ‘Ladies’, the majority vote
was in favour of ‘learned men’. This vote demonstrates that there was no
consensus on the issue of the benefits of female influence, and that ideas
regarding the importance of homosociality remained prominent in late
eighteenth-­century Edinburgh.
At the Pantheon Society women were not simply objects of debate, as
they had been at the Select and Literary societies, yet their participation
was gendered. The discursive gender dichotomy that facilitated women’s
participation is present in the use of the labels ‘ladies’ and ‘learned men’
in the question debated on 14 January 1779. This implies that ‘ladies’
possessed certain characteristics which differentiated them from ‘learned
men’, such as delicacy and emotionality. It was these feminine characteristics that were perceived to have a positive influence on men’s development of refinement, as they were what (in theory) made women more
sympathetic and less self-­interested than men.80 ‘Learned men’ are thus
able to be placed in dichotomous opposition to ‘ladies’ and inferred to
possess exclusively masculine rational abilities. In this discursive context it
is u
­ nsurprising that women did not speak in debates.
On 15 February 1776 the Pantheon Society debated ‘Is it consistent with
good policy to have Ladies for Soveraigns?’. According to the minutes for
that meeting:
78
79
80
Ibid., 21 June 1775; Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 22–3.
‘Pantheon Debating Society Minutes’, 6 February 1777.
Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse, 117–18.
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Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
it was carried by a great majority, that females ought not to be troubled with Soveraignty [sic], and that their Eminence over the Men
was Sufficiently powerful, without their deviating from that line of
Conduct which was evidently destined them by Providence to act in, all
the Ladies present, except two, were of the same opinion.81
Here women’s eminence over men in the home is decreed to be more
important than power in the political sphere. This domestic power
was accessible to middling and gentry women in a way that familial
political influence never was, and it may be for this reason that all of the
women present, except two, agreed that women should not be sovereigns. Marriage too was a question of debate in the Society, illustrating
the importance placed on the domestic sphere. One such debate, on the
question ‘Whether should Love or Money, have the greatest influence in
forming the Matrimonial connection?’ was held over two meetings on 10
and 17 December 1778 and attracted 348 people the first night and 406
the second.82 On the second night, for which male and female attendance is minuted separately, 180 women and 226 men attended. Reflecting
women’s obvious interest in questions of marriage and domesticity, this
figure is above the average for female attendance numbers.83 At this debate
a woman presented an address, the only time it is recorded that a woman
did so. According to the minutes, the woman did not literally speak, but
‘The anonymous Sentiments of a Lady were read by Mr Anderson which
had been sent to him the day before; they were received by the audience
with every mark of respect and applause.’84 In this instance, as in so many
others, the anonymous woman was simultaneously present and absent in
Scottish public intellectual culture.
Reading, writing and publishing
Women also participated in Scottish Enlightenment culture through
reading the books, periodicals, and other texts generated by this epistemological revolution. As Katharine Glover has discussed, women’s education
and reading were crucial to constructions of feminine identity in Scottish
Enlightenment culture (especially for women of the social elite). Through
the reading of newspapers and periodicals, novels, and intellectual texts
such as philosophy and history, these women claimed a space in the intellectual culture of Enlightenment.85 This was not necessarily a feminist challenge to women’s subordination, but rather endorsed the Enlightenment
view that women should be educated so as to converse intelligently with
81
82
83
84
85
‘Pantheon Debating Society Minutes’, 15 February 1776.
Ibid., 10 December 1778, 17 December 1778.
Rendall, ‘Virtue and commerce’, 53–71; Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse, 95–113.
‘Pantheon Debating Society Minutes’, 17 December 1778.
Glover, Elite Women, 50–78.
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Women and Intellectual Culture
93
men. Despite the cultural limitations on women’s intellectual agency,
the growth in print culture and education did permit female access to
Enlightenment thought, and alongside public debating societies, education facilitated the spread of ideas from elite institutions and associational
culture to other sectors of society.
Although often conducted in domestic space, reading was not a wholly
private activity. Rather, it allowed women to perceive of themselves as
members of a world of letters.86 As the social world of Alison Cockburn
demonstrates, women’s participation in domestic sociability gave them
access to the literary world. This intellectual participation illuminates the
public character of domestic space, and shows that when it was combined
with sociability, reading could engender a form of intellectual agency.
Katharine Glover’s examination of female reading practices demonstrates
that, despite women’s relative absence from the physical manifestations of
intellectual culture in Scotland, they were present as active readers. This was
not an accidental offshoot of a publishing revolution; rather, the assumption that women were possessed of a greater sensibility led male literati to
desire female opinion on their texts, with women deemed able to assess a
text’s impact on a reader’s sympathetic response. It was this that motivated
William Robertson to solicit Margaret Hepburn’s opinions on his History
of Scotland (1759), and Hume to seek Katherine Caldwell’s response to his
History of England (1754–62). This was not a one-­way process; for writers
such as Hume, history was deemed an appropriate subject for women’s
intellectual endeavour, with figures from the past able to elicit emotional
responses that would improve women, making them virtuous as well as
intellectually conversant.87
Other Enlightenment literati also sought intellectual correspondence
with women, such as Henry Mackenzie who regularly corresponded with
his cousin Elizabeth Rose of Kilravock, in the Scottish Highlands. Rose was
an avid reader, selectively recording extracts from texts in a commonplace
book. In addition to her family’s large library, she borrowed books from
the libraries of neighbours and friends. It is also possible that she borrowed
books from local circulating libraries established in the final decades of
the eighteenth century.88 As Mark Towsey has argued, subscription libraries provided women and men beyond the intellectual elite with access
to the intellectual products of the Enlightenment through book borrowing. This process through which the Enlightenment permeated broader
society was deemed by those involved to be essential to improvement. As
with Haddington’s Gray Library, the majority of members of subscription
libraries tended to belong to the professional classes who had accessed university education, and thus had prior exposure to Scottish Enlightenment
86
87
88
Glover, ‘The female mind’, 1–20.
Glover, Elite Women, 67–78.
Towsey, ‘“Observe her heedfully”’, 15–33.
94
Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
thought. However, these men, and often their female relatives, were joined
by men and women of the merchant and artisan classes.89 As with other
elites, for Rose the use of public libraries was a supplementary form of book
acquisition, but for those without access to the family libraries of landed
gentry they provided an important means of access to the print revolution.
In addition to access to knowledge via booksellers and circulating libraries, men and women could further the parish or burgh school education of their childhood through private education in schools established
in people’s homes.90 In 1760, Simon Glendinning operated a school
on the first stair above Halkerston’s Wynd, ‘for teaching Ladies and
Gentlemen Writing and Arithmetick’.91 As illustrated by Glendinning’s
school, Edinburgh’s private schools tended to offer education in specific
subjects. For example, many schools provided English teaching, and some
offered foreign languages, such as Mr and Mrs Mitchell who ran a ‘French
Boarding School for Young Ladies’ in a room in the Covenant close, or
Signor Nicolosi who lodged at Miss Sutherland’s in Monteith Close and
planned to open a school teaching French and Italian.92 The existence of
schools offering instruction in continental languages, as well as dancing
and fencing masters, alongside those offering practical training in crafts
such as sewing, indicates that urban education was multifaceted. It is also
suggests that through this informal education system, women and men
lacking elite birth could learn polite accomplishments.
For cultural commentators such as William Creech, the character of
female education was a measure of society’s moral state. Believing a moral
collapse to have occurred between 1763 and 1783 due to a rise in luxury,
Creech cited the fact that whereas previously ‘the sewing-­
school, the
pastry-­school, were then essential branches of female education’, in 1783
‘the daughters even of tradesmen’ spend their time ‘strolling from the
­perfumer’s to the milliner’s’ and ‘when she is disengaged from public or
private amusements, in improving her mind from the precious stores of a
circulating library’. Creech does not oppose women’s intellectual pursuits,
but he sees their abandonment of education focused on domesticity as a
cause of moral corruption, arguing that ‘too many of the young women
assume the meretricious airs and flippancy of courtezans [sic]’.93
89
90
91
92
93
Mark Towsey, ‘“All partners may be enlightened and improved by reading them”: the distribution of Enlightenment books in Scottish subscription library catalogues, 1750–c.1820’,
Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 28(1) (2008) 20–43; Vivienne S. Dunstan, ‘Glimpses
into a town’s reading habits in Enlightenment Scotland: analysing the borrowings of Gray
Library, Haddington, 1732–1816’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 26(1) (2006) 42–59.
On plebeian education in eighteenth-­century Britain, see Deborah Simonton, ‘Women
and education’, in Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (eds), Women’s History Britain,
1700–1850 (London: Routledge, 2005), 37–41.
Caledonian Mercury, 17 November 1760.
Caledonian Mercury, 5 November 1760; Edinburgh Evening Courant, 14 April 1762.
[William Creech], Edinburgh Fugitive Pieces (Edinburgh: William Creech, 1791), 84–5.
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Women and Intellectual Culture
95
Edinburgh’s urban geography facilitated female education, but provided
only limited space for women to enter print culture as writers. A primary
reason for this was the exclusion of women from intellectual associational
culture. As discussed in the previous chapter, there was a symbiotic relationship between this world and the published output of the Scottish
Enlightenment. That women’s exclusion from elite intellectual societies
obstructed their contribution to print culture is further demonstrated
by the comparative example of the London Bluestocking circle, which
­provided a form of female intellectual patronage.94 In Scotland, women did
not fully enter the world of publishing until the final decade of the eighteenth century, and this corresponded with increased female involvement
in intellectual associational culture.
The first clear example of organised female intellectual-­political activity in Scotland occurred in the late 1790s. Jane Rendall has shown that
during this period women became involved in radical Whig politics and
the intellectual activity surrounding it. The radical discourses of moral,
social, and material progress allowed for the active participation of women,
although still to a limited extent. The women involved in this political
culture included the daughters of the historian John Millar and the physician William Cullen, men who had both been active in the homosocial
world of the urban literati earlier in the century. The radical Whig women
of the 1790s also included Eliza Fletcher, famous for her autobiographical
description of Edinburgh’s literary and political world during her lifetime;
and Elizabeth Hamilton, a novelist and theorist on education. A Tory,
Anne Grant of Laggan, author of Letters from the Mountains (1809), was also
associated with these female intellectual networks. This network formed
a cluster of female contributors to the political and intellectual culture of
the late Enlightenment period in Scotland, both with regard to published
work and intellectual sociability. According to Rendall, Eliza Fletcher’s
house was a centre for Enlightenment sociability and an important space
for radical Whig political networking. Like the Bluestockings of mid-­to late
eighteenth-­century London, this culture of intellectual sociability enabled
women to establish intellectual and political networks among themselves as
well as with men.95
Carla Hesse has argued that the Bluestockings of England found cultural
heiresses in the social and intellectual networks fashioned by the women of
the late Scottish Enlightenment examined by Rendall.96 The London gatherings (or assemblies) of the female Bluestocking circle from mid-­century
94
95
96
Elizabeth Eger, Bluestockings: Women of Reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism (Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2010), 59–120.
Rendall, ‘Women that would plague me’, 326–42; Jane Rendall, ‘Fletcher, Eliza’, in
Elizabeth Ewan, Sue Innes, Siân Reynolds, and Rose Pipes (eds), The Biographical Dictionary
of Scottish Women (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 122–3.
Carla Hesse, ‘Introduction’, in Knott and Taylor (eds), Women, Gender and Enlightenment,
262.
96
Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
involved women such as Elizabeth Montagu and Elizabeth Vesey, who were
both hostesses, and Elizabeth Carter and Hannah More. A self-­conscious
manifestation of heterosocial intellectual improvement, their meetings
were also frequented by men, including the writer Samuel Johnson, the
actor David Garrick, and the painter Henry Reynolds.97 By creating a space
for women’s public intellectual sociability, and providing women with
access to literary patronage, the Bluestockings created a space for female
publishing, with writers such as Elizabeth Carter and Catherine Macaulay
making significant contributions to the English Enlightenment.98 A comparison of Scottish Whig circles at the end of century and the London
Bluestockings of earlier decades begs the question as to why women did
not achieve a prominent public role in Scotland earlier in the century?
When answering this question it needs to be remembered that Scottish
women did publish during this century, primarily in the poetry genre. Yet
Scottish women are absent as published contributors to the Enlightenment
during the period dominated by the group Richard Sher refers to as the
‘prime’ generation of writers who were born between 1710 and 1739, and
who included David Hume, William Robertson, Adam Smith, and Adam
Ferguson. Sher is correct to highlight women writers, specifically Elizabeth
Hamilton and Joanna Baillie, as members of the ‘younger’ generation,
or late Enlightenment, and I agree that the early nineteenth century was
when ‘gender barriers to literary pursuits were gradually breaking down’.99
Yet the chronology is not entirely transparent. Prior to the interventions
of Baillie and Hamilton, Jean Marishall contributed to Edinburgh’s print
culture and attempted, with limited success, to establish herself as a
­professional writer.100
Marishall was born in Scotland, but began her literary career in London
with the publication in 1765 of her novel The History of Miss Camilla Cathcart,
and Miss Fanny Renton. This was followed two years later by The History
of Alicia Montague. Despite succeeding in becoming a female novelist,
Marishall was frustrated by the lack of financial support for her endeavours.
When her first novel was rejected by a reputable publisher on the Strand
in London because ‘they never purchase the productions of ladies’, she
relied on recourse to the virtues of ‘Patience, Perseverence [sic], Humility
and Prudence’.101 Eventually her tenacity was rewarded, and she obtained
the support of the Duchess of Northumberland, whose influence enabled
her to dedicate the work to the Queen, for which she received 10 guineas.
97
98
99
100
101
Elizabeth Eger, ‘“The noblest commerce of mankind”: conversation and community in the
Bluestocking circle’, in Knott and Taylor (eds), Women, Gender and Enlightenment, 288–301.
O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment, 56–67; Eger, Bluestockings.
Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and their Publishers in
Eighteenth-­Century Britain, Ireland and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006),
101.
Perkins, Women Writers, 45–53.
Jean Marishall, Series of Letters, 2 vols (Edinburgh: C. Elliot, 1789), ii, 160.
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Women and Intellectual Culture
97
This felt too much like charity to Marishall, and her desire to be a professional writer led her to publish Alicia Montague by subscription, an act that
­eventually earned ‘about a hundred guineas’.102
Although able to publish novels in London, Marishall was not particularly supported by London’s literati, and she could not obtain support for
her third work, the play Sir Harry Gaylove, or a Comedy in Embryo. Frustrated
in her attempts to have the play staged in London, in the early 1770s,
Marishall sought the assistance of Edinburgh’s literati in getting Gaylove
performed. Despite the cultural restrictions on female publicity, she was
successful in obtaining the patronage of Kames, Hume, Smith, Ferguson,
and Boswell, and although her play was not performed it was published.
This achievement reflects the theatre’s function as a forum for female
­publicity, something which will be explored further in the next chapter.
Marishall published anonymously until she produced her Series of Letters
in 1789, and when promoting Sir Harry Gaylove her male patrons emphasised her femininity as an assurance of the play’s morality, and as an
indication that she would inspire sympathy in the audience.103 However,
Marishall did not passively adopt Enlightenment gender ideals. In the one
text she published under her own name, Marishall gave her own contribution to Enlightenment discourses on gender. Reversing the tendency in
Scottish writing on gender whereby men defined appropriate femininity
(Gregory and Fordyce being exemplars), Marishall produced an epistolary
text of letters written to her teenage nephew Charles in London, after he
had left her care in Edinburgh and embarked on his transition from boy
to man. Her aim was to aid Charles’s intellectual improvement and to
help him develop into a gentleman, informing him that ‘every sensible
person despises the insignificant character of a beau; and that it is only
an improved understanding and a pure mind, that give lustre to dress,
and make the complete gentleman’.104 In this mode, she criticises his
spelling, and asserts that ‘an error in grammar in a scholar, appears with
equal impropriety as a hole in the stocking of a gentleman’.105 Outward
appearance was important in achieving gentility, and Marishall expressed
concern when she heard ‘how you went to the assembly without getting
your hair cut. I should think by this time it would be below the tip of your
nose.’106
Despite the importance of appearance, in the formation of a gentleman
Marishall considered it secondary to moral and intellectual improvement.
Reflecting Scottish Enlightenment emphases on the importance of inner
sensibility as the source of outward politeness, Marishall is sceptical of the
102
103
104
105
106
Marishall, Letters, ii, 193.
Perkins, Women Writers, 50–2.
Marishall, Letters, i, 20.
Ibid., i, 30.
Ibid., i, 53.
98
Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
model of manhood promoted by the Earl of Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son
(1774). In one letter she writes:
I have not the least doubt, had his Lordship [Chesterfield] taken half
the pains with his son in pointing out to him the manly virtues of the
soul, which are inconsistent with the smallest spark of deceit, but he
would have succeeded much better than he did in making him a man
of the world.107
Marishall’s critique of Chesterfield is grounded in her adoption of
Common Sense moral philosophy. Developed in its fullest form by Thomas
Reid, this philosophy rejected the scepticism of Hume and asserted that
natural human benevolence was founded on a common moral sense,
itself bestowed by God.108 Of Chesterfield’s argument that women lack
intelligence and men are ruled by the passions, Marishall wrote that our
Creator would not have given us ‘passions impossible to govern, or created
women incapable of virtue . . . No! the Chesterfield system is contradictory
and false.’109 Rather than acting according to their passions, men’s actions
should be motivated by reason, and ‘were men to act upon a rational
principle, love and matrimony would go hand in hand’.110 In addition to
Common Sense philosophy, Marishall was influenced by Rousseau. Whilst
she adopted Rousseau’s argument concerning the importance of children’s education, she disagreed with him on the topic of children’s reason,
asserting that ‘children very early understand reason if delivered in a plain
and simple manner’.111
Following common sense was the means to happiness, and to maintain
this happiness men needed to avoid focusing on business to the neglect of
their domestic lives. According to Marishall, it was men’s neglect of their
wives that led to ‘extravagance and dissipation’ in women, leading them
to ‘fall a sacrifice to their passions’.112 Luxury also threatened happiness
because it undermined men’s domestic oeconomy. Summing up the ideal
gentleman in the last sentence of the first volume of her Letters, Marishall
contended that: ‘He is oeconomical that he may be generous; and generous that he may be happy.’113 In the second volume, Marishall expanded
upon her discussion of ideal domestic relationships with a case study of a
marriage strained because the wife was too concerned with social rank, a
fact signalled by her refusal to accompany the daughter of an artisan to the
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
Ibid., i, 106–7.
Heiner F. Klemme, ‘Scepticism and common sense’, in Alexander Broadie (ed.),
Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), 127–32.
Marishall, Letters, i, 103.
Ibid., i, 124.
Ibid., i, 126.
Ibid., i, 123.
Ibid., i, 201.
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Women and Intellectual Culture
99
assembly. Through emotional coercion the husband was able to rid his wife
of her prejudice and instil in her liberal and humane principles. These principles are expressed in a desire for a greater social equality, and Marishall
asserted that rank is an advantage, but not a mark of superiority.114 These
relatively radical ideas concerning social hierarchy mean that Marishall’s
Letters should be included among the radical texts emanating from Britain
in the wake of the American and French revolutions. Although not as eloquent as Mary Wollstonecraft nor as radical as Thomas Paine, Marishall’s
publication is significant in being a rare piece of philosophical and political
writing from a Scotswoman during the Enlightenment.
Marishall began her writing career in London, and a similar trajectory
was followed by Joanna Baillie, niece to the celebrated surgeons William
and John Hunter, and the poet Anne Home Hunter (wife of John). Joanna
Baillie was educated in Bothwell, then at boarding school in Glasgow, before
migrating to London with her mother and siblings in 1784, following the
death of her father, a professor of Divinity at the University of Glasgow. This
family background gave Baillie access to knowledge and social connections,
and it was in London during her twenties that she began a writing career
that would last until the 1840s. That Baillie’s career began in London was
partly due to the fact that it was there where she came into adulthood, but
there was more to it than that.
Like her aunt, Joanna Baillie benefited from intellectual networking
afforded by London’s literary scene, and she developed friendships with
other female writers, such as Susan Ferrier (another Scot in London),
Maria Edgeworth, Harriet Martineau, Anne Grant of Laggan, and the
actress Sarah Siddons. Typical of many eighteenth-­century British women,
Baillie’s first publication was a volume of poetry published in 1790, but
rather than remaining constrained in the poetry genre Baillie took advantage of the female publicity offered by the theatre and published A Series
of Plays in 1798. Included in this was De Montfort, which was performed at
London’s Drury Lane theatre for eight nights in April 1800.115 Baillie was
a forerunner to, and then participant in, the explosion of female publication in Scotland that occurred in the early decades of the nineteenth
century with the emergence of writers such as Anne Grant, Elizabeth
Fletcher, Elizabeth Hamilton, and Christine Johnstone.116 This explosion
was encouraged by the emergence of Romanticism as an intellectual movement. As well as Sir Walter Scott, Baillie developed intellectual friendships
with William Wordsworth and Lord Byron.117
Despite her successes, Baillie was not immune from gender-­
based
114
115
116
117
Ibid., ii, 97.
Judith Bailey Slagle (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in The Collected Letters of Joanna Baillie, 2 vols
(Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1999), i, 5–54.
Perkins, Women Writers.
Slagle, ‘Introduction’, 13.
100
Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
criticism, and she believed that male prejudice ensured that women would
be more successful if they published anonymously. When her friend, Fanny
Head published a translation of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s Messiah in
the 1820s, Baillie was concerned that she had been pressured by friends
to do so in her name.118 Writing to Scott in October 1826, Baillie asserted
‘I speak feelingly on this subject like a burnt child. John Any-­body would
have stood higher with the critics than Joanna Baillie. I too was unwisely
thwarted on this point.’119 When people discovered that Baillie’s plays
were written by a woman, critics, including Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh
Review, attacked her work. Although facing gender-­specific criticism, Baillie
did achieve popular acclaim in Edinburgh with her play The Family Legend,
which attracted large audiences in 1810. She also developed literary connections in the Scottish capital, corresponding regularly with Scott after
they met in London in 1806, and with Henry Mackenzie, who wrote an
epilogue for The Family Legend (Scott wrote the prologue). Her career was
therefore not limited to London, but it is noteworthy that one of the first
Scotswomen to gain a prominent place in Scottish intellectual life initially
did so from London.
The examples of Jean Marishall and Joanna Baillie demonstrate the
means by which the expansion of print was a crucial component of
Enlightenment culture. It not only facilitated female access to knowledge,
but allowed women to participate in knowledge production. Yet their
relative rarity also serves to highlight the limitations on women’s participation in intellectual culture during this period. Considering the extent
to which women engaged in the Enlightenment through reading, it can
be concluded that the maleness of institutional and associational culture,
combined with social conventions governing the public performance of
femininity, precluded most women from obtaining a public voice.
Conclusion
In order to properly comprehend the impact of the Enlightenment on
women, it is necessary to recognise the effect of specific national and local
contexts. Scotland shared a common political culture with England, but
without a parliament Edinburgh lacked a focus of political action, including
elite female political influence. The country was also without a royal court
after 1603. Scotland thus lacked two key sites of early modern women’s
public participation. The Scottish institutions that remained after regal
and parliamentary union, namely the law, the universities, and the Church,
were male institutions. The Scottish Enlightenment was thus formed in a
public culture that was already manifestly male, and the maleness of this
118
119
Ibid., 11–12.
Joanna Baillie, Hampstead, to Sir Walter Scott, Abbotsford, 13 October 1826, in Slagle,
Letters, i, 439 (underline is Baillie’s).
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Women and Intellectual Culture
101
sphere was reinforced by an Enlightenment ideology that ascribed dichotomous gender roles to men and women. Against these material and ideological forces, women in Scotland were able to obtain only a muted voice
in public intellectual culture. That the gendered boundaries of this culture
were relatively more permeable in London and Paris means that we should
be cautious in drawing overarching conclusions concerning women and
the British, or European, Enlightenment.120
Women’s participation in public intellectual culture is not, however, the
whole story; female involvement in the Scottish Enlightenment also encompassed public sociability. Including the theatre, assemblies, and concerts,
public sociable spaces symbolised and facilitated enlightened improvement, and it is to these and other manifestations of urban sociability that
we now turn.
120
Eger, Bluestockings; Dena Goodman, ‘Enlightenment salons: the convergence of female
and philosophic ambitions’, Eighteenth-­Century Studies 22(3) (1989) 329–50.