THE BLUESTOCKINGS: A History of the First Women’s Movement, by Susannah Gibson
In 1790, Mary Wollstonecraft sat down to write a fan letter. “You are the only female writer who I coincide in opinion with respecting the rank our sex ought to attain in the world,” she wrote in excitement to Catharine Macaulay. Macaulay had recently published her treatise “Letters on Education,” arguing that boys and girls should be taught the same curriculum, since “true wisdom … is as useful to women as men” — a principle that formed the bedrock, two years later, of Wollstonecraft’s triumphant “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.”
More than a century later, in “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf claimed several of Macaulay’s near contemporaries as role models, whose ability to earn a living from their writing, despite myriad obstacles, enabled future generations of women writers to conceive of their own intellectual freedom. “Toward the end of the 18th century,” Woolf concluded, “a change came about which, if I were rewriting history, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses.”
Both Woolf and Wollstonecraft argued far more stridently for women’s rights than did Macaulay or her peers, a loosely connected group of 18th-century British women writers and thinkers known — sometimes derogatorily, sometimes affectionately — as the Bluestockings. But as Susannah Gibson argues in her fast-paced and intimate study of the group, the Bluestockings’ feminist revolution lay in their determination to think and write and educate themselves, despite the “pitiless machinations” of British society, which kept single women dependent on their fathers, and married women subordinate to their husbands.
Gibson’s book opens in rapidly expanding London grappling with new fashions, ideas and building projects, and forging connections to Europe and the wider world. Here, in a Mayfair mansion, Elizabeth Montagu, a literary critic and writer married to a wealthy English landowner, invited like-minded women to candlelit salons where conversation was elevated to an art form, where wit and erudition were prized, and where men and women could discuss politics, literature, science and history on equal terms.
