Another International Women’s Day went by, with the usual memes, GIFs and greetings forwarded, programmes to celebrate women, laud them for their strength, multi-tasking abilities, etc. Maybe it’s time to acknowledge some of the pioneers of the women’s movement, whose battles made the progress of women possible– the Bluestockings were one such group. Today the term may be used to mock intellectual women, but they played an important role in shaping the idea of feminism as we know it today.
There have been many studies and books on the Bluestockings, a new one by Susannah Gibson, titled The Bluestockings: A History Of The First Women’s Movement, is a reminder of the work of a remarkable bunch of women, who paved the way for women for generations to come.
In 18th century England (as everywhere else), most women were not allowed an education, and expected to be homemakers. Gibson’s book begins with a description of the grand Mayfair mansion, where Elizabeth Montagu (described as “brilliant in diamonds, solid in judgement, critical in talk”), a literary critic and writer married to a wealthy English landowner, invited like-minded women and men to salons, where they discussed literature, art, politics, science and history.
In that era it was believed that educating women shrunk their wombs and made them unsuitable as wives and mothers. In 1739, a pamphlet, Man Superior to Woman, called educated women dangerous, unfeminine, neglectful of their appearance. In any case, education was accessible only to upper class women, and that too, with the expectation of a good match.
“I never knew in my life,” wrote the statesman Lord Chesterfield to his son in 1748, a woman capable of “solid, reasoning good sense… or who reasoned or acted consequentially for four-and-twenty hours together.” Another commented that comparing a woman’s intellect to a man’s would be like “mould in a garden” being “valued with the fruits it produces”.
Montagu’s salon was made possible thanks to her husband’s wealth and support. As Gibson writes in the book, “One visitor compared the salons to paradise — a place where the lion sits down with the lambs.” Montagu’s greatest pride, she writes, “was having a woman take pride of place,” which included writers like Elizabeth, Hester Mulso Chapone and Hannah More.. The guests also included somewhat enlightened men, like Samuel Johnson and Horace Walpole, who enjoyed the discussions and verbal sparring with bright women. Matching in brilliance was the salon hosted by another woman– Hester Thrale– but on a more modest scale.
Sophie Coulombeau’s review of the book, published in historytoday.com, states,”The problem with 18th-century women, for the feminist public historian, is that they just won’t fit the narrative. We all know about the Suffragettes, so the thinking goes, and we are fairly sure that their forerunner Mary Wollstonecraft can be called a proto-feminist. Surely, a generation or two before Wollstonecraft, there were also brilliant women organising to topple the patriarchy? Such a narrative underpins Susannah Gibson’s Bluestockings. The book argues exactly what its title suggests: that the group of female intellectuals loosely associated with the metropolitan salons of Elizabeth Montagu made up, collectively, ‘the first women’s liberation movement’… Gibson is an engaging writer, with a good eye for entertaining detail. I am grateful, for example, to learn that Hannah More’s cats were named Passive Obedience and Non-Resistance.”
The book can be criticised for giving too much importance to a group of aristocratic women, who did not face the challenges ordinary women had to overcome—though the account of Thrale’s multiple pregnancies (15 in 16 years) and the frequent deaths of her children (only three remained alive in 1776) makes for shocking reading. It also does not give adequate attention to the womens’ writings. But it is meticulously researched and explores the social, cultural, and economic factors that shaped the lives of these women, and through their influence on other women, helped them realise their potential too.
The women were accused of elitism and armchair activism; they were admittedly unlikely revolutionaries, and not radical feminists if seen from today’s perspective, but they worked to promote education for women, supported women writers, and paved the way for future feminist movements The seeds they sowed led to more significant movements like the suffragettes of the 19th century to the feminist movements of the 20th century.
About the impact of the Bluestockings, Hannah Rose Woods writes in newstatesman.com, “At the turn of the 19th century, men began to push back against what they saw as a move towards women’s emancipation that had gone too far. “Bluestocking” passed from being a neutral description to a term of derision. Romantic writers such as Byron and Coleridge mocked these “Ceruleans of the Second Sex”. “I have an utter aversion to blue-stockings,” wrote the essayist William Hazlitt, claiming not to “care a fig for any woman who knows even what an author means”. By the dawn of the Victorian era, their reputation had been largely trashed. From the later 19th century, feminists began to reclaim the bluestockings’ legacy. The campaigns for women’s right to attend university and to be awarded degrees claimed allegiance with their bluestocking forebears.”
(This piece first appeared in The Free Press Journal dated March 13, 2025)
