The women involved in this group generally had more education and fewer children than most English women of the time. During this time period only men attended universities and women were expected to master skills such as needlework and knitting : It was considered "unbecoming" for them to know Greek or Latin, almost immodest for them to be authors, and certainly indiscreet to admit the fact.
Barbauld was merely the echo of popular sentiment when she protested that women did not want colleges. The group has been described by many historians and authors such as Jeanine Dobbs [3] as "having preserved and advanced feminism" due to the advocacy of women's education, social complaints of the status and lifestyle expected of the women in their society, seen in the writings of the Blue Stocking women themselves:. In a woman's education little but outward accomplishments is regarded The name "Blue Stocking Society" and its origins are highly disputed among historians.
The society's name perhaps derived from the European fashion in the mid—18th century in which black stockings were worn in formal dress and blue stockings were daytime or more informal wear.
Blue stockings were also very fashionable for women in Paris at the time, though many historians claim the term for the society began when Mrs. Vesey first said to Benjamin Stillingfleet , the aforementioned learned gentleman who had given up society and did not have clothes suitable for an evening party, to "Come in your blue stockings". Stillingfleet became a popular guest at the Blue Stocking Society gatherings. The Blue Stocking society had no membership formalities or fees but was conducted as small to large gatherings in which talk of politics was prohibited but literature and the arts were of main discussion.
Learned women with interest in these educational discussions attended as well as invited male guests.
Eger traces the transition between Enlightenment and Romantic culture, arguing for the relevance of rational argument in the history of women's writing. Show all. Bluestockings: Women of Reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism explores the cultural history of women's literary and intellectual activity in Britain between.
Tea, biscuits and other light refreshments would be served to guests by the hostesses. The New York Times archives contain an article published on 17 April which describes the Blue Stockings Society as a women's movement away from the "vice" and "passion" of gambling which was the main form of entertainment at higher society parties. Montagu and a few friends Mrs. Boscawen and Mrs. Vesey, who like herself, were untainted by this wolfish passion, resolved to make a stand against the universal tyranny of a custom which absorbed the life and leisure of the rich to the exclusion of all intellectual enjoyment Many of the Blue Stocking women supported each other in intellectual endeavors such as reading, artwork, and writing.
Many also published literature. Author Elizabeth Carter — was a Blue Stocking Society advocate and member who published essays and poetry, and translated Epictetus.
Both arts require learning to create images in words or pictures that will instruct as well as delight the mind and eye. Here he established his concern with the commercial and cultural status of the nation and the promotion of the teaching of drawing as a tool of social progress: Independent of the gratitude I feel for the honour conferred, by your twice adjudging me the premium of your Gold Pallet, for the best original If we are not instructed by what we hear, we may at least derive some advantage from the exercise of our own powers, from being obliged to recollect and produce what we know or what Everything is great and vast and late and magnificent and dull. She failed to publish a substantial poetic work until nearly forty years later, when her ambitious anti-war poem, Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, shocked contemporary literary circles. Mental and moral profit was central to the model of literary community upheld by the bluestocking circle.
Contemporary author Anna Miegon compiled biographical sketches of these women in her Biographical Sketches of Principal Bluestocking Women. Arrives by Thursday, Oct 3.
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