Women and Citizenship

Women, Gender & Enlightenment Barbara Taylor and Sarah Knott. Palgrave McMillan, 2007.

Women and Urban Life in Eighteenth-Century England: On the Town. Rosemary
Sweet and Penelope Lane. Ashgate Publishing, 2003.

"The invidious censures which may ensue from striking into a path of literature rarely trodden by my sex, will not permit a selfish consideration to keep me mute in the cause of liberty and virtue, whilst the doctrine of slavery finds so many interested writers to defend it by fraud and sophistry, in opposition to the common reason of mankind and the experience of every age."

Macaulay, Catharine. History of England. x, 1763.

Orgs and Conferences

ASECS - March 22-25 in Atlanta
SCECS - February 22-24 in Tulsa - still OPEN - URL http://www.scsecs.net/scsecs/
MW/ ASECS - October 12-15 in Minneapolis - email sent


NE - November 9-12 in Salem, Mass.

SE / ASECS and WSECS at ASECS meeting in February (printed membership form for SE, sent email to W)
NW / ASECS meets in Fall of 2007

more books

Dunscombe, John. Feminiad. 1754.

Allestree, Richard. The Ladies Calling. 1673.

West, Jane. Letters to a Young Lady. New York: Garland, 1974.

Griffith, Elizabeth. Essays, Addressed to Young Married Women. 1782.

Mulso Chapone, Hester. "A Letter to a New Married Lady". 1775

Daniel Defoe - moral handbooks like The Family INstructor. 1715

Letters between Elizabeth and Richard Griffith (called Henry and Frances) 1757-70.

What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage

NY Times article June, 25 2006

Amy Sutherland "Kicked, Bitten and Scratched: Life and Lessons at the Premier School for Exotic Animal Trainers" (Viking, June 2006).

readings from Google scholar

Klein, Lawrence E. "Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century: Some Questions about Evidence and Analytic Procedure" Eighteenth-Century Studies - Volume 29, Number 1, Fall 1995, pp. 97-109

"They Wonder to Which Sex I Belong: The Historical Roots of the Modern Lesbian Identity" Martha Vicinus Feminist Studies, Vol. 18, No. 3, The Lesbian Issue (Autumn, 1992) , pp. 467-497

"Locke and the Scriblerians: The Discussion of Identity in Early Eighteenth Century England" Christopher Fox Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Autumn, 1982) , pp. 1-25

"Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660-1760" Michael McKeon Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Spring, 1995) , pp. 295-322

More books

More books -

Adkins, Lisa and Beverley Skeggs eds. Feminism after Bourdieu. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004

Fraser, Nancy. Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Post-Socialist” Condition. New York. Routledge, 1997.

Nancy Fraser laments the supremacy of perspectives that take injustice to inhere in “cultural” constructions of identity that the people to whom they are attributed want to reject. Such recognition models, she argues, require remedies that “valorize the group's ‘groupness’ by recognizing its specificity,” thus reifying identities that themselves are products of oppressive structures. By contrast, injustices of distribution require redistributive remedies that aim “to put the group out of business as a group” (Fraser 1997, 19).

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-politics/#4

Booktips from Debbie DReed

I stopped by the office of Debbie, my old anthro prof, who was nicely appreciative of my appearance and, as always, suggested some good books for me to look at.

Authors are Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith and the titles that look most interesting
(and are available in our library):

Women, autobiography, theory : a reader.
Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1998.

and

De/colonizing the subject : the politics of gender in women’s autobiography.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992.

I really don't know how she does it - she ALWAYS has something to offer and some good words to inspire you by.

I guess I want to be like her when I grow up.

May already

So I missed all of the month of April - when the following happened:

I got my dissertation proposal accepted - I am, finally, ABD. It is a very strange feeling and I am a bit lost, so I am taking a little time off to reorganise. The loved one is telling me that in some sense I have graduated - that now it is all about what *I* want to do, and I believe that is true. I believe I have to trust my own instincts now and read others as colleagues, not experts. Interestingly, the topic is coming up from different directions, and it seems to be about leadership. Sometimes the only person you lead is yourself, but you have to decide to take responsibility for your beliefs, opinions, and desires. I cannot anticipate the perspective of every body else, I can only be the best advocate for my position and trust that others will advocate their positions. I have to listen to them, of course, and consider whether I want to adopt some of their beliefs as part of my position, but I am not looking for ultimate truth. A working definition, enough to give me a place to start and a direction to go, that's what I want.
One of the most important things about leadership seems to be the ability to fail well and learn from failure. Fail your way to the top, sort of.

I did my second month as editor of the scholarly mailing list and am now off duty for six or so months. Phew. It is really interesting to realise that whereas I did make a few mistakes and had to clean up some messes, I still did pretty good and some of the others made mistakes too (one that I was able to help fix) so - again - seeing other people's insides is very different than seeing their outsides.

I did the last month as president of the graduate student association, and retired happily (and of course a tad regretfully - it's hard to let go). It has been good for me, and I have learned something about my capacity and about leadership and my limits.

I finished the photography class with a final project that is not what I wanted it to be but that has possibilities - I will keep working on some of the ideas and see where I can get to. Again, I think I have learned things - about process, about thinking visually, about photoshop.

Now I have to go do other things - like play with my xbox.

Rewrites

I wish I had kept track of how many rewrites and edits I have made to what is now a finished dissertation proposal. Well, actually, one rewrite and several edits of awkward sentences and muddled thought. It has been an interesting process and I wish I had done more editing of previous work. It really does make a difference to go through the text a few times and find the weak spots, particularly because you have time to get some distance between yourself and the text. That way, you can see what actually ended up on the paper and not just what you intended to put there.

What have I learned about writing a proposal?

Start by setting up the items that need to be covered and then start filling them in one by one, not necessarily in the right order. It really helps to have something on the page. Write at least a paragraph about what you want to do/explore/investigate. Then figure out something about WHY you are interested in this issue - what is missing in the research so far that makes this the next step.
Also, using secondary sources well is difficult. You have to define their place in your work and define what sources you are leaning on for insights OR for methods, what sources you are disagreeing with and what sources you are going to ignore after you have explained why you are going to ignore them.

Bibliography

Bibliography

Primary Texts

The Women

Macaulay, Catharine. Letters on Education. 1790. Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1994.

________. The history of England from the accession of James I. to that of the Brunswick line.
London: printed for J. Nourse; R. and J. Dodsley; and W. Johnston, 1763-83.

________. An address to the people of England, Scotland, and Ireland, on the present important
crisis of affairs. Printed by R. Cruttwell, in Bath, for Edward and Charles Dilly, London,
1775.

________. Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, on the revolution in
France in a letter to the Right Hon. the earl of Stanhope. Kitchener, Ont.: Batoche, 2000

Montagu, Elizabeth. An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare: compared with the Greek and French dramatic poets. With some remarks upon the misrepresentations of Mons. de Voltaire. London: printed for J. Dodsley; Mess. Baker and Leigh; J. Walter; T. Cadell; and J. Wilkie, 1769

________. Elizabeth Montagu, the Queen of the Bluestockings, Her Correspondence from 1720 to 1761. New York, E.P. Dutton, 1906.

________. Mrs. Montagu, "Queen of the blues", Her Letters and Friendships from 1762-1800. Boston, Houghton Mifflin. 1908.

________. The letters of Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu: with some of the letters of her correspondents. London: Printed for T. Cadell and W. Davies, by W. Bulmer, 1809.

Warren, Mercy Otis. History of the rise, progress, and termination of the American Revolution: interspersed with biographical, political, and moral observations. Indianapolis : Liberty Classics, 1988.

________. Correspondence between John Adams and Mercy Warren. New York: Arno Press, 1972.

________. “Observations on the new Constitution, and on the federal and state conventions.” 1788. in Pamphlets on the Constitution of the United States. Ford, Paul Leicester ed. Brooklyn, N.Y. : [s.n.], 1888.

______. The Mercy Otis Warren Papers, 1709-1841. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1968.

Wortley Montague, Lady Mary. Turkish Embassy Letters. London: Virago Press, 1993.

________. Complete Letters. Ed. Robert Halsband. Oxford: Clarendon, 1956.

________. The Nonsense of Common-sense, 1737-1738. Evanston: Northwestern U, 1947

________. Court Eclogs Written in the Year, 1716. ed. Robert Halsband. New York: New York
Public Library, 1977.


Their Contemporaries

Adams, Abigail. New Letters of Abigail Adams, 1788-1801. Ed. Stewart Mitchell. Boston, 1947.

George Ballard. Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain. Oxford: W. Jackson, 1752.

Boswell, James. 1791. Life of Samuel Johnson. New Haven: Yale UP, 1994.

Burke, Edmund. The Correspondence of Edmund Burke. Chicago, Ill.: U of Chicago P, 1958.

________. 1791. Reflections on the French Revolution. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.

Defoe, Daniel. 1719. The Education of Women.

Ferguson, Moira, ed. First Feminists: British Women Writers 1578-1799. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985.

Folger Collective on Early Women Critics. Women Critics 1660-1820: An Anthology. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995

Gouges, Olympe de. 1791. Declaration of the Rights of Women and Female Citizens. Reprinted in The Portable Enlightenment Reader, ed. Isaac Kramnick, New York: Penguin, 1995.

Hume, David. 1748. Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus 1988.

________. The History of England. Abridged in two volumes. London: printed for C. and G. Kearsley, 1795.

________. The Life of David Hume, Esq. Written by himself. To which is added, a letter from Adam Smith, LL.D. to William Strahan, Esq. Dublin: printed for J. Williams, 1777.

Johnson, Samuel. The Letters of Samuel Johnson. ed. Bruce Redford. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton
UP, 1992-1994.


________. A compleat Introduction to the Art of Writing Letters: Universally Adapted to all
Classes and Conditions of Life. London: printed for Henry Dell; and J. Staples, 1758.

Piozzi, Hester Lynne. Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, L.L.D during the last twenty years
of his life. Dublin: printed for Messrs. Moncrieffe, White, Byrne, Cash, W. Porter,
Marchbank, M’Kenzie, Moore and Jones, 1786.

Pope, Alexander. Selected Letters. Ed. Howard Erskine-Hill. Oxford; New York: Oxford UP,
2000.

________. An Essay on Criticism. 1711. Menston, Scolar Press, 1970.


Secondary Works

Applewhite, Harriet B., and Darline G. Levy. Women and Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1990.

Backscheider, Paula, ed. Revising Women: Eighteenth-Century "Women's Fiction" and Social Engagement. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP., 2000.

Bannet, Eve Tavor. The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000.

Bate, W. Jackson. Samuel Johnson. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.

Baym, Nina.”Between Enlightenment and Victorian: Toward a Narrative of American Women Writers Writing History.” Critical Inquiry 18 (1991): 22-41

________. “The Madwoman and Her Languages: Why I Don't Do Feminist Literary Theory.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, 3 (1984): 45-59.

Brewer, John. The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1997.

Blanning, T.C. W. The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660-1789. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.

Brant, Clare and Diane Purkiss. Women, Texts, and Histories 1575-1760. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.

Brown, Gregory S. “The Self-Fashionings of Olympe De Gouges 1784-1789.” Eighteenth Century Studies 34 (2001): 383-401.

Butler, Judith. Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Clarke, Norma. Dr Johnson’s Women. London and New York: Hambledon, 2000.

Coleman, Patrick, Jayne Lewis, and Jill Kowalik, eds. Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Creed, Carolyn. “Identity Politics in the Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.” (Ph.D. diss., U of Manitoba (Canada), 1999).

Eger, Elizabeth. “Out Rushed a Female to Protect the Bard: The Bluestocking Defense of Shakespeare.” Huntington Library Quarterly, 65 (2002): 127-151.

Eger, Elizabeth, Charlotte Grant, Clíona Ó Gallchoir, Penny Warburton eds.. Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700-1830. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.

Ferguson, Moira. First Feminists: British Women Writers 1578-1799. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985.

Fletcher, Anthony. Gender, Sex and Subordination in England, 1500-1800. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995.

Foreman, Amanda. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. New York: Random House, 1998.

Gallagher, Catherine. Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace
1670-1820. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994.

Gardiner, Ellen. Regulating Readers: Gender and Literary Criticism in the Eighteenth-Century
Novel . Newark: U of Delaware P, 1999.

Gardner, Kevin. “The Aesthetics of Intimacy: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her readers.”
Papers on Language & Literature, 34 (1998): 113-134.

Gevirtz, Karen Bloom. “Ladies Reading and Writing: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers and
the Gendering of Critical Discourse.” MLS 33 (2003): 60-72.

Goodman, Deena. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment.
Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-fashioning: from More to Shakespeare. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.

Grundy, Isobel. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment. New York: Oxford UP, 2001.

________. “The Politics of Female Authorship: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Reaction to the Printing of Her Poems.” The Book Collector 31 (1982): 19-37.

Grundy, Isobel, ed.. Samuel Johnson: new critical essays. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1984.

Habermas, Jurgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989.

Halsband, Robert. The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Oxford: Clarendon, 1956.

Hanson, Marjorie. “Elisabeth Montagu: A Biographical Sketch and Critical Edition of Her Writings.” (Ph.D. diss., U of Southern California, 1982).

Hill, Bridget. The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.

Jones, Wendy L. Talking on Paper: Alexander Pope's Letters. ELS 50. Victoria, Canada: English Literary Studies, 1990.

Kates, Gary. Monsieur D’Eon is a woman : a tale of political intrigue and sexual masquerade. New York: Basic Books, 1995.

Kerber, Linda. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980.

Landes, Joan. Women and the public sphere in the age of the French Revolution. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.

Lewis, Judith S. Sacred to Female Patriotism: Gender, Class, and Politics in Late Georgian Britain. New York: Routledge. 2003.

Lerner, Gerda. “Placing Women in History: Definitions and Challenges,” Feminist Studies 3 (1975): 5-14.

Looser, Devoney. British Women Writers and the Writing of History 1670-1820. Baltimore:
John’s Hopkins UP, 2000.

Lowenthal, Cynthia. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter.
Athens, GA.: U of Georgia P, 1994.

Mahaffey, Lois Kathleen. “Alexander Pope and His Sappho: Pope's Relationship with Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu and Its Influence on His Work.” (Ph.D. diss., UT Austin, 1963).

Matchinske, Megan. Writing, Gender and State in Early Modern England. New York:
Cambridge UP, 1998.

May, Henry. The Enlightenment in America. New York: Oxford UP, 1976.


Melton, James Van Horn. The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2001.

Meyer, Donald. The Democratic Enlightenment. New York: Putnam, 1976.

Norton, Mary Beth. Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800. Ithaca, N.Y., 1996.

Oreovicz, Cheryl Z. “Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814).” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 13 (1996): 54-63.

Outram, Dorinda. The Enlightenment. Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1995.

Porter, Roy. The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment.
New York: Norton, 2000.

________. Flesh in the Age of Reason: The Modern Foundations of Body and Soul. New York:
Norton, 2003.

Porter, Roy ed. Rewriting the Self : Histories from the Renaissance to the Present. London; New
York: Routledge, 1997.

Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.

Riley, Denise. Am I That Name? Feminism and the Category of "Women" in History. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.

Rogers, Katharine. Feminism in eighteenth-century England. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1982.

Rogers, Patrick. The Alexander Pope Encyclopedia. Greenwood,
2004.

Scott, Joan W. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” The American
Historical Review 91 (1986): 1053-1075.

Shoemaker, Robert Brink. Gender in English Society, 1650-1850: The Emergence of Separate
Spheres. London: Longman, 1998.

Smith, Bonnie G. The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard UP, 1998.

Spacks, Patricia Meyer. "Female Rhetorics." In The Private Self: Theory and Practice of
Women's Autobiographical Writings, ed. Shari Benstock, pp. 177-91. Chapel Hill:
U of North Carolina P, 1988.

Steinbrugge, Liselotte. The Moral Sex: Women’s Nature in the French Enlightenment. New
York: Oxford UP, 1995.

Stone, Lawrence. Family, sex and marriage in England, 1500-1800. New York: Harper & Row,
1979.

Stevenson, Jane. Female Authority and Authorization Strategies in Early Modern Europe.
Macmillan, 2000.

Tague, Ingrid H. Women of Quality: Accepting and Contesting Ideals of Femininity in England,
1690–1760. (Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History.) Rochester,
N.Y.: Boydell. 2002.

Tobin, Beth Fowkes, ed. History Gender & Eighteenth Century Literature. Athens: U of Georgia
P, 1994.

Todd, Janet. The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660-1800. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.

Turner, Cheryl. Living by the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Vickery, Amanda. The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998.

Wahrman, Dror. The Making of the Modern Self; Identity and Culture in Early Modern Europe. New Haven: Yale UP, 2004.

Wiesner, Merry. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Woolf, D.R. “A Feminine Past: Gender, Genre and Historical Knowledge in England 1500-1800.” American Historical Review 102 (1997): 645-679.

Wrightson, Keith. English Society, 1580-1680. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 1982.

Public Voices 5

Public Voices, Public Selves
Self-Fashioning and Gender in the Eighteenth Century

Over the past three decades women’s history has developed from a marginal topic into an accepted, even expected, approach to the study of the past. Along the way, historians from Gerda Lerner and Joan Scott onward have grappled with how exactly to write history that includes women. Some historians have focused on what Lerner calls "compensatory history," exploring the actions and experiences of exceptional, notable women. Others have focused on "contribution history," history that looks at the ways in which women contributed to the historical narrative we already know. Both approaches have been criticized, the first for focusing on women who were, by definition, not representative of some hypothetical “average” woman’s experiences, and the second for accepting a historical narrative that portrays women’s history as separate from and marginal to real or important history. With the increasing emphasis on gender rather than women some of those issues have been resolved, notably the need to consider women in relation to, and as part of, the rest of the world, rather than isolated from it. On the other hand, gender studies have tended to increase the focus on the relative power relations between men and women while consistently assuming gender as a distinguishable and relevant category (see, as examples, Fletcher and Wiesner).
Many writers have explored the fluidity of identity and self during the eighteenth century, and there is a consensus (among scholars such as Shoemaker, Stone, Todd, and Wahrman) that gendered identities in particular went through serious changes during the period. There has been heated discussion about what those changes were, what they meant, and even when exactly they occurred. Did the industrial revolution and the growth of the public sphere mean that women were locked into docile and demure domesticity, were the changes mostly rhetorical and women’s lives go on much as before, did a group of women actually engineer a position of domestic moral superiority to create a platform for public debate? Were changed gender roles a result, at least in England, of anxiety created after the former colonies in America declared independence and thereby questioned the very core of national identity (Vickery, Bannet, Gallagher, Wahrman)?
Even those writers who argue in favor of women being actively involved in the formation of gender roles and identity seem to assume that for women as a group, being women was the defining element of their identities. As Nina Baym put it, “all current [feminist] theory requires sexual difference as its ground.” She was writing over twenty years ago, but on this particular issue little seems to have changed. For research purposes, women in history have been defined by their gender as categorically as any legal disposal of them as femes covert ever managed.
Assuming gender to be the defining element of women’s identity is a useful way to learn something about what women as a group experienced and how women as a group were experienced–clearly all women shared certain experiences, expectations and legal restrictions. However, understanding the implications of the structural position of “woman” does not necessarily tell us anything about how individual women negotiated their environment. Neither does it help us understand how particular women could defy society’s expectations, much less how segments of society could accept and even embrace public acts of disobedience against prescribed behavior.
Beyond understanding how notions of gender shifted over time, and beyond exploring how women (and men) adapted the way they framed their actions to fit those shifts, it is relevant to ask what role gender played in the construction and presentation of self. I want to explore whether gender really was a primary category of identity on which everything else was dependent, or whether, as I suspect, it was a negotiable category, sometimes important and sometimes subordinate to other priorities.
In the first part of my dissertation I will set out the public expectations for women in general in eighteenth-century England and what current research says about women’s actual behavior (e.g., Backscheider, Jones, Turner), to highlight the tension between the prescribed ideal (the structural expectations) and the actual practices of women in the public sphere.
To explore how individual women negotiated and presented public selves and dealt with their gender, I will then look at the writings of a group of women (one American, the others English) who, in different ways, flouted gendered expectations to claim a voice in the public sphere. In order of birth date they are Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Elizabeth Montagu, Catharine Macaulay, and Mercy Otis Warren. I will do a close reading of their texts ranging from private and public correspondence to essays, pamphlets, and published books, in order to examine the different tropes the authors made use of to create legitimate public voices and to chart how (and to what extent) they related to the issue of their gender.[1]
After a comparison of their strategies I will examine the texts of some of the women’s contemporaries to get an idea of how their respective strategies of self-presentation were received. I will survey what strategies seem to have been accepted by the women’s readers and correspondents and what claims to legitimacy were rejected and on what grounds. I will pay particular attention to whether gender consistently appears as a primary category of evaluation or whether it was perhaps a negotiable issue, for instance more important for critics than sympathetic readers (see for instance, Burke’s references to Macaulay as a “Republican Virago”).
I will also attempt to determine to what extent the women under consideration appear to have modified their strategies depending on the reaction of their audience (making their public selves even more of a collaborative and fluid construct) and to what extent they resisted external attempts at definition.
The women whose writings and public selves I have chosen to explore were active mostly during the eighteenth century and were established as writers and speakers in the public sphere in England or the Early American Republic. I picked women whose contributions to public discourse were clearly in ostensibly male genres; women who at least in part established their public position based on nonfiction writing. I made this decision because it appears that the spectacular success of female novelists during the second half of the century made fiction a more ambiguous sphere and because women who wrote primarily on the topic of women leave open issues of audience and sphere of discourse. Women who engaged in genres of public discourse such as politics, history, moral philosophy, and theology were reaching out to a broader, mostly male, and more unambiguously public readership than women who only wrote texts for private consumption. Another criterion was the availability of both public and private writing, to provide examples both of direct appeals to their public and more private or indirect presentations of self.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) was a prolific writer of poems, of historical narratives and, especially, of letters. During her lifetime her official publication was limited, but it is clear that she intended her letters to be widely read and she was involved in several public writing endeavors (a collaboration on poetry with Alexander Pope, an article for Addison’s Spectator, etc.) She organized, and prepared for publication after her death, a collection of letters written as she accompanied her husband on his travels as the Ambassador to Turkey. She brought back from her Turkish venture the practice of smallpox vaccination that she introduced to England (decades before Edward Jenner popularized vaccination with cowpox). Her interests, as she puts it in a letter to the Abbé Conti, spanned “from religion to tulips” (Montagu, Letters 178), and she is sometimes described as an amateur anthropologist, strongly concerned with the relationship between cultural traditions and human nature.
Elizabeth Montagu (1720–1800), married to a nephew of Lady Mary, was a hostess, literary critic, and writer who helped organize and lead London’s bluestocking society. She came from money and her husband was wealthy. After his death she managed her money well enough to become one of the wealthiest women of her time. Her salon was frequented by, among others, Samuel Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, David Garrick, and Horace Walpole. She was a patron of a number of writers including Hannah More, Frances Burney, Anna Barbauld, Sarah Fielding, and Anna Williams, and herself published a piece of literary criticism entitled An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear. She was also a prolific letter writer.
Mercy Otis Warren (1728 –1814) was born and lived all her life in Massachusetts. She was a playwright, poet, and historian who was very active in the ideological debate surrounding the American declaration of independence. In addition to writing satirical plays, poems, political pamphlets, and a history of the American Revolution, she corresponded with many of the founding fathers–her private writings include letters to and from Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, and both John and Abigail Adams.
Catharine Macaulay (1731–1791) was a historian like Warren, and indeed the two were friends and correspondents. Macaulay’s History of England was immensely popular during her lifetime and seen as a radical alternative to the politically conservative history published by David Hume. Macaulay was a staunch advocate of liberal political principles; she sparred with Hume and wrote a spirited defense of the French Revolution in response to Burke’s Reflections.
I am considering the inclusion of the philosopher Catherine Trotter Cockburn (1679–1749), novelist and playwright whose A Defence of Mr. Locke’s Essay earned her the appreciation of Locke himself and the admiration of Leibnitz. In the Defence she argues that Locke’s epistemology sufficiently accounts for the origin of moral concepts and refutes charges that Locke’s theories exclude the possibility of immortality. Also under consideration is the philosopher Mary Astell (1666-1739), a high Tory Anglican and believer in the divine rights of kings whose political conservatism did not keep her from propagating some quite radical ideas about education for women in A Serious Proposal for the Ladies. Her correspondence with the Cambridge Platonist John Norris was published at his insistence as Letters Concerning the Love of God. Both Cockburn and Trotter wrote on religious topics and were politically conservative, and therefore, at least on the surface, even less likely than the previous four women to challenge societal norms by participation in public sphere.
All of the women whose writings I explore came from the gentry, although their fortunes varied. They were all better educated than most women of their time, although some had been educated by their families and others were self-taught. All of them, except Mary Astell, were married, although some wrote as wives and others only as widows. They all established an active, legitimate public voice in fields that were considered outside the scope of female activity, in subject areas that spanned from political theory and history to theology, moral philosophy, and literary analysis. My hypothesis is that the tropes they used to establish their public voices were as varied as their individual circumstances and, furthermore, that each writer used different tropes at different times and adapted her story depending on the reaction she got from her readers and correspondents.
In “The Self-Fashionings of Olympe de Gouges” Gregory Brown explores how the playwright and later abolitionist constructed and modified a public self depending on what aspect, what category of her personality seemed most useful at any given time. Thus, she would at times address the world in terms of being a writer with certain connections, at times make her plea as a vulnerable woman, and yet at other times simply describe herself in terms of an outsider. I expect to find a similar variety of strategies and constructed public selves, each molded to fit the individual needs and possibilities of each woman, some tropes heavily dependent on gender identity (either leaning on or excusing it) and other tropes marginalizing or ignoring gender completely.
In addition to illuminating how the individual women negotiated their public selves and used, ignored, or “overcame” their gender, I hope to demonstrate the need for gender studies that explore gender differences without assuming that gender was always a stable or even relevant aspect of the presentation of self. Janet Todd has shown how women writers in the early modern period hung out different “signs” representing themselves, depending on what their environment expected and demanded of them at different times. I suggest that whereas some of those signs only differed in how they reflected the gender of their writers, other signs did not rely on gender as an identifying marker at all. “Gender” remains an indispensable category for historical study, but much remains to be done in order to determine how relevant a category it was at different points in time to the lives of women in history.
Several aspects of my academic history have helped to prepare me for this project. An undergraduate degree in English Literature with a focus on the period 1550-1900 gives me a foundation in textual analysis and the literary environment I will be exploring. A masters degree in Humanities, with a focus on social and political theory and cultural anthropology, has given me a broad understanding of culture as something heterogeneous and contested and has prepared me to explore the tension between individual agency and social construction of self. Doctoral study focused on the cultural and intellectual history of early modern Europe has given me the requisite period background and exposed me to the historiographical debates in the field.To assist me in further research and preparation of this dissertation, I have asked the following faculty members to serve on my committee. Dr. Gerald Soliday, associate professor of historical studies, teaches early modern European social and cultural history, including the social history of literature. His knowledge of historical developments during the period as well as his clear understanding of both the methodological and the interpretive issues involved will be invaluable to my work. Dr. Daniel Wickberg, associate professor of historical studies, teaches American and European intellectual history. His insights into the intellectual environment of early modern England and America will be of particular help to me, especially for the colonial section of the research. Dr. Pamela Gossin, associate professor of literary and historical studies, teaches classes on early modern professional women and auto/biographical writing. Her experience in both of these fields as well as her interdisciplinary approach will be particularly useful to me as I explore the use of letters, pamphlets and treatises as auto/biographical narratives. Dr. Patricia Michaelson, associate professor in literature, teaches courses on eighteenth-century women writers in England. Her understanding of the period, in terms of literary trends and the general cultural environment, will contribute greatly to my research.
[1] Many of the letters are published, as are their other writings. What is not published can be found in manuscripts in archives or libraries located in New York, Boston, and London.

the stages thing

Where I was going with the mention of stages was to make a comparison with the stages of grief (or loss or change or - whatever):

Denial -

Anger -

Bargaining -

Depression -

Acceptance -

The dissertation journal I wish I had started earlier

I was talking with a friend today who is just reading for her exams and has reached level four - first she did the getting organised and pretending to start reading,
then she panicked and went into total avoidance, depression, and paralysing fear,
then she got pushed to do a bit of stuff and thought she would be able to get going,
then she realised she still wasn't doing anything but now she is able to pick out specific reasons why she is stuck - making her fear specific and part of the process rather than just overwhelming.

Still confused but on a higher level.

I then talked to my friend/mentor and explained about where I am (will try to write about that thursday - it's about backing into the proposal writing and then getting feedback and turning it into a process and then getting more feedback and realising that different people will have different kinds of feedback and in the end there is only one person who knows what I am trying to accomplish - me. This has to be my show!!). She pointed out that EVERYBODY goes through this - if they say they are not, they are lying. I told her about "structural emotions" and she agreed completely with the idea.

So, the structural emotions of graduate studies - that would be a title and a topic for a book.

props

scary scary shit - but there it is, a draft.

can I go home now?

Bibliography

Bibliography

Primary Sources

A) The women themselves

Macaulay, Catharine. Letters on Education.[17??] Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1994.
______. The history of England from the accession of James I. to that of the Brunswick line. London: printed for J. Nourse; R. and J. Dodsley; and W. Johnston, 1763-83
______. An address to the people of England, Scotland, and Ireland, on the present important
crisis of affairs. Printed by R. Cruttwell, in Bath, for Edward and Charles Dilly, London,
1775.
______. Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, on the revolution in
France in a letter to the Right Hon. the earl of Stanhope. Kitchener, Ont.: Batoche, 2000
Montagu, Elizabeth. An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare: compared with the Greek and French dramatic poets. With some remarks upon the misrepresentations of Mons. de Voltaire. London: printed for J. Dodsley; Mess. Baker and Leigh; J. Walter; T. Cadell; and J. Wilkie, 1769
______. Elizabeth Montagu, the queen of the bluestockings, her correspondence from 1720 to 1761. New York, E.P. Dutton, 1906.
______. Mrs. Montagu, "Queen of the blues", her letters and friendships from 1762-1800. Boston, Houghton Mifflin. 1908.
______. The letters of Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu: with some of the letters of her correspondents. London: Printed for T. Cadell and W. Davies, by W. Bulmer, 1809.
Otis Warren, Mercy. History of the rise, progress, and termination of the American Revolution: interspersed with biographical, political, and moral observations. Indianapolis : Liberty Classics, 1988.
______. Correspondence between John Adams and Mercy Warren. New York: Arno Press, 1972.
______. Observations on the new Constitution, and on the federal and state conventions. Boston, Mass. 1788. Early American imprints.; 1st series ;; no. 21111.
______. The Mercy Otis Warren Papers, 1709-1841. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1968.
Wortley Montague, Lady Mary. Turkish Embassy Letters. London: Virago Press, 1993.
______. Complete Letters. Ed. Robert Halsband. Oxford: Clarendon, 1956.
______. The Nonsense of common-sense, 1737-1738. Evanston: Northwestern University, 1947
______. Six town eclogues. With some other poems. By the Rt. Hon. L. M. W. M. London:
printed for M. Cooper, 1747.

B) Their contemporaries

George Ballard. Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain.[1752]
Boswell, James. Life of Samuel Johnson.[17??] New Haven: Yale UP, 1994.
Burke, Edmund. The Correspondence of Edmund Burke. Chicago, Ill.: U of Chicago P, 1958.
______. Reflections on the French Revolution. [1789] Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993.
Defoe, Daniel. The Education of Women. [1719]
Ferguson, Moira, ed. First Feminists: British Women Writers 1578-1799. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985.
Folger Collective on Early Women Critics. Women Critics 1660-1820: An Anthology.Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995
Gouges, Olympe de. Declaration of the Rights of Women and Female Citizens. [17??] Reprinted in The Portable Enlightenment Reader, ed. Isaac Kramnick, New York: Penguin, 1995.
Hume, David. Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. [1748] Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus 1988.
Johnson, Samuel.
Piozzi, Hester Lynne. Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, L.L.D during the last twenty years
of his life. Dublin: printed for Messrs. Moncrieffe, White, Byrne, Cash, W. Porter,
Marchbank, M’Kenzie, Moore and Jones, 1786.
Pope, Alexander.

Secondary Works

Applewhite, Harriet B., and Darline G. Levy. Women and Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolution. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1990.
Backscheider, Paula, ed. Revising Women: Eighteenth-Century "Women's Fiction" and Social Engagement. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP., 2000.
Bannet, Eve Tavor. The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2000.
Brewer, John. The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1997.
Blanning, T.C. W. The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660-1789. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.
Brant, Clare and Diane Purkiss. Women, Texts, and Histories 1575-1760. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
Brown, Gregory S. “The Self-Fashionings of Olympe De Gouges 1784-1789.” Eighteenth Century Studies 34 (2001): 383-401.
Clarke, Norma. Dr Johnson’s Women. London and New York: Hambledon, 2000.
Coleman, Patrick, Jayne Lewis, and Jill Kowalik, ed. Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.
Creed, Carolyn. Identity Politics in the Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Diss. WHERE, 1999.
Eger, Elizabeth, Charlotte Grant; Cliona OGallchaoir; and Penny Warburton. Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700-1830. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.
Ferguson, Moira. First Feminists: British Women Writers 1578-1799. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985.
Fletcher, Anthony. Gender, Sex and Subordination in England, 1500-1800. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995.
Foreman, Amanda. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. New York: Random House, 1998.
Gallagher, Catherine. Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace
1670-1820. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994.
Gardiner, Ellen. Regulating Readers: Gender and Literary Criticism in the Eighteenth-Century
Novel . Newark: U of Delaware P, 1999.
Gardner, Kevin. “The Aesthetics of Intimacy: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her readers.”
Papers on Language & Literature, 34 (1998): 113-134.
Gevirtz, Karen Bloom. “Ladies Reading and Writing: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers and
the Gendering of Critical Discourse.” MLS 33 (2003): 60-72.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-fashioning: from More to Shakespeare. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1980.
Grundy, Isobel. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment. New York: Oxford UP, 2001.
Grundy, Isobel, ed.. Samuel Johnson : new critical essays. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1984.
Halsband, Robert. The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Oxford: Clarendon, 1956.
Hanson, Marjorie. Elisabeth Montagu: A Biographical Sketch and Critical Edition of Her Writings. Diss. WHERE, 1982
Hill, Bridget. The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
Jones, Wendy L. Talking on Paper: Alexander Pope's Letters. ELS 50. Victoria, Canada: English Literary Studies, 1990.
Kates, Gary. Monsieur D’Eon is a woman : a tale of political intrigue and sexual masquerade. New York: Basic Books, 1995.
Lewis, Judith S. Sacred to Female Patriotism: Gender, Class, and Politics in Late Georgian Britain. New York: Routledge. 2003.
Lerner, Gerda. “Placing Women in History: definitions and challenges,” Feminist Studies 3 (1975): 5-14.
Looser, Devoney. British Women Writers and the Writing of History 1670-1820. Baltimore:
John’s Hopkins UP, 2000.
Lowenthal, Cynthia. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter.
Athens, GA.: U of Georgia P, 1994.
Matchinske, Megan. Writing, Gender and State in Early Modern England. New York:
Cambridge UP, 1998.
Melton, James Van Horn. The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2001.
Oreovicz, Cheryl Z. “Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814).” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 13 (1996): 54-63.
Outram, Dorinda. The Enlightenment. Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1995.
Porter, Roy. The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment.
New York: Norton, 2000.
______. Flesh in the Age of Reason: The Modern Foundations of Body and Soul. New York:
Norton, 2003.
Porter, Roy ed. Rewriting the Self : Histories from the Renaissance to the Present. London; New
York: Routledge, 1997.
Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1984.
Rogers, Katharine. Feminism in eighteenth-century England. Urbana: U of Illinois Press, 1982.
Rogers, Patrick. The Alexander Pope Encyclopedia. Greenwood,
2004.
Scott, Joan W. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” The American
Historical Review 91 (1986): 1053-1075.
Shoemaker, Robert Brink. Gender in English Society, 1650-1850: The Emergence of Separate
Spheres. London: Longman, 1998.
Smith, Bonnie G. The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard UP, 1998.
Spacks, Patricia Meyer. "Female Rhetorics." In The Private Self: Theory and Practice of
Women's Autobiographical Writings, edited by Shari Benstock, pp. 177-91. Chapel Hill:
U of North Carolina P, 1988.
Steinbrugge, Liselotte. The Moral Sex: Women’s Nature in the French Enlightenment. New
York: Oxford UP, 1995.
Stone, Lawrence. Family, sex and marriage in England, 1500-1800. New York: Harper & Row,
1979.
Stevenson, Jane. Female Authority and Authorization Strategies in Early Modern Europe.
Macmillan, 2000.
Tague, Ingrid H. Women of Quality: Accepting and Contesting Ideals of Femininity in England,
1690–1760. (Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History.) Rochester,
N.Y.: Boydell. 2002.
Tobin, Beth Fowkes ed. History Gender & Eighteenth Century Literature. Athens: U of Georgia
P, 1994.
Todd, Janet. The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660-1800. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.
Turner, Cheryl. Living by the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Vickery, Amanda. The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998.
Wahrman, Dror. The Making of the Modern Self; Identity and Culture in Early Modern Europe. New Haven: Yale UP, 2004.
Wiesner, Merry. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge UP, 2000.
Woolf, D.R. “A Feminine Past: Gender, Genre and Historical Knowledge in England 1500-1800.” American Historical Review 102 (1997): 645-679.
Wrightson, Keith. English Society, 1580-1680. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers UP, 1982.

dissertation proposal - first draft amended

Public Voices, Public Selves:
Self-Fashioning and Gender in the Eighteenth Century


Over the past three decades women’s history has developed from a marginal topic into an accepted, even expected, approach to the study of the past. Along the way, historians from Gerda Lerner and Joan Scott onward have grappled with how exactly to write history that includes women. Some historians have focused on what Lerner calls "compensatory history," exploring the actions and experiences of exceptional, notable women. Others have focused on "contribution history," history that looks at the ways in which women contributed to the historical narrative we already know. Both approaches have been criticized, the first for focusing on women who were, by definition, not representative of some sort of average woman’s experiences, and the second for accepting a historical narrative that portrays women’s history as separate from and marginal to real or important history. With the increasing emphasis on gender rather than women some of those issues have been resolved, notably the need to consider women in relation to and as part of the rest of the world and not isolated from it. On the other hand, gender studies have tended to increase the focus on the relative power relations between men and women while consistently assuming gender as a distinguishable and relevant category (see, as examples, Fletcher and Wiesner).
Many writers have explored the fluidity of identity and self during the eighteenth century, and there is a consensus (among scholars such as Shoemaker, Stone, Todd, and Wahrman) that gendered identities in particular went through serious changes during the period. There has been heated discussion about what those changes were, what they meant and even when exactly they occurred. Did the industrial revolution and the growth of the public sphere mean that women were locked into docile and demure domesticity, were the changes mostly rhetorical and women’s lives go on much as before, did a group of women actually engineer a position of domestic moral superiority to create a platform for public debate? Were changed gender roles a result of anxiety created in England after the former colonies in America declared independence and so questioned the very core of national identity? (Vickery, Bannet, Gallagher, Wahrman)
For all of the debate, even those writers who argue in favor of women being actively involved in the formation of gender roles and identity seem to assume that for women as a group, being a woman was the defining element of their identity. For research purposes women in history have been defined by their gender as categorically as any legal disposal of them as femes covert ever managed.
Assuming gender to be the defining element of women’s identity may have been a useful way to learn something about what women as a group experienced and how women as a group were experienced–clearly all women shared certain experiences, expectations and legal restrictions. However, knowing those general restrictions does not necessarily tell us anything about how individuals negotiated their environment. It does not help us understand how women defied society’s expectations, much less how society could accept and even embrace public acts of disobedience against prescribed behavior.
In the first part of my dissertation I will set out the public expectations women in general and what current research says about women’s actual behavior (e.g. Bachsheider, Jones, Turner), to highlight the tension between the prescribed ideal and the actual practices of women in the public sphere.
In order to understand how individual women did negotiate or “overcome” their gender to claim a voice in the public sphere (where they were confronted with public reactions to their behavior and dependent for their success on something more than the indulgence of family and friends) my dissertation will then examine several women writers and public actors in eighteenth century Britain from different backgrounds and writing in different areas and investigate how they themselves described to their friends and to their public what they were doing. The core of the dissertation will be the close reading of their texts, essays, pamphlets and tracts as well as letters and other semipublic texts in order to map the tropes the women made use of to create legitimate public voices and survey how they themselves negotiated the issue of their gender.[1]
After a summary of the parallels and differences in their strategies I will survey the texts of some of the women’s contemporaries will give an idea of what tropes were successful in establishing a public voice for the writers and to what extent and for what reasons the readers were willing to overlook their prescribed expectations for female behavior. Especially useful here will be to consider critics of the women under consideration, in order to establish whether gender expectations that would be flouted in favor of a popular idea became an easy means of deflating disfavored writers or whether the critics deflated the writers on the merits of their arguments. Finally, I will consider whether the self presentations of the women were affected by and modified in response to the reaction of their public.
The women whose writings and public selves I have chosen to explore were all active mostly during the eighteenth century, were all active in some sort of public activity and were relatively well known. I chose women who at least in part established their public position based on non fiction writing, since there has been some claim to consider novel writing an acceptable female endeavor (at least toward the end of the period).
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) was a prolific writer of poems, historical narratives and especially letters. During her lifetime her official publication was limited, but it is clear that she intended her letters to be widely read and she was involved a several public writing endeavors (a collaboration on poetry with Alexander Pope, an article for Addison’s Spectator, etc). She organized and prepared for publication after her death a collection of letters written as she accompanied her husband on his travels as the Ambassador to Turkey, and she brought back from her trip the practice of smallpox vaccination that she introduced to England. Her interests, as she puts it in a letter to the Abbé Conti, span “from religion to tulips” (Montagu Letters, 178), and is sometimes described as an amateur anthropologist, strongly concerned with the relationship between cultural traditions and human nature.
Elizabeth Montagu (1720 – 1800), married to a nephew of Lady Mary, was a hostess, literary critic, and writer who helped organize and lead London’s bluestocking society. She came from money, her husband was wealthy and after his death she managed her money well enough to become one of the wealthiest women of her time. Her salon was frequented by, among others, Samuel Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, David Garrick, and Horace Walpole. She was a patron of a number of writers including Hannah More, Frances Burney, Anna Barbauld, Sarah Fielding, and Anna Williams, and herself published a piece of literary criticism entitled An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear.
Mercy Otis Warren (1728 – 1814) represents the colonial perspective. She was a playwright, poetess, and historian who was very active in the ideological debate surrounding the American declaration of independence. In addition to writing satirical plays, poems, political pamphlets, and a history of the American Revolution, she corresponded with many of the founding fathers - her private writings include letters to and from Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, and both John and Abigail Adams.
Catharine Macaulay (1731 – 1791) was a historian like Warren, and indeed the two were friends and correspondents. Macaulay’s English history was immensely popular during her lifetime and seen as a radical alternative to the politically conservative history published by David Hume. Macaulay was immensely popular during her lifetime and a staunch defendant of liberal political principles. She sparred with Hume and wrote a spirited defense of the French Revolution in response to Burke’s Reflections.
I am considering the inclusion of the philosopher Catherine Trotter Cockburn (1679–1749), novelist and playwright whose A Defence of Mr. Locke’s Essay (in which she argues that Locke’s epistemology sufficiently accounts for the origin of moral concepts and refutes charges that Locke’s theories exclude the possibility of immortality) earned her the appreciation of Locke himself and the admiration of Leibnitz. Also under consideration is the philosopher Mary Astell (1666-1739), a high Tory Anglican and believer in the divine rights of Kings whose political conservativism did not keep her from propagating some quite radical ideas about education for women in A Serious Proposal for the Ladies. Her correspondence with the Cambridge Platonist John Norris was published at his insistence as Letters Concerning the Love of God.
All of the women whose writings I explore came from the gentry, although their fortunes varied. They were all better educated than most women of their time, although some had been educated by their families and others were self-taught. All of them, except Mary Astell, were married, although some wrote as wives and others only as widows. They all established an active, legitimate public voice in fields that were considered outside the scope of female activity, in subject areas that spanned from political theory and history to theology, ethics, and literary analysis. My hypothesis is that the tropes they used to establish their public voices were as varied as their individual circumstances and, furthermore, that each writer used different tropes at different times and adapted her story depending on the reaction she got from her readers and correspondents.
In “The Self-Fashionings of Olympe de Gouges” Gregory Brown explores how the playwright and later abolitionist Olympe de Gouges constructed and modified a public self depending on what aspect, what category of person seemed most constructive to present at any given time. Thus she would at times address the world in terms of being a writer with certain connections, at times make her plea as a vulnerable woman, and yet at other times simply describe herself in terms of an outsider. I expect to find a similar variety of strategies and constructed public selves, each molded to fit the individual needs and possibilities of each woman.
In addition to shedding some light on how the individual women negotiated their public selves and approached, used, or “overcame” their gender, I hope to demonstrate the need for gender studies that explore gender differences without assuming that gender was always a stable or even relevant aspect of the presentation of self. Janet Todd suggests that women hung out different “signs” in their self presentation depending on what their environment expected and demanded of them. I suggest that although some of those signs reflected the gender of their writers, other signs did not rely on gender as an identifying marker at all. “Women” still is a useful category for historical study, but much remains to be done to determine how relevant a category it was to the lives of women in history.
Several aspects of my academic history have helped to prepare me for this project. An undergraduate degree in English Literature with a focus on the period 1550-1900 gives me a solid foundation in textual analysis and the literary environment I will be exploring. A masters degree in Humanities, with a focus on social and political theory and cultural anthropology, has given me a broad understanding of culture as something heterogeneous and contested, and has prepared me to explore the tension between individual agency and social construction of self in the present. Doctoral study focused on the cultural and intellectual history of early modern Europe has given me the requisite period background and exposed me to the historiographical debates in the field.
To assist me in further research and preparation of this dissertation, I have asked the following faculty members to serve on my committee. Dr Gerald Soliday, associate professor of historical studies, teaches early modern European social and cultural history, including the social history of literature. His knowledge of historical developments during the period, as well as his clear understanding of both the methodological and the interpretive issues involved will be invaluable to my work. Dr Daniel Wickberg, associate professor of historical studies, teaches American and European Intellectual History. His insights into the intellectual environment of early modern England and America will be of particular help to me, especially for the colonial section of the research.
Dr Pamela Gossin, associate professor of literary and historical studies, teaches classes on early modern professional women and auto/biographical writing. Her experience in both of these fields as well as her interdisciplinary approach will be particularly useful to me as I explore the use of letters, pamphlets and treatises as auto/biographical narratives. Finally, Dr Patricia Michaelson, associate professor in literature, teaches courses on eighteenth-century women writers in England. Her understanding of the period, in terms of literary trends and the general cultural environment, will contribute greatly to my research.
[1] Many of the letters are published, as are their other writings. What is not published can be found in manuscripts in archives or libraries located in New York, Boston, and London.

What I say about Greenblatt

I want to look for similar patterns in the writings of my women, to see how they fashion public selves in general and how they render these selves legitimate public speakers in relation to a gender that would seem to exclude that role. Put in marketing terms the questions are
a) what kind of spin do they use to legitimize voice?
b) is it possible to discern a set of available tropes that these women leaned on?c) how do these tropes relate to gender - do they ignore gender or use it?
d) how to other people respond to the spin and to what extend do their responses relate to gender as a relevant issue (do they use gender as they women have or is gender used to undercut the women's spin)?
e) does it seem like they are constructing whole selves or bitd and pieces for different audiences (something more like Todd's signs hung out to invite a certain kind of audience).

My work is different from Greenblatt in that I am looking for how they dealt with a particular aspect of their - public - selves, that I use only non fiction texts and letters ( how different is that?), that I want to leave the door open for a fragmented self AND a fragmented, continual process of self fashioning that is affected by the responses and that may be different from the private individual self (maybe the letters give a hint to a disconnect - maybe they will show women believing their own hype).

Greenblatt is looking at literature in a historical context and I am using non fiction, but I find him useful because he looks at selves as a narrative construct, put together out of the cultural codes available in the particular environment within which they work.
and

ADDED a year later - that last is what I could use - the stuff I do is backtrack to find what common cultural codes they used to create their space ...this discussion then, might fit when I transition from what I want to explore and why I chose this way to explore it.

What Greenblatt said

With the notion of representation Greenblatt connects to literature - because the representation of a character and a person is the same, there is always a narrative, a text, that carries a presentation of self, and there is no real distinction between literature and social life. Greenblatt wants to read people, and characters, as cultural artifacts, something put together that represents and is representative of its culture. Quoting Clifford Geertz, Greenblatt says that “there is no such thing as a human nature independent of culture”, which not only means that people are constructions represented as characters, but that the process of construction is marked by the environment in which it was constructed. (3). Greenblatt argues that the construction of self is restrained by the concepts, values and structures available in a particular culture. The individual is never free to create a self out of whole cloth, but has to use existing cultural codes, things that already have some meaning.
Literature functions in this system in three ways: as manifestation of the author, as expression of the code, and as a reflection upon those codes. I take this to mean that art/literature gives us information about the author and about the code (the particular cultural structure it was written in), but literature/art is not only a passive observer, not a neutral filter - it is also a participant in the culture.
Greenblatt argues that there are similarities in the way people in a given culture fashion themselves and lists what he calls the “governing conditions”. On the one hand there is submission to some absolute authority that is at least in part external, this may be for instance God, the church, science, on the sovereign. On the other hand there is an antiauthority, a demonic Other that is also external and that is either chaotic or false. Between these two poles, a person defines herself to be like her chosen authority and unlike the Other.
Greenblatt ues six writers to exemplify his theory; More, Tyndale, Wyatt, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare. They all submit to different authorities - e.g. More to the Church, Tyndale to the Bible and Wyatt to the absolutist state. They also balance differently between authority and rejection, i.e. some define themselves more by describing Us against the Other and others by describing The Other in Us. So Spenser is said to celebrate his chosen authority - the Fairie Queen, Marlowe to “embrace the alien” and Shakespeare is said to demonstrate a more ambiguous stance, a sort of subversive submission.

I want to look for similar patterns in the writings of my women, to see how they fashion public selves in general and how they render these selves legitimate public speakers in relation to a gender that would seem to exclude that role. Put in marketing terms the questions are

a) what kind of spin do they use to legitimize voice?
b) is it possible to discern a set of available tropes that these women leaned on?
c) how do these tropes relate to gender - do they ignore gender or use it?
d) how to other people respond to the spin and to what extend do their responses relate to gender as a relevant issue (do they use gender as they women have or is gender used to undercut the women's spin)?
e) does it seem like they are constructing whole selves or bitd and pieces for different audiences (something more like Todd's signs hung out to invite a certain kind of audience).

My work is different from Greenblatt in that I am looking for how they dealt with a particular aspect of their - public - selves, that I use only non fiction texts and letters ( how different is that?), that I want to leave the door open for a fragmented self AND a fragmented, continual process of self fashioning that is affected by the responses and that may be different from the private individual self (maybe the letters give a hint to a disconnect - maybe they will show women believing their own hype).
and

ADDED a year later - this piece I will only know about AFTER I have done more research - if there are patterns, tropes, and if they look similar across the chronology ... ah ... if they are different, that might say something, if they are not, that might say something else.

What I learned about losing weight

Things that seem to make a difference (since I mention different things every time someone asks)

- Don't eat in the car. Only chewing gum, fruit, and coffee allowed in the car, which seriously cuts down on the candy, fast food and chips/pringles/cheetos.

- Do your excercise. Every day. However uninclined or stressed you may be. If you do the excercise you will be less likely to fuck up the eating - changes the body chemistry somehow and there is also, of course, the pride factor.

- Eat smaller portions. Make your stomach used to smaller portions and your head will get used to thinking smaller. This should be combined with:

- Eat often. Leave room for regular fruit/vegetable snacks and make sure you never get horribly hungry. Being horribly hungry makes you desperate and you will talk yourself into eating all kinds of odd things.

- Get enough sleep. If you are sleepy you will eat to stay alert and you have less resistance to the little hungry voice in your head.

- Do your excercise. Every day. Yes I know I already mentioned it, but it makes another sort of difference too. If you shape your body and invest in the differences you see you don't want to spoil it by bad food.

- Learn about nutrition and calories. If you know what you are eating and actually keep count you will learn - after a while - what there is room for in your food budget. You learn how to pick what calories are important to you and which you can do without.

- Stop the simple carbs. No white bread, no large heaps of white pasta or rice. Don't eat the roll or the breading or the top bun on the hamburger or the fries ... Make sure you get the flavors and the veggies and then add some carbs on the side, rather than using the carbs as a base and adding the meat and veggies on top.

Scientific Activism

The guy who got the NASA guy to resign ..

http://scientificactivist.blogspot.com/

Archival material locations - National Archive

Wortley Montagu, Mary
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/nra/searches/pidocs.asp?P=P20151
9 records- e.g. Oxford, British Library, Harrowby, Camden, Manchester ...


Elizabeth Montagu:
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/nra/searches/pidocs.asp?P=P20135
18 records - British Library, Oxford, Huntingdon, V&A, etc


Catharine Macaulay
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/nra/searches/pidocs.asp?P=P18224
2 records - British Library & New York Historical Society


Otis Warren, Mercy
No records found

Growling not helpful

I can't even be bothered to write it all down - but dammit all, I am trying the very best I can.

Edited to add that it does help a lot when I am able to talk about my stress and put words on some of my needs. Works like a charm ... *feeling just a tad silly, I know this so well, but it is SOO hard when I get stuck and stressed and all of that*

Other women

Elisabeth Elstob (1683 - 1756)
Catherine Trotter Cockburn (1679–1749)
Anna Seward (1742–1809)

Draft of proposal ... eeek

There is something there - beyond the separate spheres .... saying that the birth of separate spheres confined women to the domestic sphere assumes that women had a wider range available to them before that time.

We know that (married) women were legally invisible, and that they were not supposed to take a public role or have public opinions. There was no title for a woman thinker/writer/polemicist, no assigned space for them. So were they just accepted as harmless abberations or were they able to CREATE a space, out of existing labels, that let their voices be heard.

Was the tightening of the rules a result of industrialisation and the public sphere or was is that these women were too succesful - that they ended up threatening the social fabric because they were too good at spinning their yarns?

Bibliography or summat

Books I run into and think I need to keep track of:


Gallagher, Catharine. Nobody's Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670-1820. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1994

Folger Collective on Early Women Critics. Women Critics 1660-1820: An Anthology.
Bloomington Indiana University Press, 1995.

This webpage has correspondance TO Elizabeth Montagu from Elizabeth Carter:
http://www.faculty.umb.edu/elizabeth_fay/October28.html

Methods and theoretical framework

This is where I figure out what to do with Bourdieu and Giddens and Greenblatt et al.

Greenblatt should serve as a base for looking at how these women framed themselves, then perhaps use B to look at how the field was set up - I need to figure out a consistent language to talk about these women and what they did.

Self-fashioning, a term introduced by Stephen Greenblatt (Renaissance Self-Fashioning,1980), is the creation of oneself according to a set of socially acceptable standards. Female selves, constructed as females, did not have attributes such as smart, independent, philosophical, etc. So my suspicion is that women fashioned alternate - public - selves that downplayed the feminine and emphasized other traits. Todd talks about women hanging out signs, Queen Elizabeth described herself as a prince - emphasizing her royal blood over her gender, and Joan of Arc emphasized being a messenger of God.

CONTRIBUTION - FUTURE RESEARCH
- general understanding of the disjoint between the official narrative and what people did, how the official narrative describes a structure that is always negotiated, always manipulated and contested by individual agents. Any description of the structure is going to leave out how that structure was contested and challenged - from within - and so far most history focuses either on describing the structure OR on describing individual challenges, not (which is what I want to do) how the structure lends itself to and enables the challenge.
Furthers interdisciplinarity - using literary theory and close reading to understand history and crossing the divide between history and anthropology (explain how). A historical reading of texts, and a literary understanding of historical individuals (these are non fiction writing women after all, not so often studied by literary scholars.
Future research could/should look at how other groups negotiated the same territory - how did men during this time and place construct selves that increased their legitimacy? How was their authority challenged?

My ideas and questions

This is where I put ideas and things I need to look at or look up.

1. Clearly there is an issue of floating genres going on - women could write novels because they were low brow (compared to classsically inspired epics and poetry) and history came somewhere in between politics and morals. So women could negotiate the contested territory, claim they were providing moral guidance (Looser 16, 17) and not interfering in politics.

Sometimes this was a DIS advantage - as when history was trying to upgrade its status and claimed a professional/expert position - women could not compete on that level.

2. The floating genres issue shows up in other ways too - Looser talks about what KIND Of writing is considered historical writing; antiquarians collecting facts, the search for meaning, narrative history, biography and memoirs etc ...

Names and theories - women & history

This will be the place for me to stick different people's positions.

avoidance

Damn ... I guess I was in worse shape than I thought - I managed to let all of December go by without doing anything whatsoever about my proposal. The holidays were really useful as an excuse and helping the other half with his stuff and training as an editor, but whoa .. I really did just disappear.

Oh well, I am now officially back on track. I will go read some stuff right now, and report back tomorrow.

Promise.

Really.