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.
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
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 -
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.
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.
Saturday, March 11, 2006
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.
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.
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.
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