New class for GST/HIST

Prostitutes, Politicians, and other Public Women in Eighteenth Century England.


London in 1700

Monsieur d'Eon is a woman

Mary Montagu's Embassy Letters

Georgiana,Duchess of Devonshire

Something on the Bluestockings

Something on religious women - Hanna More?

Moll King and other prostitutes

The coffee house book

Charlotte Charke

Karen Harvey on Sexuality

Vickery's Gentleman's Daughter

Evelina

Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings by Elizabeth Eger, Lucy Peltz 2008

The lives and letters of an eighteenth-century circle of acquaintance / Temma Berg 2006

Bluestocking feminism : writings of the Bluestocking Circle, 1738-1785 / general editor, Gary Kelly, volume editors, Elizabeth Eger ... [et al.]. 1999

Querelle des femmes titles

Boccaccio, De claris mulieribus or Concerning Famous Women (1360-74)



Martin Lefranc, Le Champion des dames (1442)



Cornelius Agrippa, De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus (1529, composed 1509)

Gratien du Pont (1534)

Thomas Elyot, The Defense of Good Women (1545)

François de Billon (1553)

Marguerite de Navarre, Heptameron (1558)

Anthony Gibson, a Woman's Woorth, defended against all the Men in the World, proving them to be more Perfect, Excellent, and Absolute in all Vertuous Actions than any Man of what Qualitie soever, Interlarded with Poetry (1559)

Jean de Marconville (1564)

Philippe Desportes, Stances du mariage (1571)

Marie de Romieu, Bref discours de l'excellence de la femme (158?)

Thomas Nashe. An Almon for a parrot. London 1590.

Giuseppe Passi, Dei donneschi difetti (1599)

Moderata Fonte, Il Merito delle Donne or The Worth of Women (1592)

Lucrezia Marinella, The Nobility and Excellence of Women (1600)

Alexis Trousset, alias Jacques Olivier, Alphabet de l'imperfection et malice des femmes (1617)

Marie de Gournay, Égalité des hommes et des femmes (1622)

Anna Maria van Schurmann, On the capacity of the female mind for learning. (1640)

Jacquette Guillaume, Les Dames Illustres; où par bonnes et fortes Raisons il se prouve que le Sexe Feminin surpasse en toute Sorte de Genre le Sexe Masculin; (1665)

Francois Poulain de la Barre, (1675)

Sophia, Woman not inferior to man: or, a short and modest vindication of the natural right of the fairer sex to a perfect equality of power, dignity and esteem, with men, London 1739.


For more look here: http://www.womenpriests.org/traditio/list_qu.asp



E-texts of "feminist" men http://www.pinn.net/~sunshine/4dads/4dads6.html

Feminists versus Gallants

Feminists versus Gallants: Manners and Morals in Enlightenment Britain.
Barbara Taylor.

Representations 87, 2004 (123-148)

Starts from Wollstonecrafts critique of the Enlightenment and its tendency toward gallantry and makes an argument that this gallantry was not a remnant or relic, but a newly constructed attempt at oppression. The problem it intended to solve was, if I understand it, demands for a new civilized man for modernity, "most of whose key attributes ... belonged on the feminine side of the gender axis." (135) Women set the standard ... but "if men were to emulate women, what became of virility and its associated prerogatives?" (ibid) or as Adam Smith put the risk "The delicate sensibility required in civilized nations sometimes destroys the masculine firmness of the character" (footnote 64 page 135)

Taylor argues that, not only are Vickery and Colley right in arguing that the spheres weren't exactly separate but "by the mid-eigtheenth century, men and women of the British middle ranks were becoming more like each other" (136) and the "amazons of the pen" (Sam Johnson's expression - footnote 72) "were everywhere contest[ing] the usurpations of virility."

And now we get to it - the patronizing gallantry is a "rearguard effort to stave off the equalizing pressures of commercial society, to shore up a 'sexual distinction' " (137), as opposed to the effeminate French bastards who clearly could not be trusted to do it right.

Mary Astell - publications and public response

The belief that not only men but also all women can master clarity of thought is an important element in the most reactionary of Astell's writings, Some Reflections upon Marriage, Occasion'd by the Duke and Duchess of Mazarine's Case, published in 1700. Written in response to witnessing the divorce of a friend of Lady Catharine Jones, this work argues that a sound education is a requirement for any woman wishing to enter a healthy marriage. In addition to criticizing men who marry for money, power, or out of the vain desire to display an attractive wife, Astell paints marriage as an unhealthy state for most women, and therefore a state sought only by the irrational: "A Woman has no mighty Obligations to the Man who makes Love to her; she has no Reason to be fond of being a Wife, or to reckon it a Piece of Preferment when she is taken to be a Man's Upper-Servant; it is no Advantage to her in this World; if rightly managed it may prove one as to the next." While economic necessity and social constraints might force a woman into such an injurious institution as marriage, according to Astell a sound education would arm her with the skills necessary to turn the situation to her favor.

In 1706 Astell released a third edition of Some Reflections upon Marriage, responding to critics of her work and urging England's womenfolk to strive for a marriage based on true friendship rather than necessity or pride. "Let us learn to pride ourselves in something more excellent than the invention of a Fashion," she counsels readers, "and not entertain such a degrading thought of our own worth as to imagine that … the best improvement we can make of these is to attract the Eyes of men." In the Appendix of this work is her most-quoted line among feminists: "If all men are born free, how is it that women are born slaves? as they must be if the being subjected to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary Will of Men, be the perfect Condition of Slavery?"

Perhaps because it was not overtly defiant of male authority, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies was immensely popular among women readers, and through its wide circulation Astell won many fans. Perhaps not surprisingly, it also won its share of detractors. In June and again in September of 1709 the popular Tatler included essays by writers Jonathan Swift and Richard Steele that attacked Astell's idea of a women's school. Dubbing Astell "Madonella," the essays satirized her so-called "Order of Platonics" by imagining this order of reclusive, fragile nuns hiding while their nunnery is rudely entered by a group of rough gentlemen. Flattering Madonella by praising her writing skill, the men gain mastery over the situation; in short, they hold these educated women to their "inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary Will."

The proposal for a quasi-religious college for women that Astell first outlined in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies was revived in The Christian Religion as Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church of England, a plea for furthering women's education that was addressed to England's Queen Ann, who had taken the throne in 1702. Although because of this work the school was reported to have been at least considered by Anne, it never came to fruition due to rumors by Anne's Protestant advisors that it would result in the reestablishment of Catholic nunneries.

After 1709, perhaps partially in response to the ridiculing she received in the Tatler, Astell ceased writing. Her last published book was a revised edition of Bart'lemy Fair; or, an Enquiry after Wit; In Which Due Respect Is Had to a Letter concerning Enthusiasm, which appeared in 1722. Now in middle age, Astell refocused her attention toward opening a charity school. With the help of her patrons, she succeeded, and a school for girls was established at London's Chelsea Hospital that remained operational until the late 1800s. Ultimately succumbing to breast cancer, Astell died on May 9, 1731, at the age of sixty-four in Chelsea, England.

Quote

"Time flies like an arrow

Fruit flies like a banana"


I keep thinking there is something about a bat in there as well, but I am wrong, I also keep thinking there is a word for this kind of twist in word usage - like in the first sentence is another kind of like than the like in the second sentence.

Inflation data

One of them very useful sites - I should make a list of them somewhere ...

http://www.measuringworth.com/inflation/

Research questions

This is really what research should be about - asking questions! I found today that Mary Philipse was accused of treason with two other women during the American Revolutionary War - but I am having trouble finding any particulars about them. So this is a question to research ... and either I can find the answer easily in a book OR there is no such book and I can write it. That is how it is supposed to work.

The Broccoli Principle

It doesn’t matter how healthy it is if they won’t eat it.

OR

We have to eat the broccoli life serves us.

which one is it?

Michael Warner "The Trouble with Normal"

A review of the book can be found here:
http://www.socialism.com/fsarticles/vol21no3/bookreview.html

the book does not contend that people should be able to be gay and conservative - rather the opposite, but it does present that argument as the struggle for normal - the desire to be accepted by the mainstream - and then goes on to explain why that is troublesome. Achieving the right to marriage moves the boundary of who is accepted a white (norm/al)- it does not change the inherently bizarre structure that divides the norm/al from the degenerate and it does nothing to fix the issues with the institution of marriage.

So the fact that my women were allowed to speak - or claim non-gendered positions to speak from - may not have been a weakness in the system or a sign that oppression was less serious. It could have worked as a vent, and a way to reinforce the structure. "You cannot speak as a woman, you can be either a woman or a public speaker - you have to renounce your gender to speak" sorta thing. Pretend you are not jewish and you can be part of the culture ... fight for gay marriage so you don't fight for gay culture ... hmm.

Hayden White

this is where I will post what I find about him when I find it!

Historiography

Darn it - Rachel wrote me with the information that there is this guy Hayden White - why did I not know about him?? Why did I not know that there was Collingwood and Hayden and so many others!!!

Oh well, here goes, the beginnings of a list:

R.G. Collingwood
The Idea of History

E.H. Carr
What is History?

Roger Chartier
On the Edge of the Cliff

Michel de Certeau
The Practice of Everyday Life

Raphael Samuel
Theatres of Memory Vol. 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture, (Verso, 1996)
Theatres of Memory Vol. 2: Island Stories: Unravelling Britain, (Verso, 1999) -the ground-breaking look at the way that we see the past.

Hayden White:
Metahistory
The Content of Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, 1987

Graduate Theory Reading Group, March 19

Intro on Quentin Skinner:

Born in 1940 and educated at Cambridge in the 60's. Spent four years at Princeton in the seventies and works as a historian and political scientist. Interested in recovering the ideas of Early Modern European thinkers and exploring the history of the early modern idea of the state. With JGA Pocock he is seen as one of the elements of "the Cambridge School" (Peter Laslett too). They focus on speech acts - seeing historical texts in a context and trying to bring back the author's intentions.

This was his first major publication and it is still discussed. Together with six other texts it forms the core of Meaning and Context:Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Princeton UP, 1989) edited by James Tully. Each essay is discussed by another writer who criticques it and Skinner. Toward the end of the book Skinner gets a chance to rebut.

The article:

Five sections that explain why neither "text only" or traditional "context is the answer" approaches work. The final segment says something about what CAN be done ... although apparently Skinner is more interesting in providing general directions than a specific plan.


I
First we consider the text only approach - based on the assumption that there are timeless elements to issues. If you believe this, you want to focus on recovering the timeless questions and answers. Hard to argue that there isn't something like this going on, since we recongnize concepts and family resemblances. The dilemma is that we can only understand the new in terms of the old and so we hear the ideas of others in terms of what we think they must be saying. These expectations take several forms:

the mythologies of doctrine - expecting a person to have a doctrine on "their" topic and finding it in their texts, whether they had a doctrine on the topic or not (and if they did, whether what we believe they should have been saying is really what they intended to want to say. A version of this gives raise to the historical absurdity when authors are simply blamed or praised by how well they aspire to be like us (are they good precursors of what WE are). Also, there is sometimes a presumption of an essential, immanent idea that has a life of its own and can be traced through the writings of people who get it or almost get it or don't get it.

a version that is a reverse of the above - a person expexcts a doctrine, can't find it and then critiqued for not being as expected. The main version of this is people who are surprisingly neutral on somethign believe them to have a position on, the worst case being when eg Plato is criticised for not dealing enough with things that were not in existence to BE issues at the time.

The Mythology of Coherence - tries to decide what a person's position is and then reads everything from that presumed position, adding missing pieces by extrapolation, as if ALL their texts were connected, even to the point of discount authorial statements about what they were writing.

Discussion page 21 about persecuted writers -


II
So what happens when we move on to individual works?
First the mythology of prolepsis - working from the CURRENT importance of a work it reads back the future into the past and sees the result as the intention.
Then the mythology of parochialism - the reader sees something familiar in the text and believes the author put it there - often happens when a reader sees an apparent reference to a previous (classical work) and decides the first work influenced the second.
Then a second form of parochialism - misunderstanding the sense of a work (as an example there is a discussion of Locke's writings on government by consent - easy to see as a theory on the best organisation of government - whereas it is clear that Locke only meant to write about the ORIGIN of legitimate societies)

ALL of these issues arise when the historian "begins to ignore certain general criteria ... which must necessarily apply to the whole enterprise of making and understanding statements" (28)

You can't be said to have meant something that you clearly would disagree with (eg using concepts that arose later or were otherwise unfamiliar)

You can't claim someone failed to say something unless you can show that he had the intention of saying that particular thing or something like it.

Finally we have to consider that people may consciously adopt incompatible ideas and that most people who think wrestle with ideas and do not have them neatly organised in coherent bunches.


III
Objection - pointing out the dangers and pitfalls is not the same as saying "don't do it". But the problem is not whether there are doctrines articulated or not, the problem is whether it is appropriate or even possible to treat such a system as a self-sufficient object of inquiry (31). Indeed, I argue that the whole approach is hogwash - it fails to consider or even recognize some of the most important issues - the relation between what a person said and what he may be said to have meant by saying what he did.
Example - the case of the doctrine of religious toleration. People wrote at each other and made very oblique references that WILL be missed unless you read them together. THere is also the problem of knowing when people are sincere and when they are not, when is a position a disguise and when is it what is meant (the persecution thing again?) - and one way to get at that is to see how readers THEN received the texts.
Example - reading the idea as a self-sufficient unit ... but ideas are NOT coherent, and they are often meant in several ways at the same time (cf OED's list of meanings) - we must study ALL hte various situations inn which the given forms of words CAN be USED.

GO TO PAGE 37.

IV
At this point it might seem so much better to read by context, seeing texts as responses to immediate circumstances. This reading is getting popular but seems to end up claming that since ideas change reality and reality changes ideas maybe it is better to just do material history (42)??? I want to claim that whereas a context can HELP read a text, it does not EXPLAIN the text. Understanding the causes of an action does NOT explain the action itself.

People sometimes say they intend to do things they never do, the same set of causes leave people doing very different actions,

It is not enough to know what it means but we need to know HOW what was said was meant and what it was meant to do (e.g. is it reinforcing acepted norms or challenging them)


V
Conclusions:
we cannot write biographies concentrating on the works, OR write histories of ideas tracing the morphology of a given concept over time
THERE IS A POSITIVE CONCLUSION ABOUT WHAT SHOULD BE DONE - go to page 49



Questions:

I. how does this relate to the previous text?

II Is the critique of "text only" approach convincing? In part or in whole? What would be the advantages of reading "the text only"?

III Reactions to the discussion about persecuted writers? How DO we read them?

A Plurality of Corresponding Parts

"Literary Scholarship and Popular History" Lionel Gossman. Eighteenth Century Studies 7, 2 (1973) p 134.

"Indeed, a good case can be made for a metaphoric model allowing for the totality to be conceived as a plurality of corresponding parts, rather than a strongly unified whole in which the parts are hierarchically subordinated and subsumed"

What does it mean to say a British peasant lived in the eighteenth century rather than the seventeenth? Does that even make sense?

ASECS 2008 paper notes

Richardson, R. C., "LITERATURE AND HISTORY": THE IDENTITY AND PURPOSE OF THE JOURNAL, Literature and History, 11:1 (1985), 1-?.

Literature and History - started 1975 - is interdisciplinary but mostly (70 %) literary. "too many historians are evidently not deeply interested either in literature as the special and unique kind of source material which it is or in the methods and theories which literary critics have devised for studying it." (6)
Also a discussion of how historians deal with the icky material - as straightforward evidence or illustration ...


Allen, James Smith. "History and the Novel: Mentalité in Modern Popular Fiction"
History and Theory, 22, 3 (1983), 233-252.

"Unfortunately, social historians have expended more effort extracting and verifying information from novels than they have spent considering how this should be done. Compared with quantitative history, the level of theoretical and technical sophistication in the historian's use of literature has been remarkably low.5 Unself-conscious, eclectic, traditional historians tend to shy
away from this kind of theorizing, thus compounding the numerous problems of using a source as unreliable as fiction." (234-5)


Quentin Skinner "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas." History and Theory, 8 (1969), 3-53.

Talks about why neither the ONLY THE TEXT nor the USE THE CONTEXT to explain the text works. We must understand the text - what it says, the material and intellectual conditions and circumstances that produce the text, AND we must understand the intended force of the text. Was it intended to reinforce an accepted position, or to be subversive and controversial? Was it intended to be challenging and thoughtprovoking or simply to clarify what everyone was thinking anyway?

Anyway, the point of it is that knowing the context is helpful, but the context does not necessarily explain the meaning of the text. "The 'context' mistakenly gets treated as ateh determinant of what is said. It needs rather to be treated as an ultimate framework for helping to decide what conventionally recognizable meanings, in a society of that kind, it might in principle have been possible for someone to have intended to communicate." (49)

We can't say that history is important because it helps us study timeless ideas; there IS no perennial wisdom. There may be perennial questions but, .... "whenever it is claimed that the point of historical study of such questions is that we may learn directly from the answers, it will be found that what counts as an answer will usually look, in a different culture or period, so different in itself that it can hardly be in the least useful even to go on thinking of the relevant question as being 'the same' in the required sense after all." (52)

"The key to the indispensable value of of studying the history of ideas" is instead that the classic texts "help to reveal, if we let them, not the essential sameness, but rather the essential variety of viable moral assumptions and political commitments." (52)


Linda Colley in
Going Native, Telling Tales: Captivity, Collaborations and Empire, by Linda Colley. Past and Present, 2000, 170-193.
says "Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers - and readers - rarely accepted a rigid division between empirical reportage and fiction, and this militates against understanding in several ways" (173)
Defoe's Life ... of the Famous Captain Singleton, published in 1720, was not advertised or necessarily read as fiction - but when an ostensibly factual account by Robert Drury of his captivity was published in 1729, it was described as "such another romance as Robinson Crusoe"


BIBLIOGRAPHY FROM ALLEN:


5. In fact, despite a widespread practice, very few historians have considered their use of
literature; most "discussions" are either asides or afterthoughts, for example, Perrot, Les Ouvriers
en greve, 11545. Major exceptions to this general rule, however, are the widely ranging Peter
Laslett, "The Wrong Way through the Telescope: A Note on Literary Evidence in Sociology and in
Historical Sociology," British Journal of Sociology 27 (1976), 319-342, which touches on nearly
every issue of the source's unreliability; the more narrowly focused William 0. Aydelotte, "The
England of Marx and Mill as Reflected in Fiction," Journal of Economic History 8 (1948), Supplement,
42-58; Alexander Gerschenkron, "A Neglected Source of Economic Information on Soviet
Russia," Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 296-317;
George L. Mosse, "Literature and Society in Germany" in Literature and Western Civilization,
Vol. 5: The Modern World, 11, Realities, ed. David Daiches and Anthony Thorlby (London,
1972), 267-299; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, L'Argent, I'amour et la mort en pays d'oc: PrPcPdPdu roman de I'abbe Fabre "Jean-I'ont-pris" (1756) (Paris, 1980); Bonnie G. Smith, "The Domestic Myth," Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, 1981), 187-213; Jerome Blum, "Fiction and the European Peasantry: The Realist Novel as a Historical Source," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 126 (1982), 2: 122-139; and the more personal Herbert Butterfield, The Historical Novel (Cambridge, 1924), and Richard Cobb, Promenades: A Historian's Appreciation of Modern French Literature (Oxford, 1980).

Seeing the Past

Review by Roy Porter in Past and Present, 118, 1988, pp 186-205.

In this review Porter asks how we can read visual evidence such as prints. He points to problems with using prints as saying something real about what they portray - at least as regards the topic of a particular print (the madman acting out stage madness 202). Possibly we can use the wallpaper or peripheral figures more easily since they were intended specifically AS background (204). I think he is on to something here - but I also believe it is important and useful to understand what the "stock images" were.

He argues that prints were for the same audience as verbal texts - and that that audience was a literate elite. Political prints were, he says, "aimed at a particular elite of the reading public" (90). As evidence he uses the small print runs and the coded nature of the prints (changing over time) - something which in turn he blames on a desire to avoid censorship (all on page 191). I disagree. Prints may have been intended for that elite audience, but what was intended as political was clearly used by others for different reasons - and if the messages were coded it becomes even easier to reinterpret (see Donald and McCreary).

Finally, Porter challenges scholars to explore "what the ... prints tell us about women in Georgian society?" (204) He says that what we DO know is "how utterly 'sexualized' is the woman of the prints" (205) and suggests that this should be read as saying that "because of their sexual nature, women can be fit only for private life; the public business of politics must be left to men only" (205). This I violently disagree with. First of all I am not sure that all women are sexualized. Second, I believe we must keep in mind the common parallell between the family and the state (the concentration narratives, etc) and perhaps read it the other way around - women, sexuality, courtship, etc are so commonly portrayed in political prints as to suggest a very porous relationship between private and public and a much less regimented separation between male and female spheres.

So there.

Notes WCBS presentation

Mr. and Mrs. Bull: the Performance of Gender in British Eighteenth Century cartoons


We know the prints are there – they are oh so useful for illustration purposes, and to show undergraduates that our time period is interesting and perhaps even risqué … (the windy maids)
Art historians have written some about them, together with paintings, showing how they fit into the shift from history painting to lower subjects, representing broader segments of the population, but with no real focus on the historical information available. Historians use the pictures to, but mostly just to illustrate a particular point, reading them as transparent historical artifacts. I am not sure that is a good idea. Just the other week someone was making a statement about needlewomen being prostitutes and that was a well-known fact in the 19th century (coz there was this novelist who made some aside about it). Someone else pointed out that it was a common belief, or gossip, that needlewomen were prostitutes – the facts we have available do not necessarily support the claim. So, what I propose to tell you about today is not what people actually did, but rather what kind of conceptual – visual – language they were using to gossip with, what recognizable stereotypes might have been at the time. I believe understanding these frameworks will help me use images better in the bigger project I am working on.

I started looking at this to find out how one particular woman in the public arena was seen, and found that in addition to the written diary notes, discussion in letters and reviews or gossip in various journals there were also satirical prints of this woman – and the prints were used as if transparent, as if the portrayal of this one woman in the prints could tell us how she was seen without any further references. I decided that I needed to know more, that I needed to understand the language used in these prints, what the subtexts were, and this paper is the result of my explorations so far.

A little background;
From the Italian caricaturas – Leonardo’s grotesqueries – Dutch prints –
Some of the people:
William Hogarth (1697 - 1746) (Yale Lewis Walpole)
James Gillray (1756-1815) (Bucknell U, Brown U – also books)
Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827) (Boston Public L, Huntington)
Henry William Bunbury (1750-1811)
Hubert-François, Gravelot (1699-1773) mostly book work – France-England-France
the outside as a reflection of moral standing (crooked nose meant something about your soul) - not accepted as art but as amusement, acceptable because it was a corrective of folly, and as time wore on, as elegant wit and a particular British genre
Rarely censored, partly people bought up the edition if they disliked it, partly it was considered silly to respond – you should grin and bear it as an innocent joke.
Initially separate images sold in stores in different parts of town (on the gender issue – several female print publishers (Mrs. Humphrey (Gillray’s publisher), Mary Daly, etc). People bought prints – individually or by subscription, rented print collections over the weekend, went to the publisher’s gallery or looked for free in the window.
Audience? Often seriously allegorical so only literate folks could follow all the details, but there were broader strokes for lower class folks.

What I have looked for is:
How and where are men and women portrayed in the prints? What sort of women and men are they, are there images with both genders, or mostly separate?
What kinds of environments are people shown in – private, public, political?

Categories
Images that are ABOUT gender, gender roles and gender relations?
What do they say (what describes good gender, bad gender, confusion)?
Images that USE gender to describe something else – what McKeon describes as concentration narratives.
How is gender used here (look at the peace image – where napoleon is an effeminate man and George a woman coz they are doing the suitor thing)

Named individuals versus types?



Although cartoons are commonly used as illustrations of the political debate in British eighteenth-century studies, and the satirical depictions of women in those cartoons are regularly used as examples of assumed negative attitudes toward women, surprisingly little work has been done on how gender is actually presented and performed in the images.

There are rich sources to draw from, thousands of cartoons that depict men and women representing actual people as well as muses, virtues, and nations. In some the gender is not a matter of choice, only the way that gender is portrayed is negotiable, in other cartoons the gender is part of the message and gendered characteristics are used to define the people or situations portrayed.

In this paper I explore what kinds of meanings were assigned to gender characteristics. By looking at the words and visual gestures used to portray gender, I delineate the specifics of how gender expectations are revealed and negotiated in the images and accompanying texts. I also use the cartoons to investigate how transgressions of expected gendered behavior are portrayed, what meanings are assigned to such transgressions, and what the implied consequences, if any, are.
Finally, I look at how gender characteristics and expectations are used symbolically to represent other ideological contests, where gendered attributes are descriptive tools, not messages in themselves.

My paper is part of a larger study of how female non-fiction writers in the eighteenth century represented themselves as authoritative voices in the public sphere. I am particularly concerned with how female authors negotiated the matter of their gender in their construction and presentation of self and how their audience, their readers, responded to these constructions. Women who ventured into the public sphere at this time had to structure their public persona within the available discourse on gender, and women like the historian Catharine Macaulay were frequently seen referred to or directly satirized in cartoons. Mapping out the visual rhetorical landscape will demonstrate some of the possible strategies available in the construction and negotiation of a female public voice as well as tell us something of the disconnect between gendered characteristics as conceptual tools and gender as reified categories of understanding.

McKeon on Wahrman and King

Review article titled "Recent Studies in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century"
From SEL 45, 3 Summer 2005, 707-782.

After general comments and talk about Ruth Perry's book on changing notions of kinship we move to The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England, by Dror Wahrman.

The thesis of this text is said to be: that between the first three-quarters and the last quarter of the eighteenth century can be seen a sudden, rapid, indeed a radical discontinuity in English culture.
Wahrman’s principal interest is in “the making of the modern self,” by which he means “a very particular understanding of personal identity, one that presupposes an essential core of selfhood
characterized by psychological depth, or interiority, which is the bedrock of unique, expressive individual identity” (p. xi). In summary form, the basic difference marked by this rupture is that
between ca. 1700 and ca. 1780 English people indulged a sense of self that was fluid and unstable: intermittent, unlocalizable, and unintegrated by virtue of being unanchored in the stability of an individual and essential interiority; and that all this changed around 1780 as a consequence of the English experience of the American Revolution. Before 1700, as well, there was a different sense of self than that which flourished for most of the eighteenth century—although Wahrman says little about what this was like, and when he does it sounds very much like his eighteenth-century paradigm (e.g., p. 335n72). This change in the sense of self
Wahrman takes to be symptomatic of an even broader cultural revolution, in effect the making of modernity as such.

"he undertakes to outline how the radical discontinuity that is his subject can be observed in the way the categories of race, gender, and class change over the course of the eighteenth century."
For the gender part he starts from Laqueur's Making Sex, which claims that the old view was of
a less tight connection between biological sex and gender where " biological sex is known
to be implicated within, but not determinant of, the more general category of (what we would call) gendered social behavior, which also implies social rank, legal standing, and other aspects of
identity. In the latter conception, biological sex is separated out from this gender substratum and constituted as the natural and essential determinant of personal identity. “Sex” thereby provides the antithetical term against which the explicit idea of “gender” also is constituted.
So gender here comes out of sex, and sex is naturalized and essentialized.

After a long discussion of how Wahrman misunderstands Laqueur and unnecessarily shreds notions of interiority as nonauthentic or lacking in some vital aspect, McKeon moves on to discuss The Gendering of Men, 1600–1750: The English Phallus, by Thomas A. King.


King grounds his analysis in (among other things) the thesis of an early modern shift to a biologically grounded conception of gender difference. But he combines this insight with another thesis, indebted to the work not of Laqueur but of Alan Bray and Randolph Trumbach, that
this period also witnessed the emergence of modern notions of sexuality. The result is the doubly dialectical coalescence of, on the one hand, the modern norm of gender difference and the
orthodoxy of different-sex relations and, on the other hand, the modern deviation of same-sex relations, the negative criterion of sameness by which the norm of gender difference was sustained. The suspicion that modern concepts not only of gender difference but also of sexuality were in formation at this time was spurred by the observation that, around the turn of the seventeenth century, sodomitical behavior was acquiring a new subcultural visibility,
a notoriety as not just something that all men might do on occasion but as a mode of being in which some men might subsist as though by a perverse but natural dispensation. King breaks
new ground, I believe, by insisting that we attend not simply to sodomy but also to pederasty, the specifi c form of same-sex relations that is dominant before the eighteenth century and that has a determinate sociopolitical meaning in that historical context.
Pederasty names the species of same-sex behavior that requires between its participants a marked difference in generation, power, and status and that works, like the patron-client relationship, to cement hierarchical super- and subordination through the performance of one man’s (the prepubescent youth, but also the servant or the slave) dependence on another. From a modern perspective this is defi nitively a “sexual” behavior. Within early modern culture, however, pederasty was experienced as a political relationship of subjection that had for the submissive partner the positive status of a proximity to power that in turn bespoke power. “Courtiers, male and female, fl aunted their subordination as the mark of their favor. They displayed, proudly, their proximity to sovereign spectacle as the sign of their preferment” (p. 5).
Like other rituals of subjection to the public body of monarchy, pederasty was a highly theatrical performance of abjection and self-display on the public stage of the Stuart Court. In King’s argument, when we conceive pederasty in these terms we begin to understand the ideological meaning not only of pederasty in its eighteenth-century decline but also of gender and sexuality in their contemporaneous rise. The antithetical relationship between same-sex and different-sex behavior that is thrown into relief at this historical juncture bespeaks not a transhistorical “homophobia,” nor even simply the abstract logic of structural symmetry, but a political rebellion against the old order of hierarchical subjection. In the context of the far-flung
political, social, and cultural confl icts that marked the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the critique of sodomy that is more precisely a critique of pederasty becomes intelligible as a repudiation of royal and aristocratic absolutism akin to more ostensible
critiques such as the abolition of the House of Lords, the episcopal hierarchy, Star Chamber, feudal tenures, and the like.
Over the long term, what replaced these institutions was the concept of a “civil society” that was separated out from (and thereby also constituted by) the public authority of the state and that ensured the freedom of private institutions—religious observance, economic exchange, the public sphere—from political subjection to the state. In an analogous fashion, different-sex behavior came to stand for a new order of “gender complementariness” (pp. 96, 128): not the forced penetration of pederasty acted out on the public stage but the voluntary social-as-conjugal contract; not the superficial and one-way gaze of spectacular publicity but the asymmetrical reciprocity of looks that constitutes the deep interiority of autonomous subjectivity and privacy."

SO I wonder, is all of this a matter of trying to control where things go when you take away the vertical order ... you HAVE to pretend there is some other structure that works and is natural. And back to the public-private again, some different public/private:

PUBLIC PRIVATE
state civil society
civil society domestic
society family
guests/servants couple

They are like concentric circles with public always being the side with more people - more strangers - involved.

Back to McKeon on King:


Once we see pederasty as one among many analogous practices of the old regime, it becomes fruitful to entertain an analogy between the constitutive separation out of civil society from the state and that of “sexuality” from the traditional, all-inclusive category of political practice. As social contract theory posited the state of nature and the natural, rights-bearing individual as chronologically prior to and determinant of society and the political state, so contemporary “gender difference theory” separated out the gendered body as existentially and naturally—that is, anatomically and biologically—prior to whatever contrary political and social practices (like pederasty) might afterward be imposed upon it: “This separating out of practices from ‘the body itself’ would naturalize the self within a body increasingly assumed to possess its distinctive properties, including its gender, prior to and free of any external manipulation” (p. 62). So in my view, King’s thesis offers a more persuasive view than Wahrman’s of “the making of the modern self.” Henceforth the naturalness of possessing inborn rights and sex will come to be seen as the primary determinant of personal identity, and this movement toward the interior—away from impositions “from without” and toward an indwelling authenticity— will facilitate a reconception of “the self” as defined not by one’s place in the sociopolitical hierarchy of subjection but by one’s singular subjectivity. By the same token, this idea of the self, fully separated out from all circumstantial contingencies, will provide the basis for generalization about what is universally characteristic of humanity. “Remembering” pederasty, King argues, is crucial because it is the missing term in the prehistory of modern masculinity, the sociopolitical practice whose theatrical display of dependence was inconsistent with the conception of an autonomous privacy that might be universalized as a natural condition of independence. To remember pederasty therefore is among other things to challenge this naturalizing conception, to imply that like pederasty, gender difference has a “political” contingency: “[E]arly modern opposition to aristocratic publicity has been naturalized and mystified as subjective desire . . . The privatized, social, subjective body depended upon the negation of the passionate, ‘natural,’ subjected body” (pp. 128, 149). So when King speaks of “residual pederasty” in the eighteenth century he refers to the self-conscious reproduction of pederastic modes of superficial publicity and self-display that defiantly theatricalized the aura of being subjected to another, a politics of “counterresistance” to the new order of privacy and deep subjectivity that was itself resistant to the old order of subjection.

And then, then we get to the real meat of this ... so far. Katharine Gillespie’s inquiry in Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth Century: English Women’s Writing
and the Public Sphere.
"Gillespie argues that mid-seventeenth-century English women made use of the category of
the autonomous subject, the individual abstractly disembodied and disembedded from contextual socialization. On this basis they wrote in favor of a political contractualism that both ceded individual rights to the state and guaranteed the right to dissent from and to replace the magistrate:; they conceived themselves to be possessive individualists who had the right to own property in the wages they earned for their labor of preaching and prophesying; and they believed in the separation of the realms of the private and the public—the separation of church and state, the separation of home and state—as the institutional foundation of the free and sovereign self. As Gillespie shows at some length, these are liberal values that postmodern feminism has tended to see as masculinist ideology" .............." Gillespie counters that, often in explicit defense of women’s rights, “sectarian women writers actually forged the model of the subject that feminists actively seek to displace—that of the ‘sovereign’ or ‘abstract’ individual. Identifying them as early articulators rather than victims of this principle should challenge
us to reconsider its status as a masculine construct invented solely to further rather than ameliorate patriarchal domination” (pp. 170–1).

Concept v category

Read someone's blog on history - the writer was curious as to the difference between concept and category (because she wanted to study gender as a concept and could only find it written about as a category). So I looked up


concept
1. A general idea derived or inferred from specific instances or occurrences

and category

1. A specifically defined division in a system of classification; a class.
2. A general class of ideas, terms, or things that mark divisions or coordinations within a conceptual scheme, especially:
Aristotle's modes of objective being, such as quality, quantity, or relation, that are inherent
in everything.

So I decided that category is the better word to use because it speaks of ideas in terms of being parts of a bigger context. Since I don't believe hardly anything can be studied by itself, but always needs to be considered in terms of what it is bounded by, and since any study of a concept would be (or at least should be) interested in the boundaries of the idea in question, it seems that category is a more useful term.

On French feminism and cultural diversity

Essentially, American-made "French Feminism" celebrates women's innate difference from men: neither combating nor submitting to the patriarchy, women are called to affirm their much-neglected values. The three canonical "French Feminists" (Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray) would not disagree with this idea, although it is not the center of their work. In France, these women are not grouped together as feminists, a term they don't even use themselves. Kristeva is a respected philosopher and Cixous an innovative novelist. Their writings can be applied to but not reduced to politics or revolutionary feminine visions.
Historically, France owes its existence to uniting diverse peoples under a common language and strong central government. In a nation structured on ideals of unity and equality, feminism connotes divisiveness. This is the opposite of the United States, founded on the ideal of independent states united only for defense and economic transactions. Whereas Americans glorify liberty and diversity, the French appreciate common ground (the State and its values) and interdependence (a socialist-type system). Feminism, which places gender and not nationality as the uniting force, subverts even progressive French thought, whereas it fits somewhat better with American values. Paradoxically, certain French policies imply that because equality has been legally achieved, professional inequalities exist simply because women have other priorities and interests. Thus the outward ideal of equality surreptitiously translates into "separate but equal," each sex maintaining its role for the sake of national cohesion.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3693/is_200607/ai_n17178737

McKeon's comments at the Long Eighteenth Blog

From the blog "The Long Eighteenth"
http://long18th.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_archive.html

I agree entirely that "interpretation" and "explanation" form a dialectical doublet, in their interrelation defining what historical method should aim to achieve. I emphasize the former only because I feel as though "our" attentiveness to the self-conceptions of the past in recent years has been overbalanced by methods and perspectives that derive from modern experience. By this I meant something very imprecise, and the term "presentist" is probably misleading except in so far as it, too, means simply "what postdates the portion of the past that's under study." I think "explanation" is crucial to historical study, but perhaps only once (a schematic temporalization) "interpretation" has defined a sense of the past's self-understanding on the basis of which the claim to "explain" by *other* means can become intelligible.So in these terms, the presentism I sought to rebalance in Secret History is the tendency to read the period in which modernity first seems to emerge (which I take at least to include the 18th century) from the viewpoint of the failures of modernity, paradigmatically, capitalism, the bourgeoisie, class conflict, liberalism, the public sphere, separate spheres, "The Enlightenment." To study these things from the viewpoint of "the past" is, as I've already quoted, "to view the past not only as the prelude to our present but also as a response to its own past" (xxvii), a formulation that suggests that the distinction between interp. and explan. can also name the difference between attending to the intentional *motives* with which past activities, etc. were undertaken and elaborating a theoretical or *causal* understanding whose possibility depends on taking a certain distance from the aims of the past culture in question. In 1690 capitalism meant not commodity fetishism, alienated labor, and the extraction of surplus labor but freedom from hierarchical political and economic control. The bourgeoisie was not a self-conscious class whose ideology sought to universalize its own interests. Indeed, whether it even existed is a definitional rather than an empirical question--hence my objection (74) to the translation of Habermas's burgerlich as bourgeois rather than civil. What people *experienced* in 1690 was not class conflict but a conflict between status-based assumptions about the coextension of birth and worth and emergent class-based assumptions that worth was a function of labor discipline within one's calling, or simply one's industrious accomplishments and the upward mobility that attended them.Except for a few thoughtful "Tory feminists," "liberalism" wasn't an ideology of human rights and negative freedom that nonetheless silently drew the line at women and indigent men but a revolutionary alternative to the tacit belief in monarchal legitimacy. Similarly, the public sphere wasn't a hypocritical claim to inclusiveness and equality but a revolutionary intuition that the determination of public affairs should be the work of others besides the king and his ministers. Separate spheres was not simply the modern, more ruthlessly efficient instantiation of patriarchal inequality but one result of reconceiving gender relations no longer as a matter of better vs. worse but instead as a matter of equality in difference. And the Enlightenment was not the dogmatic adherence to rational and instrumental "objectivity" but a dialectical effort to make sense of the difference between the object and the subject, science and the humanities that had been bequeathed by the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns. This is not to fashion an apology for modernity but to fill in its other side (as it seems these days necessary to do) so as to come closer to an understanding of the past as, like the present, historical process.This sort of presentism can't be laid at the door of any single recent critical movement: the post-structuralist demystification of "history," utopian Marxist contempt for the achievements of modernization, new historicist efforts to "do" history outside the protocols of empiricism--i.e., without abandoning the poststructuralist belief that "history" is epistemologically inaccessible--all these have contributed to the haze of "negative hermeneutics" (Ricoeur) of our times. To recur to one of your points, Dave, although I see what you mean about the comparable vulnerability of "presentism" and "historicism" to partiality, I'd rather reorient these terms, partly on the precedent of previous usage. I take presentism itself to be a mode of "historicism" in the now very general sense of historicism as entailing any commitment to historical understanding. But as I see it, "historicism" came into usage to name what I've been calling "interpretation," the aim to study the past in its own terms, as opposed to the aim to elaborate general laws of historical formation and development that can "explain" history in a more trans-historical fashion, i.e., the attempt to apply the model of scientific "natural laws" to sociohistorical experience.(I associate this meaning of historicism with, e.g., Troeltsch and Dilthey; but ironically Popper and others later adopted the term to describe and discredit what I'm calling "explanation".)And I agree that to conceive interpretation as the study of the past in its own terms begs the question of what, or even more *whose*, past we're talking about. Thinking of inter./explan. as methodologically a dialectical doublet, however, suggests that this is the necessary next step in interpretation: dividing interpretation--a whole vis a vis its opposition to explanation--into its own parts once that preceding division has been accomplished. This can be both diachronic and synchronic: the former in so far as "the past" we seek to understand is a chronology that needs diachronic subdivision if we're to sort out different viewpoints and perspectives; certainly the latter once we recognize that any diachronic period is defined apart from others according to a synchronic perception of what makes it, as a unit, different from surrounding periods. I.e., synchronic study isn't the opposite of diachronic study, it presupposes it as the means by which any slice of diachrony becomes susceptible, by bracketing adjacent chronologies, to synchronic understanding. In this respect I don't think cultural studies devotes itself to synchronic rather than diachronic study; it brackets the problem of diachrony--and thereby takes a position on diachrony--by conceiving a period (or a decade or a day) as susceptible to its "own" analysis. And I think we owe synchronic study not to any recent thinking but to the Scottish Enlightenment historians and then, soon after, to the full elaboration of Marx, for whom the synchronic relationship between infrastructure and superstructure became as indispensable to "historical" study as is the relationship between one event or period and others. (The attribution of the discovery of synchrony to cultural studies might even be seen as an example of "presentism," like the case of looking to Said [as Dave points out]for the origins of what Selden already practiced.) And I think that when people castigate "master narratives" they're not thinking of diachronic totalizations alone. The strong meaning of "teleology" as positing "at the outset a result purported to emerge only as the result of inquiry" (xxv) doesn't require a linear narrative in which to operate. After all, Marx's synchronic relation of ideology/material base has been accused (although I think wrongly)of teleology, as well as of "abstraction" and "reduction." On the other hand, the ambition to hunt out teleology has led some to conflate teleology with linear succession or temporality, which seems to me a mistake. (If this were true, then chronological readings would be ipso facto "evolutionary" readings, whereas in fact they also can be, and can be criticized as, "devolutionary.")For a discussion of interp./explan. that very interestingly argues the subtlety with which that distinction can be made when applied to micro-questions of whether individual actions are the result of "internal" motive or "external" cause see Alasdair MacIntyre, "The Idea of a Social Science," in Against the Self-Images of the Age (Notre Dame, 1984), 211-29.