Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  Such developments entailed new norms for male behaviour. Figures like Squire Western (in Tom Jones), the rake Lovelace (in Clarissa) and Tyrrell (in William Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794)) were demonized as the unacceptable, unenlightened face of machismo, abusing male prerogatives and power. The tyrannical father and the injustice of the double standard were condemned. ‘Of all things in nature,’ commented the early feminist Laetitia Pilkington, ‘I most wonder why men should be severe in their censures on our sex, for a failure in point of chastity: is it not monstrous, that our seducers should be our accusers?’29 Others raised quizzical eyebrows. ‘It is the Interest of the Society,’ ironized the arch-cynic Bernard de Mandeville, ‘to preserve Decency and Politeness, that Women should linger, waste, and die, rather than relieve themselves in an unlawful Manner.’30 Would-be modernizers of masculinity commended domestic virtues. Richard Steele's publications – the extraordinarily advanced The Christian Hero (1701) and his sentimental comedy The Tender Husband (1705) – headed the early campaign to polish conjugal conduct;31 the hero of Richardson's final novel, Sir Charles Grandison (1753–4), set new standards for the sympathetic male; while David Hume praised the vogue for mixed company where ‘both sexes meet in an easy and social manner; and the tempers of men, as well as their behaviour, refine apace’.32 Such socializing led not to effeminacy, as was widely feared, but to a superior masculinity: ‘The male sex among a polite people, discover their authority in more generous, though not a less evident manner; by civility, by respect, and in a word by gallantry.’33

  And so, the ‘man of feeling’ became prized, as the patriarchalist dictum that matrimony was monarchy in microcosm yielded to a new ideal of the household as a sanctuary of emotional warmth and vehicle of socialization.34 While the ‘molly’ (homosexual), macaroni and fribble were vilified as sensibility taken to excess, enlightened discourse – the conquest of despotism by politeness – prized males who were neither ‘foppish’ nor ‘licentious’, and aimed to reconcile ‘manly liberty’ with ‘the goodly order of the universe’. Shaftesbury's ideal, for instance, conjuring up a model that looked back to Baldassare Castiglione's Renaissance ‘Courtyer’ and forward to Sir Charles Grandison, would possess ‘a mind subordinate to reason, a temper humanized and fitted to all natural affections’.35

  And as shifting cultural values commended a greater domestic mutuality, the public position of women also arguably improved. Women played vital parts in Georgian public life, in politics (both street and salon), in philanthropic and patriotic activities and in leisured culture (as both patrons and performers).36 Despite current feminist assertions that women were being excluded from urban public spaces through fear of sexual harassment and dread of losing their ‘reputation’,37 English women enjoyed a Europe-wide fame – or notoriety – for their remarkable public independence: ‘In Great-Britain the ladies are as free as the gentlemen,’ John Potter remarked in 1762, ‘and we have no diversions, or public amusements, in which the one may not appear, without any offence, as frankly as the other.’ He exaggerated, of course, but the historian Joyce Ellis observes that ‘urban women walked about freely, unveiled and for the most part unchaperoned’, to visit friends, the theatre and even the coffee house.38 There were a few mixed coffee houses and clubs,39 and female and mixed debating societies proliferated in London from the 1770s, their topics including questions like that posed on 12 November 1798 at the Westminster Forum: ‘Does the clause of Obedience in the Marriage ceremony, bind a Wife to obey her Husband at all times?’ If The Times moaned predictably that ‘the debating ladies would be much better employed at their needle and thread’, its protests were to no avail: at least four dozen sets of rooms in the metropolis were hired out to such societies.40

  Above all, the participation and perhaps also the status of women were improving through the new opportunities provided by print culture, especially once Aphra Behn, Delariviére Manley and Eliza Haywood achieved early literary fame,41 and other women shone intellectually. Anne Conway's Cartesian The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy appeared in Latin in 1690, while Catherine Trotter Cockburn published one of the first vindications of Locke. Across the board, female education improved: ‘All our ladies read now,’ commented Dr Johnson in 1778.42 He of course disparaged female pretensions (a woman preacher, famously, was like a dog walking on its hind legs) and no female authors figured in his Lives of the English Poets (1779–81), but such exclusions were being eroded as women played an increasing part in print culture.

  In 1777 Richard Samuel exhibited at the Royal Academy a group portrait of The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain, which was then reproduced in Johnson's Ladies New and Polite Pocket Memorandum. It was a modern pantheon adorned in classical drapes: Elizabeth Carter, bluestocking and translator of the Stoic Epictetus; Angelica Kaufmann, one of two female members of the Royal Academy; Anna Laetitia Barbauld, educationalist, poet and essayist; the singer Elizabeth Linley; Catharine Macaulay, educationalist and author of an 8-volume History of England (1763–83); Elizabeth Montagu, ‘Queen of the Blues [bluestockings]’ and head of a renowned literary salon; Elizabeth Griffith, the Irish actress, novelist and playwright; Hannah More, poet, novelist and Evangelical; and the novelist Charlotte Lennox.

  Women won their spurs in public culture; they appear in George Ballard's Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain who have been Celebrated for their Writings or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts and Sciences (1752), Theophilus Cibber's Lives of the Poets (1753), in the Catalogue of 500 Celebrated Authors of Great Britain, Now Living (1788), in the New Biographical Dictionary (1796) and in the Literary Memoirs of Living Authors of Great Britain (1798), while they form the exclusive subject matter of Mary Hays's 6-volume Female Biography (1803).43 The periodicals boom, to which women themselves contributed, forced writers to appeal to mixed readerships; while items sympathetic to female aspirations regularly cropped up in the press, not least, if oddly, in the Gentleman's Magazine.44

  Indeed, nearly all the bestselling novelists at the turn of the century were women: Maria Edgeworth, Elizabeth Hamilton, Amelia Opie, Mary Brunton, Jane and Anna Maria Porter and Sydney Owenson – only Sir Walter Scott could match them for sales. Joanna Baillie was the top dramatist of the day, and women also figured in poetry – at least 339 women poets published under their own names between 1760 and 1830 and a further eighty-two anonymous ones have been identified. In her Thoughts on the Condition of Women (1799), Mary Robinson listed over two dozen eminent female literary critics, essayists, historians, biographers, translators and classicists, maintaining that her sex had written ‘the best novels that have been written, since those of Smollett, Richardson, and Fielding’.45

  With such tensions existing between male ideologies and women's claims to a place in the sun as cultural producers, controversy inevitably flared as to the true nature of the sex. Alongside familiar scriptural, metaphysical and psychological teachings, one truth claim which loomed large – inevitably so, in an age of science – was biology. Physiological and medical studies, many insisted, would finally crack the secret of women's nature, and hence of their proper social position: anatomy was destiny. And, according to many medical experts, such a ‘science of women’ dictated a gendered order formally compatible with the status quo, though one which, far from endorsing Halifaxian female inferiority, viewed the sexes as possessing (broadly speaking) equivalent but different endowments.46

  According to anatomical and physiological thinking, the female constitution was specially designed by God and Nature for childbearing, while psychologically too they were meant to be soft and nurturing, thereby suiting them to matrimony and that ‘chief end of their being’, motherhood. The ancient Aristotelian idea that the female body was a botched version of the male, with her organs of reproduction inversions of the male equivalents (the vagina as an outside-in penis) was replaced, it has been argued, by the idea that male and female bodies were radically different. Anatomical structures that had been thou
ght common to men and women, like the skeleton and the nervous system, were now differentiated. Organs such as ovaries and testicles, which had previously shared a name, became distinctively labelled. Some studies of women's brains held that they were smaller than men's, thereby indicating their unfitness for intellectual pursuits.47

  Such conclusions hinged in particular on a gendered reading of the nervous system: women's nerves were viewed as more sensitive than men's, and their ability to control their impulses by will power was also questioned. Given these biological facts of life, claimed self-styled biomedical experts, the social good demanded that women should devote themselves earnestly to the maternal role for which Nature had fashioned them. They must cease to be mere butterflies, but nor should they emulate men; rather, they must follow Nature and be ‘themselves’.48

  This doctrine was spelt out in extreme form by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who hailed the true woman as the incarnation of feeling, all heart – or, in Mary Wollstonecraft's devastating summary, a house slave ‘without a mind’.49 While full-blown Rousseauvian views won little favour in Britain, English writers, male and female alike, approved some aspects of them. A warm admirer of Rousseau's pedagogical treatise Émile (1762), Wollstonecraft herself was one among many who endorsed his notion that women's unique endowment lay in childrearing. They could be good mothers and sound educators, however, only by cultivating the rational faculties with which – despite Rousseau's nonsense – they had been blessed. If the male must ‘necessarily fulfil the duties of a citizen, or be despised’, his wife should be equally intent to ‘manage her family, educate her children, and assist her neighbours’. Committed to promoting education and moral training so that future generations would prove worthy daughters, wives and mothers, Wollstonecraft deemed it a tyranny that they had to ‘remain immured in their families groping in the dark’. The ideal marriage should be one based on neither sexual attraction nor romantic passion, but on mutual respect, affection and compatibility.50

  A few males who piqued themselves on being paladins of enlightenment did, however, take up Rousseau's pet project (announced in Sophie (1762), the companion to Emile) of grooming a female for her privileged role as protectress of the race. Thomas Day of the Lunar Society, a great admirer of Rousseau and his vision of women as softly submissive,51 put theory into practice by acquiring a living doll to transform, Pygmalion-fashion, into the perfect wife, an angel schooled to despise fashion, live in domestic retirement and devote herself to her husband and offspring. Aided by a friend, Day selected for his experiment a blonde girl of twelve from the Shrewsbury orphanage, whom he named Sabrina Sidney (after the River Severn and his political hero, the Whig martyr Algernon Sidney). He then went to the London Foundling Hospital where he chose her an 11-year-old brunette companion, Lucretia. To avoid scandal, he took his protégées to France, where he endeavoured to fire them with a Rousseauvian contempt for luxury, dress, title and frivolity, deploying an educational plan which followed the Genevan's. They quarrelled, however, irked him and finally caught smallpox – while Lucretia proved ‘invincibly stupid’. After a year, Day returned to England, apprenticed the latter to a milliner and set Sabrina up in Lichfield.52 His experiments in training his intended's temper proved, however, deeply disillusioning. When he dropped melted sealing wax on Sabrina's arm in order to inure her to pain – a good Rousseauvian experiment – she actually flinched; worse, when he fired blanks at her skirts, she shrieked. Concluding that she was a poor subject, he packed her off to boarding school – later he decided she also had a weak mind and abandoned her.53 Eventually Day found a congenial soulmate in one Esther Milner; thanks to her husband's repeated efforts, she was successfully hardened into a spartan lifestyle, abandoning her harpsichord and accepting that she would be denied servants. In his didactic novel Sandford and Merton (1783), Day then went on to paint the portrait of a perfect Rousseauvian lady, who rose before dawn, dedicated herself to housewifery and wholly renounced the fashionable vices which, enlightened feminists believed, trivialized the sex and spoilt them for their natural duties.

  While Day was regarded as quixotic even by his cronies, the notion that Nature had endowed woman with a sacred duty to fulfil her biological endowment as guardian of morality appealed to many. In her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), Mary Wollstonecraft gloried in woman as nurse of the rising generation54 and, on that elevated basis, expressed her profound contempt for simpering, whimpering, flirtatious spoilt coquettes – those who, in making love their vocation, ‘always retain the pretty prattle of the nursery, and do not forget to lisp, when they have learnt to languish’, thus turning sexuality into the Trojan horse of oppression.55 The foibles of the senseless sisterhood who pandered to men and to their own vanity merely perpetuated female weakness: ‘imbecility in females,’ spat Jane Austen, ‘is a great enhancement of their personal charms’.56 Aware how sexuality could destroy the sisterhood, Wollstonecraft particularly deplored that complicity between beauties and beaux which locked the former in subjection: enticed by men to display ‘infantile airs’, women's ‘strength of body and mind are sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty’.57 For that reason she denounced the false system of education designed to make women ‘alluring mistresses’ rather than ‘affectionate wives and rational mothers’.58 True strength in a woman demanded self-control and abstention from sentimentality or seductiveness:

  Novels, music, poetry, and gallantry, all tend to make women the creatures of sensation, and their character is thus formed in the mould of folly… This overstretched sensibility naturally relaxes the other powers of the mind, and prevents intellect from attaining the sovereignty which it ought.59

  Sense must triumph over sensibility, that ‘manie of the day’, claimed Wollstonecraft; praising Locke, she commended mental self-discipline.60

  Influential, if equivocal, in promoting positive images of women were Addison and Steele, whose writings advanced a civilizing mission for the sex. Mingling raillery with reproach, they urged improved female education: ladies should comport themselves more rationally, so as to be good companions to their husbands and examples to their children. The essayists flattered women by honouring their role, if, in Swift's tart phrase, ‘fair sexing it’.61

  Launched in 1709, Steele's Tatler was targeted not just at ‘publick spirited men’ but also at ‘the Fair Sex, in Honour of whom I have invented the title of this Paper’.62 That barbed compliment belittled women's discourse (‘tattle’) while its author was not above dabbling in it himself. ‘I do not mean it an injury to women,’ he wrote, ‘when I say there is a sort of sex in souls.’ That was a view reiterated by the Spectator: ‘The soul of a man and that of a woman,’ it pronounced, ‘are made very unlike, according to the employments for which they are designed.’63 Confronting Poulain de la Barre's view, endorsed by John Dunton, that ‘l'esprit n'a pas de sexe’ (‘the mind has no sex’), Addison ventured the counter-possibility that there may be ‘a kind of Sex in the very Soul’.64 Odd though it may now seem, prominent ladies welcomed Addison's view and his attitude towards them. ‘The Women have infinite obligation to him,’ complimented the bluestocking Mrs Elizabeth Montagu:

  before his time, they used to nickname Gods creatures, & make their ignorance their pride, as Hamlet says. Mr Addison has shown them, ignorance, false delicacy, affectation & childish fears, are disgraces to a female character, which should be soft not weak, gentle, but not timorous. He does all he can to cure our sex of their feminalities without making them masculine.65

  Women who considered themselves enlightened – if lacking any aspiration to become like men – might thus believe that inclusion within the Spectatorial rational circle of polite print culture enhanced their status.

  Pondering Addison's modest proposal, and wondering ‘if there is really a sex in the soul’, the character Savillon in Henry Mackenzie's novel Julia de Roubigné (1777) concluded that ‘custom and education have established one, in our idea’.66 There, of course, lay t
he rub: if the soul was indeed gendered, was that the work of Nature or nurture? – a question which Addison, normally such a loyal Lockean, unaccountably failed to address, indeed like Locke himself.

  All hinged on the capacity for rationality, that great instrument of humanity and liberation. Did women naturally partake of rationality precisely as men? If so, the existing socio-legal order must surely be oppressive. Likewise, if, as post-1688 ideology insisted, monarchs were no longer kings by Divine Right but by contract, on what grounds could fathers and husbands legitimately claim their ascendancy over women?67

  Wife and servant are the same,

  But only differ in the name:68

  in a modest couplet Lady Mary Chudleigh thus got to the heart of the gender, if not the servant, problem!

  Responses to this conundrum were complex and confused. Locke had stated that all minds, male and female alike, began as blank sheets of paper and hence were equally receptive to training.69 He did not, however, pursue the logic of this line of thought to the point of questioning women's current legal or professional status.70 Various female writers built upon Locke's work. Seeing womanhood as ‘manly, noble, full of strength and majesty’, the Whig educational theorist Catharine Macaulay mocked ‘the notion of a sexual difference in the human character’ – it would be disproved by ‘close observation of Nature’ – and advocated unisex education.71