Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

by Roy Porter

  The implications of a common rationality were both simple and complex. Bathsua Makin, in her Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen (1673), and Judith Cook, in her Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (1696), held that education was a fundamental right – and were not well-instructed ladies, in any case, national assets?72 The most articulate voice of such opinions was Mary Astell, although her positions defy crude feminist pigeon-holing. Newcastle-born, she moved to London in 1687 and became the intellectual companion of John Norris, ‘the last Cambridge Platonist’, who attacked Locke's sensationalist epistemology for marginalizing God. Unlike later female intellectuals, Astell rejected Locke: in her view his The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) threatened the Christian faith and the Anglican Church, and she rebutted his contractual theory of government in her The Christian Religion (1705), which reinstated the ideal of sacred kingship.73 Denouncing Shaftesbury as ‘deistical’, she rejected Whiggery in favour of passive obedience,74 while, in ecclesiastical politics, her A Fair Way with the Dissenters and Their Patrons (1704) and An Impartial Enquiry Into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War in This Kingdom (1704) upheld the penalization of Dissenters and endorsed Tory doctrines of non-resistance.75

  Astell was not so conservative, however, when it came to the status of women. In Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700), she repudiated the ‘Tame, Submissive and Depending Temper’ of ‘those Women who find themselves born for Slavery’, assailing the doctrine of familial ‘absolute Sovereignty’: ‘if all Men are born free, how is it that all Women are born Slaves’? Yet, while championing the spiritual independence of women and deploring their trivialization as decorative charms, she also warned against those who might blow ‘the Trumpet of Rebellion’ and lead wives on ‘to Resist, or to Abdicate the Perjur'd Spouse’.76 Politically a High Church Tory, Mary Astell had no desire to undermine the Christian gendered hierarchy: women were men's spiritual equals but wives must obey husbands.

  Astell's prime aspiration lay in better education, so as to ensure and enhance women's development as moral and spiritual agents: cultivation of the mind was a right. Though men were made for the active life and women for the contemplative, for that their souls must be properly nurtured. The solution she advanced to this end was a female ‘monastery’, which would be ‘not only a retreat from the world for those who desire that advantage, but likewise, an institution and previous [i.e., early] discipline to fit us to do the greatest good in it’.77 Her idea of a female educational enclave found various later echoes, including Sarah Scott's utopian novel Millenium Hall (1762), which pictures a woman-only philanthropic community in which a group of ladies create a feminine utopia caring for the elderly, the poor, the sick and the handicapped. The community is mainly made up of women who have suffered abuse from men and it is more sentimental, less intellectual than Astell's proposed college.78

  Enlightened thinkers insisted that women were endowed with rational souls equivalent to men's; hence, their minds deserved to be educated. As Astell's case may suggest, much rarer, however, was any call – either by women, or by men chivalrously speaking on their behalf – for greater freedom, social, economic or political, or for radically new roles and rights. Likewise, despite – or, perhaps, because of – extensive castigation of the double standard, demands for what would later be called sexual emancipation were uncommon. A rare forthright repudiation of the status quo was Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), significantly a work of the Revolutionary era.79

  Though a lifelong Anglican, Wollstonecraft gained her intellectual and political education from Richard Price and the cluster of rational Dissenters in the London suburb of Newington Green, where she ran a school in the 1780s. Politicization came gradually, as she made her way through a turbulent life and became successively an educationalist (Thoughts on the Education of Daughters), a novelist (Mary, a Fiction (1788)), a children's writer (Original Stories from Real Life (1788)) and a reviewer for the Analytical Review. A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), her reply to Burke's Reflections, cast Burke as a toady to power and an apologist for oppression.80

  A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) protested against the failings and misdirection of female education. Incensed that a woman should be trained to consider that her true purpose in life lay in pleasing men, Wollstonecraft inveighed against the encouragement of ‘listless inactivity and stupid acquiescence’. Women were ‘kept in ignorance under the specious name of innocence’, and men sought in them only ‘docility, good humour, and flexibility – virtues incompatible with any vigorous exertion of intellect’. ‘Kind instructors!’ she fumed, ‘what were we created for? To remain, it may be said, innocent; they mean in a state of childhood.’81

  Presenting herself as a ‘philosopher’ and a ‘moralist’, Wollstonecraft politicized her rejection of subordination. ‘'Til society is very differently constituted,’ she expostulated, ‘parents, I fear, will still insist on being obeyed, because they will be obeyed.’ The answer to it all? – a ‘Revolution in female manners’. How it would be brought about and exactly what that would entail were hardly clear, however.82 Nevertheless, her plea found some echoes. The Dissenter Anna Laetitia Barbauld proclaimed in 1795 in The Rights of Woman:

  Yes, injured Woman! rise, assert thy right!

  Woman! too long degraded, scorned, oppressed;

  O born to rule in partial Law's despite,

  Resume thy native empire o'er the breast…83

  while in A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination (1799), addressed to her ‘unenlightened country-women’, Mary Robinson similarly rallied her sex: ‘Shake off the trifling, glittering shackles, which debase you… Let your daughters be liberally, classically, philosophically and usefully educated.’84

  However dramatic, all such proclamations were also remarkable for what they omitted. Wollstonecraft urged women to develop their talents, but she had no plans for votes for women or political activism. Nor did male reformers argue the case on their behalf. The democrat Major Cartwright refuted the idea that women were fit for the vote,85 and, in his Essay on Government (1824), the Benthamite James Mill likewise excluded women, advancing hoary clichés about virtual representation (their interest ‘is involved either in that of their fathers, or in that of their husbands’).86

  Nevertheless, enlightened women who talked politics had gone out on a limb, and they were widely attacked. Not content to deny that women were men's equals, John Bennett's Strictures on Female Education (1787) warned against female ‘over-education’, for then ‘the world would be deprived of its fairest ornaments… and man of that gentle bosom, on which he can recline amidst the toils of labour’.87 Demonizing Wollstonecraft, the Revd Richard Polwhele accused unruly women of overturning God-given order:

  I shudder at the new unpictur'd scene,

  Where unsex'd woman vaunts her imperious mien;

  Where girls, affecting to dismiss the heart,

  Invoke the Proteus of petrific art;

  With equal ease, in body or in mind,

  To Gallic freaks or Gallic faith resign'd.88

  Appealing to Nature (that ‘grand basis of all laws human and divine’), the Cornish cleric ruled that the woman who defied her place would ‘soon “walk after the flesh, in the lust of uncleanness, and despise government” ’, while graciously accepting that ‘the crimsoning blush of modesty, will always be more attractive than the sparkle of confident intelligence’.89

  It was, moreover, a classic case of ‘women beware women’. Margaret Cavendish – labouring under the sobriquet ‘mad Madge’ – was attacked by others of her sex for her outlandish views, as was Aphra Behn for her audacity. ‘Wit in women is apt to have bad consequences,’ tartly reflected Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, à propos the spirited Laetitia Pilkington: ‘I am sorry to say the generality of women who have excelled in wit have failed in chastity.’90 In turn Catharine Macaulay was ostracized by fellow bluestockings for writing in to
o political a vein – and for marrying a man thirty-six years her junior: both Elizabeth Montagu and Hannah More refused to read her writings.91 The latter also chided such ‘female politicians’ as Mary Wollstonecraft,92 as did Mrs Chapone, for whom the Rights of Woman was marred by ‘many absurdities, improprieties, and odious indelicacies’.93 For her part, Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins, in her Letters on the Female Mind, Its Powers and Pursuits (1793), scapegoated Helen Maria Williams, a radical living in Paris who was putting out sympathetic accounts of the Revolution. ‘Our Maker never designed us for anything but what he created us, a subordinate class of beings,’ she insisted, endorsing the gendered status quo and boasting that she considered ‘the regulation of a kingdom's interests as far too complex a subject for me to comprehend. I would dissuade my countrywomen from the study.’94

  Such responses betray defensive anxieties – as with Caesar's wife, it was essential to be above suspicion. Women knew that they had too much to lose: emulating men in dirty fields like politics, they would cede the moral and spiritual superiority derived from unblemished virtue. They had to stick together as they ran the gauntlet in a man's world. What was endlessly reiterated, moreover, was the demand for mental cultivation, to make women fit to be responsible adults pulling their social and familial weight, and to endow them with some sort of independence and a degree of rational control over their lives as moral agents. This was what counted to the circles gathering round such bluestockings as Elizabeth Carter, the translator of Epictetus, and Elizabeth Montagu – a lady, complimented Dr Johnson, who ‘exerts more mind in conversation than any person I ever met with’.95 In her Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773), a hugely popular work reprinted at least sixteen times, another bluestocking, Mrs Chapone, demanded that women's minds be treated like men's.96 The prime call was thus not for socio-sexual reorganization but for the acceptance of mental and spiritual equality and the right to education so as to end ‘Perpetual Babyism’.97 Women must think for themselves: as so often with the British Enlightenment, the envisaged solution lay in emancipating the mind.

  The age of reason has been portrayed by postmodernist feminists such as Catherine Belsey as a disaster for women: ‘The Enlightenment commitment to truth and reason, we can now recognise, has meant historically a single truth and a single rationality, which have conspired in practice to legitimate the subordination of… women.’98 Other feminists demur, some going so far as to argue that women, far from being disadvantaged by the Enlightenment, were its very vanguard: in the guise of consumers, cultivators and communicators of feeling, women were to the fore in the birth of the Modern. ‘The modern individual,’ declares the critic Nancy Armstrong, ‘was first and foremost a woman.’99

  15

  EDUCATION: A PANACEA?

  I consider a human soul without education like marble in the quarry.

  JOSEPH ADDISON1

  He that undertakes the education of a child undertakes the most important duty of society.

  THOMAS DAY2

  We will venture to say, that there is no class of men to whom a nation is so much indebted as to those employed in instructing the young: For if it be education that forms the only distinction between the civilized and the savage, much certainly is due to those who devote themselves to the office of instruction.

  ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA (1800) 3

  The model enlightened person was the educated adult, presumed adult, independent – and male: a ‘Mr Spectator’, a man of sense or feeling. It was also believed that women were, in principle, at least honorary members of this club, rather than associates of some salon des refusées. But what of others?

  Children were evidently crucial. Special attention was newly fixed on them, for they would be the standardbearers of that brighter morrow so dear to progressive minds.4 And opinions about children were undergoing radical change. Mainstream Christian doctrine was put in a nutshell by the leading Evangelical educator Hannah More: were not infants ‘beings who bring into the world a corrupt nature, and evil disposition, which it should be the great end of education to rectify’?5 In line with such Original Sin tenets – the biblical spare the rod and spoil the child – brutal, indeed bloody, childrearing practices had been both preached and practised. Often rationalized by a theology of sin, much traditional upbringing – and not only for the poor – was stern, and beatings were the lot of the young, at home, at school and in the workplace, in the belief that minors were, in a broadly Filmerian sense, the property of their parents or those in loco parentis. Some historians have further argued that pre-industrial society scarcely even entertained a distinctive concept of children, seeing them simply as Lilliputian adults: what possible reason could there then be to privilege their condition?6

  But by 1780 Miss More was on the back foot, for the enlightened had challenged hardline views of children as wicked sinners. Deeming human nature improvable and looking to a brighter future, they knew there could be no progress without a fresh model of the child and a generous vision of education's potential. As with so much else, Locke held the key.7

  ‘Of all the men we meet with,’ maintained Locke in his Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693), ‘nine parts of ten are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education. It is that which makes the great difference in mankind.’8 Whereas Protestant rigorists queried whether the young could truly be schooled into virtue – wickedness was too ingrained to be corrigible by mortal means alone – Locke by contrast likened the infant mind to ‘white paper, or wax, to be moulded and fashioned as one pleases’9 – although it was not precisely a matter of ‘as one pleases’, for parents were not (as they were for Filmer) owners of their offspring, but trustees, required by God to bring up their children to be rational, responsible Christians.10

  Locke did not idealize infant innocence – sentimentality came later, and child worship began only with Romanticism. He did, however, regard human nature as malleable: as babies were born indeterminate and more or less identical, so their future temper would hinge upon their upbringing in the widest sense. Much followed from this. Education must not be narrowly scholastic: it was not about being learned but about learning for life, a training in character, habit and conduct. The reader might be surprised, he warned, how little he had said about books: but bookishness was not the point.11 What counted was to discipline the mind in the correct habits of thinking so as to mould a good disposition. Applying the empiricist epistemology of his Essay concerning Human Understanding, Locke insisted that instead of pedantic scholasticism on the one hand or silly fairy stories on the other – works ‘as should fill his head with perfectly useless trumpery’ – children should be trained to use their powers of observation in getting to know the world at hand. Light-headed imagination must yield to solid sense,12 and Locke particularly warned parents against letting servants scare children with ‘Notions of Spirits and Goblins… of Raw-Head and Bloody Bones’. Once such ‘Bug-bear Thoughts… got into the tender Minds of Children’, he maintained, they could not be ‘got out again’, making them ‘afraid of their Shadows and Darkness all their Lives after’.13

  The usual see-saw of whippings and indulgence produced pettish, peevish youngsters who lacked self-control. However, such self-control was paramount. Crucial to this ‘art of stifling their desires’ were encouragement and example.14 The tutor must proceed not through threats and force but by appeals to reason and by winning over the will. Addressed to the higher faculties – brains not buttocks – education should proceed psychologically, through praise and blame, esteem and shame, to instil discipline and build character.

  As befitted a physician, Locke did not neglect health. ‘Most children's constitutions,’ he maintained, ‘are either spoiled, or at least harmed, by cockering [mollycoddling].15 Children should swim a lot, and even in winter their feet should be washed daily in cold water – better still, shoes should ‘leak and let in water’.16 Girls' clothes should be loose: ‘Narrow breasts, short and stinking breath, ill lungs a
nd crookedness are the natural and almost constant effects of hard bodices and clothes that pinch.’17

  Diet should be simple, meals irregular – stomachs should not be pandered to – but excretion regular. Costiveness ‘being an indisposition I had a particular reason to inquire into’, Locke had found infants could be trained to go to stool directly after breakfast.18 Pampering was wrong, ‘for if the child must have grapes or sugarplums when he has a mind to them… why, if he is grown up, must he not be satisfied too, if his desires carry him to wine or women?’19 Holding that education's goal was ‘virtue’ and that that lay in ‘the power of denying ourselves the satisfaction of our own desires, when reason does not authorise them’, he urged that children should be made to ‘go without their longings even from their very cradles’.20 was one thing, however; cruelty was another: a ‘slavish discipline’ would produce a ‘slavish temper’.21 Rewards and punishments ought not to take a physical form, but rather involve ‘esteem and disgrace’. If fear and awe gave parents their first hold over children, love and friendship would follow.22 Locke thus entertained no rose-tinted vision: children gloried in dominion, and parents must distinguish between the ‘wants of nature’ and the ‘wants of fancy’ – which should never be gratified.23

  On the positive side, faculties should be stimulated. Rote learning was useless, curiosity counted. Locke did not completely anticipate Rousseau's faith in finding out by doing and learning through mistakes, but he certainly disapproved of dinning dead matter into young heads: they must remain receptive and eager to learn.24 While Locke was far from indifferent to breeding and bearing, unlike Lord Chesterfield later, his accent was not on the trappings of civilization but on the development of responsible, rational creatures capable of meeting their Christian duties.25 Regarding girls as endowed with reason much like boys, he foresaw ‘no great difference’ in the training of the sexes.26