The Gentleman's Daughter

by Amanda Vickery

  A second area of critical weakness for the domesticity thesis concerns the interpretation of contemporary commentary. Much weight has been placed upon an apparent increase in texts grumbling about unemployed womanhood, a muttering which grew to a clamour from the 1690s. A flashy villainess swanked across the pages of plays, commentaries and complaining sermons: the London woman who scorned productive labour for the sake of consumerism and indulgence. However, the redundant woman of the Augustan period, languishing on her sofa, may not have been as novel a creature as the indictments suggest. More likely, it was her flamboyant habits that were new and public, rather than her actual lack of gainful occupation. It could even be argued that such criticism was merely another symptom of the general moral panic of the late seventeenth century about the decline of Spartan virtue and the rise of luxurious corruption, rather than evidence of any new social group or practice. After all, in their fears about the vicious consequences of wealth, writers fell back upon stereotypical images of devouring, unreasonable womanhood, images that were as old as Eve herself – something which suggests we might better view such accusations as testimony to the persistence of male anxieties, rather than a simple guide to female behaviour.13 Of course, scholars of print might also suggest that the rising tide of complaint and conduct literature owes far more to the relaxation of censorship after the failure to renew the Licensing Act in 1695 than it does to the outbreak of a new disease called female parasitism.

  If this flowering of public discussion was not necessarily a simple reaction to the mass female abandonment of active enterprise, was it subsequently responsible for the creation of an entirely new model of feminine behaviour? Did the grande peur about female ostentation and publicity lead to the inscription of a new pattern of virtuous, domesticated womanhood? To be sure, many scholars have detected a growing emphasis on women's innate moral superiority and a declining preoccupation with uncontrollable female sexuality in Augustan literature. Backed by an authoritative survey of advice literature written between 1670 and 1750, Fenela Childs argues that cloying idealization set in from 1700, although she stresses the obvious but important point that visions of female nature had for centuries oscillated between impossibly pure and irredeemably depraved.14 Similarly, Marlene Legates suggests that we should not overestimate the novelty of eighteenth-century views of women. She argues that chastity and obedience were ancient prerequisites of the ideal woman, that a belief in woman as redeemer was as old as courtly love, that positive views of marriage had co-existed with explicit misogyny in classical and humanist thought, and that even the sentimental themes of love, marriage and virtue under siege had a long pedigree. Legates concludes that the eighteenth century saw not so much a dramatic break with past assumptions about the good woman, as a compelling dramatization of her traditional predicament.15 Indubitably, eighteenth-century literature contains much that nineteenth-century historians might identify as ‘domestic ideology’, yet these themes were far from revolutionary. The dialectical polarity between home and world is an ancient trope of western writing; the notion that women were uniquely fashioned for the private realm is at least as old as Aristotle.

  It is important to remember that periodicals, novels, sermons and conduct books contained many other ideological messages. Jean Hunter's examination of the Gentleman's Magazine (the most widely read and successful of all eighteenth-century journals) reveals much less celebration than one might expect of the joys of life within the narrow confines of domestic office. As she concludes, ‘if three out of every four writers who touched on the woman question bemoaned the plight of women and suggested concrete reform measures, perhaps the traditional, conservative ideal of woman had less widespread support and more opposition in the eighteenth century than has been thought’.16 Even the prevailing didactic lectures and venomous attacks were probably subject to multiple or selective readings. Who can say how the female reader received the exaggerated complaints in the Gentleman's Magazine of July 1732 ‘that women were seeking to supplant men in some of their prerogatives. They were wearing breeches, riding astride, shaking hands, ordering men to get the coffee rather than serving them as they should, carrying pistols, and even taking the initiative in love affairs.’17 Can we assume that all readers recoiled with fastidious horror at such an excitingly Amazonian prospect? Furthermore, sermons and satires were hardly the only publications on the market, and female taste might be just as eclectic as male. The female reader could study sermons preaching domesticity in one mood and philosophies praising active citizenship in another. Take the example of Mary Chorley. In 1776 in Lancaster this ten year old admired the Life of William Penn, as one might expect of a Quaker, but she also thrilled to the rigorous public spirit of Plutarch's heroes – ‘Publicola was the most virtuous citizen and greatest general Rome ever had. He was tried at the expense of the public’ By thirteen she was gasping at the goodness of Richardson's Sir Charles Grandison (1754) – ‘Oh what a noble man Sir Charles Grandison is I do think …’ – and laughing at the drolleries of The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771).18 We should not presume without evidence that women (or men) mindlessly absorbed a single didactic lesson like so many pieces of unresisting blotting-paper. Nor should we see the promulgation of domesticity as cast-iron proof that women were domesticated. Viewed from another perspective, the increased harping on the proper female sphere might just as easily demonstrate a concern that more women were seen to be active outside the home rather than proof that they were so confined. In fact, the broadcasting of the language of separate spheres was almost certainly a shrill response to an expansion in the opportunities, ambitions and experience of Georgian and Victorian women – a cry from an embattled status quo, rather than the leading edge of change.

  Is ‘separate spheres’ useful as description of women's lives? Did the wives and daughters of eighteenth-century elites resemble domestic angels, confined to a private sphere? Certainly it is incontrovertible that the majority of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ladies were primarily associated with home and children, while gentlemen controlled the majority of public institutions. Indeed in no century before the twentieth did women enjoy the privileges that nineteenth-century feminists sought – the full rights of citizenship. Public life for Georgian gentlemen invariably assumed the taking of office, but there was no formal place for their wives in the machinery of local government. However, this rough division between private and public could be applied to almost any century or any culture – a fact which robs the distinction of its analytical purchase.19 If ‘separate spheres’ boils down to the observation that women are obliged to spend more time at home with children while men appropriate greater institutional recognition and reward, then separate spheres is an ancient phenomenon, which is certainly still with us. These deep-seated and enduring inequalities are to be deplored, but they do not capture the specificities of gender relations in a particular social group, country or century.

  Of course, biological and familial imperatives governed the chief roles available to women in professional, commercial and gentry families, as they long had done. Ladies' lives resembled a stately progress through recognized stations – maid, wife, mother and, if she was lucky, widow, dowager and grandmother – with different duties and liberties attached to each role. Each stage had its own frustrations, but in their difficulties women told each other to bow to the will of providence and do their duty. Indeed, it was a commonplace that the strict performance of duty generated a degree of secret pleasure, and ladies were relentlessly tutored on how to reach and enjoy the moral high ground: ‘You must also learn to be satisfied with the Consciousness of acting Right’, counselled Lady Sarah Pennington, ‘and look with an unconcerned Indifference on the Reception every successless Attempt to please may meet with,’ while Eliza Haywood promised ‘Sweet indeed are the reflections, which flow from a consciousness of having done what virtue and the duty owing to the character we bear in life, exacted from us …’20 Women's own letters and diaries do su
ggest that many did their duty to a round of inner applause, finding a certain exaltation in it. Ladies accepted patriarchy in theory, although, strikingly, the assertion of male authority often proved much more acceptable and manageable coming from fathers than from husbands and brothers. Still, when wronged, genteel women rarely questioned the justice of the gender hierarchy; rather they bemoaned the fact that their menfolk departed so sorrily from the authoritative masculine ideal. That said, none of the women studied here expected to endure tyranny, or in contemporary terms an ‘Egyptian bondage’, and they were fully conscious of what was owing to their dignity and rank. While not above the occasional exhibition of an almost theatrical feminine inferiority when petitioning for favours, the habitual self-projection of most was of upright strength, stoical fortitude and self-command. To be mistress of oneself was paramount – genteel ladies aimed to be self-possessed in social encounters, self-controlled in the face of minor provocations, self-sufficient in the midst of ingratitude, and, above all, brave and enduring in the grip of tragedy and misfortune. Abject feminine servility was the ineradicable mark of the kitchen maid not her employer.

  For most genteel women, the assumption of their most active material role coincided with marriage, when they became the mistress of a household. Thereby, the administration of the household, the management of servants, the guardianship of material culture and the organization of family consumption fell to their lot. Most were well prepared for this deluge of responsibility; in girlhood, many had copied and seconded their mothers, others heeded advice that they should begin a reference manual on matters material to the running of a house. A lady's work was managerial, but in this she resembled her husband. Gentlemen did not, after all, harvest corn or weave cloth themselves, but instructed servants, labourers and apprentices to do it for them: ‘To manage well a great Family’, acknowledged Richard Steele in 1710, ‘is as worthy an Instance of Capacity, as to execute a great Employment …’21 Even as conduct literature advocated female softness and obedience in one chapter, in another it minutely tutored privileged women on the exercise of power.

  Yet the household and family were not the limit of an elite woman's horizon. Nor was the house in any simple sense a private, domestic sphere. Indeed, the idea that the home was a refuge insulated from the social world is one that would have perplexed the well-established in this period. Genteel families were linked to the world in a multiplicity of ways, as kinsfolk, landowners, patrons, employers and as members of the elite. All these social roles were expressed through a variety of encounters which took place in the home. Open-handed hospitality was still crucial to the maintenance of social credit and political power, and, as mistress of ceremony, the elite hostess might wield considerable practical power from the head of her dining-table. The women at the heart of this study presented themselves to the world in the mantle of politeness. Politeness was a tool which a well-born woman could use to extend her reach: she could use the language of politeness and civility to encourage heterosexual sociability, to demand social consideration and to justify criticism when this was denied. The accusation of vulgarity was as significant as a weapon to undermine male posturing and masculine brotherhood, as it was a device to disparage the less socially favoured. A polite lady also laid claim to wider cultural horizons through reading and exchanging periodicals, pamphlets, papers and novels, through letters, and through cultural consumption on an unprecedented scale. The domesticates of the morning were the polite adventurers of the afternoon.

  It is hard to overestimate the impact of what has been termed the English urban renaissance on the scope of privileged women's social and cultural lives. The mushroom-growth of cultural institutions in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century provincial towns – assembly rooms, concert series, theatre seasons, circulating libraries, clubs, urban walks and pleasure gardens, and sporting fixtures – inaugurated an entirely new public, social terrain which celebrated, indeed depended upon, active female involvement.22 By the 1730s in most large towns it was possible for wealthier women to pursue a host of public activities and yet remain well within the bounds of propriety – as even the most fastidious observers understood it. From the early eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century the core of public entertainment remained remarkably constant. However, by the end of the period the opportunities for institutional participation had expanded markedly. During the late eighteenth century there was a proliferation of charitable institutions through which women could garner a new kind of public standing and radiate something of that public spirit revered by their brothers. The institutionalization of fashionable benevolence constructed altogether new arenas for the expression of female conviviality and officiousness. Far from being eclipsed as the eighteenth century progressed, the public profile of privileged, provincial women had never been higher. The saga of progressive female incarceration is as inconsistent with the social history of the eighteenth century as it is incompatible with the new history of the indefatigable Victorians.23

  My rejection of the conceptual vocabulary of ‘public and private’ and ‘separate spheres’ deployed so extensively in women's history rests above all on the fact that it has little resonance for the prosperous women studied here. In so far as they categorized their lives, they singled out their social and emotional roles: kinswoman, wife, mother, housekeeper, consumer, hostess and member of polite society. To make sense of their existence they invoked notions of family destiny, love and duty, regularity and economy, gentility and propriety, fortitude, resignation and fate. Hence, women's own writings suggest that the dominant historiographical debate about elite women's lives has been misfocused, curiously negligent of those women's own concerns; distinctions of limited significance have been over-emphasized, while central preoccupations have been missed altogether. To be sure, we can never definitively know what women writers took for granted, but if we are to construct an account in which they might at least recognize a reflection, we must take seriously the terms they actually used. Of course, only an antiquarian would limit analysis entirely to the historical actors' own conceptions of events, but historians must give those conceptions very serious consideration to avoid the most crass anachronisms. In identifying absences and silences we must be cautious. It is futile to berate Georgian women for ‘failing’ to perceive their limitations. It is also worth considering what we are measuring these past lives against; for instance, a typical letter written by one woman to another in our period might agonize over a child's illness, exchange local news and society gossip, offer opinions on literature and politics and request information about servants, fashions and consumables; perhaps, by modern standards, a touch parochial in its details. However, read this letter against the archetypal missive sent man to man in the same era and it looks like a national editorial, for a man's letters often chiefly concerned his own illnesses, minor matters of law and local administration, and above all sport – effectively summarized as my gout is still bad; here is the gun dog I promised you; have you finished the will? Of course, genteel men had more opportunities than the letter through which to ventilate their intellectuality, but it is deeply questionable whether genteel women's mental horizons were any more hidebound than men's, even though their economic and political power was obviously much more circumscribed. Yet I would do these families a disservice if I set too much store by the factors that divided husbands and wives and neglected to mention the powerful experiences and convictions which they held in common. All shared an unassailable belief in the social consequence and intrinsic authority of the propertied; most were united in a sense of history and of place, of stoic philosophy and unenthusiastic faith; and many were welded together through heartfelt loyalty and love, bearing together the tragedies of what remained, in their own eyes, a hard life.

  This book does not present a history of Everywoman; it offers a study of genteel women strongly anchored in the hills of the north of England. Yet because of the nature of their correspondence networks – northern
women received copious post from letter-writers dispersed across the country, and concentrated in some numbers in London – claims to a broader viewpoint can also be made (see Appendix 1 for sources). It must also be said that the experiences of one particular woman, Elizabeth Shackleton (1726–81), dominate the book because of the astounding richness of her manuscripts: amidst literally thousands of letters she received and wrote, thirty-nine minutely detailed diaries document Mrs Shackleton's life over a nineteen-year period from 1762 to her death in 1781. However, while Mrs Shackleton's records are unparalleled in their range and detail, they are far from extraordinary in their content: elements of her experience and value system can be found across scores of other women's manuscripts. In effect, the diaries constitute that intact Delft platter (to borrow a metaphor) which allows us to identify and make sense of the shattered fragments scattered across other collections and archives.24 Still, the book is not an exhaustive account of all aspects of female experience, but a concentrated examination of the concerns that privileged women were prepared to commit to paper (two topics that were virtually never canvassed, for instance, were spirituality and sex). This book quite consciously uses the categories which emerge in women's own writings. Thus, female experience is carved up by the multiple roles they played. In the playing, these roles could be constraining, but a proper performance drew its own psychological and social rewards. For the women at the heart of this study considered themselves profoundly conventional. They were hostile to errant duchesses, adulterous wives, female fraudsters and pregnant servants, holding to the view that the woman who set the world at naught was very far gone. It is hard to imagine them ever smiling on the likes of a feminist writer such as Mary Wollstonecraft, a mannish lesbian such as Anne Lister or a fashionable adulterer such as Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. What follows then is a study in seem-liness; a reconstruction of the penalties and possibilities of lives lived within the bounds of propriety. Yet, as it will emerge, even the bounds of propriety were wider than historians have been apt to admit.