In an article of 1764 for the Monthly Review, one critic announced that, ‘It can never be a dispute with the liberal, whether the fine arts are the proper province for the exercise of female genius.'Footnote 1 The use of the term ‘liberal’ here is striking; probably this is the first time it made its appearance as a noun and a noun that expresses an individual’s value system. The critic, the poet John Langhorne, implies that the views of the ‘liberal’ are normative. ‘The true’ or ‘liberal’ critic was the best judge of gender issues: he was ‘superior to the popular notions which have so long been humiliating to the fair sex’.Footnote 2
Throughout the period of the Enlightenment, literati devoted much energy and attention to conceptions of gender, devising and discussing accounts of the nature and roles of women and of appropriate relationships between the sexes.Footnote 3 ‘Stadial’ theory, whereby the status and condition of women were taken to be indicative of a country’s degree of civilization, seemed to many historians, including the Monthly’s critic Gilbert Stuart, to be particularly illuminating with respect to social codes, or manners and morals. In the words of Jane Rendall: ‘the relations of the sexes became a central theme in understanding the significant motors of progress’.Footnote 4 Yet, in his View of society in Europe (1778), Stuart also argued that with the decline of ‘the institutions of chivalry’ such a system subsequently underwent ‘a universal corruption’, so that the contraries of ‘fierceness and effeminacy’, and ‘politeness and the oppression of women’ prevailed.Footnote 5 Stuart’s text was emblematic in articulating the tension in contemporary views between notions of polite sociability and progress, and the enduring desire to shore up secular hierarchies and maintain conventional restraints on the conduct of women.Footnote 6 As Dorinda Outram has written, during the Enlightenment a wide gap existed between the rights and autonomy that men demanded and the submission to male authority required of women.Footnote 7 Even so, a noteworthy development in the cause of women’s emancipation has been charted at the end of the eighteenth century in a milieu of mostly nonconformist writers.Footnote 8 Arianne Chernock has shown that the views of dissenters, like William Enfield (one of the Monthly’s leading critics), encapsulated a radical political and cultural programme that was a fundamentally collaborative effort sustained by a common belief in progress through reason, and whose objective was equal rights for women.Footnote 9 In this article, I shall also be examining salient features of a collaborative enterprise, in this case by literary critics – including Enfield – who belonged to the circle of friends and acquaintances of the founders of the Monthly Review, the dissenters Ralph Griffiths and William Rose. Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor have remarked that the eruption of feminism into political discourse during the French Revolution was such a critical moment in women’s history that it has tended to obscure antecedent developments.Footnote 10 This study of earlier developments concerns the modus operandi of literary reviewers, and in primis attempts to understand what critics meant when they advocated views that were ‘liberal and enlightened’.Footnote 11 As Amanda Vickery has pointed out, in gender studies interest in the ideology of separate spheres ‘may have blinded us to the other languages in play’: to the significance of alternative (moral and socio-political) frameworks of thought.Footnote 12 Taking a new approach to ‘the woman question’, I begin by illustrating the core ‘liberal’ values and principles expounded by critics in the review journals, and subsequently consider whether the critics’ ‘liberal’ agenda was sufficiently liberal in its objectives as to include a significant challenge to different forms of arbitrary power, those featuring in the ideology of patriarchy. Were ‘liberal-minded’ critics able to shrink ‘the gap’, to overcome stereotypical views of women, and hence acknowledge their equal capacity for rational pursuits and celebrate their intellectual achievements? Gender politics, I suggest, serves as a type of case-study of the role a literary review played in the emergence of a distinctively liberal stance, of ideas central to liberal thought or a body of social, ethical, and political principles.Footnote 13 Throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, critics were eager to contest different forms of ‘tyranny’, demonstrating a strong anti-authoritarian strand of thought. Remarkably, they sought to promote a recognizably liberal cluster of values: ‘liberal and rational’ political principles and a social morality of open-mindedness, reason, toleration, and ‘equity’ or justice as fairness. A sizeable group of leading critics, both dissenters and members of the established church, like the lawyer Owen Ruffhead or the poet John Langhorne, shared and disseminated a comprehensive set of ‘liberal’ values. For William Rose, ‘a person of an enlarged and liberal turn of mind’ would endeavour to defeat prejudice in its different guises: he was ‘a bigot to no party, to no religious establishment whatever’; and, most important, he or she ‘thinks and writes freely’.Footnote 14
It was only Dr Johnson and sometimes critics for the Critical Review who ‘could turn the customarily mechanical task of the eighteenth-century reviewer into a creative process of theological, literary, and social and religious criticism’, one scholar has claimed.Footnote 15 Such an account of the monthly review journals requires modification. For although in both the Monthly (founded 1749) and the Critical (founded 1756) critics were initially expected simply to characterize a work of literature, which they mostly did by abstract and quotation, by the 1760s the literary critic had expanded the scope of his critique, not only judging the ‘performance’, but often developing objections and counter-arguments to a writer’s thesis in fairly extensive commentaries. In any issue of the reviews, critics might take the opportunity to discuss a topic raised by an author pertaining to a range of subjects whether religious, political, legal, literary, historical, medical, scientific, or social and economic. Not only did these journals typically provide detailed judgements on all kinds of literature (the Gentleman’s and the London magazines were selective and far more succinct),Footnote 16 but from time-to-time critics debated issues in reviews and essay-reviews of considerable length.Footnote 17 As James Basker has written, ‘the review journal combined the popular reach and cultural aspirations of the magazine with the higher pretensions of the learned journal’.Footnote 18 Critics at the Monthly, like Gilbert Stuart, were experts in their field, though several reviewers wrote about women’s work and what these revealed of a woman’s capabilities. A close look at their arguments will show how seriously they took the issue. Contributing to the ‘famous question concerning the equality or superiority of the sexes’, reviewers could be enthusiastic in their evaluations of women scholars.Footnote 19 Such was the interest, intense for some, that critics frankly expressed their own feelings, and reviewing took a personal and animated turn when they argued about what was conducive to meaningful relations with the opposite sex.
At the Monthly, reviewers were committed to promoting an ‘enlightened’ or ‘liberal’ stance on civil rights and liberties, but they also held that the ‘liberal spirit’ was free in a wider sense, rejecting ‘all those restraints which men of mean, arbitrary, and selfish principles would impose on the understanding, ability, improvement, and comfort of their fellow creatures’.Footnote 20 Such a ‘liberal’ mindset did indeed recognize that women deserved better treatment and greater respect. According to William Rose, James Fordyce was right (in The character and conduct of the female sex (1776)) as to the kind of moral and intellectual relationships that should subsist between the sexes. His advice to young men should contribute to forming ‘the rising generation to knowledge and virtue, to every thing that is liberal and manly’. As Rose explained, ‘the most moral, the most conscientious men, are in general, those who have the greatest regard for women of reputation and talents’. The ‘liberal and manly’ character will treat women with ‘openness’ and ‘justice’.Footnote 21
Exercising his power to condemn the ‘illiberal’, Abraham Rees, one of the most prominent dissenting ministers in London, declared that Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his son were ‘a calumny against the whole female world’: ‘illiberal, unjust, and inexcusable’. ‘We have been astonished, that a writer of his Lordship’s rank and liberal turn of mind should descend to the vulgar practice of railing at the women.’Footnote 22 Attention to the complex of ideas and commitments pertaining to the ‘liberal’/‘illiberal’ binary frame of reference supplies one answer to the question as to why, beginning in the 1750s, critics would want to advocate the intellectual emancipation of women.Footnote 23 Relating in considerable detail John Millar’s thesis regarding the reasons for changing attitudes to women (in Observations concerning the distinction of ranks in society (1771)),Footnote 24 Stuart was sure that such a work ‘only could be produced in an age superior to prejudices, and guided by the spirit of a free and liberal philosophy’.Footnote 25 Critics were concerned, it appears, to live up to the ‘liberal’ ideals that exemplified ‘truly enlightened men living in a truly enlightened nation’.Footnote 26
According to the dissenter Andrew Kippis, some writers sought to express the ‘enlarged and liberal principles of modern times’, to belong to an elite of ‘the most enlightened and philosophic of men’, while simultaneously they ‘want to vindicate, or palliate the arbitrary proceedings’ of kings. The upshot was ‘an almost ridiculous inconsistency in their writings’.Footnote 27 Liberal and proto-feminist patterns of thought are a noteworthy feature of critical discourse and quite an achievement. Nevertheless, and hardly surprisingly, when critics wrote about women the occasional example of stereotypical habits of thought does emerge, and some reviewers appear inconsistent. The odd blind spot, the incongruous remark, may be discerned even in the commentaries of critics like Griffiths and Ruffhead, both of whom clearly aimed to project an ‘enlightened’ and pro-woman persona. As we shall see, when critical discourse involves significant shifts of thought, the fashioning of a review may testify at one and the same time to the importance of ‘liberal’ ideas and to the fact that representing a ‘liberal and enlightened’ mindset – one ‘superior to prejudices’ – might be somewhat complicated.
I
To understand key features of ‘liberal’ thought-patterns requires looking closely at the ways in which journalists employed the protean and sometimes elusive term ‘liberal’, and at the considerable repertoire of liberal values that they promoted. Like the historian William Robertson, critics discovered in Hume’s History of Great Britain (1755) that a ‘liberal’ character had become identified with certain political views.Footnote 28 Under James I, the philosopher and historian traced ‘an insensible revolution’ in the ‘minds of men’, and discerned in ‘liberal natures’ a ‘love of freedom’ and ‘a more free and independent genius in the nation’.Footnote 29 Hume combined two key liberal attributes in a ‘liberal’ outlook: mental autonomy and the desire for political freedom. For Griffiths, ‘Men of the most liberal minds are the most smitten by the charms of independency.’Footnote 30 Although no fully fledged ‘liberal’ ‘system’ or theory was elaborated, critics emerged as cheerleaders for a distinctive set of liberal values, principles, and practices. William Rose’s characterization of Abbé Millot’s mindset attests to a set of key objectives: the ‘liberal spirit’ was ‘an enemy to superstition, bigotry, violence, and tyranny; and a hearty friend to every thing that can improve, adorn, or exalt humanity’.Footnote 31 Many decades before the term liberalism was devised, the word ‘liberal’ was employed by critics, and most notably by those at the Monthly Review, who, greatly interested in the transformations in political life during and after the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9, formulated precepts of a liberal political stamp.Footnote 32 Tobias Smollett and Owen Ruffhead were amongst the first critics to mention ‘liberal sentiments’ or ‘liberal principles’ or a ‘liberal turn of mind’ in a political context.Footnote 33 As with Hume, in the reviews the word ‘liberal’ came to distinguish a political stance that supported an individual’s rights and civil liberties. And so, in 1759, Ruffhead chastised Edward Hyde, Lord Clarendon, for a kind of patriotism which was not that of ‘a liberal and comprehensive nature, which deserves the applause of posterity’. Hyde was not ‘a zealous friend to public liberty’.Footnote 34 Central to a ‘liberal’ conception of the polity was an acceptance of the principle that government operates in the best interests not of the monarchy or ministerial elite, but of ‘the people’.Footnote 35 Indeed, ‘it is natural and reasonable to oppose practices, which tend to their general prejudice’.Footnote 36
In addition to a syntax which contrasts and emphasizes fundamental political principles,Footnote 37 meaning accrues through the use of verbal adjuncts which form important word associations, so that recurring combinations (as in ‘just and liberal’ or ‘liberal and rational’) establish conceptual affiliations.Footnote 38 Griffiths explained how, in his New history of London (1773), John Noorthouck had shown how ‘a more liberal, popular system of government took place of military barbarism and feudal tyranny’.Footnote 39 In this case, ‘liberal’ derives its meaning of emancipatory from an antithesis with ‘tyranny’, but such emancipation pertains – crucially – to ‘the people’. Denouncing forms of arbitrary rule throughout the decades, ‘liberals’ insisted that recognition of ‘the rights of the people’ was a way of securing ‘the common interest’.Footnote 40 A subject’s liberties and rights should be respected so that he was ‘no tool of power, nor enemy to human liberty’.Footnote 41 Again and again, we find that a ‘liberal’ terminology has become a key element in political discourse of a progressive character. And so, for example, Matthew Robinson’s pamphlet (1777), which favoured the doubling of representatives of the counties in parliament, was celebrated for its ‘just, bold, liberal, and reflected ideas’.Footnote 42 While for Enfield, the ‘political character’ of a work of history ‘is indeed throughout liberal’: both authors ‘agreed in affixing a deserved stigma on the tyranny which, with very few exceptions, has disgraced the French monarchy’.Footnote 43
For Langhorne, the ‘progress of liberal knowledge’, or liberal precepts, had a universal dimension and concerned the ‘common privileges of human nature’.Footnote 44 In his commentary on Lord Carysfort’s Thoughts on the constitution (1783), one critic formulated another fundamental liberal tenet, explaining that in the past popular representation was far from being ‘the result of liberal, systematical ideas of human rights’.Footnote 45 Further, when a reviewer noted that cabinet councils are ‘a mode of secret influence inconsistent with our liberal frame of government’, the term ‘liberal’ encapsulates (modern) notions of accountability and popular consent that are also significant features of a liberal agenda.Footnote 46 So although scholars have remarked that the term ‘liberal’ came from Spain and had no specifically political connotations until the 1810s,Footnote 47 what we find is that from the late 1750s a ‘liberal’ vocabulary referencing liberal values and practices had become available to social and political theorists, such as Major John Cartwright, who argued, in 1780, that those with a ‘liberal mind’ would engage in the work of reformation so as to restore ‘the liberties of our country’, and secure ‘JUSTICE TO ALL’;Footnote 48 or James Mackintosh, whose Vindiciae Gallicae (1791), paid tribute to the ‘liberal and enlightened spirit’ evinced in the deliberations of the National Assembly in revolutionary France.Footnote 49
II
By the 1780s, ‘liberal’ patterns of thinking had clearly spread within print culture. A ‘liberal’ terminology employed in the expression of progressive socio-political views was exported to the New Annual Register, which was founded by one of the Monthly’s foremost reviewers, Andrew Kippis. In one striking example, ‘the bigotry’ of British judges in India was condemned; they were destitute of any ‘liberal and enlarged views’.Footnote 50 Notice was taken of responses to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) by an array of writers including the reformers the lawyer Capel Lofft and the dissenter Joseph Towers, both of whom were commended for their ‘liberal’ views.Footnote 51 The sermons of Dr John Disney, the eminent dissenter, were also described as ‘liberal’. Demonstrating ‘a detestation of civil and ecclesiastical tyranny’, they ‘will receive the commendation of every person of a liberal and enlightened mind, however opposite soever his creed may be from that of Doctor Disney’.Footnote 52 The Letters and essays, moral and miscellaneous (1793) by (the much maligned) dissenter Mary Hays were deemed to be ‘sensible and liberal’.Footnote 53 Despite the worsening situation in France and the conservative backlash within Britain, Hays was cautiously optimistic: ‘It needs little of the spirit of prophecy to predict that the present just and liberal notions on civil government…must in the end [prevail].’Footnote 54
Dissenters, like Hays, Disney, and Towers, have long been associated with ‘radical’ views,Footnote 55 but time and again contemporaries employed a ‘liberal’ vocabulary to describe their ideas. According to one writer, ‘a certain society of dissenters claimed to be possessed of liberal, candid, and enlarged principles’.Footnote 56 The dissenter Joseph Priestley alluded to their ‘enlarged views and liberal sentiments’ in his Free address to Protestant dissenters (1788), maintaining that in civil matters their object must be ‘the cause of liberty’; they were persons who profess ‘to think more freely than others’.Footnote 57 His comments on the education of women, whose minds were ‘capable of the same improvement and the same furniture as those of men’, were ‘just and important’, observed the Monthly’s critic, Rev. Christopher Lake Moody.Footnote 58 One theme recurs: concern for the key liberal goods of autonomous thought and expression. For Mary Hays, ‘the emancipated mind is impatient of imposition’.Footnote 59 Quoting a passage from a sermon in which Kippis insisted (inter alia) on the dissenter’s ‘right of private judgment’, William Rose commented that his sentiments were ‘extremely rational, liberal, and judicious’.Footnote 60 But at the Critical, another reviewer wished ‘that the dissenters would not speak so often of themselves as the only liberal and enlightened sect’.Footnote 61
Both prior to and during the early years of the French Revolution, critics at the Monthly continued to employ a ‘liberal’ terminology when recommending ‘progressive’ precepts and the political objectives of prominent theorists and reformers, such as the dissenter James Burgh.Footnote 62 Cartwright’s ‘liberal principles of reason and equity’ informed his argument that ‘the communities governed by a power in which they have neither controul or participation, are in a state of slavery’.Footnote 63 William Enfield praised the historian William Belsham’s ‘judicious and liberal reflections’ (in his Essays, political, historical, and literary, 1792), explaining that government was ‘a trust’ supposed to act in the ‘true interests of the people’.Footnote 64 (Belsham’s later historical studies show how a ‘liberal’ language articulating liberal ideas progressed into the nineteenth century.Footnote 65) Adding some reflections of his own, Enfield expressed the democratic idea that those filling ‘the offices of government’ are ‘delegated’ to such positions by ‘the people at large’, who possess a ‘controlling power’ and may thus effectively secure liberty in the constitution.Footnote 66
For the Cambridge fellow and critic, Thomas Pearne, every ‘liberal’ was keen to put ‘the rights of man’ centre stage. Every ‘liberal and enlightened European’ looked on ‘liberty, civil and religious’ as their ‘birthright’.Footnote 67 Anticipating another of the basic tenets of liberalism, Pearne stated that ‘We may call our notions liberal, if we please, but [contra the ‘hot-brained Jacobins in France’] we should remember, that it cannot possibly consist with liberty, to force [our notions] of liberty on others’.Footnote 68 Pearne, like Ruffhead, specified that an ‘independent and liberal attachment’ to the constitution entailed a commitment ‘to the principles on which the constitution was so settled; that is to the principles of civil and religious liberty’.Footnote 69 At a time of immense political turmoil, Pearne’s ‘liberal’ politics envisaged parliamentary reform, but with the proviso that such reforms should not endanger the existing institutional framework of ‘our excellent constitution’.Footnote 70
Living in what they called a ‘liberal and enlightened age’, critics popularized a version of the ‘liberal spirit’ that was pro-liberty and pro-reform, at the same time as they advocated a set of virtues and values that comprise a liberal typology of social morality. And so, for instance, quoting Voltaire, Langhorne related a ‘liberal and unbiassed understanding’ to the ‘esprit philosophique’ which called for ‘des loix plus favorables à l’humanité’.Footnote 71 A person ‘of a liberal turn of mind’ would share Rousseau’s views on religious toleration or exhibit the traits of ‘candour, moderation, and seriousness’.Footnote 72 Another writer’s observations regarding the government of the colonies were ‘just and liberal’; they revealed ‘a spirit of equity and moderation’.Footnote 73 For the critic, the minister Benjamin Sowden, greater freedom and equality in the polity would mean that those with ‘liberal sentiments’ would derive the ‘greatest satisfaction from the consciousness of their own improvement, and their extensive usefulness’; typical liberal aspirations.Footnote 74 Langhorne’s evaluation of Voltaire’s History of the Russian empire under Peter the Great (1764) highlights the scope of the ‘liberal, philosophical, and just’ reflections that characterize the truly ‘enlightened mind’. Voltaire’s work is ‘neither obscured by narrowness of conception, nor betrayed by an indolent acquiescence in the determinations of others’. Voltaire is ‘warm with the love of Liberty, and an advocate for the rights of human nature…with that unprejudiced freedom which is natural to an enlightened mind’.Footnote 75
III
As represented here, the moral and social precepts and political principles expounded in the reviews may be sketchy, yet what emerges from these commentaries are the characteristics of a mindset that is distinctively liberal. Throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, critics professed a set of guiding principles that were anti-authoritarian, contesting ‘slavery to arbitrary principles’ and extolling ‘the natural freedom from subordination’ which, ‘antecedent to civil compact, belongs to every individual of our species, who is arrived at years of discretion’.Footnote 76 Given the importance of such ideas, the question now arises as to how ‘liberal and enlightened’ reviewers endeavoured to be when discussing that much-debated topic, the status of women? Could they achieve the ‘unprejudiced freedom’ of mind that Langhorne attributed to Voltaire? I suggest that there were many ‘liberal-minded’ critics at the reviews who were keen to contest the popular belief that female subordination to patriarchal authority was natural and desirable.Footnote 77 Anticipating the views of Mary Wollstonecraft,Footnote 78 they argued that women were, and should be treated as, the equals and companions of men;Footnote 79 that their apparent intellectual limits were a function of their education, and not of fixed abilities; that negative attributes of femaleness were due to ‘the tyranny of man’; and that in their scholarship many provided evidence of their rationality and some had even demonstrated superior competences to men.Footnote 80 Critics attempted, it appears, to apply the standards enjoined by ‘the manly [or bold], candid, and liberal spirit’. A ‘liberal turn of mind’ was open to new ideas and possibilities; ‘it was far from being decisive and dogmatical’, and set an example of fairness, ‘of proper, fair, and manly attention’.Footnote 81 There may not have been a consensus amongst reviewers regarding the roles and status of women, but at the Monthly the majority seemingly reckoned that it just was the duty of ‘the liberal and enlightened’ critic to open up debate on such controversial issues and consequently query traditional social wisdom.
By contrast, a survey of the historiography of gender relations that attends to the question as to whether enlightened attitudes to women – and especially to ambitious female intellectuals – were in the ascendant within print culture in the late eighteenth century reveals the widespread persistence of a stubborn patriarchal sense of superiority.Footnote 82 The ability of women to pursue studies that required fine understanding or acute or solid judgement was controversial, according to Anthony Fletcher. Patriarchy’s scriptural basis was still intact by 1800, and hence women’s nature was still widely believed to be inferior to that of men.Footnote 83 The words of Rev. John Brown illustrate such a viewpoint with a desideratum masquerading as a description: ‘the female frame of person and mind tends chiefly to fit and qualify the sex for the domestic life only’.Footnote 84 Since women exerted great influence on manners, Rev. John Moir decided that they were best confined to the household: ‘This is their natural province…their sphere.’Footnote 85 According to one speaker in the Court of Requests, women should be less free than many evidently were: ‘But few women know their sphere, and but few men dare teach them; the full liberty of a female pen is dangerous.’Footnote 86 In Elizabeth Eger’s view, contemporary opinion was increasingly ambivalent towards women who were active in the literary public domain.Footnote 87 While for Norma Clarke, prescriptive models of femininity had hardened by the late eighteenth century.Footnote 88 In the words of John Mills, the translator, women ‘are inclined to make a wrong use of their advantages’. Education somehow ‘adds to the natural weakness of their sex’, inhibiting ‘that politeness, which a proper desire of pleasing gives reciprocally to both sexes’.Footnote 89 Prejudice against women was due to the fact that they were acting badly; they were too assertive, while men, foolishly, allowed the sciences to be ‘let down to the level of their little capacities’.Footnote 90 Mary Scott claimed in her poem The female advocate (1774) that ‘warm sentiments’ towards women were ‘still very contracted’ even in ‘the generality’ of ‘men of sense and learning’.Footnote 91
However, scholars have also highlighted the views of ‘less austere and narrow minds’. Jane Rendall has drawn attention to the arguments of Francis Hutcheson, as expounded in his System of moral philosophy (1755).Footnote 92 Hutcheson denounced the ‘tyrannical powers’ given to husbands under certain political systems.Footnote 93 Crucially – as William Rose noted – according to the philosopher, in social or marital relationships, ‘no superior endowments, natural or acquired, can give a perfect right to assume power over others, without their consent’, for ‘nature shews no foundation for any proper jurisdiction or right of commanding in this relation’. Rather what counts are ‘the reasons of equity and humanity’.Footnote 94 Barbara Taylor has suggested that despite the conviction amongst some men that erudition and argumentativeness ‘broke the rules of chivalrous engagement’, the boundaries supposedly rigidly separating men’s and women’s lives and interests were weakening, and in certain intellectual circles female participation in rational discourse was a point of pride to all concerned.Footnote 95 Indeed, according to one line of reasoning, the undue confinement of women in private or domestic spaces would deprive society of women’s ‘energizing and conciliatory presence’.Footnote 96 Like Karen O’Brien, Betty A. Schellenberg proposes that the thesis of the domestic ideal as deterrent to the active engagement of women in intellectual life should be viewed with ‘healthy scepticism’.Footnote 97 A contributor to Robert Dodsley’s Museum or literary and historical register was encouraging: ‘Assert your claim to sense, and shew mankind/that reason is not to themselves confin’d.’Footnote 98 In his study of a wide variety of contemporary publications, Stephen Howard has argued that despite some suspicions of female learning, substantial attention was drawn to women who had achieved a measure of public prominence.Footnote 99 Attention was drawn to women writers but generally any appreciation was circumscribed by caveats. Exemplary in this respect was William Whitehead’s deity ‘Jove’, who was contemptuous of male crassness towards women. But then women, too, were cautioned: ‘In modern days, the female pen/Is paramount, and copes with men…In learning, doubtless, you have shin'd,/The Paragons of human kind./Each abstract science have explor’d…And yet what small remains we find.’ ‘Jove’ reckoned that women deserved greater recognition and status, but subject to an important condition: only if modest, you may ‘justly claim Your genuine share of power and fame’.Footnote 100 So long as women did not overreach appropriate feminine bounds of discretion and decorum, writes Karen Green, literati would welcome their participation in literary debates.Footnote 101 One critic was forcible on the subject: ‘The effects of real knowledge are gentleness and modesty in a sex, where any thing approaching to assurance is intolerable.’ Footnote 102
As Sylvana Tomaselli has noted, conceptions of human nature and, in particular, of both male and female virtue, ‘of true moral worthiness’, continued to be of prime concern to literati.Footnote 103 If at both the Monthly and the Critical reviewers attempted to evaluate a writer’s achievements, many were also keen to determine what the work revealed of an author’s character, of his or her ‘sentiments’ and/or principles. Certain virtues continued to be desirable: some were indeed characteristic of the female sex. But even after Rousseau’s ridiculing of the ‘superficial partizans of the fair sex’, the majority of critics continued to prize agreeableness, rather than subservience, in women. Owen Ruffhead conveyed satisfaction when announcing that Catharine Macaulay’s ‘liberal spirit’ made it unlikely that she would ‘ever vow obedience to the tyrant man’.Footnote 104
IV
It may well be the case that when they discussed the nature and roles of women many journalists at the Monthly Review took their cue from Ralph Griffiths, the editor. In an early review of Catharine Cockburn’s works, Griffiths agreed with Thomas Birch, Cockburn’s editor, that she had ‘raised our ideas of [women’s] intellectual powers, by an example of the greatest extent of understanding and correctness of judgment, united to all the vivacity of imagination’. She had pursued ‘some of the deepest enquiries of which the human mind is capable!’.Footnote 105 From his early to his late reviews, Griffiths celebrated women’s accomplishments highlighting their intellectual virtues. Smollett accused his wife, Isabella, of meddling in the affairs of the review,Footnote 106 and she may have had some say in her husband’s reviews. In a substantive critique of Thomas Amory’s ‘fairytale journey’ – as narrated in his Memoirs of several ladies of Great Britain (1755) – Griffiths affirmed that women were ‘formed to yield [men] so much delight and improvement’, declaring that the ‘ladies’ who appeared in the Memoirs do ‘honour to womankind’ on account of a number of qualities: ‘their fine understandings, their valuable learning, their strong judgments’; they possess ‘the heads of philosophers, the knowledge of divines, and the hearts of primitive Christians’. Such women ‘cannot be enough admired’. Amory’s narrator is a ‘Happy, happy man!’, Griffiths adds sardonically. ‘For us, alas! it hath been given us to know but one Mrs Cockburn, but one Mrs J—es, one Miss C—r’!Footnote 107 Contesting potentially hostile reviews of The letters of the Right Hon. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1763), Griffiths declared that these letters are ‘worthy of the curiosity and attention of all men of taste and even of all women of fashion’. Montagu’s letters are judged to be superior even to those of Pope and Swift, who wrote ‘laboured Letters’ for the press.Footnote 108 And yet, to expect to find an ideal-type liberal is to expect too much. Griffiths evidently could not resist co-opting Montagu into a (supposedly) superior category: she was ‘in sex a woman, in understanding a man’.Footnote 109 On the other hand, his steady support for women intellectuals reveals an impressive sense of fairness that contrasts sharply with the outlook articulated, for instance, in a work by the polemicist and playwright William Kenrick.
The case of Kenrick merits close examination for an early work, The whole duty of woman (1753), seems to demonstrate that this prolific critic was no liberal, rather the opposite. And, indeed, this text has been taken by Fletcher to represent an enduring patriarchal ideology.Footnote 110 Kenrick, it appears, concurred with the views expressed in a popular work published by Robert Dodsley that ‘Submission and obedience are the lessons of [a woman’s] life, and peace and happiness are her reward.’Footnote 111 In The whole duty, a passionately pious voice preaching docility and confinement seems to prove that a providential belief-system had formed an out-and-out misogynist of its author: ‘It is not for thee, O woman…to trace the dark springs of science’, rather ‘learn only to govern they self and thy dependents.’Footnote 112 ‘Be thou obedient, for the law of superiority is given to man from above, and subjection is the portion of the daughters of Eve.’ But an alternative reading is more likely, for the text’s rhetoric works consistently to undermine its ostensible ideology with a strategy of hyperbole. The language is for the time absurdly inflated and dated; the quaintness, affectation, and ‘declamatory and flowery diction’ elaborate the conceits of a seventeenth-century puritanical preacher like John Sprint, author of The bride-woman’s counsellor (1699). Notions of sinfulness and depravity saturate the text, and men fare no better than women: sex-mad and devious, they are ever on the alert to assault unguarded female chastity: ‘Thou art fair as the snow-drop of the spring…But the rude hand of the spoiler cometh…the ways of men are dangerous and hard to find out. Thy ignorance of his cunning may lay thee open to his deceit.’ And, alarmingly, ‘the wages of sin is death’.Footnote 113 Although Kenrick wrote a number of plays, women (presumably, a large part of his audience) were warned off the theatre and ‘the throng’d parts of the city’. Throughout, the notions of both female frailty and male duplicity are so insistent, human nature is conceived as so corrupt and corruptible as to suggest that this early work is simply a jeu d’esprit, or a parody of clerical discourse at its most guilt-inspiring. Most likely, Kenrick’s real views emerge in his review for the Monthly of Rousseau’s Letter to d’Alembert (1759) where he adopts a very different stance on the issue of female conduct. Rousseau needs ‘to adapt his schemes to the age in which he lives’, Kenrick stated. Timidity in women, or an ‘awkward sense of shame’, ‘for which Rousseau is so strenuous an advocate’, was ‘the usual attendant on ignorance and simplicity’, and in treating this matter ‘the Philosopher will be apt to look down upon Mr Rousseau’.Footnote 114
V
Other journalists at the Monthly made a point of exhibiting their ‘liberal’ credentials. In lengthy and frequently polemical pieces, Owen Ruffhead seemingly intended to prove that he belonged in the company of ‘the liberal and enlightened’. In an early review of Elizabeth Carter’s Works of Epictetus (1758) the accomplishments of women authors were taken to illustrate the intellectual potential of the female sex. Ruffhead attaches importance to Carter’s ‘zeal for religion’, ‘which animates the whole’, and ‘deserves the highest applause’, but Providence does not make a deliverance on behalf of the male sex. On the contrary:
The Work before us, will be of no small mortification to the vanity of those men, who presume that the fair sex are unequal to the laborious pursuit of philosophic speculations. Those assumers have been ready to acknowledge the Ladies’ preheminence with respect to light and ornamental talents; but, the more solid and noble faculties, they have reserved as their own prerogative. They have arrogated this superior excellence, as a distinction they derive from Nature, for which they are solely indebted to the advantages of education. If women had the benefit of liberal instructions, if they were inured to study, and accustomed to learned conversation – in short, if they had the same opportunity of improvement with the men, there can be no doubt but that they would be equally capable of reaching any intellectual attainment.Footnote 115
Ruffhead furnishes an unequivocal endorsement of the ‘equality thesis’, which maintained the equal cognitive potential of men and women, and which, as Siep Stuurman has shown, was much discussed in seventeenth-century France.Footnote 116 In Britain, according to Roy Porter, responses to the nature/nuture conundrum were ‘complex and confused’.Footnote 117 In Ruffhead’s commentary, nuture was crucial, given that nature has endowed both sexes with the capacity to pursue ‘philosophic speculations’. However, if one of Ruffhead’s reviews challenged the ‘naturalness’ of masculine supremacy, another – dedicated to Dr Johnson’s Rasselas (1759) – shows how sexist remarks might be casually expressed when there was no specific intent to promote women writers. It was obvious to Ruffhead that certain types of literature should contribute ‘to the good of society’, which meant they might profitably investigate those pursuits that would encourage ‘the active progress of the mind’.Footnote 118 Dr Johnson’s Rasselas failed to do this. But there was another problem. For Johnson’s prince was endowed with ‘all the simplicity of a credulous virgin’; while his sister ‘opposes his delusion with bold, manly, and masterly sentiments, enforced with all the energy of declamation’. Hence,
one would imagine that they had changed sexes; for surely that fond hope and pleasing delusion had been more natural on her side; and those deep sentiments and spirited remonstrances had been more becoming in the prince. Nekayah might have related her observations; but the reflections resulting from them should have been reserved for Rasselas.Footnote 119
Previously, Ruffhead had remarked that ‘when thus instructed by a female Preceptor [Elizabeth Carter], we hear with pleasure, and with pride obey’.Footnote 120 And now, he is plainly caught in blatant self-contradiction when objecting to the superior rationality of the princess. Signs of weakness of character were more ‘natural’ or plausible in a girl. It is worth noting, nonetheless, that although his celebration of a ‘female Preceptor’ now looks like mere gallantry, Ruffhead did seem to be committed to the idea that equality of intellect is advisable in marriage: it is most likely to promote felicity. When comparing the states of celibacy and marriage, ‘all collateral circumstances [should] be equal’:
if we suppose two men and two women, in whom the circumstances of intellect, morals, and disposition are equal, and that one couple is married while the other remains single, certainly we should not hesitate to conclude, that the married pair have the best prospect of enjoying the most perfect felicity human nature is capable of possessing.Footnote 121
It is natural and desirable for a woman to possess the same (elevated) intellect as a man and hence participate in a relationship between equals: the ‘use of learning’, Ruffhead proclaimed, serves ‘to render us complacent, agreeable and useful to each other’.Footnote 122 Such a discourse on equality of understanding and education as central to successful partnerships can be contrasted to the widespread preference for asymmetrical relations and ‘complementary’ character traits as typically propounded by the clergy, including Rev. John Moir: the female sex ‘yield to us [men] in strength and steadiness, extent and elevation of understanding’, though in ‘the exercise of benevolence’ women are superior to men.Footnote 123
Ruffhead’s subsequent views on gender relations were published after Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile; or education (1762) set a new challenge to all men who advertised their respect for the female intellectual. For Rousseau, strictly defined gender roles would ensure female propriety and, most important, they would contribute to the welfare of men, hence promoting harmonious relationships within the family.Footnote 124 Women ‘should doubtless learn many things, but only those which it is proper for them to know’; ‘a state of dependence being natural to their sex, they perceive themselves naturally formed for obedience’.Footnote 125 Woman is naturally submissive, and becomes ridiculous when she presumes to encroach on the prerogatives of men. But the advocates or ‘the superficial partizans of the fair sex’ were also ridiculous, and would rightfully suffer from the arrogance of a witty woman. ‘These women of genius never impose upon any but fools.’ ‘Every learned lady would remain a virgin for life, if there were none but sensible men in the world.’ In any case, women can only imitate: ‘we know what man of letters was the oracle they privately consulted’; an ‘imposture’ that is ‘unbecoming a prudent woman’. And, in the unlikely event that a woman had real talents, ‘her pretensions would debase them’.Footnote 126
One of the Critical’s reviewers found Rousseau’s conception of a woman’s role most appropriate: quite rightly, Rousseau ‘expresses the utmost disgust to a learned lady’. The ‘natural rectitude of the principles laid down by Mr Rousseau [are] such as nature and reason dictate’.Footnote 127 The Monthly’s more complex response to Rousseau arrived with Ruffhead’s review of Catharine Macaulay’s History of England (1763).Footnote 128 Employing the method of point and counterpoint, Ruffhead began strongly by repeating his pro-woman declaration: ‘The great numbers among the Fair Sex, who have figured in the republic of letters, have given frequent checks to the vanity of such as presume that the privilege of thinking is confined to those who wear beards.’Footnote 129 Objections will arise, however, to a woman’s learning: ‘Whatever reputation…the lady may have acquired by this display of her abilities and industry, many, perhaps, will be inclined to wish that the same degree of genius and application had been exerted in more suitable pursuits.’Footnote 130 And yet, ‘the fair sex have powers to keep pace with, if not to outstrip us, in the more arduous paths of literature’. Turning to the subject of the ‘natural and becoming’ accomplishments or ‘characteristical’ excellencies of the sexes, with flagrantly sexist advice the critic apparently now shows his true colours: ‘yet we would by no means recommend such a laborious competition to the practice of our lovely countrywomen…Intense thought spoils a lady’s features.’ As he proceeds, Ruffhead appears to be reasoning his way into complete agreement with those men who were firmly opposed to female intellectuals. As his train of thought becomes increasingly bizarre, and as he apparently runs out of ideas, it becomes clear, however, that Ruffhead is employing an argumentum ad absurdum: ‘In truth, it is in every way dangerous for the fair; for while they are wrapt in a profound reverie, they may lose – We don’t know what they may lose.’ Objections to female scholars result in positions that are plainly absurd, and Ruffhead drops the mask: ‘But to be serious – the work before us has unquestionable merit, though, perhaps some rigid critics may dispute the propriety of calling it a History’. This ‘History, then, for so we will call it in spite of hypercritics, is dictated by a noble spirit, which ever pants strongest’ in the ‘weaker sex’. Evidently undeterred by the notion that he might appear foolish, Ruffhead was adamant that Macaulay had out-performed ‘many learned and ingenious men’. Rousseau was wrong in smearing women as untalented imitators. Macaulay’s ‘manly and liberal’ – or bold, free, and independent – spirit might favour collaboration, but she would never act as a man’s subordinate: ‘Were we at liberty to suppose Mrs Macaulay married, we might suspect that her husband and she were joint Historians’, but ‘we can never believe, that a lady who worships Liberty like her, would ever vow obedience to the tyrant man’.Footnote 131 In another singular comment, Ruffhead announced that he was ‘glad’ to find that ‘the woman is not lost in the historian, and we are disposed to envy (a propensity natural to critics) the happy husband who enjoys an amiable companion’, one who combines ‘more than manly sense’ with ‘female tenderness’.Footnote 132 What made Ruffhead irate was having to endure female ignorance: ‘according to the present modes of female education, it is difficult for a man of sense and worth to make any impression on a woman’s mind, without first debasing his own’.Footnote 133 The issue of what makes for satisfying personal relationships was of fundamental importance, and Ruffhead anticipated the aspirations of Mary Wollstonecraft for companionship within marriage between intellectual equals. Likewise, the writer and critic John Hawkesworth also pitied the man who had failed to find an agreeable because well-educated companion: a woman who ‘has all the discernment and knowledge of the philosopher’.Footnote 134 As Tomaselli has written, the idea that both men and women would benefit from improvements in women’s education became a key argument in proto-feminist theory.Footnote 135
VI
Critics were so far from endorsing a ‘separate spheres’ ideology that would restrict women to private or domestic affairs,Footnote 136 that they acclaimed women writers who – like Catharine Macaulay, Helen Maria Williams, or Louise de Kéralio – professed the ‘manly principles of liberty’ in the public domain. Such a ‘public spirited’ woman was clearly worthy of recognition and esteem.Footnote 137 Macaulay’s advocacy of civil and religious freedom, and of the principles of ‘equity and reason’ was ‘liberal, acute and animated’.Footnote 138 According to Gilbert Stuart, although she lacked the impartiality which was essential for historical studies, Macaulay’s opposition to all forms of authoritarianism, ‘the detestation she expresses against every mode of tyranny, and the commendation she bestows on liberty and equal laws’, ensure that her performance is ‘extremely useful, and acceptable, in a country where there is a perpetual and necessary opposition between the interests of the crown and that of the people’.Footnote 139 Like Ruffhead, Stuart took a firm stand on the subject of women who have been ‘ambitious of reputation within the republic of letters’ with a robust statement on the nature/nuture question in favour of women’s intellectual capacities. Stuart was clear: ‘Topics, which require investigation and labour, have been thought too serious and important to engage their attention. It has been conceived, that they are inferior in capacity to men, and that wisdom is an enemy to beauty.’ However, any ‘narrowness of understanding’ was not to be ascribed to an inferior female nature but to the ‘want of cultivation’.Footnote 140 And, significantly, the critic added that the same intellectual achievements have ‘not always been attained by those [men] who have treated of English affairs’.Footnote 141 Yet again, Macaulay’s History of England in a series of letters to Dr Wilson (1778) showed, according to Griffiths, that ‘genius is not confined to either sex’.Footnote 142 Echoing Stuart, he noted that ‘it is generally allowed’ that the work ‘is superior to most of those, in particular, who have treated of English affairs’. Indeed, ‘we know of no production of the kind, that affords us a more satisfactory view of the temper of parties, or the policy of the times’. Like other ‘public spirited persons’, ‘this noble-minded woman’ was firmly attached to those bold or ‘manly principles of liberty’.Footnote 143 Macaulay was not a ‘republican’ – a controversial position – but rather ‘a CONSTITUTIONALIST, a denomination superior to all others in our political vocabulary’, as proved by ‘her zeal for the legal and sacred rights and liberties of this country’.Footnote 144 The Critical’s reviewer was uncompromising when praising Macaulay’s political principles, which can be ‘opposed only by those who deserve to have the stigmata of slavery branded on their foreheads’. Furthermore, ‘as to the propriety of a lady’s undertaking [a work] of this kind, that can only be judged by the execution; for it can be of no consequence to the public, whether the man or the woman guides the pen of a masterly performance’.Footnote 145 Critics dismissed the notions which Harriet Guest has seen as still so relevant for women in the 1770s and 1780s, those of ‘the private, domestic, and familial’.Footnote 146
For the Monthly, Louise de Kéralio’s ‘just reflections’ were ‘equally favourable to the principles of moral virtue and political freedom’. (The New Annual Register corrected the sentence, her work was ‘distinguished by just and liberal reflections’.Footnote 147) Her Histoire d’Elisabeth, reine d’Angleterre (1786) – an ‘important historical production of a female pen’ – ‘discovers the warmest approbation of those principles of legislation and government which tend to protect the weak against the arm of power, and to insure the natural privileges of mankind’. Given ‘the enlightened spirit of the people’, it was ‘highly probable, that some important political revolution, in France, is at no great distance’; a revolution that was due in part to the spread of ideas from British writers on ‘the principles of freedom’ and the ‘natural rights of mankind’.Footnote 148
An enlightened perspective also characterized A journey through the Crimea to Constantinople (1789) by Lady Elizabeth Craven, which demonstrated a desire ‘to improve, with the help of the English, the industry and commerce of the Greeks’.Footnote 149 For the critic, the dramatist George Colman, such ‘liberal reflections’ on ‘the common good’ testified to a much to be admired double identity: they ‘do honour to the writer, both as a lover of her own country, and a citizen of the world’.Footnote 150
In her Letters written in France (1790), yet another liberal-minded woman, Helen Maria Williams, ‘had nobly [exulted] in the triumph of liberty’, according to Griffiths.Footnote 151 Williams’s work ‘abounds with just and liberal sentiments’ claimed William Enfield, and he quoted a passage in which Williams acknowledged the ‘manly independence’ of the ‘lower order of people’.Footnote 152 The attack on Williams for celebrating the overthrow of tyranny in France, and for declaring that the nation had ‘a natural right to govern itself according to its own will’, was no less than ‘artful sophistry’: indeed, ‘if this [defence of the French] be a sin, let our souls be with such Sinners’. Just like her attacker, the female author of Letters on the female mind, its powers and pursuits (1793), Williams was a ‘skillful advocate’ and her writings attested to her ‘patriotic’ politics. According to Enfield, women ‘not only may make themselves acquainted with the great principles on which civil communities are formed, but ought to do so’. They should be ‘well acquainted with the general rights and obligations of men as associated beings’; the reason: women naturally had influence over the education of their children.Footnote 153
Acknowledging ‘different degrees of natural sagacity’ – though not as a distinguishing characteristic of the sexes – Enfield discerned in Letters from Italy (1776) by Lady Anna Riggs Miller, not only ‘liberal sentiments’ and a ‘cultivated taste’, but also a ‘solid understanding’. The critic’s terms of evaluation are worth noting: instead of ‘servilely following the footsteps of other travellers’, this woman ‘has pursued her own ideas and used her own judgment’; hers was a ‘valuable production’.Footnote 154 Enfield’s ‘liberal’ perspective showcases value and merit, eschewing the confining ideology of the separate spheres.Footnote 155
VII
By the 1770s in certain literary circles, it was evidently considered de rigueur to adopt a ‘liberal’ stance and hence challenge various modes of tyrannical and/or ‘slavish’ thought and conduct. However, as we shall see, a survey of attitudes to women at the reviews is somewhat complicated by an analysis of the work of critics for whom a commitment to being ‘candid, liberal, and just’ was evidently problematic – though ultimately not unachievable. Hence, although we find that the position of William Rose and John Hawkesworth was distinctively liberal, the reviews of other critics are testimony to the lasting power of stereotypical conceptions of women’s potential even amongst those who self-identified as ‘liberal and enlightened’.
The views of William Rose were characteristically liberal as he exhorted his readers to pay close attention to The character and conduct of the female sex (1776); a work which was directed by its author, James Fordyce, at the ‘gloomy bigot or angry critic’. This treatise, Rose insisted, ‘will teach you to form a higher opinion of female understanding; it will shew you that there are many women highly respectable for their mental powers and acquisitions, eminently distinguished not only by brilliancy of fancy’, but – most important – ‘by solidity of judgment and acuteness of penetration’.Footnote 156 Of a comparable mindset was the editor and critic John Hawkesworth. When reviewing John Langhorne’s Letters supposed to have passed between M. de St Evremont and Mr Waller (1769), Hawkesworth was incensed by one character’s tirades against ‘masculine women’ or ‘insupportable’ women intellectuals, lawyers, divines, or historians. Subjects like history or law were not gender specific, Hawkesworth countered, and in any case such studies could have no adverse effects on a woman’s character: ‘surely it is arrogant in man, and injurious to woman, to suppose truth and knowledge to be, in this author’s sense, of the male kind…It is difficult to conceive how a woman becomes less feminine in her sentiments by knowing any truth, either in divinity, history, or law’.Footnote 157 Another tract Female government! (1779) was also vehemently contested by the Monthly’s critic, the dissenting minister Samuel Badcock, who saw exactly how the power dynamic was intended to play out according to ‘this gloomy and malignant Writer’: ‘under pretence of supporting domestic tranquillity [he] would erect a domestic tyranny – break the pleasing associations of the sexes, under pretence of supporting conjugal honour – and make women slaves, that they may not be tyrants nor strumpets!’Footnote 158
But other reviewers sent out mixed messages. One critic’s (liberal) appeal for an improvement in female education was motivated by unpleasant experiences with ‘literary vixens’: ‘It is dreadful for a man of real knowledge and politeness to encounter one of these literary vixens’; women who ‘offend’ the codes of decorum with ‘an empty mind bloated with vanity’. Such disagreeable encounters justified advances in women’s education, but the objective was represented in such a manner as to suggest that equality was hardly to be wished for: ‘the ladies can never hope, in any considerable numbers, either to rival the men in literary fame, or to render themselves such rational, entertaining, and improving companions, as to reconcile us to their learning, till some persons of real and extensive knowledge introduce considerable improvements in their education’. Nevertheless, the critic was candid enough to acknowledge the talents of Mary Scott, whose poem, The female advocate showed that she was ‘a warm and able advocate’ for the female sex.Footnote 159
The prominent dissenting minister Jabez Hirons apparently had doubts regarding the intellectual equality of the sexes, but he also – it would appear – took the liberal ideal of equity, or fairness, seriously. Reviewing Catharine Macaulay’s Modest plea for the property of copy-right (1774), Hirons pompously and patronizingly declared that ‘it would, perhaps, be unreasonable to expect, in the sudden effusions of female genius, a connected train of reasoning, or a full investigation of truth’. But a metaphor which belittles Macaulay’s endeavours (this slight skirmish), nonetheless testifies to the critic’s attempt to be candid or fair-minded as he acknowledges the potential efficacy of her work:
it is a question with us, whether our heroine has not discomforted the enemy as much by this slight skirmish, as the veteran forces by their regular attack; and whether it has not happened in this contest, as it sometimes happens in military encounters, that the light and flying troops do as much execution as the rest.Footnote 160
Again, an analysis of the review of the poems of Anna Laetitia Aikin (Mrs Barbauld),Footnote 161 by William Woodfall, an actor and editor, reveals conflicting impulses at play. Woodfall’s engagement with this woman’s ‘performance’ elicits thought after thought, ultimately demonstrating a propensity to transgress the Rousseau-esque codes of female reticence so starkly set forth: ‘A woman is as perfect of her kind as a man: she appears inferior only when she quits her station, and aims at excellence out of her province.’ For Woodfall, ‘There is a sex in minds as well as in bodies.’ However, gender difference should be appreciated as a positive disposition given that women might own and display their own kind of sensibility with respect to their own experiences. ‘If [only she] had breathed her wishes, her desires…We hoped the Woman was going to appear.’Footnote 162 Aikin should be less reticent, Woodfall now suggested, for a female perspective on the subject of desire would be welcome. Aikin’s poem ‘Corsica’ expressed ideas of the greatest freedom, which was ‘freedom of the mind’. While ‘To Wisdom’ was not composed on narrow or ‘puritanic principles’, but on ‘the most rational and liberal philosophy’.Footnote 163
VIII
The attack on women’s rationality, her ‘very capacity to think’, was, Dorinda Outram has written, a ‘strong’ feature of ‘the allegedly egalitarian Republic of Letters’.Footnote 164 It is striking, then, that, as we have seen, when reviewing the work of Anna Laetitia Aikin and other women, liberal-minded critics typically dismissed the commonplace notion that female minds were less rational or less vigorous and penetrating than those of men.Footnote 165 In the ‘court of liberal criticism’, what counted was ‘fair and just argument’.Footnote 166 Hence, women’s rationality was celebrated by those men whose professional ethic required the exercise of fairness, or the kind of justice that relied on evidence. In the words of Ralph Griffiths, the collection of Catharine Cockburn’s works – from which lengthy extracts were published – are ‘so incontestible a proof of the superiority of [her] genius’ that ‘full justice’ should be done to them.Footnote 167
For Ruffhead, Catharine Macaulay’s History of England was exemplary in appealing ‘to every rational being’ on behalf of liberty.Footnote 168 Despite disagreeing with some remarks in her Letters on education (1790), Enfield stressed that critics had always ‘heartily concurred’ in her ‘general principles of civil policy’, and have ‘readily’ ascribed to her ‘the merit of great intellectual energy’.Footnote 169 Another critic not only applauded another woman’s ‘liberal’ political principles (‘the principles of humanity and the natural rights of mankind’), but had no qualms in claiming that Kéralio’s scholarship was superior in some respects to that of an eminent male rival. Her work would convince Mr Hume of his ‘many mistakes and wilful perversions’. Contra Hirons, this woman was certainly capable ‘of a connected train of reasoning’; her arguments were ‘clear, forcible, and undisguised’.Footnote 170
Rejecting notions of female inferiority, critics identified the manifold qualities of the female mind. Introducing Lady Luxborough’s Letters (1775), one reviewer at the Critical suggested that his readers should be aware that, like Lord Bolingbroke, her brother, she had ‘inherited from nature uncommon endowments of mind’.Footnote 171 Likewise, Mrs H. Cartwright’s Letters on female education (1777) also ‘discover the indications of a rational understanding, and a good heart’.Footnote 172 Again, at the Critical, while remarking on ‘the narrow limits which custom has assigned to the province of the fair’, one critic affirmed that ‘of late, the British ladies in particular, have by their own example’ refuted the error that ‘the sex was formed by nature incapable of great attainments in what relates to the more elevated faculties of the mind’. And, he continued, ‘there is hardly any branch of polite literature which has not been successfully cultivated by some female genius of the present age’. According to the Critical, ‘We have women daily rising up among us, whose compositions amply vindicate the honour of the female character, and will reflect a lustre on the present age.’Footnote 173
At the Monthly well before the laudatory reviews of Wollstonecraft appeared, the powers of the female intellect were commended time and again. There may not have been strict unanimity amongst critics, but the number of tributes to a woman’s intellect is nonetheless quite remarkable. Griffiths prized the ‘well-cultivated mind’ of Mary Jones; here was an example of female fitness for moral philosophy.Footnote 174 And he quoted the editor of Elizabeth Montagu’s Letters on her intellectual acumen, noting the ‘sprightliness of her wit’ and ‘the solidity of her judgment’.Footnote 175 According to Ruffhead, Elizabeth Carter united ‘an acute understanding and solid judgment, sufficient to unravel the intricacies of Philosophy’.Footnote 176 For another critic, Mrs Chapone’s Miscellanies in prose and verse (1775) are ‘equally proof of genius, and of a refined knowledge of life and manners’; her views were ‘sustained’ by ‘every rational principle’.Footnote 177 Elizabeth Craven’s Journey through the Crimea retailing her travels ‘afford a proof of a lively imagination and a good understanding’.Footnote 178 Edmund Cartwright declared that Catharine Macaulay’s comments on the Glorious Revolution were the result of both ‘political knowledge and penetration’, or insight and understanding.Footnote 179 Macaulay’s Treatise on the immutability of moral truth (1783) was the ‘production of a penetrating, vigorous, and ardent mind’, according to Samuel Badcock, who provided a lengthy commentary. Badcock’s was high praise, for he noted that despite some flaws, ‘some parts of it are equal, both in point of elevation and expression, to the most admired pieces of the most admired authors of ancient or modern times’.Footnote 180 While the Critical’s reviewer expressed his admiration for ‘that comprehensive mind, that strong imagination, and those virtues and liberal principles which [Macaulay] has displayed on former occasions’.Footnote 181
According to William Enfield, ‘it would have been an inexcusable omission, not to have paid respect to female merit in the Biographia Britannica, by giving the names of illustrious women a place in these records’; and, indeed, the editors ‘might have paid a greater attention to the fair sex’.Footnote 182 Enfield agreed with the pro-women body of critics, placing Mrs Barbauld in the elevated company of liberal-minded intellectuals: the thoughts expressed in her Devotional pieces (1775), were those ‘of an enlarged and independent mind, capable of comprehending the most extensive views’. It has taken ‘her able and masterly pen to show, that a devotional spirit is not beneath the attention of the most cultivated and philosophical spirits’.Footnote 183 In her ‘excellent discourse’ Sins of government, sins of the nation (1793), she had demonstrated ‘strong reasoning’ and ‘force of argument’ regarding the responsibility of the people to hold the government to account for its acts of wrongdoing.Footnote 184 Like Stuart, Enfield boldly affirmed in his review of the Vindication of the rights of woman (1792) that ‘women of the present age are daily giving us indubitable proofs that the mind is of no sex’, and, further, that Wollstonecraft had ‘a right to a distinguished place’ in the class of philosophers.Footnote 185 The New Annual Register objected to some ‘singularities and fanciful opinions’, but also reckoned that on the subject of female education Wollstonecraft’s work contained ‘much judicious reasoning and important reflections’ plus ‘originality of sentiment, and acuteness of observation’.Footnote 186 In her Historical and moral view of the origin and progress of the French Revolution (1794), Wollstonecraft had written ‘this wonderful chapter in the history of the world…like a philosopher’. For Enfield, her mind was ‘naturally vigorous, inured to reflection, and free from vulgar prejudices’.Footnote 187 The New Annual Register echoed such praise, adding, significantly, that her ‘well-informed mind’ entertained ‘liberal and comprehensive views of policy and morals’, which merit the attention of politicians of every party.Footnote 188 Wollstonecraft belonged to a sizeable group of acclaimed women intellectuals which included Manon Roland. Roland was admired for ‘the vigour and elasticity of her mind’: somewhat surprisingly, she evinced the kind of mind that ‘would suit a man who was called to found an empire’.Footnote 189
IX
Despite the vilification to which pro-women writers were subjected by Rousseau, most reviewers held to ‘liberal’ norms, seemingly intending to defeat prejudice and judge autonomously, temperately, and fairly or justly. Arguably, the Monthly came close to establishing a unifying continuity of liberal thinking as Ralph Griffiths and his journalists – Gilbert Stuart, Owen Ruffhead, William Rose, Edmund Cartwright, Abraham Rees, John Hawkesworth, Samuel Badcock, George Colman, and William Enfield – all repudiated the frightful prospect of the arrogant ‘masculine woman’, and envisaged more harmonious relationships between men and women who shared an equality of intellect, education, and virtues. Although members of the clergy, in particular, continued to disparage women: ‘beings whose power and faculties are not so extensive, whose judgment and reason are not so strong and solid as our own’,Footnote 190 critics argued that women could be both virtuous and capable of acute and independent thought, and hence rightly ambitious. They possessed ‘true genius’ as well as good characters. According to the Critical Review, it was well known that Britain was ahead of other nations. In our ‘literary commonwealth’, there is ‘a boldness and freedom of thought to which all Europe pays homage’:
From this cause we have likewise been taught, that nature has imparted the same perfectibility to the minds of women as to those of men; and whereas other countries scarce begin to feel the unjust prejudice which has long subsisted against the sex, our literary commonwealth possesses numbers of female authors in prose and verse, among whom many shine with peculiar merit in the very first class of writers, both in point of matter and of style.Footnote 191
The critic’s optimistic comment substantiates the thesis that the realization that women could achieve the same intellectual ‘perfectibility’ as men – and thus be counted ‘in the very first class of writers’ – was one effect of those innovatory thought-practices that provided guidance as to what it meant to be enlightened or the opposite. In Britain, the ‘liberal sentiments’ that were attributed to writers by critics, and that expressed the core values of all free-thinking literati, continued to play a vital part in the dissipation of prejudices that had ‘long subsisted’ against the female sex. In our country, claimed one reviewer, ‘liberal sentiments and polished manners have pervaded the middling ranks of people’.Footnote 192 Indeed, we find that by the 1780s ‘liberal’ discourse, employing the language of ‘liberal sentiments’ and recommending liberal principles and precepts, had spread within print culture, appearing, as we have seen, in the New Annual Register. Republishing an extract from Kippis’s Biographia Britannica, the New Annual Register for 1789 compared the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, and declared that previously ‘there was by no means that diffusion of knowledge, that cultivation of mind, that taste for books, which we now meet with in almost every company of ladies’.Footnote 193 For William Alexander, Europeans now set an example to other nations by treating their women ‘in a more liberal point of view’, which meant treating them ‘as companions and equals’.Footnote 194 In his Essays on subjects connected with civilization, the lawyer Benjamin Heath Malkin lamented the fact that earlier civilizations ‘did not possess those liberal principles of equality, or those general and salutary provisions which characterize an enlightened policy’. Women in particular had suffered. However, if ‘rational principles of equality’ were to prevail, if the ‘protracted reign of despotism and ignorance’ were to end, both sexes would benefit; for women might then become ‘the rational companions’ of man.Footnote 195 In the next step towards female emancipation, liberals would argue that women were entitled to the same rights as members of the male sex.Footnote 196 If men adopted a ‘liberal’ frame of mind, if they were sufficiently ‘wise and liberal’, according to the officer Alexander Jardine, they would bring about ‘an equality and resemblance between the sexes’; they would give women ‘their natural rights and influence: and thus give to society all the benefits of their powers and talents’.Footnote 197
Acknowledgements
I am most grateful to the anonymous referees for The Historical Journal for their very helpful suggestions. My thanks also to Anna Teicher and Jennifer Dari for their aid in procuring material.
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