A woman's identity and her experience are influenced, in part, by the ways in which she is ‘constructed' by others.
This means that the language used to describe her and what the ideals of womanhood and femininity should be, are just as important for her experience of life as the economic and social structures that surround her.
To understand the structures of womanly life we must appreciate the construction of the woman. Part I of this book is concerned with this. We look at how woman and her role were imagined by philosophers, scientists, writers and women themselves in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Constructions of that abstract concept ‘woman' — her body, her mind and her role — were all important in helping to determine how she was treated in European society. At the same time though, women both negotiated and challenged these constructions through their everyday actions and their writings.So much of the verbal construction of our modern world began with the Enlightenment. For many historians of the modern period it is the eighteenth-century Enlightenment which signals a turning away from the darkness and superstition of the early modern period and an awakening in the light, symbolised by rationality, science and knowledge. Centring on France, but extending across most of Europe from Edinburgh to St Petersburg, and lasting some seventy years, the Enlightenment was at its essence an intellectual, philosophical and scientific investigation into the human condition and the physical world, characterised by a desire to apply fresh observation to old ways of thinking. Old shibboleths were opened up for discussion and subjected to reasoned debate. Enlightenment writers and thinkers addressed the ‘science of man': the human condition, family, marriage and gender relations. This movement or set of ideas acts as a convenient frontier between early modern and modern Europe, between the old regime and the new.
The Enlightenment also constructed modern woman.
But the merits of this construction are double-edged. It left an ambiguous legacy for women. There is a danger in drawing a line between Enlightenment belief in individual natural rights and arguments for those rights to be applied to women. As Jane Rendall remarks: ‘the heritage of the Enlightenment to feminists and their opponents is an extraordinarily confusing one.'1 The revolutionary potential of Enlightenment thought on such diverse subjects as marriage and the family, individual citizenship rights, political thought and natural law nevertheless stopped short of challenging the fundamental relationship between the sexes. Sexual difference was rethought but not undermined or rejected; inequality was questioned and reworked but not discarded. For every writer who raised the possibility of women's emancipation, he or she was outnumbered by those who sought to justify or even reaffirm existing inequalities and sexual difference. Some, like Montesquieu, managed to combine a belief in woman's natural weakness with calls for her independence and greater gender equality, but most intimated that woman's nature inclined her towards passion and irrationality, her mind dominated by her biology. The truly revolutionary writings of those philosophes who dared to suggest the unthinkable in terms of women's status were marginalised, not least because the question of the relationship between the sexes was more a by-product of debate about the nature and source of difference than a discrete issue. The French mathematician and philosopher the Marquis de Condorcet (1743— 94) questioned the absurdity of the exclusion of women from citizenship rights, and the Prussian Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel (1741—96) similarly demanded that women be granted equal political, educational and professional rights. In one sense, Enlightenment thought turned traditional ideas about woman's nature inside-out: although woman was ascribed a new elevated status in the family (as wife and mother) and by extension within society, her role was still, if not even more, tightly defined. And the privilege of citizenship was not extended to women. European society was not ready to consider female citizenship rights. It much preferred the language of gender difference to that of equality which threatened stability in the home and in the body politic.It would be careless to disregard this philosophical revolution on account of its apparent irrelevance to women. Women did have an Enlightenment.
All women were affected but some actively engaged in and benefited from this unprecedented opportunity to challenge accepted ways of thinking. Some participated in the intellectual ferment, hosting salons for intellectual sociability and debate and providing a space where women could ‘think for themselves'. In London, Elizabeth Montagu (1720—1800) became known as the pioneer ‘blue stocking', so-called because she permitted this apparel in the place of the more formal black silk at her literary gatherings. In Paris, Madame du Deffand and Madame Necker, and in Berlin Rahel Levin Varnhagen (1771—1833), hosted gatherings of intellectuals helping to create a culture which encouraged independent thought.2 Women also contributed to the realm of scientific and mathematical knowledge. The physicist Laura Bassi (1711—78) and mathematician Maria Agnesi (1718—99) both rose to prominence at the University of Bologna, although there were many more whose contribution was never properly acknowledged, or at least not by their contemporaries. The Anglo-German astronomer Caroline Herschel (1750—1848) discovered a comet in 1786 but was only recognised much later for this work of assisting her brother William.
For most women, however, the Enlightenment impacted in other ways. They participated even more than men in the explosion of literature and the dissemination of knowledge. Women's literacy rates, especially in urban parts of Protestant Europe, rose faster than those of men. In Amsterdam for example, two-thirds of women could read in 1780 compared with only one- third in 1630.3 Although female literacy rates as a whole still lagged behind male, many more women could consume the debates about gender relations in newspapers, broadsheets and ballads and could contribute to those debates through the pages of novels and journals.
We women think under our coiffures as well as you do under your wigs', insisted the female editor of the Parisian Journal des Dames in 1761. ‘We are as capable of reasoning as you are.'4 The range of contributions was enormous, from the poetry of Austrian Gabrielle Baumberg (1766—1839) who used her writing to express her belief that the convention of marriage was stifling women's expression of sexual desire, to the writings of English republican Catherine Macaulay- Graham (1731—91), an early advocate of education for girls.5 In Britain, Eliza Haywood's (1693—1756) contributions to the first periodical written by and for women, The Female Spectator, published between 1744 and 1746, both addressed the difficulties faced by women within a system that defined their role in such restrictive ways and advocated a ‘life of the mind' as compensation for subordination to a husband. Women's lack of education was disabling, argued Haywood:Why do they call us silly Women and not endeavour to make us otherwise?... For while we live in a free Country, and are assured from our excellent Christian Principles that we are capable of those refined Pleasures which last to Immortality, our Minds, our better Parts, are wholly left uncultivated, and, like a rich Soil neglected, bring forth nothing but noxious Weeds.6
And then there were the novels of countless female authors, amongst them Jane Austen (1775—1817) and Sophie von La Roche (1731—1807), featuring heroines who experienced all the contradictions and constraints for women at the end of the eighteenth century. Women were talking, writing and reading about themselves in ways they had never done before. Woman was in her own thoughts.
Certainly the intellectual shifts wrought in terms of citizenship and politics by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution had less direct impact than those in the realm of science, medicine and culture. The end of the eighteenth century signalled a change in the ways in which woman was imagined, for good and for bad. These changes were mediated through debates about woman's body and the relationship between the body and the mind, and in turn the relationship between mind and body and a woman's role in the family and society. Moreover, a new concept of female piety and domesticity was to emerge as a central plank of nineteenth-century idealised femininity, and it had a profound impact on the image of woman and the ways in which women experienced their lives. These shifts did not affect all women equally or at the same time, yet, by the end of the nineteenth century there were few places where Enlightenment thought, however diluted, had not reached.