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A Revolution in Female Manners
Catharine Macaulay
by Robert Edge Pine, c. 1775
oil on canvas
© National Portrait Gallery, London
Mary Wollstonecraft
by John Opie, c. 1790-1
oil on canvas
© Tate, London 2005
Hannah More
by Augustin Edouart, 1827
cut black paper with wash
© National Portrait Gallery, London
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Conference
| Publication | Audio
Exhibition: Introduction
| The Bluestocking Circle
| Celebrating Modern Muses
At the end of the eighteenth
century, the political and social situation became more repressive
in Britain in the wake of the American and French Revolutions.
Until the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, Britain experienced
increasing economic and political insecurity. This joined with
radical opposition to the government at home to result in a conservative
backlash which halted the slow move towards equality between
the sexes.
With greater restrictions imposed
on personal freedom, the final section of the exhibition considers
the changing fortunes of the intellectual and creative woman.
A Revolution in Female Manners explores the rise and fall
of two writers - the republican historian Catharine Macaulay
and the early 'feminist' Mary Wollstonecraft. Both held radical
beliefs, greeted the French Revolution with enthusiasm and spoke
out for women's rights. But their troubled reputations were due
not only to their uncompromising politics, but also to their
rejection of traditional female behaviour, especially in their
liberal attitudes, publicly-voiced political opinions and unconventional
sexual lives. But the contemporary moral climate saw new limits
placed on female self-expression and the traditionally demarcated
roles of the sexes were emphasised once again.
The republican historian Catharine Macaulay was one of the leading
political activists of her times. Her eight-volume History
of England, published between 1763 and 1783, and many political
tracts contributed to the radical programme for political reform.
With the rise of radical political ideas and unrest in Britain's
American colonies she and her supporters used a variety of media
to establish her as a spokesperson and figurehead of the radical
cause in the 1760s and 1770s. In several cases, these portraits
likened Macaulay to potent historic male figures such as the
Emperor Brutus or a Roman senator. This was the case with Robert
Edge Pine's (1730-88) political portrait that was painted around
the start of the American War of Independence in 1775. This shows
the statuesque figure of Macaulay, posed in a Roman Forum-like
setting and leaning on a marble plinth, topped with volumes of
her History, and incised with the republican inscription:
GOVERNMENT/ A POWER DELEGATED/ FOR THE HAPPINESS/ OF/ MANKIND.
She also wears a Roman 'stola' with a purple sash - the distinctive
emblem of an elected Roman Senator, although as a woman she could
never hold such office.
Such a transgression of gender
boundaries and accepted female manners led eventually to Macaulay's
fall from favour, but this was not before a profound shift in
the political landscape. The turning point was the American Declaration
of Independence in 1776. For Britain this was perceived as a
national disaster and open support for an independent America
became increasingly difficult. Remaining staunchly republican
and becoming increasingly vain and indiscreet in her personal
life, Macaulay was subjected to vicious satire. As the exhibition
reveals, her public reputation was most severely affected when
the forty-seven year old historian eloped, in 1778, with the
twenty-one year old brother of her 'quack' doctor. This inevitably
led to accusations that she had abandoned her intellect and principles
for lust. Elizabeth Montagu was concise in her analysis of the
situation: 'All this has happened from her adopting masculine
opinions and masculine manners. I hate a woman's mind in men's
cloaths I always look'd upon Mrs Macaulay as rather belonging
to the lads. Indeed she was always a strange fellow.'
The scandal of Macaulay's second marriage irrevocably damaged
her reputation yet she continued to publish. Most notable was
her Observations on the Reflections of the Rt. Hon. Edmund
Burke (1790) which was a riposte to Burke's conservative
reaction to the Revolution in France and the dire consequences,
in his view, for Britain. Macaulay's Observation's
encouraged the young writer Mary Wollstonecraft to send her
a bold and unsolicited letter proclaiming: 'You are the only
female writer who I consider in opinion with respecting the rank
our sex ought to attain in the world. I respect Mrs Macaulay...
because she contends for laurels whilst most of her sex only
seek for flowers.' While this final sentence of the letter captures
the spirit of these two writers' shared interest in promoting
a new model of assertive womanhood, Wollstonecraft's principle
excuse for writing to Macaulay was to send a copy of her pamphlet
A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), which like
Macaulay's Observations was her own recently-published
reaction to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution.
Wollstonecraft is now considered
one of the founders of modern British feminism. In political
writing, social treatises and novels she made a powerful case
for emancipating women from subordination though education. This
sensitive and confident portrait by her friend John
Opie (1761-1807) depicts Wollstonecraft in the year before
the publication of her most famous work: A Vindication
of the Rights of Woman (1792). In this she argued that English
women had been forced into narrow roles within society, denied
access to education and trivialized as frivolous creatures whose
purpose was only to please men. She even suggested that women
were instrumental in their own subordination due to their love
of sentimental novels, fashion and gossip. Arguing that it was
serious study that would lift women from sensation to intellect,
Wollstonecraft's rallying cry was aimed at the radical reform
of Britain as a whole:
It is time to effect a revolution in female manners - time
to restore them their lost dignity - and make them, as part of
the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the
world.
Wollstonecraft's ideas were rooted in her belief in 'perfectibility',
the theory that people can achieve perfection through their own
actions. Her work was also based on a 'levelling' principle which
took its inspiration from the French Revolution. Both were contentious
positions to adopt and yet it took sometime for a full-scale
conservative backlash to develop against A Vindication of
the Rights of Woman. In part this was due to the fact that
most people judged it as an 'elaborate treatise on female
education'. It was only the extremist Critical Review
which correctly identified the revolutionary implications
of Wollstonecraft's proposals, and voiced anxiety about the social
impact if women -when educated to the level of men -refused to
continue in their allotted duties of childcare and nursing the
sick.
Despite the relative success of A Vindication of the Rights
of Woman, the book and its author would soon become synonymous
with libertarian immorality and radical politics. The reasons
for Wollstonecraft's plummeting reputation are several. They
include the increasingly repressive nature of the social and
political situation and the public discovery of the details of
her private life. Four months after Wollstonecraft's gruesome
death in childbirth, her devastated widower, the philosopher
William
Godwin (1756-1836), published his Memoirs of the Author
of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1797). Representing
his wife as a passionate and intellectually assertive woman,
Godwin revealed intimate and previously unknown information about
her troubled life: her illegitimate child and life out of wedlock
with one man, her attempted suicide, her pregnancy before marrying
Godwin and her refusal of Christian rites on her death-bed. Combined
with her obvious political beliefs, Godwin's overly-frank Memoirs
ruined Wollstonecraft's reputation for the generations to come.
In the most reactionary press, she was branded a 'philosophical
wanton' and her life was turned into an example of revolutionary
immorality in action.
One vehement exponent of this sentiment was the Reverend Richard
Polwhele (1760-1838) who published The Unsex'd Females (1798)
a long anti-revolutionary poem against independent-minded, radical
feminist writers. Using the emotive label 'unsex'd' to suggest
that such people gave up their right to be respected as women,
Polwhele named and shamed eight women who he believed had violated
their gender by abandoning 'natural' modesty, displaying French
sympathies and criticising Britain's social, political and religious
institutions and calling for equal rights. Chief among Polwhele's
'unsex'd females' was 'Wollstonecraft, whom no decorum checks/
the intrepid champion of her sex'. Polwhele is an extreme example
of the growing hostility towards intellectual women that emerged
in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless
Polwhele was not opposed to female learning in total. He praised
several of the original Bluestocking Circle for their respectability
and Hannah More, who had become a prominent evangelical Christian
writer, was represented as the essence of 'seraphic', or angelic,
femininity.
The elderly Hannah More is represented here by a silhouette which
depicts her seated at her desk with ink pot and tea set. Sometimes
called the 'Bishop in petticoats', since her conversion to evangelical
Christianity she had turned her pen to promoting the abolition
of slavery and the increase of public morality and piety. Along
with numerous conduct books, educational primers and novels,
her series of 'Cheap Repository Tracts' sold millions and made
More a household name. Through simple homilies and stories about
devout but upwardly mobile heroes, such as Betty Brown, the
St Giles Orange Girl, these tracts aimed to reform the poor
and thus diffuse the predominantly middle-class fear of a popular
uprising inspired by events in France. No supporter of women's
rights, More believed that female subordination was god-given.
Instead she called on women to use their influence for the national
good arguing that as 'charity is the calling of a lady; the care
of the poor is her profession'. More gave women a central role
as agents of the philanthropic action that would 'raise the depressed
tone of public morals' and 'reanimate the dormant powers of active
piety'. As the nineteenth century progressed, such philanthropy
became a new and effective form of domestically-based female
activism and empowerment.
Despite the fact that eighteenth-century bluestockings made a
substantial contribution to the creation and definition of national
culture, their intellectual participation and artistic interventions
have largely been forgotten. By the end of the eighteenth-century
the combined social and intellectual prominence of so many intelligent
women began to be greeted with suspicion and disgust. The most
vociferous attacks on bluestockings came from the leading male
Romantic writers who wished to protect their status and success.
The literary critic William
Hazlitt (1778-1830) declared that he did not 'care a fig
for any woman who even knows what an author means.' While
the best-selling Lord
Byron (1788-1824) famously ridiculed the poet Felicia Dorothea
Hemans -who often outstripped his popularity and his sales 'by
moaning uncharitably, she should 'knit bluestockings instead
of wearing them.' With openly intellectual women once again viewed
with suspicion and scorn 'bluestocking', so recently a mark of
distinction, became a term of insult and ridicule.
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