How British bluestockings shaped the modern age
During the 1750s, a group of lively, educated women started meeting regularly to discuss books, life and anything else that took their fancy. Hardly earth-shattering, until you realise the prejudice these so- called ‘bluestockings’ were up against.
A recent commentator had compared clever women to ‘Mould in a garden’, which was not to be ‘equally valued with the Fruits it produces’. The Fruits, to be clear, were men.
‘The Queen of the Blues’, was Elizabeth Montagu. She had grown up ‘plump and jolly’, addicted to dancing and wearing ‘ribbons and bows’. But young Elizabeth was no flibbertigibbet. She and her sister had learned Classics, French, italian and Shakespeare from their grandfather, who was a Cambridge don. She could not overturn the patriarchy — indeed, that never crossed her mind — but she could improve her lot in life by marrying well. Step forward Edward Montagu — mild, middle- aged, consumed in his own scientific studies, and helpfully wealthy.
Edward provided Elizabeth with a magnificent new-build mansion in Mayfair, from which she could run her weekly salons. guests were expected to be able to converse on literature, fine art, history, foreign affairs, science and philosophy.
Oddly enough, the term bluestocking originates from a man, Benjamin Stillingfleet, who once declined an invitation to an intellectual gathering as he had nothing suitable to wear. He was told he could come in his ‘blue stockings’, the most ordinary kind
Montagu’s salon was the first and most celebrated, but other clever women were quick to follow suit. A London brewer’s wife, Hester Thrale, started inviting clever men and women to her Streatham home.
The big draw here was her good friend and house pet Dr Samuel Johnson, the celebrated author and legendary wit who lived with the Thrale family for weeks at a time. Johnson, despite being ultraconservative, had a soft spot for clever women. Anyone who wanted to get a glimpse of the great man had to wangle an invitation to Mrs Thrale’s.
While the bluestockings were not by nature revolutionaries, they started to raise concerns about the harsh realities of
marriage. Thrale had 15 pregnancies in 16 years and lost most of her children to early death, wrecking her health in the process. Her husband was compulsively unfaithful and a spendthrift.
After being widowed, Thrale made a second, happier marriage to a much younger Italian musician, and was roundly condemned by the fashionable world for being declassée (Dr Johnson, until now her greatest supporter, never spoke to her again).
Meanwhile, Montagu’s sister, Sarah, was obliged to leave her marriage after just ten months (the reasons are murky, although several letters mention that her husband, George Scott, was ‘a very bad man’).
Instead of collapsing, she set up her own version of a salon in the Somerset countryside. No wonder Montagu, who had lost her beloved only child at 16 months, confessed herself astonished whenever two people decided to get married, ‘I weep more at a wedding than a funeral’.
The bluestockings were no one’s ideas of political radicals. But, says Gibson in this lively account, ‘theirs was a revolution that began as a whisper — a handful of women writing, speaking and having opinions’.
From there grew a social and political movement that would, over the next 250 years, transform the expectations and conditions of women around the world.
Virginia Woolf even went so far as to say that the moment bluestockings started to write was ‘of greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses’. Whether or not you agree with that radical statement, we certainly have a lot to thank them for.