Eighteenth-Century Women Writing About Women Writing

Our friend Aphra.

A couple of years ago I had the privilege to teach an upper-level English course at Stony Brook on a topic of my choice. Since the department was looking to run an upper-level course on poetry, I proposed (successfully) to teach a course on eighteenth-century women poets. It was an exhilarating experience in many ways, as the students were mostly unfamiliar with eighteenth-century literature or culture. Together we explored the fabulous voices of female poets starting with Aphra Behn and Anne Finch and ending with Joanna Baillie and Mary Robinson.

One thing that particularly struck me was how often women wrote about writing, specifically, about being female poets and the challenges therein.

Elizabeth Thomas’s poetry is filled with the anger and frustration of being told (apparently) many times over that poetry was not “fit for women,” as in her poem, “On Sir J---- S---- saying in a Sarcastic Manner, My Books would make me Mad. An Ode”:

Unhappy sex! how hard’s our fate,

by Custom’s tyranny confined

To foolish needlework and chat,

Or such like exercise as that,

Lady Mary Chudleigh

But still denied th’ improvement of our mind!

(1722)

In these lines, she reiterates, almost to the letter, the earlier complaints of Mary, Lady Chudleigh in “The Lady’s Defense”:

‘Tis hard we should be by the men despised,

Yet kept from knowing what would make us prized;

Debarred from knowledge, banished from the schools,

And with the utmost industry bred fools;

Laughed out of reason, jested out of sense,

And nothing left but native innocence;

Then told we are incapable of wit,

And only for the meanest drudgeries fit

(1701)

Sarah Egerton’s “The Emulation” (1703), Elizabeth Tollet’s “Hypatia” (1724), Mary Leapor’s “An Essay on Woman” [not an essay…a poem] (1746), and Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s “The Rights of Woman” (c. 1795) elaborate similar themes of being withheld from knowledge and education all the while being told that, as women, they were silly, useless or incapable of bettering themselves.

Poems like Anne Finch’s “The Introduction” (1713?) and Esther Lewis’s “A Mirror for Detractors. Addressed to a Friend” (1748) more specifically discuss the problem of being a woman poet:

Anne Finch

Alas! a woman that attempts the pen,

Such an intruder on the rights of men,

Such a presumptuous creature, is esteemed,

The fault can by no virtue be redeemed

--From “The Introduction”

…when a woman dares indite,

And seek in print the public sight,

All tongues are presently in motion

About her person, mind, and portion;

And every blemish, every fault,

Unseen before, to light is brought

--From “A Mirror for Detractors”

For those of us who study the literary output of the ladies of the eighteenth century, such sentiments are probably expected from our literary foremothers. For my students, however, they were a wonderful illustration of the limited rights and position of women in the eighteenth century. Even for myself, the anguish, chagrin, frustration and outright anger of these women was palpable in these poems in a way that was immediate and unmediated, and I started using them in introductory women’s studies courses as a way of foregrounding later nineteenth- and twentieth-century women’s right movements.

As usual, the past reasserts itself in the present, however, and I find these poems still illustrate the frustrations of women writers writing now. Countless articles have appeared lately about how women writers are constantly belittled and their output discounted by publishers and reviewers, as well as how women’s novels are often marketed with “softer” “more feminine” book covers. All this, despite the fact that women now edge out men in pursuit of bachelor’s degrees in the United Stated. We no longer lack the education, but we are still marginalized when it comes to reviews and marketing.

Similarly, the poetry of women is, in my experience, under-taught at the undergraduate level. When I mentioned to a colleague (a male Romanticist) that I was teaching a course on “eighteenth-century women poets,” he (half-) jokingly replied, “Oh, were there any?” If he looked at almost any general literary anthology, however, he might surmise that there certainly weren’t enough to make an entire course syllabus just on them alone. 

Ladies in Breeches: Hannah Snell

My primary research interest in the eighteenth century right now is the representation of cross-dressed women in the literature . One of my favorite characters is that of Hannah Snell, a real life female cross-dresser, whose story was written and published under the title, The Female Soldier, in 1747 in England.

One of the most popular images of Snell.

Hannah sailed the seas with the British marines, disguised as a man, and, according to her story (she was illiterate, so her story is told by a, seemingly male, narrator), her female sex was never discovered. Initially, she joins the army in order to find her husband, who abandoned her when she was pregnant. After she gives birth and her child dies, she decides to find him. She hears of his being pressed into service (this was common in the 18^th century as Britain waged many wars and conquests without the resource of a standing army; more about that when I discuss Peg Woffington and her turn as “The Female Volunteer” next week!) and decides to join up herself in search of him.

While on her travels, she sees the world, and eventually she fights at the Battle of Pondicherry, India, where she is wounded with a groin wound. She manages to escape being “discovered” by convincing a local woman (referred to in the text as a “Black,” though this designation applies to the Indians of India in the eighteenth-century) to give her some ointment for her wound.

As with many of the “passing women” of the eighteenth century, Hannah must prove herself with feats of strength—and flirtations with other women. She defends the honor of several women in port who may have otherwise fallen in with some of her fellow crewmen with evil intentions, and these women apparently find her version of masculinity quite appealing. 

A rather different image of Snell.

 

Upon her return, Hannah goes with her ship’s mates to the marine offices to prove that she indeed served aboard ship and to collect her pay—which she does, successfully. Afterwards, she appears in her uniform on stage at Sadler’s Wells, performing her military exercises for money.

While the text ends on a happy note, historians have found evidence that Snell eventually re-married (rather unhappily) and died alone and in poverty (not unusual for an interesting, independent woman of this period, unfortunately; the writer Aphra Behn also died in pain and in poverty despite penning many fantastic works of fiction, poetry and plays).

What I find fascinating about the actual text of Snell’s tale are the narrative contortions necessary to make Snell a virtuous woman but also a strong and valiant character. She’s good at disguising herself (lying to others), but it’s ok, because she’s doing it for a noble end. She’s deathly afraid of getting raped aboard ship, but she’s also one of the toughest and strongest crew members. Most interestingly for my research is the narrator’s insistence that we understand exactly how she passed despite being female-bodied. We never learn how she relieved herself aboard ship in front of fellow crew-members, or how she hid her monthly menses, but we get a blow by blow of how she dug out the bullet from her own groin at Pondicherry to avoid dealing with a surgeon. 

 

A less masculine version of Snell.

Similarly, when Snell is to be whipped shirtless in front of the company for disobeying orders, the narrator goes into detail about how she had small breasts, and how she wore a bandanna, and how she stood with her arms held up and facing the wall, so no one could tell she had breasts. Snell’s female-bodied-ness is central to the story, as it establishes the need to stay hidden, it illustrates how much she wishes to preserve her virtue, and it creates the central tension of the text. On the other hand, this need to keep her true sex hidden leads her to flirt with other women, women who, according to the text, seem to really, really like her. As a man. Or something. The ambiguity, the possibility of reading women like Snell from many different angles, is part of what makes the study of 18th-century female cross-dressers so fascinating.

Welcome to Notes & Petticoats!

Welcome to my blog and my very first post! This blog, like many wonderful blogs before it, is dedicated to discussing, pondering and examining aspects of eighteenth-century life and literature, especially in the British Isles. Posts will focus on literature, material histories, and issues of representation, especially with regard to gender and sexuality, which is my scholarly focus in eighteenth-century literary studies.

Why “notes and petticoats,” you might ask? Good question.

A petticoat is a skirt; in the eighteenth-century, it can be either a skirt worn under a dress or jacket, completely invisible from the outside, or it can be the main item of clothing covering the lower body of women. Petticoats could be completely functional, or they could be ornately decorated and embroidered lavishly. As an item of clothing, the petticoat is both functional and excessive, but it always refers to women’s clothing. In this sense, the petticoat exemplifies the focus in my research specifically on representations of women in the eighteenth century.

Similarly, in the eighteenth century, “the petticoats” could be a way of referring to women in general, as opposed to “the breeches,” the pants that men wore at the time and signifying the menfolk. The term “petticoat government” refers to the rule by women of the home, and can often be used both a positive sense (the pleasures of domesticity), or a negative one (the tyranny of the female sex over the male sex, i.e. being “whipped” or, as an eighteenth-century denizen would term it, “hen-pecked”). Henry Fielding uses the term in at least two plays he penned in the century to refer to such female tyranny. Petticoat, therefore, can be something of a loaded term.

The sartorial divisions between men and women were stringent in the eighteenth century. Yet, the practice of cross-dressing flourished during this time—a topic I explored in my dissertation and which I continue to work on in articles and a future book project. Women donned breeches for a variety of reasons in the eighteenth century—some of those women I’ll explore in future posts. In any case, the large dresses of the late eighteenth century, fitted with various hoops and layers, were difficult to maneuver, and breeches, at the very least, provided comfort and ease of movement. At the same time, most eighteenth-century moralists (i.e. men) believed that women in breeches were, at the very least, committing a sexually salacious act by wearing breeches, as the breeches clearly defined where a lady’s legs began and ended.

Thus, petticoats symbolize the expectations placed on women of the time, in addition to illustrating the divisions between public and private selves, the construction of the body through clothing, and the changing understanding of sex and gender in the eighteenth century. Lastly, petticoats could function as secret hiding places located right on a woman’s body. In Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela (1740), the eponymous heroine tries to hide the letters she writes and receives by sewing them into her “undercoat, next to her linen,” i.e. into her petticoat. Just like the petticoats go from underclothes to outerwear, so Pamela’s secret thoughts become public when Mr. B forces Pamela to give him her letters, literally undressing her. Petticoats are titillating secret-holders, reminding us of the eighteenth-century obsession with young girls making their entrance into the world, resisting worldly temptations, and learning how to make a good match.

Who can resist a petticoat? Its many layers draw us in, tempt us, hiding and revealing at the same time. Here on this blog, I’ll be examining the many different layers of the eighteenth century, just as Mr. B. examined Pamela’s petticoat. (Oh myy, as George Takei would say.)

I hope you’ll join me along the way, especially with reading suggestions, interesting Enlightenment-related links, comments, and guest posts.