Jane Rendall

Women and the Public Sphere

In Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the contrast between ‘public’ and ‘private’ worlds drew not on one, but on multiple, contrasts. However, recognising such variations does not necessarily provide us with new analytical tools. This article examines some of the ways in which twentieth-century commentators have attempted to categorise these contrasts. In particular the article critically engages with Habermass definition of the public sphere and suggests the advantages and disadvantages of using his notion through a discussion of the relationship of the British womens suffrage movement to the debate over citizenship in the 1860s.

Writing women's history : international perspectives

Part 1 Conceptual and methodological issues: challenging dichotomies - perspectives on womens history, Gisela Bock demographic history and its perception of women from the 17th to the 19th century, Anne-Lise Head-Konig uneven developments - womens history, feminist history, and gender history in Great Britain, Jane Rendall finding our own ways - different paths to womens history in the United States, Phyllis Stock-Morton experience, difference, dominance and voice in the writing of Canadian womens history, Ruth Roach Pierson womens culture and womens power - issues in French womens history, Cecile Dauphin et al global womens history - organizing principles and cross-cultural understandings, Ida Blom. Part 2 The state of the art in womens history: writing the history of Australian women, Patricia Grimshaw the development of womens history in Japan, Noriyo Hayakawa womens history in India - a historiographical survey, Aparn Basu writing women into history - the Nigerian experience, Bolanle Awe womens history in Norway - a short survey, Ingeborg Floystad the state of womens history in Denmark, Nanna Damsholt the state of womens history in Sweden - an overview, Yvonne Hirdman womens history behind the dykes - reflections of the situation in the Netherlands, Francisca de Haan womens history in Austria, Brigette Mazohl-Wallnig issues in womens history in the Federal Republic of Germany, Ute Frevert and Christina Vanja historical research on women in the German Democratic Republic, Petra Rantzsch and Erika Uitz womens history in Switzerland, Regina Wecker womens history in Brazil - production and perspectives, Maria Beatriz Nizza da Silva two decades of womens history in Spain - a re-appraisal, Mary Nash womens history in Yugoslavia, Andrea Feldman womens history in Greece, Efi Avdela the development of womens history in Ireland, Mary Cullen womens history in Italy, Paola Di Cori women, gender and family in the Soviet Union and Central/East Europe - a preliminary bibliography, Mary F.Zirin.

Scottish Orientalism: From Robertson to James Mill

It is by now accepted that James Mill’s History of British India , which exercised such influence over the British image of India and Indians throughout the nineteenth century, was cast in the mould of‘philosophical history’, the kind of historical writing typical of the Scottish Enlightenment By the 1790s such an approach was faught at Edinburgh by Dugald Stewart, and in Glasgow by John Millar; and their teachings and writings did much to form Mill’s approach, overlaid though it later was by the Benthamite political message. The characteristics of ‘ philosophical history’ can be identified. Writers of the Scottish Enlightenment were concerned to apply to the study of man and society methods of enquiry comparable to those of the natural sciences, and this, for them, involved the formulation of general laws on the basis of observation, and the available evidence about the history, economy, culture, and political institutions of different societies. Certain guidelines were evolved. The starting point was the close interrelationship between all aspects of mens life within society, between the economy, government, culture, and social life of a people. Secondly, a civilisation, by which was implied all these aspects of a society, could be located on an evolutionary scale, a ladder of civilizations running from ‘rudeness’ to ‘refinement’.

‘Women that would plague me with rational conversation’: Aspiring Women and Scottish Whigs, c. 1790–1830

The women whom, fifty years later, Eliza Fletcher represented as like herself, ‘aspiring or ambitious’ in early nineteenth-century Edinburgh society were, like Francis Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review from 1802, heirs to the Enlightenment in Scotland. The significance of the Scottish Enlightenment for the language employed about the condition of women in the early nineteenth century, and potentially for the social and political practice of women of the middling to upper ranks has still to be identified. Much recent work has suggested that both the conjectural histories of the condition of women shaped by John Millar and Lord Kames, and the language of ‘complacency’ and female sensibility employed by Henry Mackenzie and his associates, served to differentiate more sharply a ‘private and intimate domestic realm’ within which alone women’s moral powers and influence might be fulfilled.2 But most recently Mary Catherine Moran has argued that conjectural histories of the condition of women may be read rather as indicators of progress and refinement in the manners of men, implying a passivity for women, even if she also identified Millar’s qualified endorsement of a social role for women in a modernising commercial society as in ‘an intermediary social sphere that was thought to guarantee both civic and domestic virtue’.3 The emphasis of Millar and others on a progressive improvement in the situation of women, as a significant index of the development of a commercial and civilized society characterized by free institutions, could however be employed in more challenging ways.

Bluestockings and reviewers: gender, power, and culture in Britain, c. 1800–1830

Taylor and Francis Ltd GNCC041038.sgm 10.108 /08905490512331329358 Nineteenth-Ce tury Contexts 0890-5495 (pri t)/1477-2663 (online) Original Article 2 04 & Francis Ltd 6 4 00December 2004 In October 1817 the editors of the recently founded Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, John Wilson and John Gibson Lockhart, together with the novelist James Hogg, published what became known as the Chaldee Manuscript, a mock satire in biblical language on literary Edinburgh society, aimed directly at the Whig Edinburgh Review. It prophesied the defeat of the publisher Archibald Constable, “a man who was crafty in counsel” (101), and his “familiar spirit” Francis Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review (110). To those in the know, it clearly identified Jeffrey’s allies and supporters. One brief line of this extended satire suggested that, behind the male supporters of Jeffrey, “there followed him many women which know not their right hand from their left, also some cattle” (117). Three years later, in October 1820, John Wilson wrote triumphantly that in the years before his magazine had been established in 1817 “bluestockingism was in its cerulean altitude” in a city culturally dominated by the Edinburgh Review. For then, he went on

Adaptations: History, Gender, and Political Economy in the Work of Dugald Stewart

Summary This paper notes and explores the attraction of Dugald Stewarts moral philosophy for women readers and a few women writers. Student lecture notes reveal the chronological development of his ideas, as he drew upon the works of Thomas Reid, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson, and responded to political events. Particular attention is paid to Stewarts comments relating to women and gender, through discussions of education, the institution of marriage, and population questions. After 1800, he shifted away from a speculative conjectural history towards a philosophy of moral progress rooted in common sense philosophy and a belief in perfectibility. He taught a system of practical morality relevant to the education of children and strongly emphasised the importance of the association of ideas in childhood. For women readers, the message was contradictory in that he united an apparently conservative reinforcement of the relations of the sexes with a belief in the improvement of the condition of women through education in a modern, progressive, and commercial society.

‘Elementary Principles of Education’: Elizabeth Hamilton, Maria Edgeworth and the Uses of Common Sense Philosophy

Summary Both Maria Edgeworth and Elizabeth Hamilton drew extensively on Scottish moral philosophy, and especially on the work of Dugald Stewart, in constructing educational programmes that rested on the assumption that women, and especially mothers, were intellectually capable of understanding the importance of the early association of ideas in the training of childrens emotions and reasoning powers. As liberals they found in Stewarts work routes toward intellectual and social progress—both for women and for their society as a whole—that stopped short of radical politics and preserved moral certainties compatible with Christian faith. Both were assailed by Evangelical critics; Edgeworth acquired an undeserved reputation for infidelity, but Hamilton resolutely defended her committed but nonsectarian Christian faith, as she broadened her ambitions towards making her own contribution to the philosophy of mind, which she argued was relevant to the education of all classes in a modernising society.

Women Writing War and Empire: Gender, Poetry and Politics in Britain during the Napoleonic Wars

In her poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812), Anna Barbauld, then aged sixty-eight, a dissenter in religion, a pacifist and a much-published poet and educationalist, wrote of Britain’s military engagement in the global ‘storm of war’ as part of the expansion of its empire and commerce. She did so in no triumphalist spirit but in meditation on the destructive effects of a war that brought with it famine, death and economic ruin to a once free and powerful nation. Published at the height of the Peninsular War, the poem evoked a hostility from critics that has become legendary. Most reviewers denounced it as unpatriotic and subversive, its criminality exacerbated by the sex of the writer and her technical accomplishment. The most notorious attack appeared in the conservative Quarterly Review, where John Wilson Croker spluttered: We had hoped, indeed, that the empire might have been saved without the intervention of a lady-author: we even flattered ourselves that the interests of Europe and of humanity would in some degree have swayed our public councils, without the descent of (dea ex machina) Mrs. Anna Letitia Barbauld in a quarto, upon the theatre where the great European tragedy is now performing. Not such, however, is her opinion; an irresistible impulse of public duty—a confident sense of commanding talents— have induced her to dash down her shagreen spectacles and her knitting needles, and to sally forth … in the magnanimous resolution of saving a sinking state. …2

Introduction: Gender, War and Politics: Transatlantic Perspectives on the Wars of Revolution and Liberation, 1775–1830

In 1801 an unknown Parisian artist produced the engraving on the front cover of this volume, which he entitled ‘Rien ne manque plus a sa gloire’ (Nothing more is lacking for his glory). It shows Napoleon Bonaparte as a military leader and sword-bearer standing on top of the globe with the inscription ‘General Peace’. He is receiving an olive branch from a young and beautiful female figure representing Peace. Another allegorical female, Abundance, is pouring a cornucopia of goods, a horn of plenty, upon the world below. The engraving represents a moment of hope. In 1801 Bonaparte was still First Consul of the French Republic. Austria had signed the Treaty of Luneville, Naples had made peace with France, and Britain and the Ottoman Empire had both signed preliminary peace treaties with the French Republic. There was—at least from a French perspective—good reason to expect that the worldwide wars would be over, and peace and prosperity established under Napoleonic rule. Yet the engraving also suggests a divided gender order, one in which the warlike conqueror, successful on the field of battle reserved for men, has secured the world for the calm pursuits of peace, prosperity and private life represented by a woman.

Introduction: War, Empire and Slavery, 1770–1830

For historians, the six decades spanning the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century seem pivotal to the emergence of modernity. For Eric Hobsbawm, they formed an ‘age of revolution’; for Christopher Bayly, they witnessed a ‘world crisis’ and a series of ‘converging revolutions’; Reinhart Koselleck has described them as a ‘Sattelzeit (saddle period) during which modern ways of thinking took shape against a backdrop of accelerated political, economic and social transformation.1 These dramatic changes, including the emergence of new forms of statehood and of nationalism, and major shifts in global power relations, were partly forged in the crucible of imperial wars fought around the globe by European powers: principally France, Great Britain, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands. The Seven Years War might claim the distinction of being the first worldwide war. But the American War of Independence, in which the same European rivals were engaged, established an independent nation and a durable model of citizenship. As Jurgen Osterhammel observes in his recent panoramic history of the global nineteenth century, ‘the great conflict between the empires in the years between 1793 and 1815 did not remain limited to Europe. It was fought out on four continents: a true world war.’2 The military and political conflicts between France, Britain and their allies from 1793 to 1815 were larger and more diffuse than earlier wars, and were truly far-reaching in their effects and legacies.3