Bathsua Makin and Mary More with a Reply to More by Robert Whitehall: Educating English Daughters: Late Seventeenth-Century Debates ed. by Frances Teague and Margaret J. M. Ezell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bathsua Makin and Mary More with a Reply to More by Robert Whitehall: Educating English Daughters: Late Seventeenth-Century Debates ed. by Frances Teague and Margaret J. M. Ezell Elizabeth Ann Mackay Bathsua Makin and Mary More with a Reply to More by Robert Whitehall: Educating English Daughters: Late Seventeenth-Century Debates, ed. Frances Teague and Margaret J. M. Ezell. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, 44. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. Vol. 491. Toronto: Iter Academic, 2016. Pp. xvi + 201. $34.95. The three early modern documents in this collection present some available options for the education of early modern women—going to school, learning at home from one’s mother, teaching the self through reading and writing. The collection also demonstrates a few ways early modern English women and men thought about and responded to women’s education and its consequences. The collection’s tight focus, together with its neatly edited, accessible primary texts, makes this a worthwhile collection, one best suited for novice readers of early modern texts, upper-level undergraduates, and graduate students in the disciplines of history, literature, education, and/or women’s studies. Two of the texts in this collection—Bathsua Makin’s published treatise, An Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen (1673), and Mary More’s manuscript pamphlet, The Woman’s Right (c. 1674)—have appeared in previous anthologies, usually in excerpts. Educating English Daughters is especially valuable because it presents both women’s texts in their entirety; both texts are also newly revised by Mss. Teague and Ezell (who have previously edited these texts). The collection also introduces readers to Robert Whitehall’s manuscript response to More, The Woman’s Right Proved False (c. 1674). In the engaging, informative general introduction to the collection, readers will profit from ways that the editors contextualize early modern women’s reading and writing with details about the traditional humanist education designed for boys and men. At times they challenge current critical discussions about women’s education. For instance, they question historical notions of “literacy” that have been used to discount women’s learning and intellectual productions. They also include details about several other women educators who were not members of the royal family or the elite class but “ordinary” women such as Elizabeth Jocelin, Susannah Perwich, Mary Ward, and Mary Astell. The introduction also shows that not all men in this period were opposed to women’s learning, a [End Page 69] point often forgotten. However, the introduction tends to ignore more nuanced readings of early modern gender, gendered education, and women’s writing produced by historians and critics such as Katharine Gillespie, Patricia Pender, Eve Rachele Sanders, and Wendy Wall. Mss. Teague and Ezell have shaped some of the most instrumental, influential scholarship in early modern women, women’s roles, and women’s education, but here they do not seek to intervene in more recent and ongoing conversations. Even as they bring some attention to “voices that attempt to change what a culture believes about education, about rights, and about gender,” the editors have restated much of their earlier work, presented here as standard, basic information about women’s education and women’s writing. Ultimately, the greatest strength of the general introduction is how it encourages readers to make connections between early modern and twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts and artifacts, while also arguing that issues of a gendered education are still relevant and complicated sites of contest today. For instance, readers are reminded that we live “in a century when many girls are still denied education for political, religious, or economic reasons.” Mss. Teague and Ezell take note of Malala Yousafzai, a Pakistani children’s and women’s rights activist and the youngest Nobel Prize recipient, who was “shot for boarding a school bus” when she defied the Taliban to attend school. This general introduction, then, lends itself to our instruction of students: it offers instructors concrete ideas about the kinds of texts or artifacts that we can put into conversation with early modern texts, whether we choose to use its suggestions (such as Woolf’s Room of One’s Own, Joanna Russ...