Paradigms for their sex? Women's grammars in late eighteenth-century England

Abstract

ABSTRACT : Elizabeth Elstob addressed characteristically if not exclusively female needs by not writing her Old English grammar in Latin. Her successors had humbler aspirations : the few identifiably female eighteenth-century grammarians were mostly among the many schoolteachers who wrote elementary English grammars in the 1780s and 1790s. Those texts written for a female audience constitute a small if distinct subgenre, traditional in linguistic content, but almost uniformly illustrated with examples invoking a distinctly feminine world, limited and concrete. The grammars increasingly incorporate such pedagogical strategies as conversation and play, often overtly linked to women's increasing responsibility for elementary education.