Satirizing women's speech in eighteenth‐century England

Abstract

In the summer of 1763, James Boswell witnessed Quaker woman speaking to her Sunday gathering. Shortly thereafter, Boswell remarked on the event to Samuel Johnson. Sir, Dr. Johnson replied, a woman's preaching is like dog's walking on its hinder legs. It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.' Johnson's comment expresses two significant features of early modem rhetorical practice: women's public address was rare, and it was widely considered an affront to conventions of cultural discourse. Neither comes as surprise for those familiar with eighteenth-century public life; but they do serve as prompts to the question: How and to what effect was women's speech portrayed in this period? In searching for answers, we are led back toward the modem origins of rhetoric's historical association with misogyny. I examine in this essay popular representations of women as speakers in the eighteenth-century. Surveying prominent journals, reviews, newspapers, and magazines, we can better understand how rhetorical conventions help to condition audiences and habituate responses. One such rhetorical convention-misogynist satire-is here examined as force in shaping attitudes toward women as speakers. My interest is not so much in the formal properties of satire-though we must reckon with rhetorical form-but more in convention and content as modes of insinuation. satiric portrayal of women by men in eighteenth-century England may be grouped for synoptic purposes according to two general characterizations: (1) Womens's speech is perverse, and (2) it is meaningless. Subsidiary associations interlard this body of satiric literature, including images of violence, victimage, and absurdity. Together, these satiric representations help to establish patterns of reception, habits of perceiving women's speech as naturally aberrant. Insofar as such images of women's speech were promoted in popular and pejorative terms, we may accord to the eighteenth-century male satirists significant role in shaping modern attitudes about women and speech. My analysis thus enters into the arc of rhetorical action where production and praxis meet-that is, at the point where misogynist convention and audience inclination touch. I hope to thereby establish the destructive force of such satire, and to show that it functioned to withhold from women incentives to public address. This study, then, takes as its point of departure Felicity Nussbaum's observation on eighteenth-century discursive practices. The context of antifeminist satires, she writes, creates myth of assumptions that resonate in the satirists's minds. Women, as the violator of the authority of her contractural bonds to the patriarchical order, dares to disdain that authority in the Restoration