The Blue-Stockings: Getting It Together

Abstract

In England after the middle of the eighteenth century, a group of educated women, known along with their male counterparts as BlueStockings, preserved and advanced feminism.1 These women were tired of being excluded from the company of articulate, literate men and tired of wasting their time in eternal, mindless games of cards. Under the social leadership of Elizabeth Montague and Elizabeth Vesey, they conducted salons where they could converse on an equal basis with men such as Horace Walpole and Dr. Samuel Johnson. Blue-Stocking women were, to my knowledge, the first women in modern history who did not just talk or write about social change, but acted. And they acted not as individual women but as a group with a common goal. The most important female Blue-Stockings, both in their own time and for the purposes of this paper, include Elizabeth Montague, Elizabeth Vesey, Hester Thrale Piozzi, Elizabeth Carter, Hester Chapone, Hannah More, Mary Pendarves Delaney, and Fanny (Burney) d'Arblay.2 In general, these women had more education and fewer children than their contemporaries. Many had literary careers. Most became economically independent. Several made unconventional