Celebrating Bluestocking Week
August
2012
At the Discussion Group last Sunday we celebrated the start
of Bluestocking Week for 2012, enjoying a delicious dinner and delving into
discussions about what ‘bluestocking’ represents for women, education and
society today.
Below is a blog by one of our members, ‘Lizzy
Unpronounceable’, with some fascinating insights into the history and
significance of the Bluestocking ‘movement’. Thanks Liz!
Lizzy’s disclaimer: This post is very brief, and so skirts
around a lot of issues. It is also focused on English and Australian higher
education. History of bluestockings in non-English speaking countries
such as Japan would be pretty fascinating, and I invite others to comment with
any information about such movements.
'Bluestocking'
It is ironic that the term 'bluestocking', now used to
exclusively refer to women in academia, was actually coined in this sense in
1756 in reference to a man. Benjamin
Stillingfleet was the first Bluestocking; the term referenced his eccentric
behaviour of wearing his blue woollen stockings to a high society literary
gathering, rather than fine white silk stockings as was expected. The literary gatherings were hosted by
Elizabeth Montagu, a member of the literary elite who was wealthy enough and
well connected enough to encourage the growth of a circle of fashionable
intellectuals. The group (the membership
of which also included Mary Wollstonecraft, Catharine Macaulay, Hannah More,
Samuel Johnson, and Edmund Burke) become known as the 'blue stocking
philosophers' after Stillingfleet's faux pas, and Montagu's house became known
as the 'Blue Stocking Lodge'.
Stillingfleet's blue stockings were taken on as a sort of symbol of
unconventional behaviour, just as the idea of women being interested in and
able to participate in intellectual pursuits was unconventional. The term came to refer only to women engaging
in intellectual pursuits, and then to women lobbying for (greater) access to
higher education and as a derogatory term for supposedly unfeminine, unwomanly,
and worst of all unmarriageable women engaging in academia and higher education
in conjunction with women's rights more generally.
Bluestockings and
women in higher education
Elizabeth Montagu and her intellectually minded friends were
operating at a time when women were completely excluded from higher
education. Universities were elite
institutions, and higher education was not nearly as accessible in the 18th
century as it is now in the 21st century.
However, while men were excluded from the academy on the basis of class
or wealth, women were excluded because they were women.
Girls were notionally expected to be educated up to a point,
either through the contemporary equivalent of primary and secondary schools, or
home schooling by a parent or governess.
However, schooling was limited by the teacher's own level of education
and by the parents' willingness to bear the financial burden, particularly when
the child reached an age where they could start to earn an income.
There were avenues that women could follow if they were
academically minded, for example enjoying religious and literary scholarship by
joining nunneries, or self instruction through reading their way through
fathers' or husbands' libraries. Girls
could learn vicariously through their brothers when they were home for the
holidays, relying on second-hand information remembered from the boys' own
classes. However, until the 1800s, there
were no social structures for girls' continued schooling or for encouraging
women to engage with academia.
In England in the 1800s, teaching colleges started to spring
up, providing women a way to qualify for one of the only respectable careers
available to them. Colleges and
universities started to allow women to attend out-of-hours public
lectures. In America, a number of
colleges admitted women from about 1830 onwards, and women-only colleges like
Vassar and Smith were established in the second half of the century. In Australia, the first universities were established
in the 1850s, and women were excluded from them until 1881.
Once women were admitted to universities, there was still no
guarantee of equal access to educational experiences. Some universities still excluded women from
certain courses, effectively funnelling women into education and home
economics. There are examples of
lecturers refusing to lecture when only the female students had bothered to
turn up to class, and of tutors setting different problems for female students,
or marking them differently. Oxford and
Cambridge allowed women to matriculate, studying the same degree courses as
men, from the second half of the 1800s.
However, women were not awarded degrees until 1920 and 1948
respectively. After winning the fight to
occupy academia, women had to fight to participate in academia.
A range of bizarre beliefs about women and women's capacity
to learn plagued the bluestocking cause.
One commonly held medical belief was that women's reproductive
'apparatus' would be endangered by the redirection of energy from the ladyparts
to the brain. Anti-bluestocking
arguments asserted that the act of studying would lead to a withering of the
womb, and would make women barren, weak or sickly, mentally ill, and possibly
eventually cause death. Those whose
education did not rob them of their reproductive abilities and physical and
mental strength were attacked for marrying later in life or not at all, and
anti-bluestocking arguments morphed into concerns about low birth rate leading
to humans dying out. Another argument
against higher education for women was a little closer to reality. There was little demand for women with
degrees in the labour market, and so what use was a university education to a
women whose post-degree options were often limited to a career in teaching or
homemaking? For many women, university
life was a brief respite from familial duty, and once the classes ended, so did
their access to the academic world.
Arguments that supported women's higher education were not
all that enlightened either, and tended to focus on the benefits of an educated
thinking woman to society and to their menfolk.
That is, an educated woman would be better placed to pass on that education
to their sons. Education for the
betterment of women as individuals did not seem to be taken as a compelling
argument.
Bluestocking and
Suffrage
Restricting women’s access to higher education was also a way
of restricting women's access to other freedoms, particularly suffrage. As male student riots in Cambridge in 1897
demonstrated, people were motivated by an underlying fear of gender equality
that manifested in attacks against women's education, women's suffrage, and
even women's right to ride bicycles – all symbols of the freedom and equality
that first wave feminists were fighting for.
Arguments against women being allowed to vote often centred on their
supposed inability to think rationally and their childish or uninformed
opinions. Voting while female was a
danger to society, as women were not in a position to know enough about the
world to make meaningful decisions about it.
Increased equality in higher education was a slippery slope that would eventually
lead to equality in many other areas where men enjoyed privilege. Give women degrees and soon they would expect
equal access to employment, income, and suffrage. With hindsight, we can now happily say that they
were spot on about that, at least.
In 1949, women accounted for 20% of all university
undergraduate students in Australia. A
government briefing paper from 2003 put women's engagement in higher education
at just over 50%. However, echoes of the
historical bluestocking experience are still evident when looking at the
subject areas that men and women tend to pursue. In 2002, women were still more likely to
engage in arts and humanities, and far more likely to pursue education than
men. Men were slightly more likely to
enrol in physical and chemical sciences, and far more likely to pursue
information technology and engineering.
This is also true across the globe, as women are vastly more likely to
graduate with a degree in an education area than one in engineering or
computing [UNESCO have released an atlas of global access to education].
In less than 200 years, women have gone from complete
exclusion from higher education to making up more than half of the global
student body. However, 19th century
ideas of biological 'fitness' for certain areas of academia still inform both
women and men's choices about higher education.
Women still tend to pursue higher education in traditionally 'feminine'
fields seen as requiring communication and nurturing skills, and are actively
discouraged from pursuing areas that are perceived as requiring 'masculine'
abilities of logic and rational thought or of manual dexterity and
strength. 'Bluestocking' as a label has
changed from a badge of honour to a vicious pejorative, and back again. Women's education is now seen as an integral
part of economic and social growth, recognising the potential for women as
change agents. Far from bringing about
the end of the human species, Bluestockings started the ball rolling for equal
access to higher education and academia, a cause that we must still actively
pursue.
Further Reading
Aleman, Ana M. Martinez & Renn, Kristen A. (2003) Women
in Higher Education: an encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO
[http://books.google.com.au/books?id=dqVP7mU5vuEC]
Carrington, Karry & Pratt, Angela (2003) How Far Have
We Come? Gender disparities in the Australian higher education system,
Information and Research Services, Department of the Parliamentary Library.
[http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/Publications_Archive/CIB/cib0203/03CIB31]
Eger, Elizabeth (2010) Bluestockings: Women of reason from
Enlightenment to Romanticism, Palgrave MacMillan,
Kamm, Josephine (1965) Hope Deferred : Girls' Education in
English History, Routledge
[http://books.google.com.au/books?id=yW_TWf7RwiMC]
Robinson, Jane (2009) Bluestockings: The remarkable story
of the first women to fight for an education, Viking. [http://books.google.com.au/books?id=LV7Opc061ZYC&dq]
UNESCO eAtlas of Gender Equality in Education (2012)
[http://www.unesco.org/new/en/education/themes/leading-the-international-agenda/gender-and-education/resources/the-world-atlas-of-gender-equality-in-education/]
