Wit, Virtue, and Emotion: British Women's Enlightenment Rhetoric (Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms) - Softcover

Elizabeth Tasker Davis is a professor of English and coordinator of graduate studies at Stephen F. Austin State University, where she teaches courses on British literature, satire, and writing. Her scholarship has appeared in Women’s Writing, Rhetoric Review, Peitho, South Atlantic Review, Re/Framing Identifications, and the Sage Handbook of Rhetorical Studies.

 

INTRODUCTION
 
We shall say what has not been said before, or if the substance is old, the mode & figure shall be new.--Elizabeth Montagu, “Letter to Elizabeth Carter” (1769)
 
Despite the subordination and suppression of women as a group under patriarchy, individual women throughout history have spoken out on a wide range of subjects through the means available to them.  During the age of Enlightenment, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these means increased significantly for British women.  Increasingly higher levels of literacy and new venues (private and professional) led them to pursue many diverse avenues of intellectual society and persuasive discourse.  Myriad writings and artifacts—such as the large corpus of letters by and to famous Bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu—stand as extant evidence of women’s Enlightenment rhetoric.  In Montagu’s letters, we can discern her knowledge of rhetorical theory and practice.  As Tania Smith argues, Montagu’s construction of her own rhetorical identity reflects a careful study of Cicero’s moral character and his blending of public and private rhetoric (“Elizabeth Montagu” 165).  Certainly, Montagu was a highly educated member of the intellectual elite; however, middle-class eighteenth-century women also engaged in self-reflexive rhetorical practices, such as the activities of the teenage girls of the Fair Intellectual Club of Edinburgh who documented their protocols in their charter, published in 1721.  Unsurprisingly, these types of rhetorical acts did not elevate women to equal public standing with men.  Montagu could not hold a seat in parliament (as her husband Edward Montagu did), and the Fair Intellectuals felt the need to keep their society secret and to protect their reputations by carefully maintaining their members’ anonymity. 

With its expansive, yet subtle, historical development, British women’s Enlightenment rhetoric presents an intricate and challenging subject of study.  Contextualizing the contributions of British women to the history of rhetoric during the age of Enlightenment is the mission of this book.  The scope of this history includes contributions by women as individuals and as an impactful demographic within British Enlightenment culture. This introduction provides the background necessary to set up this conversation, starting with a gendered description of the Enlightenment and a brief review of cultural studies scholarship on British women during this era.  I then move into the disciplinary subfield of Enlightenment rhetoric and, within that, review the scholarship on women’s rhetorical activities within the context of eighteenth-century Britain.  

The Enlightenment refers to the evolution of progressive socioeconomic and scientific ideas that emerged across Western Europe and North America from the early seventeenth to the early nineteenth century.  Forming a segue between the Renaissance world of church and state and the modern world of science and industry, the Enlightenment worldview privileged individual experience and inductive reasoning over the auspices of classical authority and deductive logic.  Enlightenment thought coheres around the premises that humans are 1) rational, sentient beings; 2) relatively equal in cognitive capability; and 3) alike enough to work together on social, scientific, and economic projects for the progress of society. Along these lines, Enlightenment theory is greatly concerned with cognition of empirical evidence; moral reasoning and benevolence; capitalist models of government and commerce; and new appraisals of social class, education, religion, and gender roles.  

The umbrella term of the European Enlightenment includes both the English and Scottish Enlightenments (among other national subdivisions), and it also encompasses the disciplinary subarea of Enlightenment rhetoric, all of which occurred in Britain during what is called the long eighteenth century—from 1660 to approximately 1800.  During this era, people in Britain held strong ideas about sex and gender identity, including qualities of masculinity and femininity.  Some of these assumptions were based on biology—male strength and female softness were considered part of nature—and oftentimes perceptions of these biological differences extended to religious and moral antecedents, such as the notions of males possessing God-given rationality and females being driven more by emotion and a mysterious sense of intuition.  Many people believed that these qualities were, indeed, biological facts.  In addition and contrast to these stereotypes of biological predeterminism, many members of eighteenth-century British society recognized gender identity as a socially-conditioned construct, and it was widely acknowledged that people could possess qualities of gender deemed opposite their biological sex (although this was not encouraged).  In fact, gendered identities and behaviors constituted a topic of ongoing discussion.  As Karen O’Brien explains, “the issue of the ‘distinction of sex’ was central to the Enlightenment attempt to understand the role of women…, yet it was also one of the areas of most fundamental disagreement” (“Sexual Distinctions” 3).  Debates about the influences of nature and nurture in establishing gender identity proliferated.  Popular opinion tended to conflate gender identity with the two recognized biological sexual identities (male and female), but many people—especially intellectuals and scholars—also recognized gender as a multiplicity of socially-constructed roles and behaviors. 

The textual legacy of the Enlightenment, however, has long exhibited a male bias.  The Enlightenment canon consists of ideas and works by a group of geographically-dispersed, white, western European and American men—philosophers and professors whose diverse theories find unity in their views of modern social progress.  Historical narratives about the Enlightenment, although usually focused on the eighteenth century, often begin earlier with Francis Bacon’s Essays (1597) and Nova Organon (1605), Descartes’ Discourse on Method (1637), and Hobbes’ The Leviathan (1660).  From these seventeenth century roots, a diverse group of modern philosophers emerged across Europe and America, including John Locke, Isaac Newton, and Anthony Ashley Cooper in England; Denis Diderot, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, Marquis de Condorcet and Jean Jacques Rousseau in France; David Hume, Adam Smith, Francis Hutcheson, George Campbell, and Hugh Blair in Scotland; Baruch Spinoza in Holland; Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in Germany; and Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin in America.

Broad as this international list of elite historic figures seems, participation in the Enlightenment was even broader and included intellectual performances of women as well as men.  As Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor explain in Women, Gender, and Enlightenment, “Enlightenment was a living world where ideas were conveyed not only through ‘high’ philosophical works but also through novels, poetry, advice literature, popular theology, journalism, pornography, and that most fluid of eighteenth-century genres, the ‘miscellaneous essay” as well as “conversation, reading (both private and communal), pedagogy,” and many sociable contexts (xvii-xviii).  The...