Were Women Writers "Romantics"?

Ever since Joan Kelly Gadoll's paradigm-challenging essay "Did Women Have a Renaissance?" appeared in 1977, feminist historians and literary critics have wondered whether the current academic constructions of literary or historical periods are still valid. ¹ What happens when we track the history of women's writing independently from that of canonical writing? Do the same epistemic, conceptual, or even roughly historical divisions--medieval; Renaissance/early modern; Restoration/seventeenth century; neoclassical/eighteenth century; Romanticism/Victorian/nineteenth century; modern/postmodern/ twentieth century--make any sense for British women's writing?

Taking the literature I know best, eighteenth- and nineteenth- century British women's writing, I would argue that our literary periodizations for this era--neoclassical, Romantic, Victorian--are conceptually useless for, perhaps even counterproductive in, illuminating women's literary history. Insofar as they imply significant thematic epistemological divisions or historical shifts, these labels hinder a clearer, more accurate account of how women's writing developed between 1700 and 1900. Following the lead of Margaret J. M. Ezell, we must "rewrite" women's literary history. ²

Women's writing entered the public print culture in England in the early modern period under two pressures, the first religious, the second political. A Protestant dissenting culture encouraged women to speak in public about their religious experiences, as preachers, publishers of sacred verse and hymns, and autobiographers of religious conversions. Phyllis Mack and Ezell draw attention to the numerous seventeenth-century Quaker women who preached in public and who published over one hundred religious tracts and epistles containing accounts of their conversions, persecutions, and transcendent visions, as well as sacred verse written in a style both plain and supple. ³ Christine L. Krueger further documents that by the end of the eighteenth century women preachers had learned to invoke scriptural authority for the right of women to speak in public, citing the prophet Joel, who had described a time of special blessing as one in which "your sons and your daughters shall prophesy" (2.28). ⁴ They further reminded their listeners that even Saint Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, had acknowledged that in Christ "there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female" (3.28).

Identifying themselves as the voice of Christian virtue, answerable to no merely mortal male, Mary Bosanquet Fletcher, Sarah Crosby, Susanna Wesley, Sarah Cox, Frances Pawson, Hester Ann Rogers, Mary Tooth, and scores of other female evangelical preachers, many of whom published autobiographies, memoirs, and polemical tracts, had by 1800 established both a social practice and a literary precedent for women to speak publicly on religious issues. They had claimed and achieved the right to comment on the rectitude or unrighteousness of the government, the military, and the professions of law and medicine and especially of commerce, and to condemn in the name of the highest authority--God or Scripture--the sins of the males who surrounded them. Encouraged by John Wesley, the Methodists, and the Dissenting Academies, female preachers grew in number and influence throughout the early nineteenth century.

These preachers taught that a careful reading of the Bible provided telling precedents for female judges (Deborah), for female rulers (Queen Esther), for female military leaders and saviors of their people (Judith). The Bible also authorized women to resist fathers, brothers, and husbands who might lead them astray; to leave the family home in order to pursue a life of greater sanctity; to gather in communities independent of male control; even to laugh at God (as Sarah did). This tradition of women's religious writing grounded its prophetic messages in a revisionist reading of Holy Scripture. Its authors frequently defined themselves as the mouthpieces or vessels of the "Divine Word." In addition to the Bible, they invoked examples from written and oral history (such as Queen Elinor, Gertrude von der Wart, the female Christian martyrs) to prove that, as women, they had demonstrated fidelity (to Christ, to a child...