The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England: Literature, Commerce and Luxury (review)

In The Feminization Debate in Eighteenth-Century England, E.J. Clery begins by observing that eighteenth-century disputes over emergent capitalism’s conception of human nature were “fundamentally informed by the category of gender” (1). These disputes concerning the moral and political consequences of commerce, she notes, constituted a “feminization debate” staged across multiple genres. Within this debate, women served as an index of “progress,” that is, commercial growth and the social changes it wrought; for better (an increase in refinement and civility) or worse (a national surrender to the vices of luxury and effeminacy), women were perceived as exercising greater social power and influence over men. The elevation of women’s status became fundamental to the legitimization of the emerging capitalist order, politically, morally, and literarily.

In the 1980s, Nancy Armstrong and Terry Eagleton used the word “feminization” to characterize the power given “feminine values” by an emergent bourgeoisie struggling for cultural hegemony in the eighteenth century. Both scholars located the most influential expression of that feminization—women’s reforming influence over men as a salient characteristic of modernity—in the novels of Samuel Richardson. Since then, the concept of feminization has come to seem a truism of eighteenth-century history. In some ways, Clery writes, her own book could be considered a kind of prologue to those pioneering studies: her account of the feminization debate begins with later seventeenth-century writers and publishers, and culminates in two substantial chapters on Richardson.

But in key matters, Clery takes issue with these predecessors, disagreeing, for instance, with Armstrong’s thesis that Richardson’s ideal is the conduct-book-extrapolated “domestic woman”; rather, Clery argues, it was the feminization debate that served to bring women, especially literary women, to public prominence, “a factor quite distinct from the history of sensibility or of domestic ideology” (11). Clery also questions what she sees as both scholars’ use of “feminization” as a neutral description of cultural history. The goal of her book, she says, is to restore the contested nature of this eighteenth-century debate, and to make it clear that Richardson and other “literary” writers she discusses were politically aware, active participants in a “broad debate on commerce, luxury and the direction of history” (2).

Clery sets out a tripartite historical trajectory: (1) the emergence of the feminization debate in the later seventeenth century within the context of coffeehouses and early periodicals, especially John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury, which took up the question of women’s social status within a context of an eroticized “platonic” idealization; (2) a misogynist resurgence propelled by financial scandals such as the South Sea Bubble, expressed in satires that used women as emblems of cultural decline and social chaos, and whose dominant literary voice was Alexander Pope; and (3) the mid-century period of Richardson and his elevation of woman as the embodiment of virtue and agent of moral reform.

Clery provides an astute and interesting chapter on late seventeenth-century coffeehouse culture and John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury, particularly the discourse he called “Platonick Love”—in which men were “subjected to the improving influence of women by a fusion of physical attraction and moral idealism” (30). Referring particularly to Dunton’s championing of Elizabeth Singer [Rowe], Clery credits his periodical with promoting debate on the status of women and establishing “the case for the transformative influence of women on men, and of literary women on the newly emerging reading public” (42). Subsequent chapters on the “resurgence of misogyny” related to the financial scandals of the 1720s and 1730s, most particularly the South Sea Bubble, discuss the satiric equation of economic corruption with women in the works of Bernard Mandeville, Daniel Defoe, and Pope, and Elizabeth Carter’s negotiation of a literary culture in which women were equated with national decline, and misogyny had become a political...