“L’espirit n’a point de sexe”: Women and Learning in Western Thought

In 1929, Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own about a research trip to the British Museum, to find out the truth about the status of women. “If truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum,” she reflected, “. . . where is truth?” As she combed the catalogues, she posed the rhetorical question: “Have you any notion of how many books are written about women in the course of one year? . . . Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?” The expedition to find “women” in the catalogues of the British Museum reveals that while most of the works on women were written by men, few writers had taken the male sex as their subject. Books on women were instead written by “professors, school-masters, sociologists, clergymen, novelists, essayists, journalists, men who had no qualification save that they were not women,” and one of the themes of books about women was “are they capable of education or incapable?” Woolf wondered at the “anger of the professors” as they strove to prove the mental, moral, and physical inferiority of the female sex, concluding that these books could not have been written in the “white light of truth.”²

The recent publications by both Mary Hilton and Carol Strauss Sotiropoulos add to the still-expanding field of research on “women” in the catalogues of the British Library, but they also provide some of the white light of truth, demonstrating that in fact many women had written about their own sex between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and much of their work argued that women were indeed capable of education. That the narrator in A Room of One’s Own could find nothing by women writers in the catalogues of the 1920s reminds us that many women writers had to publish their work anonymously, and, even when authorship was evident, few works by women were deemed worthy of collecting within the great copyright libraries. That situation has changed. When I carried out an exhaustive search of the catalogues of the British Library, Oxford University Library, and Cambridge University Library in the early 1990s, while doing research for Women and Learning in English Writing, 1600–1900, I found a large corpus of print culture on my theme, which had been produced by both women and men. The eighteenth century, which was marked by an increase in publications by and for women, is a particularly rich period for examination.

Hilton’s book assembles the full cast of British eighteenth-century women writers who had a serious interest in education—Catherine Macaulay Graham (1731–91), Hester Mulso Chapone (1727–1801), Sarah Trimmer (1741–1810), Mrs. Sherwood (1775–1851), Hannah More (1745–1833), Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), and Maria Edgeworth (1767–1849)—they are all here. These women have been scrutinized by scholars including Marilyn Butler, Nancy M. Cutt, Mary Poovey, Elizabeth Kowaleske-Wallace, Cheryl Turner and Charles Howard Ford, and Deirdre Raftery, so I was naturally interested to see if Hilton’s book said something new.³ It did. It provided a robust and very thoughtful examination of the work of women intellectuals, reminding us of their major role in the education debates of the eighteenth century and nineteenth century, and linking this role to the form—and indeed the...