British Women and the Intellectual World in the Long Eighteenth Century ed. by Teresa Barnard (review)

This collection of nine essays incorporates a range of interests including the scientific, literary, religious, and political in exploring women’s intellectual pursuits during the long eighteenth century. The first section focuses on scientific concerns and natural phenomena, the second is devoted to religious topics spanning women’s individual meditations to theologically-based hermeneutics, and the final section is even more eclectic including philosophy, politics, and the intellectual ramifications of travel. The essays treat a broad representation of women’s writings, and to a lesser extent their public actions, offering the reader a smorgasbord of their concerns and efforts. There is a great deal of information to be gleaned from individual contributions, but there are two serious limitations to the collection.

The introduction and much of the content focus on the last thirty years of the century reaching into the early nineteenth century. Little attention is given to the early years of the 1700s and almost no attention to the “long” portion of the eighteenth century that began in the latter part of the seventeenth. But even more significantly, virtually no space is given to defining what is meant by the term “intellectual.” Here, almost any topic or type of writing is deemed appropriate for such an appellation. One would expect a collection associated with intellectual interests to be tied to the pursuit of ideas, but this is the case here only if the term “ideas” is employed so broadly that it loses its essential meaning.

The introduction notes that women learned at “nature’s school” and could participate in the “expanding print culture” and visit “new museums, theatre, exhibitions,” as well as associate with educated men in their families (2). While much of this was essential, it did not equal their framing their own thought or understanding of society. Much of the collection deals more with what might be termed “cultural” access or advances rather than intellectual achievement. And, much also deals with writings on child-rearing or religious meditations that seldom rose to the level of original ideas or intellectual analysis.

Individual essays offer interesting evidence regarding women’s interests, but not always their intellectual accomplishments. The scientific section includes an essay on Mary Wortley Montagu’s introduction of the small pox vaccine into Britain, but the bulk of the article focuses on her broader life and the general history of efforts to control smallpox. The second essay by Teresa Barnard traces women’s fascination with volcanoes to their “self education and literary imagination” (32). Here, Barnard’s gendered analysis is based on Bacon’s project to use science to gain power “over” the natural world (34), a goal excluding women and one against their nature. However, the term “intellectual” itself has often been used to exclude women within gendered analyses, which highlight men as rational and women as emotional beings. Can one employ uncritically such gendered suppositions in a collection treating women’s role in intellectual community and pursuits? The final essay by Malini Roy treats a two-page fragment by Wollstonecraft on infants, and links it to pediatric medicine rather than to children’s nature. It is overly kind to Rousseau, barely mentioning the restrictions on Sophie’s education and linking him too closely to Locke who, in contrast, supported women’s serious learning. The material on pediatrics and child-rearing offers little from the perspective of children’s intellectual pursuits.

Section two, focusing on religious interests, seems even further from the intellectual world. The introductory essay by Susan Chaplin on Hannah More terms her “a highly influential public intellectual” (72), while reiterating her basic Christian conservativism in identifying feminine frenzy and irrationality as an impetus for the French Revolution and other radical acts. Certainly a woman intellectual does not need to hold progressive or feminist views, but a collection on women and the intellectual world requires a critique of More’s impact...