Bluestocking Women and the Negotiation of Oral, Manuscript, and Print Cultures

Abstract

As the editor of this volume has noted, one of the tasks facing twenty-first-century historians of women’s writing is that of demonstrating ‘how and in what ways, rather than whether, women’s writing is key to literary history’.¹ For the eighteenth century, this issue is overlaid by the persistence of non-print modes of production at a time when the world of letters was undergoing rapid transformation into a print-based culture. Thus the gender divide has often been mapped onto a divide between non-print and print media; between a feminized, private use of oral and manuscript forms on the one hand, and a masculine, public use of print on the other. Margaret J.M. Ezell’s influential 1993 work on Writing Women’s Literary History, for example, argued powerfully that a modern identification of authorship with print publication had led, anachronistically, to the neglect of much pre-eighteenth-century writing by women.² And many writers have insisted that the lingering stigma of print as commercialized and vulgar was felt in a particularly acute way by women writers.³ Proper women, it could be inferred, predominantly conversed, wrote letters, kept journals, and exchanged manuscript poetry, while men dominated the production of periodicals and pamphlets and published the vast majority of religious, scientific, critical, and literary works.