Female Worthies and the Genres of Women’s History

Abstract

In The Christian Religion, as Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England (1705), Mary Astell remonstrated against the fundamentally masculine character of historical writing, but she was not thinking of just any kind of history. She was thinking of a specific and very prestigious genre of political history that had originated in classical antiquity, and she was likely provoked by the greatest such work published in her lifetime, the 1st Earl of Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (1702–04). Astell eagerly mined what she called ‘that useful and valuable History’ for two pamphlets she published in 1704. Yet while the History of the Rebellion fortified her High Church Tory polemical writings, it paid scant attention to women. The principal actors in Clarendon’s sprawling political narrative of the British Civil Wars were men, and his character sketches of them were an acclaimed feature of his neoclassical masterpiece.¹ Clarendon’s ‘great men’ conception of history certainly had a hallowed pedigree, but so too did a parallel historical tradition of ‘great women’ which Astell herself sometimes deployed. In fact, I shall argue that the discourse of ‘female worthies’ was the prime vehicle for the dramatic growth of women’s historical self-knowledge in Britain during the long eighteenth century. In Astell’s day, writers lamented the paucity of information about women of the past, and it was men who usually wrote collective female biographies, but by the end of the eighteenth century female authors dominated the genre and their works appeared in profusion.