Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

This is a high-level overview of the English Bluestocking movement(?), as part of a special volume of Huntington Library Quarterly on “Reconsidering the Bluestockings.” As such, it doesn’t touch much on specifically sapphic topics, but provides a useful context for various individual Bluestockings.

The article starts off with two quotes, roughly contemporary with the heyday of the Bluestockings: one from Elizabeth Montagu talking about how wonderful the experience is, one by Frances Burney semi-satirizing Montagu’s autocratic rule over her circle. These serve to illustrate the poles of opinion about the group.

The Bluestockings were informal salons, including both sexes (though generally organized and presided over by women), primarily drawn from the gentry and upper classes (though professing social equality). Their goal was education, intellectual conversation, and engaging in polite socializing. The peculiarly English character of this movement rested, in part, on its conservative Anglican foundations.

Not all Bluestocking salons were as rigidly hierarchical as Montagu’s, as Montagu herself noted with respect to those of her friend Elizabeth Vesey. But rumors of factional competition within the movement were often fictions invented due to anxieties about women’s prominence in the movement and the widening of women’s social roles in general in the 18th century.

The name “Bluestocking” has been traced originally to an incident during the “Little Parliament” in 1653 in reference to the simple dress of some members, but was taken up in the 18th century in reference to one Mr. Stillingfleet who, having turned down an invitation to one of Vesey’s gatherings due to not being in the habit of dressing up, was told “Come in your blue stockings!” as the garment was still a symbol of informal dress. In the 1750s and 1760s the term became common for certain salon circles in London, Bath, and Dublin. Originally informal afternoon receptions, they evolved around principles of merit-based invitations resulting in a certain limited social mobility, equality between the sexes, and intellectual conversation. In common with the French salon tradition, they were organized and presided over by female hosts.

By the 1770s, the term Bluestocking increasingly came to refer only to female members of the salons and began having a negative tinge, especially when used by those who felt excluded. A second generation of hosts arose, including a few men. In addition to in-person gatherings, Bluestocking culture was maintained by large quantities of correspondence among the members. The expansion of membership helped lead to the application of the term Bluestocking to any intellectual woman. But in the anti-intellectual backlash in reaction to the French Revolution in the 1790s, the term acquired a much more negative sense, as intellectual and politically active women came to be associated with dangerous radicalism. In a general sense, the word continued in active use into the first decades of the 19th century for intellectual and literary women, but with an air of social privilege and conservatism.

Taken as a whole, “Bluestocking” covered a wide range of practices and attitudes, but certain progressions can be identified. The early Bluestockings took a socially progressive approach, though still from a position of aristocracy, addressing what they considered corrupt and libertine practices at court. Though channeled through female leadership, they took a gender-essentialist view that “feminization” was a civilizing force. But this left them open to the reverse charge: that they supported “effeminacy” in public life. The tightrope balance between these two positions meant that even as Bluestockings supported greater education and opportunities for women, they felt the need to enforce rigid standards of respectability and morality, especially around sexual issues. Moving into the 19th century, this led to an emphasis on Christian philanthropy, to some extent ceding the literary and artistic field to the masculine-coded Romantic movement.

As the Bluestockings moved into the realm of history, there was a tendency for specific participants to be singled out as noteworthy, while the movement as a whole was marginalized. (And at this point, the article moves on to the historiography of the Bluestockings, rather than their actual history, followed by a summary of the volume’s other contents.)