Homework oct 23rd

This weeks reading was concerned with the education of women. In the 18th century women were bound by strict conventions and expected to be a good wife rather than a writer.  Sarah Fyge Egerton in her poem The Emulation sees women enslaved by tradition, by the ‘Tyrant Custom’, which makes ‘Poor Womankind ['s] in every State, a Slave’. She must be loving and obedient, while ‘The husband with insulting Tyranny/ Can have ill Manners justified by Law’. In a patriarchy men have all the rights. But the author admits that women in a matriarchy would do the same: ‘They’re Wise to keep us Slaves, for well they know,/ If we were loose, we soon should make them so.’ If women developed their intellectual powers, women woul ‘be Wits, and then Men must be Fools’.

Mary Barber describes her husband’s dislike for her writing in The Conclusion of a Letter to the Rev. Mr. C-. She is careful to finish her writing before her husband comes home, because he does not like her poetry. She imagines him advising her to write in form of a letter, as that would be more becoming to her role as a woman. She then anticipates the reaction of the addressee to a poetical letter – hideous. Women are not even supposed to read, let alone write letters, and in verse. The addressee would sure pity her husband for having such a frantic wife and even suggest punishment. What a man expects of his wife are abilities solely concerned with the home, cleaning, cooking, ‘serve and obey’, help her husband to dress. But bringing up the children also falls into the female realm, and here she is free to exercise some power and influence her son. She advises him not to take a ‘housewifely Shrew ‘, who is only concerned with her beauty and too stupid to find another occupation than playing cards. She wants him to look for a woman who is educated and speaks her own mind. In turn, he should treat her with respect and be a ‘Friend and Protector‘, not ‘Tyrant and Hector‘.

In To the Memory of Mr Congreve Mary Wortley Montagu praises the deceased, showing that not all men are tyrants. ‘[T]he best and loveliest of Mankind’ had the ‘softest temper’ and was one of the few honourable men, ‘[i]n this Lewd age when Honour is a Jest’. Maybe he was raised by a mother whose thoughts ran along the same lines as Mary Barber’s.

Anne Kingsmill Finch picks up again the notion that women’s writing is not considered worthy enough and censured. In The Introduction she laments that a woman writer is considered as ‘an intruder on the rights of men’. She also lists what men expect women to be and to do, and makes a clear distinction between nature and education. Women are not naturally housewifely and illiterate, but restrained by education. Custom and tradition do not allow for women to excel intellectually. Yet, as all these women writers show, they are well able to not only break tradition, but to actively question it.

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