ABSTRACT
Bluestocking circle' designates the mid-eighteenth-century group of men and women around Elizabeth Montagu and her close friends, 'Bluestocking' a woman member or associate of that circle, and 'Bluestocking' a woman regarded or regardable as an intellectual or artist in that and following generations, to the present. This chapter complicates that narratives hierarchies of different and gendered kinds of knowledge and work by historicizing them in the period that saw both the intense controversy around the figure of the 'bluestocking' and the onset of modernization. It argues that the larger significance of the Bluestockings now is that they and those who followed them in this period engaged in reformation and revaluing of certain kinds of knowledge and work in the onset of modernization as a field of struggle between different social, economic, political, and cultural interests, a struggle that continues today.
