ABSTRACT

My interest in the questions addressed in this essay comes from reading, years ago, the comment by Sylvia Harcstark Myers in her Bluestocking Circle, that ‘the anxiety of competence as a woman writer ... suffered by bluestockings ... would not be unreasonable, given the generally unsystematic nature of their education’.1 In what ways, I wondered, had bluestockings’ education been ‘unsystematic’? What did ‘unsystematic’, and for that matter, its obverse ‘systematic’, mean in the context of eighteenth-century education? All I found was a habitual collocation of the terms ‘unsystematic’ ‘unmethodical’, ‘superficial’, ‘lacking in order’ and ‘informal’ with women’s education and of ‘methodical’ and ‘formal’ with men’s.2 More importantly, this research made me realize how fragmented and often contradictory was the historiography of women’s education in the period. Exploring the meanings and deployments of those terms has therefore served as a useful point of entry into my re/viewing and rethinking women’s education in the long eighteenth century, in the hope of providing a more coherent story than current perspectives provide.