ABSTRACT
The 1792 printing of Some Arguments Against Worldly-Mindedness, a popular New England religious tract of the 1790s, bears on its title page a woodcut showing two women.1 The subtitle of the pamphlet clarifies that they are the voices through which the author will speak: A Dialogue or Discourse between two, called by the Names of MARY and MARTHA. Below, the author’s name appears: Eunice Smith. The tradition of women giving other women religious instruction had a famous and controversial precedent, of course, in Anne Hutchinson. However, the tenets espoused in Smith’s pamphlet are conservative and Congregationalist: To be content, a wife and mother should accept the doctrine of free grace and, by meditating upon it, come to see the beauties inherent in it; she should focus her mind on the state of her soul; and she should do her duty in her place in the world. Nothing Hutchinsonian here. What’s notable about this pamphlet is that, conservative as it is, Smith’s Arguments participates in a widespread practice in which women’s writings highlight the connections among literary and intellectual women. The work is also notable for its focus on the author: the work had not been held until after its author’s death, as was so common in women’s religious writings earlier in the century, and yet her full name appears on the title page of all but the first (1791) edition (although even there her signature can be read in the acrostic poem at the end). The title page of the 1792 edition and a note at the end of the work also highlight Smith’s authorship of other religious pamphlets, and the acrostic poem is accompanied by another woodcut, this one of a woman, presumably Smith, at a writing table. Perhaps because her doctrine is so unexceptionable, Smith’s work does not display the anxiety over authorship that later critics have so often found in women’s writing; if anything, the 1792 printing seems purposefully to highlight its female authorship. Casting her arguments in the form of a dialogue between two women, Smith presses into service the accepted notion of a homosocial woman’s sphere implicitly to authorize her activity as an author. Smith’s apparent lack of authorial anxiety might seem surprising, given that we know women’s authorship in the eighteenth century faced serious opposition in the form ofa renewed querelles des femmes. Satires against learned women flourished in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature. Writers on education, even when advocating improved instruction for women, often warned against the
Fig. 1.1 Title page of the second edition of Eunice Smith’s Arguments Against Worldly-Mindedness (1792)
Fig. 1.2 Woodcut and acrostic poem spelling out the author’s name from the last page of Smith’s Arguments Against Worldly-Mindedness (1792)
danger of too much female learning. Three important European works in this tradition, Rousseau’s Emile (1762), James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women (1765), and John Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (1774) were widely printed and read in America in the post-Revolutionary era. (Notably, readers could also have found critiques of all three in Wollstonecraft’s 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Woman.) Each of these works argues that too much education could make women unfeminine and undesirable, poor wives and mothers. Indeed, Gregory recommends that his daughters hide their learning from men. Such attitudes about women’s learning clearly were shared by many American thinkers. Even founders of girls’ seminaries warned against the danger of excessive education, which could make women “disgusting and disagreeable” (Kelley, “Vindicating” 8). Similarly, the Lady’s Magazine, which claimed to be devoted to proving women’s literary abilities, in 1793 published a story warning against the dangers of female pedantry (“On Female Authorship”). Parodies of Wollstonecraft, sometimes brutal, epitomized the social risks run by women who sought to demonstrate female intellect and literary ability.2 In the face of such critique, many women writers adopted a strategy that merged the idea of a woman’s sphere with a coterie culture of literary activity: they formed homosocial ties with other women writers in a set of practices I’ll refer to collectively as literary sorority. The practices of literary sorority took a wide variety of forms, from participation in local literary groups to correspondence with other writers known only through their works. Discursive strategies such as writing about other women writers, dedicating works to other women, and publicly endorsing women’s
writings also enacted literary sorority.3 The connections women made were both local and cosmopolitan, demonstrating that a given woman writer’s activity was not an isolated exception. Women also presented themselves as part of networks that were both contemporary and historical, showing that women’s participation in the realms of learning and letters was not new. Sororal literary networks simultaneously enacted a separate sphere and incorporated the life of the mind as an integral part of that sphere. Moreover, literary sorority was an important part of women’s imagining of themselves as authors, in both personal and public dimensions. At the level of self-conception, literary networks offered an apprenticeship model for launching a career. Members of literary networks formalized their commitment to writing as a vocation, marking through their voluntary association a commitment to honing their literary skills and producing works worthy of others’ praise. Literary networks thus enabled women’s selfconceptions as serious authors; moreover, writers publicized their participation in literary networks in order to construct similarly serious and ambitious authorial personae in the public view. This chapter examines both the private and the public uses of literary sorority in imagining the role of woman author. In forming female literary networks and representing those networks in their writing, women often replicated patterns available to them in popular reading imported from London during the earlier part of the century. The Spectator, widely available in Anglo-America long after its original publication, thematized club and sociable culture, promoting its practices to those outside the metropolis. More obvious as a model for women writers was Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator (1745). In its later collected versions The Female Spectator remained one of the most widely read texts for women readers in the Revolutionary era.4 Highlighting its author’s gender throughout, The Female Spectator offered women a model of authorship that was firmly embedded in female networks, as Haywood, in imitation of Steele, describes her literary contributors as a close-knit society-all of them, in this case, female (1:4-6). In the collected editions, as well, readers would note Haywood’s dedication of her work to the Dutchess of Leeds, a dedication that stresses the dedicatee’s specifically gendered virtues. Although Haywood’s “coterie” was composed of personae of her own creation, The Female Spectator nevertheless offered a model of female literary sociability. Its strategies-literary discussion and correspondence with other women and publicizing that those associations in print-became central to the culture of American women’s writing in the decades following the Revolution.5 The frontispiece of The Female Spectator presents a striking image of female authorship as embedded in a homosocial sphere. Although this image was reengraved for subsequent editions, the central elements remained consistent. Four women, presumably Haywood’s club, gather around a desk in a private library. Behind them, a bust of Sappho sits on a shelf, turned toward the group as if she too is a participant. A collection of uniformly bound books lines the walls behind the group. Behind the desk, marked by her mourning attire, sits the woman
Fig. 1.3 Detail from the frontispiece of Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator (1745)
Haywood describes as “a Widow of Quality” who has not retired from society but participates in fashionable entertainments only “as she finds them consistent with Innocence and Honour” (1:6). The authority of the older woman is emphasized by her position behind the desk in a high-backed chair. The other three women appear to be listening intently; one, with a quill in her hand and a book spread in front of her, appears ready to record inspiration or wisdom. Here we find the central components of women’s literary sociability: the group physically gathered together suggests the importance of spontaneous conversation as part of the social aesthetic; the grouping of the three younger women around the matron indicates the importance of mentoring; the bust of Sappho reminds us that these women see themselves as working in a historical tradition; the well-appointed library indicates their intellectual ambition; and the place of meeting, evidently within a private home, affirms the incorporation of women’s literary networks within the domestic, even as the printed image displays the domestic within the public realm of print and introduces the literary production presumably nurtured in the domestic realm as a commodity to be consumed by the public.6
