ABSTRACT
In some respects, the social predicament of women was worse in the eighteenth century than it had ever been, not because their opportunities for employment were fewer than in previous periods but because they were becoming steadily more informed and more inclined to think for themselves. Their education was typically unsystematic, but more and more current literature, onwards from the journalism of the Spectator in the reign of Queen Anne, was addressed as much to a female readership as to a male one; thus women and some men increasingly questioned the assumption that they were intellectually inferior. The prevalence of this prejudice against women having an intellect has led David Monaghan, writing on 'Jane Austen and the Position of Women' to declare that 'Women can rarely have been held in lower esteem than they were at the end of the eighteenth century'.
