800 Years of Women's Letters Read Online Free PDF Page A

write as she wished, thanks to an unusually understanding husband. The public letter included is addressed ‘To All Writing Women’. It exploits rhetoric in a way few women did, probably because she wished to make public statements, like the Latin orators seldom taught to girls.
    From her time, women rebelled more overtly against restrictions, and by the eighteenth century were expressing themselves with striking clarity, whether writing to men or women, but especially to women they knew well, such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu who wrote skilfully on girls’ education. In this extract to her daughter she expresses clear ideas for her granddaughter, advising her against breeding ‘a fine lady qualifying her for a station in which she will never appear, and at the same time incapacitating her for that retirement for which she is destined’. Such advice might seem to emanate from a poverty-stricken pen. The fact that it comes from the daughter of the Earl of Kingston, whose husband was an ambassador, is first-hand evidence of the low public esteem of even well-born women.
    Mary Hays and Mary Wollstonecraft felt a little freer just before the French Revolution, when what might be called a feminist movement surfaced. They expounded public issues, the rights of women, their social position, the need for franchise, demands for education. However, Hays lived long enough to feel the backlash against feminism (and revolutionaries) in the late 1790s, and softened her political statements with her Christian beliefs.
    To counteract such subversiveness, many middle-class writers, mainly men, expounded on female duties. These hierarchical, proclaimedly Christian attitudes were often interiorized by women, who wrote letters, both real and fictitious, usually to daughters, on topics such as duty towards husbands, female education, and proper behaviour. From the 1740s there were attempts to define women’s roles and determine sexual ethics. Mary Astell had already written on wifely submission, in 1700, but with irony; whereas Hannah More, in 1799, stressed obedience, while advocating education (‘industry and humility are worth more than splendour’). Lady Pennington (1761) advised ‘discreet improvement’ of indifferent males, and education of daughters – strategies of subversion and adaptation, a frequent necessity.
    The nineteenth century saw an increase in the availability of education, though slowly. There was a wider spectrum of female letter-writers, from middle-class wives with enforced leisure, to girls forced to support themselves in one of the few new professions, teaching. Village schools, ragged schools and Sunday schools were being founded, generally underfunded, but at least keeping some children out of factory work while imparting a modicum of literacy. Primary education for all was not introduced in England until 1873, later than in France and Germany, and cost a penny a week, even from the unemployed. Capitalism was also producing industrialists who employed governesses for their offspring, hoping to resemble the aristocracy. Many letters from lonely, underpaid young middle-class women testify to their usually undignified treatment, and misery in old age.
    By the 1850s, with Victoria securely on a now respected throne, more women felt able to lead public campaigns against the harsh treatment of their sex, of poor children, and of the working class. The letters of Caroline Norton are impressive, since her arguments are both reasoned and forceful. She campaigned for years, and finally brought about some improvement for brutally treated wives. Women like her devoted years of their lives to fighting for women’s rights. They succeeded in alleviating various harsh laws (against prostitutes, etc.), in creating the first colleges of higher education for women, and in winkling an opening to some of the professions, such as medicine. This struggle was pursued far more publicly by the