dating from the 1420s and surviving in a single manuscript discovered in the 1930s, is one of the earliest known memoirs by a woman. Much of it relates to her spiritual journey, undertaken in the grip of what sounds like post-partum psychosis.
Among the religious revelations is the more fascinating one that Kempe ran a microbrewery in her home town of Norwich. The Book of Margery Kempe is pleasingly graphic about what ensued on the day a batch of ale became contaminated: ‘When the ale had as fine a froth on it as anyone might see, suddenly the froth would go flat, and all the ale was lost in one brewing after another, so that her servants were ashamed and would not stay with her.’5 Having only taken up brewing in the first place ‘out of pure covetousness’, Kempe interpreted this stalled fermentation as a punishment from God.
Less heavenly patriarchs intervened over the next century. A woman’s work was reduced to child-rearing and caring. Acquiring education, power, money? Not so much. There were exceptions such as the entrepreneur Katherine Fenkyll who, like Alice Chester, took over her husband’s business (he had been a draper) with huge success after his death in 1499. But apprentices to trades were usually male: only seventy-three women are known to have been enrolled as apprentices in sixteenth-century London, compared with thousands of men.6
Women weren’t thought to be worth properly educating, so they couldn’t acquire skills the blokes took for granted. In the early modern period, female education was generally a religious affair, designed to get round the fact that women were ‘born in sin’ as daughters of Eve, the ‘weaker vessel’; gossipy and obstinate, prone to idleness, volatility, hysteria – or any other vice which could be hurled at them.
Exceptions to this rule tended to be royal, or as good as. Sir Thomas More treated Margaret Roper and his other daughters to the same education as he had. Margaret could read Aesop’s Fables by the age of three and went on to study languages, history, philosophy, rhetoric and – her particular passion – astronomy. She married, as she was expected to do, but when More discovered that she and her husband William Roper were both studying astronomy, he wrote a bold, inspiring letter to her that sounds – sounds – as if it is legitimising her intellectualism: ‘I am ever wont to persuade you to yield in everything to your husband; now, on the contrary, I give you full leave to strive to surpass him in the knowledge of the celestial system.’
Yet there remained a sense that a woman’s mind was ‘naturally bad’; that Margaret was remarkable not in herself but because her education represented a triumph over women’s inherent defects – defects which, More conceded, ‘may be redressed by industry’.7
So it was that the future Queen Elizabeth I was tutored industriously by Roger Ascham between 1548 and 1550. Ascham was impressed by Elizabeth’s intellect: ‘Yea, I believe, that beside her perfect readiness in Latin, Italian, French, and Spanish, she readeth here now at Windsor more Greek every day than some prebendary of this church doth read Latin in a whole week.’ Aged eleven, she presented her stepmother with a translation from the French of Navarre’s Mirror of the Sinful Soul protected by a needlepoint canvas cover she had made herself. Truly, she possessed all the virtues!
But the adult Elizabeth justified her success by declaring that she was different from other women, possessing the (male) heart and stomach of a king. Pictures show her armoured, manly. But she was the exception which proved the rule. Edmund Spenser’s female knight Britomart in Book III of his epic Gloriana poem The Faerie Queene is supposed to represent Elizabeth. But as the poet makes clear: ‘virtuous women wisely understand/That they were born to base humility/Unless the heavens them lift to lawful sovereignty.’
Elizabeth Joscelin’s The Mothers Legacie (1624), a conduct manual written in the form of a letter to an unborn child, is revealing about prevailing attitudes towards female education. While it was vital that women be taught ‘good housewifery’, writes Joscelin, ‘other learning a woman needs not.’ She goes on: ‘Though I admire it in those whom God hath blest with discretion, yet I desired not much in my owne, having seene that sometimes women have greater portions of learning than wisdome.’
One female Restoration writer who bucked the trend for feminine modesty was Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. She craved reputation, recognition, visibility – all the markers of success men believed were their due, for, as she wrote in the preface to Poems, and Fancies, ‘they hold books as their crown, and the sword as their sceptre, by which they rule and govern.’ Not only was Cavendish prolific, but she refused to be restricted to a single genre, turning her hand to biography, poetry, science fiction, philosophical and scientific treatises – anything she felt like. Thanks to her talent for self-promotion – she designed her own extravagant, daringly masculine costumes and travelled with a full complement of carriages and servants – she became one of fashionable society’s must-see attractions.
When Cavendish visited London in 1667, Samuel Pepys became obsessed with obtaining a sighting of her. After several failed attempts, he finally caught up with her when she addressed the Royal Society on 23 May – the first woman ever to do so. Unfortunately, Cavendish was overcome with nerves, possibly because of the presence in the room of so many scientists she had been rude about in print, and she gave a poor account of herself. Pepys was scathing: ‘The Duchess hath been a good comely woman; but her dress so antic and her deportment so unordinary, that I do not like her at all, nor did I hear her say anything that was worth hearing.’
This was pretty unfair, especially as Cavendish had received ‘no formal education in even the most basic writing skills’.8 In fact, as an aristocratic woman, she had arguably received a worse education than her immediate social inferiors, who’d been trained up as governesses, ladies’ companions and teachers. Yet her instinct, as with so many latter-day women, was to blame her failings on herself, rather than an unjust society. ‘It cannot be expected I should write so wisely or wittily as men, being of the effeminate sex, whose brains Nature hath mixed with the coldest and softest elements.’
The sense that education for women might be genuinely important – because the lack of it isolates them from spheres of legal and political influence – doesn’t gain momentum until the end of the eighteenth century when radical ripples from revolutionary France cause turbulence in Britain.
‘Talents put a man above the World, & in a condition to be feared and worshipped, a Woman that possesses them must be always courting the World, and asking pardon, as it were, for uncommon excellence,’ wrote the aristocratic social-reformer Elizabeth Montagu to a friend in 1763. To help level the playing field, Montagu and like-minded ladies such as Mary Monckton turned their houses into salons where women and men could meet and mix as intellectual equals. The salon was a French import and the point was conversation, not debauchery – no drink was allowed, or card playing. Montagu’s function as hostess was to encourage and bestow patronage on writers she liked.
Salonieres became known as ‘bluestockings’ – not, at this stage, a pejorative term for a studious woman – after a male guest, Benjamin Stillingfleet, turned up to one wearing blue worsted stockings because he hadn’t been able to afford black silk ones. Exactly how the term came, by the late eighteenth century, to apply only to women isn’t clear – possibly because it was two women, Monckton and Elizabeth Vesey, who decided to ‘own’ it by calling their salon the Blue Stockings Society. James Boswell, biographer of Samuel Johnson (he of the Dictionary) went along to one of Monckton’s salons and noted that ‘her vivacity enchanted the Sage [i.e. Johnson], and they used to talk together with all imaginable ease.’ The novelist Fanny Burney was sceptical, describing Monckton in 1782 as ‘between thirty and forty, very short, very fat … [and] palpably desirous of gaining notice and admiration’, and Montagu as having ‘the air and manner of a woman accustomed to being distinguished, and of great parts’. So much for the sisterhood.
If Johnson was happy to drink tea and chat with educated women, he still thought of them as essentially decorative; still believed, like most of his kind, that ‘a man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table than when his wife speaks Greek. My old friend Mrs Carter [a celebrated female linguist, who tutored her brother so that he, unlike her, could have the privilege of going to Cambridge] could make a pudding