In a fascinating and informative analysis, Rosalind Carr examines the gendered participation of elite men and women in eighteenth-century urban Scotland. She concentrates on the period from the 1750s to the 1790s, when the influence of Scottish Enlightenment ideology was at its greatest. Carr considers the public urban social geography of elite society as forming three distinct but overlapping and integrated spheres: the domestic, where certain public functions were nevertheless performed; the intellectual-political sphere of elite Enlightenment associations, professional institutions, and published texts, which was predominantly a masculine homosocial environment but in the 1770s included more overtly democratic debating societies which admitted women; and, lastly, locations of “urbane and urban sociability,” which included both mixed-sex public locations, such as dancing assemblies, musical societies, and the theatre, and single-sex masculine convivial clubs. Following a lucid historiographical introduction, Carr provides a microsociological analysis of these various institutions, using gender performativity as an analytical tool to illustrate the ways in which gender differentiation permeated the discourse, the regulations and the performance of both masculinity and femininity in the clubs, societies, and other locations of entertainment used by the elite, even down to such minutiae as the arrangement for refreshments at the assemblies.

Compared with locations such as London or Paris, Carr notes the lack of female participation in overtly public intellectual aspects of the Scottish Enlightenment discourse such as active participation in public debates, membership of the elite intellectual societies, or authorship of publications. She finds that women were variously present in the public sphere as the subject of debates in the intellectual societies, as directors and arbiters of etiquette and morality in the assemblies, and as listeners and voters in the mixed-sex debating societies, for example. But she also notes that women did not take active or dominant roles in these locations of public performance: they listened but did not speak at debates; they oversaw social relations but were not involved in the administration of the assemblies. She suggests that even the experiences of Jean Marishall and Joanna Baillie, exceptions who succeeded in penetrating Scottish intellectual print culture, merely illustrate the opposing material and ideological forces that ascribed only a muted voice to women. This needs an explanation given that Scottish Enlightenment ideology was distinctive for the emphasis it assigned to sociability and, within this context, to the influence of women. The feminine role was considered influential in creating the refined, civilized masculinity in which knowledge and civilization could develop and improve. Carr suggests that the feminine role, which was so influential in Scottish Enlightenment thinking, was also one which prevented women from fully participating in public. Women were restrained by the concept of an appropriate feminine performativity, a concept formed and refined by male Enlightenment thinkers in homosocial locations of male performativity. Scottish Enlightenment writers suggested that the level of progress reached by a society could be measured by the status it assigned women, from slave to the pinnacle of companion. Carr argues this concept did not give women agency but instead placed them in an unchanging category of “natural” sensibility, while men progressed from “savage” to “civilized.” For the elite woman there was only one Enlightenment model of civilized femininity, signified by her emotions, her sensibility, her self-control, and her modesty.

In contrast to the idealized feminine, Carr finds that the Scottish Enlightenment model of masculinity as the refined, polite, civic-minded gentleman of sensibility was a “dominant” rather than a hegemonic model, even among the literati. Attitudes towards drinking, homosocial sociability, elite violence such as the duel (to which she devotes a chapter), and other ritualized outlets for elite male transgressions of this role—such as Freemasonry, the use of prostitutes, and libertine sex clubs—offered alternative conceptualizations of masculinity, in which cultural ideologies such as chivalry and personal honor, or perceptions of social rank, were prioritized by contemporaries.

Carr suggests that a perception of French intellectuals as increasingly effeminate was blamed on the influence of women in the mixed-sex spaces of sociability in Paris, such as the salons. This and the negative stereotype of the “fop” encouraged a counteracting Scottish emphasis on a masculine homosocial sociability. Crucially, such a reaction was strengthened by the particularly close connection of the Scottish intellectual elite with the masculine socioeconomic culture of the church, the universities, the legal system, and the publishing networks. Moreover, rather than being opposed to the aristocratic political elite, many of the literati had family or professional connections with members of the Scottish nobility and landed gentry. Influential aristocratic individuals were integrated within the intellectual societies of the Scottish literati; such societies then acted as vehicles for promotion within a political patronage system that was closed to women.

Social rank, patriotism, geographic space, and temporality are explored as contexts that could have an impact on gendered sociability, although the influence of religion might perhaps have been examined more fully. Consumerism as a public and gendered performance informed by Enlightenment ideas is not discussed. Restricting the definition of the intellectual elite to public intellectual associations and published texts possibly understates the influence on Enlightenment thinking of the widespread semi-public circulation of manuscript material and the informal networking of intellectual men and women in domestic locations or through correspondence, though Carr would suggest this also proves her point as to the impact of Enlightenment ideology on women's agency and public performativity. Scholars will find Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland an invaluable aid for its insightful analysis of the performance of gender in a variety of Enlightenment spaces. As Carr points out, the distinctive Scottish experience of women's limited participation in the public intellectual culture of the Enlightenment provides a warning against drawing overarching conclusions without sufficient analysis of contextual variations in culture.