This is a highly ambitious, challenging, and stimulating book that makes a significant scholarly contribution to early modern intellectual and gender history. In it, Hilda L. Smith identifies what she describes as the concept of the “false universal,” which operated through a language that purported to be socially inclusive (e.g., terms such as “human,” “man,” “freeman,” “people,” or “human nature”) but in reality excluded women, boys, and individuals on the basis of race. The overriding theme of the book is the analysis of this ubiquitous and durable language—as used in educational treatises, advice literature, popular periodicals, guild records, parliamentary debates, and political tracts—as a means of examining and explaining women's marginalization from political discourse and public life. The starting point for Smith's argument (and inspiration for the title of her book) is the Athenian Mercury, a periodical popular in the 1690s, the editors of which claimed was aimed at an audience of “all men and both sexes.” Here, “all” refers to men of all classes or conditions, but not to women and boys; early modern writers, she argues, divided human beings into three “mutually exclusive categories”: age, condition, and sex. Allied to this textual point of reference is a visual image of the Seven Ages of Man depicted in stained glass; again, what outwardly appears to be universal is exploded: beyond the image of a mother and infant child (or boy), the representation is of an exclusively male life cycle, from infant to schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice, pantaloon, and old man. The “male maturation process,” which is closely tied to definitions of adulthood and public responsibility, is at the heart of the book's explanation of gender exclusion. Women, it is argued, were excluded from these life stages; demarcations in the female life cycle were linked to sexual, relational, and legal changes, as women progressed from maid to wife to widow. Not only are we exhorted to be sensitive to the language and imagery of exclusion in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writings and pictorial representations, but also we are warned of the pitfalls of perpetuating this exclusion of women in modern-day scholarship.

The concept of the false universal is analyzed in several different contexts in four main chapters: the first focuses on educational treatises and discussions of the male maturation process; the second looks at gender and female involvement in early modern guilds, arguing that the symbols and ceremonies of guilds reinforced ideas of citizenship as belonging to independent, adult males; the third studies political definitions of “the people” during the trial of Charles I; and the last surveys womanhood and consumerism in eighteenth-century Britain. Despite an epilogue discussing women in the era of the 1832 Reform Act, this is very much a book anchored in the early modern period prior to the French Revolution. Nevertheless, Smith successfully generates a very real sense of historical change and development. Her book ably examines women's marginalization both before and after the invention of “separate spheres” in the eighteenth century, as a new discourse of sensibility depicted women as dependent outside of the state. She also draws continuities in the gendered ideas of citizenship and nationhood found in seventeenth-century notions of the “free-born Englishmen” and in those of the Enlightenment and the doctrine of the Rights of Man. One of the book's real strengths is in its breadth of vision, its ability to analyze the category of the false universal over the long term.

Overall, however, it is this ambitious scope, both chronologically and thematically, that is most problematic. Taken as a whole, Smith's straightforward concept of the false universal provides an invaluable analytical and linguistic tool to study female exclusion to the social and political margins. Yet stripped to its constituent parts, the wider implications of Smith's book are less persuasive. This is particularly the case with the chapter on male maturation. While it usefully rehearses arguments about reform of male education, citing a range of texts from Comenius and Hartlib to Drury and Milton, the chapter's discussions of female education and pedagogy lack the same thoroughness and conviction. There is no attempt, for example, to engage with or borrow insights from a range of careful studies by historians such as Linda Pollock, Kenneth Charlton, and Alice T. Friedman, who have done so much toward recovering societal and parental attitudes on female education, and in elucidating the nature of early modern women's education and upbringing. In relying on printed sources to document precept, there is a tendency to overlook a rich corpus of manuscript sources, such as letters, diaries, textbooks, commonplace books, and household accounts, that survive among collections of family papers for the members of the nobility, gentry, and mercantile groups, and which provide a much clearer picture of educational theories and indeed practices. By accepting the informality of teaching provision for women and female exclusion from male centers of learning as barriers to historical recovery, there is also a danger of perpetuating early modern as well as modern patriarchal assumptions relating to women's education, a danger that Smith herself warns against. Nonetheless, I mean in no way to diminish from what I think is an immensely thought-provoking and important book. Though strident and antagonistic in parts (as all good scholarship should indeed strive to be!) this book will provoke much debate and have a lasting impact on the way in which historians view women's lives and experiences in the past.