Karen O'Brien's important and long-awaited study will expand and enrich the vocabulary of work on women in eighteenth-century England and Scotland and help students of the period to consider the increasingly visible role of women in the broader context of historical conceptions of their contribution to the progress of European civilization. This is a grandly conceived and ambitious intellectual history of the place of women in the principle philosophical and theological theories of the Enlightenment in Britain. It takes on big debates in a broad span from Astell and Locke to Malthus and Marcet and presents a careful and detailed survey of their implications for women while also mounting a challenging and controversial thesis.

For many students one of the most useful features of the book will be the series of focused case studies of the work of individual philosophers and theorists who exercised a significant influence on conceptions of the role of women in the development of civilization. O'Brien frames her study, for example, with perceptive and lucidly argued readings of Mandeville and Malthus, and the intervening chapters include useful accounts of the contributions of important figures such as Hume and Hutcheson and also accord due weight to women writers, such as Catharine Trotter Cockburn and Damaris Masham, the significance of whose arguments has not always been fully acknowledged. These well-researched and thoughtful studies alone should mean that this book will immediately be added to the reading lists of a wide range of courses including but extending well beyond those whose principle focus is the intellectual history of women in Britain.

The argument of the book initially gives an unusual degree of emphasis to the importance of Latitudinarian Anglicanism in the first half of the century. O'Brien argues that this moral rather than political set of values, characterized by a toleration that embraces most varieties of Protestant belief but gives priority to good works over faith or election, provides the most significant context for debates over the competing theories associated with John Locke and the earl of Shaftesbury in the writing of women of the early and midcentury. This sociological rather than ideological emphasis continues in the central section of the book, which focuses on the arguments and influence of the theorists of the Scottish Enlightenment. O'Brien traces the divergent uses and implications of conjectural models of historical development in the work of Lord Kames, James Beattie, and Dugald Stewart, on the one hand, and Adam Smith, John Millar, and William Robertson, on the other. She argues that the stadial theories of Smith and his followers, tracing an interdependent relation between economic and moral development, exercised a more local and limited influence than the arguments of the first, Common Sense group, which tended to support the separation of moral and economic discourses and to promote a particularized history of moral progress in European manners. In O'Brien's account this social history displaces conjectural models, whose role in the later century she regards as minimal.

In the second half of the book the notion of manners (not as etiquette but in the broader sense of social customs) becomes central to her analysis, and she uses Edward Gibbon and Edmund Burke to argue that women come to be understood as the representatives and guardians of ethnic heritage, preserving the values or manners of the Gothic and chivalric past in the modern commercial present. Chapters focusing on Catharine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft make an intriguing and suggestive case for considering their theological arguments in relation to the earlier tradition of the Latitudinarian Enlightenment and for reading their work as engaged in dialogue with the notion of women as the relicts of the good old days of chivalry. In a powerful discussion of Wollstonecraft that will influence the direction of much future debate, O'Brien argues that she was principally interested in effecting the gradual progressive evolution of society through the modernization and moralization of the “sub-political stratum” of manners, which she believed had arrived at much the same partial stage in ancient Rome, modern Britain, and ancien régime France. This version of Wollstonecraft sees women needing to struggle out of their anachronistic confinement in Gothic and feudal manners into the sunshine of commercial modernity. Finally, the association between women and the Gothic past is seen to bear fruit in the numerous histories of private life and manners produced by women writers in the early nineteenth century.

The later chapters of the book are increasingly animated and combative, and this gives O'Brien's writing an enjoyable fluency and verve and perhaps also results in some surprising assertions. The sociological tradition that sets women in the context of a particularized discourse on manners dominates this account, and where women writers contest this in the late century the arguments available to them seem very much more restricted than those available to their male contemporaries and friends. So Macaulay emerges here as a modern liberal historian, whose politics are more concerned with what is practical and contingent than with ideals of republican virtue and who adopts an almost Tony Blairite vocabulary of individual choice. O'Brien tends to prefer arguments and explanatory narratives whose direction is linear and unambiguous so that, for example, different models of national development such as sentimental medievalism or conjectural history supersede rather than interact or complicate one another. Both Macaulay and Wollstonecraft are allowed to have no truck with the notion that commercial modernity might pose a few problems for women (or indeed for anyone else), and at an early stage of the book, “most writers” accept Hume's temporal distinction between the corrupting luxury of classical antiquity and the positive and productive nature of modern luxury. The notion that there might continue to be tension or conflict about the influence of commercial luxury and refinement after that is dismissed without being much considered. That said, this is an impressively researched and argued book that deserves to have a major impact on how we understand women's history in the period.