At first glance, Mary Wollstonecraft might seem the likeliest candidate for issuing the remarks cited above. Writing in 1794, just two years after the publication of Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the author of this quote passionately defended female reason in a two-part essay entitled “On the Rights of Woman.” The scribe, however, was not Wollstonecraft or one of her female coterie but, rather, Thomas Starling Norgate, a Unitarian Dissenter active in Norwich radical politics and journalism. Though Norgate admitted that many of his feminist positions were inspired by Wollstonecraft, he did more than simply parrot. As Norgate explained at length, and as is captured in this excerpt, he saw it as his particular charge, as a member of the opposite sex, to assist women in achieving intellectual emancipation.

This article shows that Norgate was not the only enlightened man to hold such beliefs. A diverse constellation of late eighteenth-century nonconformist middle-class British men—including theologians, military officers, industrialists, writers, headmasters, and historians, linked by faith as much as politics—argued that the sexes shared the same intellectual capabilities and that it was men's responsibility to help women secure equal educations. In fact, many of these men proved so committed to this idea that they placed themselves in the vanguard of educational reform throughout England and Scotland, advocating new curricula, academies, and, on one occasion at least, a coeducational university. Of course, not all male members of the late British Enlightenment endorsed such activities—just as all women who traveled in these same circles were not necessarily in favor of equal education. As the Dissenting writer Anna Barbauld famously remarked in her poem “The Rights of Woman,” “Separate rights are lost in mutual love.”Footnote ² There were plenty of enlightened men and women alike who, though perhaps keen to celebrate the accomplishments of the “fair sex,” ridiculed the idea of sexual egalitarianism.Footnote ³ What is more, even those men who did subscribe to a general set of progressive educational principles often differed in their specific interpretations, a crucial point to which I will return later in this article.

Nevertheless, there was a considerable, and as yet largely undocumented, outpouring of male support for egalitarian educational initiatives during this period, the sheer existence of which challenges many of our received ideas about the origins of feminism in Great Britain.Footnote ⁴ Drawing attention to this constellation of men highlights the extent to which feminism in its nascent stages was a collaborative project. Although much exciting work is now being done on eighteenth-century British feminism, historians tend to focus on women's roles in feminist activity, neglecting men's contributions. Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Catherine Macaulay, and Maria Edgeworth, among others, appear as the leading players, while male reformers are typically cast as, at best, cautiously supportive and, at worst, openly hostile.Footnote ⁵ Helen Bruder contends that most male radicals adopted a “complacen[t] and distinterest[ed]” stance toward women's rights. They “would let nothing distract their gaze” from the “lofty libertarian horizons” opened up by the French Revolution.Footnote ⁶

This article seeks to correct this vision by showing that many men were also deeply invested in fostering changes in the way that women were treated. These reformers, I will argue, did not view sexual egalitarianism as a distinctly female concern but instead connected it to the other pressing religious, political, and social issues of the day, including achieving civil rights for religious Dissenters, curbing the slave trade, and combating “Old Corruption,” campaigns in which many feminists (male and female alike) were active participants. Norgate, for example, penned an essay on “Equality” and edited a book on “The Principles of Government”—both intended to promote greater democracy in Britain. As Norgate and many of his compatriots no doubt believed, creating a more egalitarian relationship between the sexes was intimately bound up with creating a more humane, tolerant, participatory, and, above all, rational citizenry—in other words, with creating a more perfect version of British Enlightenment. (Critics of sexual egalitarianism, it must be noted here, likewise connected their arguments about women to their more conservative social and political agendas; as Joan Wallach Scott has shown, arguments about gender—wherever they fall on the spectrum—are always already arguments about power in a more general sense.)Footnote ⁷

The remaining sections of this article will be devoted to discussion of the philosophical underpinnings of this feminist position, followed by an examination of the concrete ways in which men sought to make good on their claims by urging educational reforms at the local, regional, and national levels. By way of conclusion, I will engage with the thornier questions relating to the long-term goals of these pedagogical initiatives. Some reformers, whom for heuristic purposes I will label “instrumentalists,” insisted that women who received an equal education would exclusively benefit the family. Others, whom, again for heuristic purposes, I will describe as “egalitarians,” suggested that learned ladies would directly and actively contribute to the public good.Footnote ⁸

Like the women with whom they corresponded and collaborated, men of the late British Enlightenment did not fashion their feminist disquisitions purely as ad hoc responses to recent political developments. Rather, they drew on a range of philosophical positions that had been elaborated and popularized over the previous century—namely, Lockean sensationalism, Rational Dissenting theology, and Scottish stadial theory—in forging a “fragmented” feminist ideology.Footnote ⁹ In distinct yet overlapping ways, each of these traditions helped illuminate the links between equal education and true enlightenment.

John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding perhaps provided reformers with their clearest mandate. Written two years after the Glorious Revolution, the Essay demonstrated that education alone was the guarantor of progress, since skill was acquired, rather than innate. According to Locke (and his eighteenth-century interlocutors, including David Hartley and Claude Adrien Helvétius), learning was an active process, forged through interaction between human and environment. It was in “experience” that “all our knowledge is founded, and from that it ultimately derives itself.”Footnote ¹⁰ On these grounds, one could not claim an original distinction between the sexes in mental capacity. Difference was the effect, not the cause, of unequal educations.

This was a troubling realization for many radical reformers, who recognized that British culture and, specifically, those men in charge of administering that culture, were responsible for producing what had long been held to be natural discrepancies between the sexes. As the essayist and historian Benjamin Heath Malkin succinctly summed up in his 1795 Essays on Subjects Connected with Civilization, “intellect admits of no sexual distinction.”Footnote ¹¹ Or, as the writer John Bristed put it more bluntly in his 1801 Pedestrian Tour through part of the Highlands of Scotland, only “knaves and dunces” would deny that “there is no sex in minds, and the female understanding is, at least, equal in power to that of the male.”Footnote ¹² Eager to distinguish themselves from Bristed's “knaves and dunces,” countless male reformers rushed to identify with this feminist position. Indeed, in what can easily be read as a kind of masculine jockeying for the title of “Most Enlightened Man,” they strove to outdo each other in their condemnation of other men's attitudes toward female intellect. Vicesimus Knox rebuffed critics as early as 1781 for failing to acknowledge what he construed as “well-known” evidence: “The instances which might be brought to prove this [intellectual equality], are all too well known to admit of citation.”Footnote ¹³ George Butler, a member of Cambridge University's Speculative Society, delivered a speech “On Female Literature” to his peers in 1795 in which he took great pains to distinguish what he perceived as the fact of mutual capability from the fiction of female incompetence: “That the female mind is not capable of improvement equal to that of the other sex, I am happy to think … is a groundless prejudice.”Footnote ¹⁴

Agricultural and artistic metaphors were particularly popular vehicles for illustrating this point. In a series of letters written for The Universalist's Miscellany from 1799 to 1801, for example, the Cambridgeshire Unitarian minister Richard Wright took his readers to a figurative “quarry,” where he compared the male and female minds to two blocks of stone, which would look strikingly similar if shaped by the same sculptor—perhaps an allusion to Joseph Addison's earlier comment in The Spectator that “a human soul without education” was “like marble in the quarry.”Footnote ¹⁵ Plant metaphors were also common. In his essay “On the Rights of Woman,” Norgate suggested that women's and men's minds were like plants that had simply been tended to and watered in different fashions. It is “not to the infecundity of the soil we are to attribute the barrenness of immaturity,” Norgate wrote, “but to the want of that ripening power, deprived of whose kind assistance, the most vigorous of mental plants soon fade away.”Footnote ¹⁶ The artillery officer Alexander Jardine, a close friend of William Godwin, couched his arguments in cultivational metaphors in his 1788 Letters from Barbary, France, Spain, Portugal, & C: “The talents or abilities of the sexes are probably nearly equal, when equally cultivated: or, if some mental constitutional differences exist, these are not greater than between individuals of the same sex, and not beyond the power of habit and education to assimilate and equalize.”Footnote ¹⁷

A closer examination of the above passages, however, suggests that this was not a purely Lockean stance. Much of the language—relating to the sexes’ identical souls—issued from the tradition of Rational Dissent (basically intellectual Unitarianism), a tradition in which Barbauld, Hays, and Wollstonecraft, among other learned women of the period, had also found moral sustenance. Wright, for example, insisted that all of God's creatures had been given “a capacity to understand his will, and ability to do it”—a position that emphasized the Rational Dissenters’ belief that knowledge of God, as much as of self, was the goal toward which all humans ought to strive.Footnote ¹⁸ The Dissenting minister and essayist William Enfield, active with Norgate in Norwich politics, made a similar spiritual injunction: “The tree of knowledge, planted by the hand of nature, in an open plain, invites every passenger to partake of its bounty; and man, instead of rudely hedging it round with thorns, to deter the approach of woman, ought to assist her in plucking the fruit from those branches which may happen to hang above her reach.”Footnote ¹⁹ As Enfield construed the situation, it was as much his spiritual as his intellectual responsibility to help women acquire educations.

Kathryn Gleadle, Helen Plant, Barbara Taylor, and Ruth Watts have all recently demonstrated that the Unitarians’ doctrine, which explicitly rejected the concept of Original Sin in favor of a more forward-looking faith in human perfectibility, proved highly amenable to arguments for intellectual equality.Footnote ²⁰ God, so the Rational Dissenters believed, had endowed all of his creatures with reason. It was therefore incumbent on both men—and women—to use their reason to achieve their full potential. This point was repeatedly driven home by early converts to Unitarianism, including Joseph Priestley, Theophilus Lindsay, Robert Robinson, and Richard Price during the 1770s and 1780s, to whom the promotion of female intellect was both a religious and feminist commitment. That these same men, as Dissenters, had themselves been literally excluded from the British establishment—the Corporation and Test Acts, in place since the seventeenth century, prevented Dissenters from holding offices under the crown and denied them an Oxford or Cambridge education—only intensified these feelings. They knew what it felt like to be educated apart in the Dissenting Academies of Warrington, Daventry, Hoxton, and New College, Hackney. They understood discrimination. As Taylor notes, “The analogy between the oppression of women and the penalties suffered by Dissenters was readily drawn.”Footnote ²¹ This same phenomenon may at least in part explain why so many Scottish men became advocates of women's rights. Following the 1707 Act of Union with England, Scottish men may have experienced similar forms of identification with women as second-class citizens.

A third key source of intellectual inspiration was the Scottish Enlightenment. The notion that women's status served as a useful metric for measuring the “progress” of civil society had its origins in the stadial philosophies, or philosophies of social development, espoused by David Hume, John Millar, William Alexander, and James Fordyce at midcentury. In the Scottish moralists’ historical essays, part of a larger Scottish Enlightenment project promoting “the spirit of improvement,” Britain owed its triumphant journey from the stages of civilization of rudeness to refinement to its women. As the moralists explained, women were the “virtuous” and “sympathetic” creatures who had succeeded in transforming men from barbarians into civilized subjects through polite conversation.Footnote ²² The female was imagined as the engine of change, the initiator of social and cultural advancement. It was during the “early ages” that women had been “forced to labour without intermission in digging roots, in drawing water, in carrying wood, in milking the cattle, in dressing the victuals, in rearing the children, and in those other kinds of work which their situation has taught them to perform.”Footnote ²³ In marked contrast, a woman in “civilized” society was to be treated “neither as the slave nor the idol of her husband, but as the friend and companion, who soothes and alleviates his misfortunes, who doubles all his joys, and who is capable of taking a part in the care and labour to which he is subjected.”Footnote ²⁴

Of course, “companionship” could be interpreted in a variety of ways, and these same arguments were often used to justify male gallantry. But stadial theory also had the potential to liberate women. As Bristed explained, “Let those who wish to know more of the matter [of women] than we can tell them, consult Alexander's History of Women, or Kames’ Sketches of Man, or St. Pierre's Studies of Nature,” adding that these works “show that [women’s] powers, of virtue and of knowledge, are at least equal to those of men.”Footnote ²⁵ Based on his own reading of these sources, Bristed arrived at the conclusion that “men had entered into an open and avowed conspiracy against the exertions of female intellect.”Footnote ²⁶ Bristed determined that men owed it to themselves to treat women equally, both because such treatment would promote social advancement, and because the status of women was indicative of a society's civilized status.

It is only in this philosophical context that male reformers’ energetic efforts to identify and cultivate women's intellectual capabilities become comprehensible. For many eighteenth-century men and women alike, female learning and enlightenment were inextricable. Fusing Scottish stadial theory with Rational Dissenting theology and Lockean sensationalism, they stressed female education as a question of both private and public import. As Malkin proclaimed in his Essays, advocacy of equal education was one of his principle commitments, for “the pleasing prospect” of “continual approximations to perfection” depended on nurturing women's reason.Footnote ²⁷

When it came to concrete reform, there was significant work to be done. Whereas Lockean and Rational Dissenting principles emphasized the sexes’ shared capacity for understanding, contemporary educational provision seemed designed at every stage to undermine female potential.Footnote ²⁸ As Jacobin novelist Robert Bage pointedly observed in his 1792 fiction Man as He Is, then-current educational practices “poison[ed] the minds of young ladies.”Footnote ²⁹ While middle-class girls typically received piecemeal instruction from a governess, tutor, or family member in subjects including cooking, sewing, dancing, spinning, language study, literature, history, and sometimes botany, boys were far more likely to acquire a rigorous education, first at home, at the home of a nearby instructor, or at one of the many boarding schools (including the network of schools run by the Church of Scotland), followed by training at a university or Dissenting academy, depending on religious persuasion.Footnote ³⁰ This is not to suggest that girls’ educations were always insubstantial—Michèle Cohen's recent work on female curricula argues that girls who were educated at home “could—and often did—learn a variety of subjects.”Footnote ³¹ But even when moralists encouraged female education, they typically prohibited subjects including the classics and abstract sciences and advocated extensive rather than intensive training. The hallmark of the “feminine” curriculum, writes Cohen, was the “superficial” approach to conveying information.Footnote ³²

Nor did this differential treatment end with the completion of schooling. As Locke had emphasized, “education” was really a synonym for culture, encompassing not only lessons in specific subjects but also the whole range of social interactions throughout one's life. It was in social respects, specifically, that male reformers felt themselves to be particularly complicit—and thus particularly committed to feminist educational initiatives. Their own tendency to fawn over the female sex at dinners and dances made them just as responsible as tutors and instructors for “singing” women's reason “to sleep.” “Suppose any sensible and well-informed man should address to his own sex the flattery and absurd nonsense with which he assails the other,” Thomas Garnett, a member of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester and an instructor at both Anderson's Institution in Glasgow and the Royal Institution of London, caustically observed in his 1800 Observations on a tour through the Highlands, “would he not be knocked down, or confined in a mad-house? But why does he treat the female sex in this manner? When in their company, why does he not converse rationally on subjects of taste, of science, or of morality, as when he is in company with men? Because their minds have not been cultivated, and they cannot take a share in such conversation.”Footnote ³³ Malkin was equally condemnatory, labeling gallantry an “erroneous” system. “We have at length descended from the altitude of Gothic politeness,” he wrote in his Essays, “but the ritual of modern fashion, with all the ceremonies of adoration by which women are to be approached, is borrowed from the great original appointed by our ancestors, and though modified, retains the spirit of the primary institution.”Footnote ³⁴ The Scottish Lord David Steuart Erskine, the rare aristocrat engaged in feminist initiatives, lambasted those “men of Europe” who “have crushed the heads of the women in their infancy, and then laugh at them because their brains are not so well ordered as they would desire.”Footnote ³⁵

In response to these critical self-appraisals, male reformers began to develop concrete projects aimed at minimizing or even, in some cases, eliminating the disjuncture between enlightened theory and social practice. Their goal was to cultivate women whose rational capabilities would be encouraged in the same (or at least a similar) manner as men’s. The creation of such women meant providing daughters with sustained training in subjects including Latin, philosophy, and many of the sciences, disciplines that had traditionally been seen as inappropriate or taboo for female study. Rejecting the claims of the Scottish moralist James Fordyce, who in 1766 had explicitly lumped the study of “abstract philosophy and all the abstruser sciences” with the “masculine” pursuits of “war, commerce, politics, [and] exercises of strength and dexterity,” radical reformers insisted that the study of classics, philosophy, and science was as suitable for the one sex as for the other.Footnote ³⁶ As Knox, headmaster of the Tonbridge School, explained in his landmark Liberal Education (1781), female education ought to consist of training in Latin, French, Italian, history, astronomy, experimental philosophy, and “geography mathematical, physical, and political”—as well as in the more traditional “ornamental accomplishments” of music, dress, and dancing.Footnote ³⁷ According to Knox, the “method to be pursued” in teaching young ladies, specifically young ladies of “genius,” ought to be “exactly the same as that which is used in the private tuition of boys, when judiciously conducted.”Footnote ³⁸

Over the next two decades, a wide range of male reformers undertook projects aimed at realizing Knox's vision. Robinson, a Dissenting minister and mentor to the writer Hays, instructed his daughters in the classics, languages, math, and science.Footnote ³⁹ According to Priestley, a Dissenting scientist and educator who delivered the funeral sermon for Robinson in 1790, the minister had firmly believed that “the minds of women are capable of the same improvement, and the same furniture, as those of men.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The Jamaican-born, German-educated reformer and novelist James Henry Lawrence, meanwhile, hoped that at some future point men and women might be educated alongside each other at schools like Eton, with “ability” rather than sex used as the primary criterion for ranking students.Footnote ⁴¹

The members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, named so because their monthly meetings corresponded with the appearances of the full moon, demonstrated a similar resolve to give women equal training. At least four affiliates of the society, Thomas Beddoes, Thomas Bentley, Erasmus Darwin, and James Keir, wrote ruminations and treatises that encouraged women to study the sciences.Footnote ⁴² What is particularly striking about the Lunar men, however, is that many of them were eager to provide females with educations not only like those received by males but also education alongside males. Josiah Wedgewood, for example, educated all of his children together at home, and the Lunar men's daughters frequently attended the society's meetings. Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck, the daughter of Samuel Galton, fondly recalled one evening spent with the “Lunatics” in which she was praised for catching a snake that had accidentally been set free—an anecdote that suggests that Schimmelpenninck was not only present at the society's gatherings but also encouraged to play an active role in its scientific proceedings.Footnote ⁴³

Nor did the Lunar men keep their integrationist model a strictly private affair. Beddoes designed a series of anatomical lectures intended for a mixed-sex audience during the 1790s, which he defended on the grounds that “women … attend without scruple lectures in which the eye is demonstrated … mothers, the most delicately educated, brave disgust for the sake of a child.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Richard Lovell Edgeworth, the father of the writer Maria, expressed a desire for an “elementary school for children of both sexes,” a project that he noted it had been his desire to establish for “many years.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Perhaps most remarkably in this period, John Anderson, a professor of natural philosophy in Glasgow and close friend of the Lunar Society member James Watt, founded a coeducational university. In a will written shortly before his death in 1796, Anderson laid out a plan for the establishment of “Anderson's Institution,” a school designed to bring men and women together to study mathematics, science, and philosophy. According to Anderson, the institution would be explicitly designed to provide “the ladies of Glasgow” with “such a stock of general knowledge” as to make them the “most cultivated in all of Europe.”Footnote ⁴⁶ As Anderson's other writings on “natural history” make clear, he was resolutely opposed to the assumption that the female intellect was “naturally” inferior. All people were capable of “bodily and mental powers,” he once noted, if provided with sufficient “exercise and Emulation.”Footnote ⁴⁷ His own experiences lecturing to the “labouring and manufacturing classes” at the University of Glasgow had only reinforced this belief.Footnote ⁴⁸

Anderson's words were heeded, and the coeducational institution opened its doors in 1796. From the outset, the school's directors encouraged female participation; some of the earliest advertisements for the school address the institution's desire “to afford a rational and agreeable amusement to the Ladies.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Minutes from initial managerial meetings, meanwhile, go so far as to cite women's education as the priority of the institution. One set of minutes indicates that “Mr. John Anderson Professor of Natural Philosophy, by his Latter Will and Testament bequeathed his Library, Museum, Philosophical Apparatus etc. to the Public for the Improvement of Science, particularly for the establishment of Lectures in Natural Philosophy to Ladies.”Footnote ⁵⁰ These same commitments were reflected in the trustees’ choice of instructors. Garnett, the first professor of natural philosophy who also maintained links to the Lunar Society, was extremely enthusiastic about the prospect of lecturing to women, insisting that Anderson's ideas were “perfectly in unison” with his own.Footnote ⁵¹ In his lectures, offered “for a small fee,” Garnett introduced women to subjects including astronomy, electricity, magnetism, hydrostatics, hydraulics, and optics.Footnote ⁵² As Garnett proudly announced in his own assessment of the school, “This is the first regular institution in which the fair sex have been admitted to the temple of knowledge on the same footing with men.”Footnote ⁵³

In all senses, Anderson's institution was a significant development. Long before Britain's other universities began admitting women, Anderson and his followers had already launched an ambitious plan to level the educational playing field.Footnote ⁵⁴ That Garnett left Anderson's Institution in 1799 to join the fledgling Royal Institution in London only makes a stronger case for the importance of Anderson in the history of women's higher education in Britain. The Royal Institution, like its Glasgow affiliate, admitted women to its classrooms from its inception (though denying them a role in the management of the school) and boasted the participation of such prominent women as the duchess of Devonshire.Footnote ⁵⁵

What impact were these reforms meant to have on women's function and destiny? Surely, male reformers realized that coeducation would raise questions about women's place not only within the classroom but also within the broader socioeconomic order. If capable of studying Latin and the abstruse sciences alongside men, then what else might the fair sex be fit for? It was precisely this question that had made Wollstonecraft's Vindication such a controversial book. Not only had it endorsed coeducation (already a radical idea), but it had also suggested that coeducation was but the starting point.Footnote ⁵⁶ In his own writing about his institution, Anderson studiously avoided contemplating this subject. Far from imagining it as a place where women might become trained for professional life, he insisted that “education for domestic affairs” would “not be interrupted” by attending his school and that the goal of acquiring “general knowledge” would always be the female's return to the home—a sentiment reflected in the school's decision not to grant women degrees for their course of study.Footnote ⁵⁷ As Anderson and his followers repeatedly explained, scientific education was but another form of preparation for motherhood, a role that, for all of Anderson's interrogation of the category of the “natural,” he never seriously questioned. Even Garnett, strident in his commitment to female intellectual equality, was far more subdued when it came time to discussing the implications of his seemingly radical agenda. Education, Garnett wrote, “enables [women] to fulfil, with credit and propriety, the most important occupation in life, which is generally committed to their charge: I mean the cultivation of the infant mind, which is to lay the foundation of the morals, patriotism, religion, and all the virtues that adorn society. It is justly observed by an excellent writer, that the seeds of virtue and morality are oftener sown by the mother than the tutor.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Here Locke's emphasis on reason and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's focus on motherhood appear not so much at odds as mutually reinforcing.

Institutions like Anderson's thus afford insights into the ways in which this new kind of education was intended to fit into the British public at large. What was the ultimate objective in bringing the sexes closer together (at least intellectually) than ever before? In what concrete ways might female education benefit the polity? Tracing male reformers’ respective answers to these questions, we detect a bifurcation in opinion between those men who subscribed to “instrumentalist” positions and those who adopted more “egalitarianism” stances, albeit with much slippage between the two. (It should also be noted here that female reformers struggled between these two poles. Against Wollstonecraft's suggestion that women might be “fit” for a wider range of employments, Maria Edgeworth insisted that they ought to be content to play the role of educated mothers, as “Private virtues are public benefits.”)Footnote ⁵⁹ The desire to close the educational gap did not translate into uniform views regarding the ultimate function of equal training.

Of those who subscribed to the idea of equal intellectual capabilities, instrumentalism proved by far more popular than egalitarianism. For the instrumentalists, women were rational creatures, yes, deserving of equal training. But that reason, once cultivated, “must be exercised in different directions,” as Malkin carefully explained.Footnote ⁶⁰ In this sense, the instrumentalists regarded female education primarily as a domestic tonic. The new educational initiatives, far from disrupting the organization of the family, would in fact protect it by better regulating its activity. If the family was to reflect and, in a very real sense, perpetuate civil society (through the production of the next generation of citizens, as Rousseau had so powerfully insisted), then, educated women, in their special role as companions and guardians, would be more equipped to undertake their maternal duties.Footnote ⁶¹ Even the Lunar Society members, some of the most forward-thinking scientists, writers, and industrialists of their day, indicated that they were imparting a rational education to women so that they might become better homemakers.Footnote ⁶²

From the instrumentalist perspective, arguments for the provision of equal training were ultimately arguments for the creation of better housewives. As these men frequently queried their peers, what husband would not want a wife with whom he could discuss serious topics, and who would also provide his children with a stimulating learning environment? After all, they insisted that it was those women who had “a resemblance of character” to men who would be the best companions and guardians.Footnote ⁶³ “It seems probable,” remarked Knox, “that little nourishment of mind can be imbibed from a mother whose ideas hardly ever wandered beyond the limits either of a kitchen or of a dressing-room.”Footnote ⁶⁴ The Cambridge-based Dissenter William Frend offered similar sentiments. In letters written to his sister, he noted that he would ultimately marry a woman who displayed rational capabilities while still considering “home as the place of her happiness.”Footnote ⁶⁵ As these examples make clear, the goal was to incorporate radical principles into domestic conceptions of femininity rather than to rethink the category of the “feminine” itself.

What might at first seem a fairly conservative argument, however, must be viewed in its proper context. Within a society in which it had long been held that rigorous training and domesticity were fundamentally incompatible, it was significant to argue that the two could complement each other. We must bear in mind that rational education and child rearing had been traditionally viewed as diametrically opposed.Footnote ⁶⁶ Mention the “learned lady,” and most eighteenth-century subjects would likely have considered Elizabeth Carter and her Bluestocking circle “old maids,” as the poet William Hayley put it, who “could make their pen an instrument of essential service to human nature” precisely because they were “autumnal maidens.”Footnote ⁶⁷ This was certainly the fate that the Scottish physician and moralist John Gregory feared for his own educated daughters when he urged them in his popular 1774 A Father's Legacy to His Daughters to keep their “learning” a “profound secret, especially from the men, who generally look with a jealous and malignant eye on a woman of great parts, and a cultivated understanding.”Footnote ⁶⁸ It was this seeming incompatibility that the instrumentalists wished to overcome. As they repeatedly made clear, improving female understanding (within what they construed as appropriate limits) would by no means lead to women's desexing.Footnote ⁶⁹ “It is sufficient,” remarked Bristed in his A Pedestrian Tour, “to say a woman is passionately fond of reading, science, or the fine arts, in order to draw an immediate inference that she neglects the management of her family, that her servants are in disorder, that her children are in tatters, and that her husband cannot even obtain a button to his shirt.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Knox made a similar point in his essay “On Female Literature”: “[Gentlemen of a different persuasion] entertain a notion, that a lady of improved understanding will not submit to the less dignified cares of managing a household. She knows how to make verses, says the witling, but give me the woman who can make a pudding.”Footnote ⁷¹

The instrumentalists could not have disagreed more with what they described as a false dichotomy. The learned lady, they argued, rather than neglecting her domestic duties, would pursue them with more efficiency, enthusiasm, and skill. As Knox explained, ridiculing his opponents for their unenlightened outlook, “A woman of improved understanding and real sense is more likely to submit to her condition, whatever it may be, than the uneducated or the half-learned.”Footnote ⁷² This was a theme further developed by the Unitarian minister William Shepherd, who praised the efforts of his friend, Anne Wakefield (wife of the Dissenting theologian Gilbert Wakefield), for combining “cooking” with “studying.” As Shepherd proudly boasted, here was a woman who “mouths out old Homer & then makes a pudding.”Footnote ⁷³

Not all male reformers, however, believed that learned women's futures lay primarily in making pudding. While few would reject women's domestic functions altogether, a more limited cadre argued that true perfection could only be achieved by granting educated women a more public role, as advisors, friends, authors, scholars, and sometimes even politicians. For these egalitarian men, there was an absurdity in training men and women to be more like each other than ever before, only to reinscribe difference as the end point of the educational experience. Thomas Poole, a writer who briefly entertained notions of joining poets Robert Lovell, Robert Southey, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in forming a “Pantisocratic” utopian community on the banks of the Susquehanna River, directly highlighted this inconsistency. Noting that it was the Pantisocrats’ “regulations relating to the females” that proved the most “difficult,” he pitted the poets’ belief that “the greatest attention is to be paid to the cultivation of [females’] minds” against their belief that “the employments of the women are to be the care of infant children.”Footnote ⁷⁴ As Poole implied in his letters, this was a strange proposition. The sexes need not be brought closer together only for schooling. Like Wollstonecraft and Hays, the egalitarians wished to provide those women whose minds were “of a superior cast” with a road by which they could “pursue more extensive plans of usefulness and independence.”Footnote ⁷⁵ “Till one moral and mental standard is established for every rational agent, every member of a community, and a free scope afforded for the exertion of their faculties and talents, without distinction of rank or sex, virtue will be an empty name, and happiness elude our most anxious research,” Hays observed in one of the many letters that she wrote to the Monthly Magazine.Footnote ⁷⁶

This same impulse prompted some men to begin to imagine a more expansive role for educated women, which would allow them significant influence in the public realm. As they frequently insisted, domestic responsibilities could not possibly occupy all of a woman's time. Children grew up; husbands were frequently away (or died). Why could women not be wives and mothers at certain times and philosophers and scientists at others? Men, after all, daily demonstrated their ability to play many parts, to assume a flexible identity. In his “Letters on Women,” Wright wrote, “The other sex [men] is supposed capable of learning the duties of husbands and fathers, of acquiring the knowledge of a trade, or regular profession, consistently with their receiving a liberal education.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Why then did woman's accomplishments always have to be defined by her sex, limited to such a small sphere of operation?

The insistence on the desirability of female knowledge as a public benefit rather than on female knowledge as the precondition for wifedom and motherhood revamped older paradigms regarding female sociability. Here women appear not just as the softening or restraining agents that Hume envisioned in his midcentury Essays, Moral and Political, nor as the salonnières praised by the philosophes across the Channel, but rather as active intellectual contributors in their own right.Footnote ⁷⁸ This marks the beginning of an argument for the inclusion of women in cultural, economic, and, in some instances, even political practices on the grounds that the nation that included women would be more competitive, inventive, and prosperous. As one writer for the Edinburgh Review would later comment, scolding countries for keeping half of their “talent” behind closed doors: “It is of great importance to a country, that there should be as many understandings as possible actively employed within it … but, as the matter stands at present, half the talent in the universe runs to waste, and is totally unprofitable. It would have been almost as well for the world, hitherto, that women, instead of possessing the capacities they do at present, should have been born wholly destitute of wit, genius, and every other attribute of mind of which men make so eminent an use.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Educated women, it was presumed, should not only instruct the next generation of citizens but also increase the wealth of nations.

Some egalitarians merely hinted at the kinds of activities that an educated woman might pursue. In his 1790 sermon on the death of Robinson, Priestley observed that the minister had believed that women ought to have not only the same education as men but also the “same power of instructing the world by writing, that men have.”Footnote ⁸⁰ In a 1792 review of Wollstonecraft's Vindication for the Monthly Review, Enfield conceded that “the world, as well as the nursery, may be benefited by their [women’s] instructions.”Footnote ⁸¹ In a 1796 review of Maria Edgeworth's Letters for Literary Ladies, Enfield offered clarification of this point. While he by no means endorsed the idea that “all our affectionate wives, kind mothers, and lovely daughters” ought to be converted “into studious philosophers or busy politicians,” Enfield did not rule out the possibility of at least some women's participation in public pursuits.Footnote ⁸² Enfield's choice of the word “all” here is highly significant. He would state that same year in the Monthly Magazine, speaking through the character of one “Margaretta,” a sage expert on female education, that “with suitable opportunities and advantages, I see no reason why minds of a particular cast, among women as well as men, may not contribute essentially to the advancement of knowledge.”Footnote ⁸³

Erasmus Darwin and some of his Lunar Society peers offered similarly cautious yet striking calls for expanding the sphere that educated women might inhabit. Although predominantly instrumentalist in their perspective on women's education, they did occasionally adopt a more egalitarian language. (As I noted earlier, the distinction between the instrumentalist and egalitarian positions was not hard and fast.) For Darwin, such claims seem to have been prompted primarily by his concern that middling women might have ways of securing a livelihood, particularly if the “inactivity, folly, or death of a husband” rendered such activity necessary—concerns, no doubt, fueled by witnessing his own illegitimate daughters’ struggle to make a living by establishing a school in Derbyshire.Footnote ⁸⁴ At times in his Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools, however, Darwin shifts from a pragmatic argument for female intellectual activity toward a more general encouragement of women's participation in the public sphere. For those women possessing “inquiring minds,” he writes, the study of “geography, civil history, and natural history,” as well as “other sciences,” might “not only afford them present amusement, but might enable them at any future time to prosecute any of them further, if inclination and opportunity should coincide; and by enlarging their sphere of taste and knowledge, would occasion them to be interested in the conversation of a greater number of more ingenious men, and to interest them by their own conversation in return.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Here Darwin suggests that certain women with “inquiring minds” could help transform the social field.

Several egalitarians were far more direct in their claims. Wright, for example, offered a compelling vision of what learned women might contribute to the “republic of letters”—insisting that women's contribution to society ought to consist of more than “making puddings, keeping the house in order, administering to the gratification of their male companions, and … contributing towards the procreation and rearing of the next generation.”Footnote ⁸⁶ As he further observed, “man owes his proud pre-eminence, in the republic of letters, solely to his having been favoured with those advantages of education and means of improvement of which woman has unjustly been deprived … otherwise she might have shone with equal luster in the world of literature and science, and have ceased to be that mere helpless dependent on, and appendage to man which she now so generally is.”Footnote ⁸⁷ In a subsequent letter, he praised those women who had pursued “works of imagination” and “excelled in the fine arts,” as well as the “female astronomer by whose discoveries the boundaries of that science have been enlarged.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Wright insisted that the goal of educating women to the same degree as men was not only to make the fair sex better wives and mothers but also to “stimulate” them to a more general “active usefulness in society.”Footnote ⁸⁹

Erskine provided an even more stunning vision of the social revolution, or “instauration magna” as he put it, which would ensue once women began to receive an education “in no way differing from that of men.” He opined in his essays written for The Bee that such an education would “render them [women] happy in themselves, agreeable in their families, and useful to society.”Footnote ⁹⁰ But for Erskine, it was the personal and social benefits, rather than familial ones, that occupied most of his attention. With his essays, we see a firm response to the instrumental feminists regarding the purpose and function of women's education. For Erskine, education was preparation for pursuing interests and supporting oneself as well as for nurturing others.

Education would no longer be confined to a period before marriage but would instead become a lifelong project, to be pursued in a range of settings, according to one's particular needs and desires. For women of the middling classes, this might lead to work in higher education: “A female professor in a college, as at Bologna,” Erskine wrote, “will be no longer mentioned as a solecism, nor Macaulays, Montagues, Carters or Blackburnes be stared at as wonders, or envied by the ladies, and laughed at by the gentlemen.”Footnote ⁹¹ Erskine believed that for women of the lower classes—a group of women whom few of the other men discussed in this article took time to consider—education would provide a more practical function: to ensure financial livelihood. “Haberdashers, grocers, and every kind of shop-keeping, watch-making, and all the nicer operations of the hand in sedentary occupations,” Erskine opined, “might be performed by them [women], whereby the wealth and strength of nations would be greatly increased, and a greater militia kept up (without hurting the community) to preserve order at home, and defend the property and honour of nations abroad.”Footnote ⁹² Throughout his essays, Erskine focused on this link between women's education and national prosperity. Preventing women from contributing their knowledge and skills to public pursuits, he argued, was akin to wasting valuable resources: “We may fairly state the numbers of individuals who would be added to the workers of this magnificent machine for raising the superstructure of human happiness, by the introduction of women, at an equal, if not a superior quota; and how much this might accelerate the improvement of society … is past all calculation.”Footnote ⁹³ Given this, Erskine wondered, why were so many men opposed to freeing female talent?

Other writers also advocated women's education, such as the novelist James Henry Lawrence, who went so far as to construe coeducation as a necessary precondition for the establishment of imperial preeminence. In The Empire of the Nairs; or, The Rights of Women, a “utopian romance” written in 1800 though not published in English until 1811, Lawrence imagined his British protagonist, De Grey, and his Western-educated Hindu lover, Camilla, as partners who liberate the Muslim women of Kandahar from the tyranny of the harem. According to Lawrence, Camilla's success in enlightening the East is intimately bound up with her education in England, where she achieved great success at Eton in the disguise of a boy.Footnote ⁹⁴ Camilla's educational experiences, Lawrence suggests, help her to recognize and intervene in curbing inequalities in the East.

It was this linkage of coeducation with national, and sometimes even imperial, improvement that proved to be one of the most striking ideas offered by the egalitarians during this period; they insisted on the larger benefits to be reaped by encouraging female intellectual autonomy. As Jardine suggested, the “best habits” proceeded from the “constant intercourse and mutual inclination of the sexes,” not from their separation and differentiation.Footnote ⁹⁵ Why not then encourage men and women to engage in the sustained project of living and working side by side? This was a question that Jardine had been prompted to consider by his own travels through other parts of Europe: “I think I have observed, in several different countries, that wherever the men and women live, and are most employed, together, there results a similarity of character,—the powers and exertions, the good order, of the whole, are much increased. Such are the countries in the northern mountains of Spain, among some of those in Switzerland, Germany, and remarkably so, here in France.”Footnote ⁹⁶ While admiring other nations’ advancement, Jardine marshaled his evidence as a caution to Britain to maintain its claims to progress. His countrymen would not want to be like the “Asians,” Jardine warned, committed to the “subordination and separation between the sexes” at the expense of “absurd and pernicious tyranny.”Footnote ⁹⁷ The minimization of such differences was vital to civil society. Women, he thus enthused, ought to work as “companions and assistants, as mothers and tutors” in all the “learned and sedentary professions”—in whatever combination or combinations they might choose.Footnote ⁹⁸ Jardine extended this vision to the realm of politics. “The nation that shall first introduce women to their councils, their senates, and seminaries of learning,” he observed in his Letters from Barbary, “will probably accelerate most the advances of human nature in wisdom and happiness.”Footnote ⁹⁹

In these egalitarian interpretations, we have intimations of the dramatic changes afoot. Here is the suggestion that women, once encouraged to flee the cage (as Norgate would have it), will not and ought not be persuaded to return to their former resting place. In this formulation, true Enlightenment depended not only on training women to be men's intellectual equals but also on bringing them into the literary and commercial marketplace. For if man and woman shared the same capabilities, then why could not she—like he—pursue whatever course she desired? Why, in other words, the persistence of the idea that they “are not destined to the same employments”?Footnote ¹⁰⁰

These were central concerns for those men who admitted that women might be their “partners and companions” in some larger sense. Once they began to distinguish women from the stereotype, it became increasingly clear that the ties should be loosened in other respects as well. Of course, these ideas proved infinitely more complex in their translation from theory to practice. As becomes apparent in studying the ways in which egalitarian men responded to women's actual forays into the public sphere, female employment was not always met with approval. The editors and readers of the progressive Monthly Magazine, for example, attacked Hays after she published pieces on female education.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Nevertheless, male reformers shared a bold vision, and one that continued to attract adherents among radicals and socialists long after 1798, the date typically cited to mark the waning of feminist enthusiasm in Britain. Scholars have argued that the publication in 1798 of Godwin's incendiary Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Richard Polwhele's misogynistic poem The Unsex’d Females, coupled with heightened government repression, allegedly cooled whatever remaining interest in feminism existed at this point in Britain. It is clear, however, that many male reformers remained steadfast in their commitment to women's rights.Footnote ¹⁰² Several of the men discussed in this article—Bristed, Garnett, Lawrence, and Wright—published their work after 1798. What is more, similar calls continued to be issued in the following decades. In his address to the Female Reformers of Stockport in 1819, John Bagguley, a Lancashire reformer and leader of the Blanketeers March of 1817, expressed a strong desire to “see female Newtons, and female Locks [sic], and female Hampdens.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Owenite socialist William Thompson, meanwhile, would note in his 1825 Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men that “real and comprehensive knowledge … equally and impartially given … to both sexes” was but the first step along the path to “higher enjoyments.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ To deny women a fuller spectrum of rights, he explained, would be to exclude women “in the true eastern style”—a cautionary remark intended to scare those skeptics who posited a different, more segregated path forward.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ These male voices by no means reflected the majority opinion on female education, but their presence suggests that what had begun as a collaborative Enlightenment project continued as such well into the nineteenth century.