By Bailey Meyerhoff
The issue of “female education” was under debate for hundreds of years when the discourse reached new levels of traction in the eighteenth century. The debate would retain relevance in the following centuries, culminating in feminist works that challenged limited perceptions of, and opportunities provided for, the intellectual capacity of women, such as, perhaps most famously, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929). This debate on women’s education frequently showed up within periodicals of the eighteenth century, some of which began to incorporate educational curricula for women within their pages. While periodicals were more commonly created by men, male editors recognized the dual audience of periodicals and included articles for, and by, women within their publications. Furthermore, the later years of the eighteenth century saw an increase in women as editors of, contributors to, and audiences for periodicals. Examples of women-led magazines in the eighteenth century include Eliza Haywoods’s Female Spectator (1744–1746), Frances Brooke’s Old Maid (1755–1756), Charlotte Lennox’s Lady’s Museum (1760–1761), and Sara Trimmer’s Guardian of Education (1802–1806). These woman-edited and -penned periodicals became an avenue for women to educate themselves in a socially acceptable way at a time when they were largely barred from pursuing institutionalized education.
This critical introduction will explore the ways in which the eighteenth-century periodical made education more accessible for women by examining the shifting perceptions of their reading habits, the ubiquitous debate on female education and how it permeated periodicals, and the educational curricula that was offered within the publications themselves.
Novels and Periodicals
During the eighteenth century, romance novels were popular reading material for women. Because romances were largely thought to be (and often represented as) frivolous works, romance reading was commonly viewed as a trivial practice. As Judith Dorn argues, women’s reading—centered as it was on “entertainment at the expense of instruction”—was perceived as evidence of “their irresolute minds, which only pursue narratives that flatter female vanity.”[1] Comparatively, Iona Italia notes that the editor of the Oxford Magazine encouraged his female readers to abandon their novel-reading habits and work toward emulating the limited examples provided by female scholars of the time.[2] Of course, the apparent dichotomy between the novel and the periodical is more complicated than it may originally seem; for instance, Lennox published her serialized novel, “The History of Harriot and Sophia,” as 11 installments in the Lady’s Museum—a decision meant both to drive sales of the periodical and her forthcoming novel Sophia in 1762, and to juxtapose the more educational portions of the publication with works of entertainment. Jane Austen wrote herself of the value of novels, describing them as “performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.”[3] The widespread condescension with which romance reading was viewed, however, contributed to the growing social acceptance of women’s consumption of periodical writing, as periodicals were perceived as “safe alternative reading.”[4]
Debating Female Education
While female education had been under debate in the preceding centuries, the discourse reached new heights of popularity in the eighteenth century. For example, thirty years after the initial print run of Lennox’s Lady’s Museum, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1791), Mary Wollstonecraft revolutionarily criticized the negligent state of female education, writing that women should pursue a “nobler ambition” than that of “inspir[ing] love.”[5] Because of the topical nature of the debate, earlier periodical editors such as Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, John Dunton, and Lennox herself included their positions on the issue within their periodicals. Those in support of expanding women’s access to education published pieces “demonstrating [women’s] educability and calling for a more ambitious programme of female study.”[6] Publications such as the Free-thinker, the Visiter, the Ladies Magazine, the Ladies Journal, the Ladies Diary, the Delights for the Ingenious, the Lady’s Museum, and the Spring-Garden Journal, for example, explicitly supported the improvement of female education, with some even claiming that women were better-suited for study than men. Additionally, because some women served as teachers to their children at home or governesses to the children of others, a common perspective in support of the expansion of women’s access to education was that their increasing knowledge would provide a “social good”; some periodicals, however, were concerned with women’s education for its own sake, instead of its implications for their children and husbands.[7] These periodicals are examples of proto-feminist publications that looked beyond how women’s education might benefit others, instead considering how education might serve women themselves.
Educational Curricula
While many periodicals offered their female readers domestic tips and moral instruction, some magazines—such as Haywood’s Female Spectator and Lennox’s Lady’s Museum—incorporated work on subjects such as natural philosophy, history, theology, and politics in their educational curricula.[8] While natural philosophy and history were not necessarily uncommon additions to periodicals for women, since they were often viewed as having a “special aptitude” for subjects based on “observation and experiment, rather than theoretical knowledge,”[9] Lennox writes of the potentiality of women’s superior intellectual capacity for these subjects withinthe Lady’s Museum (a periodical which is especially noted for its ambitious approach to female education). Periodical editors also often provided their female readers with reading lists that directed them to conduct further independent research on scholarly subjects. Furthermore, Jennie Batchelor and Manushag N. Powell argue that the miscellaneous nature of periodicals—their juxtaposition of works on various subjects and of diverse genres—aided in increasing the critical reasoning capacity of women readers, contributing to the periodical’s place as a “crucial force in making available to women of middling to higher social status an education that reached beyond basic necessary and domestic skills.”[10] In this way, both the content and the format of periodicals furthered women’s intellectual growth in the eighteenth century, a shift made possible by the changing social views on women’s reading and the increasingly popular debate on female education.
NOTES
[1] Judith Dorn, “Reading Women Reading History: The Philosophy of Periodical Form in Charlotte Lennox’s the Lady’s Museum,” Historical Reflections 18, no. (Fall 1999): 11.
[2] Iona Italia, “‘Studies proper for women’: The Lady’s Museum and the Periodical as an Educational Tool,” The Rise of Literary Journalism in the Eighteenth Century: Anxious Employment (New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2012): 181.
[3] Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (New York: Penguin Books, 1995): 36–37.
[4] Italia, “Educational Tool,” 180.
[5] Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012): 4.
[6] Italia, “Educational Tool,” 178.
[7] Jennie Batchelor and Manushag N. Powell, Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain 1690–1820s: The Long Eighteenth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018): 23–24.
[8] Batchelor and Powell, Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture, 28.
[9] Italia, “Educational Tool,” 183.
[10] Batchelor and Powell, Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture, 23.