Women of England

by Bartlett Burleigh James

The artificiality of eighteenth-century society was a precursor of the practicality of that of the nineteenth. The influences which had given shape to the society of the time of the Stuarts had passed away, and the new influences and forces were in operation. The result of the contest between the Puritan and the sensualist had been a broadened social apprehension; and into this new concept entered harmoniously the catholicity of the worldly spirit and the conservatism of the religious spirit. This was the society which was productive of women of eminence in the arts and literature, as well as of women untalented, but blessed with a broader scope of life, more varied experience and controlled natures, than those who had gone before them.

Society as a whole indirectly profited by the English dalliance with French manners. Corruption was but a circumstance of the closer relationship, in social ways, of England with the continent. Political animosities and ambitions had more largely than anything else brought England and the rest of Europe into contact, nor was the contact by clashing at an end. A nation generally is not greatly concerned in the projects of princes, so that, while territorial aggrandizement or curtailment or similar benefits or injuries resulted from the wars of England, the salient fact as a social consideration is that the English people were still further broadened from the provincialism which the insularity of their country induced. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the women of England had escaped the local and narrow spirit and separateness of customs which threatened them from England's beginning, and from which they were saved by recurrent and ever more frequent contact with continental nations.

English society, however, had not become so imbued with the cosmopolitan spirit as to feel at ease in it as in a loose garment; the people were straitened and formal. They were lacking the versatility and adaptability which developed in the nineteenth century, when, amongst women, convention became settled custom, and custom the careful promulgator of social laws. There were present all the evidences of the finer sensibilities which give clear notions in matters intellectual, and society in the last half of the eighteenth century became thoroughly aroused to a social consciousness with regard to the middle and lower classes. The industrial revolution and the rise of the school of classic economists brought forward great discussions which had for their purpose the determination of the fundamental basis of a nation's prosperity. Into this discussion women entered as participants, but very much more largely as interested subjects of the matters involved.

The growth of England's industries, more than any other single thing, contributed to the well-being of the masses of English society, while at the same time it tended to make sharper distinctions among them. The increase of ease and comfort in living affected largely the character of domestic life; and the wider scope of industry and sterner demands for labor, which were the outcome of a desire to participate largely in the benefits of the new industries, gave opportunity to individual talent and application; while the unfrugal and shiftless, or the unfortunate, experienced in proportionately greater degree the severity of living. To mining, fishing, farming, sheep rearing, fruit cultivation, weaving, seafaring,—the industries of England other than manufactures,—were added during the seventeenth century glass manufacture, cotton manufacture, and other industries which were the foundation of England's material greatness. This list was greatly augmented during the eighteenth century, and the development of manufactures of all sorts created the factory towns, which drew to them, as into a vortex, the populations of the rural districts, and created many problems of modern society in which female and child labor are involved.

Among the women in everyday life, social habits were easy and existence had many elements of contentment. Gossip—which had become differentiated from scandal, because of a wider variety of subjects to chatter about than flagitious conduct, occupied a large proportion of the time of the women. The public gardens and the promenades of the cities, notably the capital, were as much resorted to as during the reign of Charles, and there was as keen an interest in the display of styles and the parade of wealth by the women who rode in their carriages or were carried in their sedan chairs as formerly there had been in the conduct of the gilded set of the Restoration.

Society as such had not as yet reached the coherence which it knows to-day. It was much a matter of classes or sections. The "democracy of aristocracy," which makes a cross-section of all the social grades and includes the wealthy, the noble born, the intellectual and the gifted of all ranks of society, was a later development. It is true that women of gifts did not have to rely upon patrons for their reputation, but had direct access to the public and were sustained by their own worth; nevertheless, the pride of birth was still strong enough to make those who possessed it hold themselves far above even the most gifted and talented of the sex who were not born within the narrow circle of noble society. Yet it was no longer simply the person garnished with titles of nobility who attracted the popular eye and was singled out in the crowd; for when women whose only claim to notice was their saintliness of character and Christian service, or their philanthropy, or their literary gifts, or their art attainments, were seen in the places of general resort, they attracted as much attention as did women of rank.

The prosperous and well-domiciled woman of the middle classes could rest in the comfortable feeling that the demarcations of society no longer absolutely precluded the possibility of her daughters' entering the ranks of those famous for their signal worth of one sort or another; but as yet the great movements of modern society had not come into close touch with the lives of ordinary women. Newspapers were published, but women seldom read them. Philanthropy was making headway, but women had little part in its movement, nor had they fully entered as yet into their birthright in the realm of literature. In the rural districts, their life was so contracted that a weekly newsletter, passed from hand to hand, was the chief medium of information as to the outside world; but even this was not usually read by the womenfolk, who were content to receive their news by hearsay. Unlike the women of the aristocracy, the women of the middle classes did not become beneficiaries to any large degree in the wider connections of their husbands, because such connections were for the most part of a business nature and not social. They were women of mediocrity, and their rôle was domestic. It was still thought unimportant to widen woman's horizon beyond the elements of an education. To these, in the case of the more prosperous, were added those accomplishments which are still looked upon by ignorant persons with disdain, but which serve to bridge the chasms of society by establishing tests of good breeding irrespective of social birth; so that to reading, writing, geography, and history there were added music, French, and Italian. Such a curriculum, faithfully followed, prepared young women to move in polite circles.

The old cry of women's incapacity for intellectual attainments of the same order as those of men is audible throughout the eighteenth century. One writer, after speaking of the regard in which the sex were held in England, discusses the matter of their education and concludes that it is not easy to comprehend the possibility of raising them to a higher plane than that to which they had been lifted, because of their natural incapacity for other than the domestic and social functions which they so gracefully fulfilled. To English people generally, it was a matter of pride that their women received greater respect and were held in greater affection than those of continental countries. This was often remarked upon by foreign visitors, one of whom observes that "among the common people the husbands seldom make their wives work. As to the women of quality, they don't trouble themselves about it." The position of the wife in middle-class society has been set before us by Fielding in a satire that has in it much of truth: "The Squire, to whom that poor woman had been a faithful upper-servant all the time of their marriage, had returned that behavior by making what the world calls a good husband. He very seldom swore at her, perhaps not above once a week, and never beat her. She had not the least occasion for jealousy, and was perfect mistress of her time, for she was never interrupted by her husband, who was engaged all the morning in his field exercises, and all the evening with his bottle companions." Certainly home had come to have attached to it a notion of greater sanctity than ever before, and women were accorded their natural rights and position, with the respect and deference in the tenderer relations of life, which signified much more than the profuse chivalry of the Middle Ages or the mock courtesy of the time of Charles II.

The English people were above all domestic; and the period, in its emphasis upon this phase of social life,—the English home,—marks in a way the beginning of that conception which is now regarded as being at the very foundation of a secure society. While France was going on in its iconoclastic way, destroying all things sacred in a mad desire to seize for the Third Estate the rights which they realized belonged to them, and the grasping of which was to cause French history to be written in the blood and fire of the great Revolution, the English, having passed out of the social depravity of the reign of Charles II., became eminently steady and conservative of those elements of social progress which, in their case, unlike that of their French neighbors, had already been secured for them by progressive and largely peaceful measures.