At the Restoration we enter upon a new era of feminine activity. The beginnings of this era do not, however, coincide sharply with 1660, but belong at least a decade earlier. The chief women writing and studying between 1650 and 1675,[510] the Duchess of Newcastle, Mrs. Philips, Mary North, Dorothy Osborne, Margaret Blagge, Lady Pakington, the Countess of Warwick, Mrs. Hutchinson, and Lady Fanshawe, brilliantly ushered in this new period. With the coming of peace and national security women were apparently conscious not only of a new freedom, but of a new power and a new demand for some form of personal expression. After the unusual services rendered by them in war-times they could not settle down at once into the tame concerns of peace. This does not refer particularly to the women counted the heroines of the Civil War. It refers rather to the general emotional excitement and freeing of the spirit consequent on war activities. There was on the part of women a blind and unfocused but persistent and stimulating sense that larger and more varied opportunities were awaiting them. Latent powers had been stirred into self-consciousness and could not again be lulled into the old quiescence.
It was not only the inevitable burdens and responsibilities of war that had stirred women to new life. They could not fail to share in the new sense of personal importance and power that came to the people as a whole in their victorious struggle with autocracy. But it must be observed that along with this consciousness of national and political self-realization there was, under the Puritans, stern repression in matters of social and religious life. At the coming of Charles, however, all this was changed. With disastrous suddenness people found themselves free to follow with all gayety of spirit wherever their pleasure-loving instincts led. That such breaking of bonds resulted in an almost incredible outburst of immorality should not be allowed to obscure the fact that there was also a remarkable freeing of the mind from conventional standards. For good or for evil the individual found himself free to give energetic expression to his individual tendencies. By this freedom, by this license, women as well as men were profoundly moved.
The new impulses thus brought into being did not, however, give rise to anything like orderly and progressive activity on the part of women. The century following 1660 is seen to be an inchoate assemblage of beginnings. It is rich with a promise that comes to no decisive result. The path, instead of leading to some well-marked fortress or to some mount of vision, loses itself in unmeaning meanders.
There is, indeed, after the middle of the eighteenth century, even an appearance of retrogression in the attention devoted to learned pursuits for women. It is not till the end of that century that the movement acquires new momentum. Until we come to Catharine Macaulay, the novelists in the last quarter of the century, and Mary Wollstonecraft at its end, we have little that is new in theory or striking in achievement. From 1760 to 1775 no new woman writer of distinction appears. On ideals of education and conduct, Dr. James Fordyce, Mrs. Barbauld, and Mrs. Chapone, the recognized arbiters, are tame compilers of bromidic maxims with little of the dignity and spirit of the best writers on feminism six or seven decades earlier. The actual accomplishment of the period before 1760 was a destruction of old placidities, a restlessness of discussion, rather than a movement reaching definite achievement. But this discussion and the many individual examples of literary or learned accomplishment on the part of women were together slowly having their collective effect. Finally salons came and gave social prestige to the women who could think and talk brilliantly, and gave a tremendous impetus, if not to actual learning, yet to the idea that a woman should have sense, intelligence, a wide knowledge of books, and an understanding of history and current affairs.
From Catharine Macaulay to about the time of Tennyson's Princess is a period possessing considerable unity and one that would reward minute study. Such an investigation would bring us close to the establishment of great schools for the higher education of women and their consequent entrance upon a new era, an era that should look back with astonishment and respect to such ancestors as Anna van Schurman, Bathsua Makin, Dr. Hickes, and Mary Astell.
The learned woman and a public
One of the most promising characteristics of the work of women is the emergence of learning from the aristocratic seclusion of the "golden age." In Tudor times it was in courtly circles only that learning was counted appropriate for women. Elizabeth Lucar stands as a solitary record of a lady from the wealthy middle class whose accomplishments were similar to those in the palaces of the great. But a significant change is to be noted in the century initiated about 1660. Duchesses and countesses are listed with wives and daughters of the clergy, of rich merchants, of needy tradesmen. From the Duchess of Newcastle to Mary Leapor, the gardener's daughter, the roll shows that aristocratic restrictions are no longer in full force in the realm of letters. In intimate connection with this change is the fact that authorship is no longer a private, home affair. The days when Margaret Roper was praised because she found her father and husband a sufficient audience had passed forever. The work of women was no longer a carefully tended flower of the hot-house. It must grow in the open. To be sure, women hesitated to publish. The Orindas and Astræas and Philomelas and Ardelias, whom Richardson derides as "the lovely dastards" of the sex, show how women sought protecting pseudonyms. But publish they did. They craved readers. The applauding males of their households were no longer adequate. Under the spell of a thousand traditional timidities and reluctancies they yet desired to see their words on the printed page, and they secretly coveted a public.
Furthermore, women were thinking of authorship as a tool and as a weapon, not merely as a private resource. Mrs. Behn, the first English woman to write definitely for money, was but the precursor of various women in succeeding years who came to regard the products of their minds as of pecuniary significance. Especially is this true towards the end of the period. When we find Mrs. Haywood and Mrs. Manley writing fiction of a sort that will sell, Mrs. Blackwell doing superb botanical work in order to pay the fine imposed on her husband, or Mrs. Collyer writing that she may supplement a meager income and educate her children, we may not have come upon great art or literature, but we have come upon a new idea for women, the possible economic value of their work. It was not an idea that reached any but the most meager fruition, but at least the seed of a new thought was sown.
A third change was a respect for literature as a weapon, sometimes of offense, but mainly of defense and propaganda. The women who had ideals to promulgate, causes to urge upon the indifferent, or evils to be meliorated, found that talking at home was weak and futile. They must secure a public, and so the pamphlets poured forth. In fact, the fundamental difference between the golden age of the Tudors and the much less agreeable period for learned women after the Restoration was this matter of a public. Learning for home consumption only and as an elegant resource was sterile. However feeble intrinsically, learning and letters used for a purpose and submitted to a public had within it the seeds of vitality and the promise of a future.
Large number of intellectual women