L'Essai Sur Les Femmes - Essay On Women

LEssai sur les femmes/Essay on Women: an Eighteenth-Century Transatlantic Journey
by Mary Catherine Moran

In August 1775 the Pennsylvania Magazine published An Occasional Letter on the Female Sex. The article opens with an epigraph taken from Thomas Otways Restoration tragedy Venice Preserved (1681): O Woman! lovely Woman!/Nature made thee to temper Man/We had been Brutes without you.1 These lines set the tone for a brief historical survey, which finds that women have been, at all times and in all places, adored and oppressed and that man has been at once their tyrant and their slave. Sketching out the different kinds of wretched misery that women have suffered in different ages and nations, the article repeats the well-worn distinction between their brutal neglect among savage peoples and their voluptuous enslavement among Eastern nations, where an excess of oppression springs from the excess of love. Despite the pessimism of its account, however, the Occasional Letter ends on a note of optimism, conceding that all men have not been equally unjust to their fair companions, and noting that some men have made use of art, eloquence and the records of history to pay public honours to women.2 Given his role as editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine, it is not surprising that Thomas Paine (17371809) has often been identified as the author of its Occasional Letter on the Female Sex. In the 1925 edition of The Life and Works of Thomas Paine, William M. Van der Weyde asserted that Paine undoubtedly wrote it, although it appears without signature, and described the article as the first plea on behalf of women ever published in America.3 Writing in 1973, another Paine biographer approved his sympathetic and sensitive treatment of women, but suggested that, since Paine stops short of endorsing female equality, his article hardly warrants the place in the literature of womens rights that some of his biographers have given it.4 Recent commentators have taken a more generous view. Paines famous piece on women has been described as the work of a most-radical male revolutionary who asserted that revolutionary women [should] be treated like men,5 and has been reprinted in an anthology of writings by pro-feminist men in America.6 It also appears in an anthology of Early American Writing, where it serves to illustrate the breadth of Paines emancipatory vision. Here, as in so much of his writing, explains the editor of this collection, Paine was carrying forward his belief in the necessity of an emancipation that must begin with liberation from repressive
History Workshop Journal Issue 59 doi:10.1093/hwj/dbi002 History Workshop Journal 2005
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History Workshop Journal
institutions but that could only be completed with liberation from repressive ideas.7 Whatever his views on the emancipation of women, however, Thomas Paine did not write An Occasional Letter on the Female Sex. As Frank Smith recognized as long ago as 1930 in a brief and apparently overlooked correction,8 although it may have been Paine who added the embellishment of an epigraph by Otway, the text of his article was taken verbatim from the Introduction to William Russells Essay on the Character, Manners and Genius of Women in Different Ages. William Russell (17411793) was a Scottish printer and press corrector who carved out a successful career as an author, beginning with poetry and fiction but eventually finding his niche in the production of popular histories of Europe and America.9 His two-volume Essay on Women was published at Edinburgh in 1773. A year later, Russells work appeared at Philadelphia under the imprint of the Scottish-born Robert Aitken, who was also the publisher of the Pennsylvania Magazine. Surprisingly, Aitken and/or Paine did not use the article as a means of puffing the two-volume book: unlike many of the Pennsylvania Magazines excerpts, the Occasional Letter was printed without signature and with no indication of its original source.10 If Thomas Paine did not write the Occasional Letter but borrowed the text from William Russell, nor, with the exception of one chapter, did Russell write the two-volume Essay on Women. As Russell explains in his onard Preface, the work is a translation and improvement of Antoine-Le Thomass Essai sur le caracte`re, les murs et lesprit des femmes dans les differens sie`cles, which was first published at Paris in January 1772. Antoine onard Thomas (17321785) was a member of the French Academy, a Le five-time recipient of the Academys prize for eloquence, and the author of loges a number of works of poetry and eulogies, including an Essai sur les E ` re Mme (1773). He enjoyed a close friendship with the celebrated salonnie Geoffrin, whom he eulogized in 1777, and was a frequent attendant at the prestigious salon of Suzanne Necker.11 Thomass Essai sur les femmes enjoyed a broad circulation (a copy of the work was found in David Humes library),12 running through at least three French printings, along with several English editions published in both Britain and America.13 Thus a historical essay on the character, manners and genius of women travelled from Parisian salon culture to revolutionary Philadelphia via the efforts of an Edinburgh printer turned author. The movement of this work across national, cultural and linguistic borders indicates a widespread interest in the theme of women and manners, even as it illustrates the very loose notions of authorship and intellectual property that governed (or failed to govern) the production and circulation of a good deal of the eighteenth centurys popular literature. In a period prior to international copyright law, the material and legal conditions of print permitted a wide range of practices that would now be defined as plagiarism, and encouraged the composition of works translations, compilations, miscellanies, and the
L Essai sur les femmes/Essay on Women
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like that were the products not of single authors but of multiple and often conflicting authorities. Like so much of the periods female-oriented literature including the Scottish-authored female-conduct literature that achieved enormous commercial success in both Britain and America14 the Essai/Essay should be seen not so much as the unitary and stable product of a single identifiable author whose meanings and intentions can be readily fixed, but rather as a composite of any number of appropriations and borrowings which represents a series of thematically linked, but sometimes different and potentially divergent, interests and orientations. This paper interprets Russells translation of Thomass text in terms of the popularization of a distinctively Scottish contribution to the eighteenth centurys attempt to write the history of women and civil society. Specifically, in his improvements of the French work, I will argue, Russell drew upon the work of canonical Scottish Enlightenment historians to offer his female readers a much more positive and progressive evaluation of the role of women in society than is found in Thomass Essai. But while Russells Anglo-Scottish version of the history of women can be seen as a more liberal reworking of Thomass text, it can hardly be viewed as a revolutionary document: indeed, the chapter that Russell added to Thomass work combines a Whiggish faith in societal progress with an obvious Tory bias in political sympathies. Nor should either the original French or the English translation of Thomass work be seen as directly political in concern: attention to the European origins of Paines revolutionary article, I will suggest, allows us to place the Pennsylvania Magazines Occasional Letter on the Female Sex within the context of an eighteenthcentury debate which revolved around the participation of women not in the political but in the social sphere. PARIS: THOMASS ESSAI SUR LES FEMMES In his Essai sur les femmes, Thomas drew upon a wealth of sources both ancient and modern to survey the condition of women from ancient Greece and Rome to eighteenth-century France. As a contribution to the history of manners (lhistoire des moeurs), the Essai sought to uncover the qualities and different sorts of merit of which women are capable, how far government, circumstances and laws can raise them, and the secret connections between politics and female manners.15 The theme of women and manners afforded ample scope for any number of related topics, from an extended gloss on Tacituss argument that the northern forest of the barbarians was the nursery of chivalry, to an imaginary debate with Montaigne on womens capacity for friendship, where Thomas conceded that for great occasions, one should perhaps wish for a man friend, while maintaining that for the happiness of everyday life one should wish for the friendship of a woman.16 Yet despite his frequently digressive mode, and notwithstanding his insistence that he aimed at neither a panegyric nor a satire but
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a collection of observations and facts, the Essai is organized around a broader polemical purpose. With its concern to discover not only what women have been but also what they are, and what they might become,17 Thomass Essai sur les femmes can be seen to engage in a simultaneous historicization and naturalization of its subject matter. In its use of a comparative framework that is clearly derived from Montesquieu, the Essai places its emphasis on the variety and diversity in sexual manners and mores that is exhibited across cultures and over time. At the same time, however, the text also displays a more Rousseauvian concern to establish the immutable differences between the sexes and to arrive at a fixed notion of female nature. Indeed, if the Essai often cites from Montesquieus De Lesprit des loix, it also contains a number of passages which, as several commentators have noted, might have been taken word for word from the pages of Rousseaus mile and La Nouvelle Helose.18 And in shifting between Montesquieu E and Rousseau (that is, between what we would now respectively call a historicist and an essentialist framework), Thomas sets up a related opposition between nature and society. These tensions between history and nature and between nature and society can be briefly illustrated by considering his discussion of Greece and Rome and his treatment of his own eighteenth-century France. Thomass treatment of ancient Greece focuses on the singular position of the courtesans, who played a very great role in Greek society and especially at Athens. How, he asks, did a class of women who corrupted at once their own sex and ours gain respect and even a great celebrity at a time when other women were valued for their chastity and were, indeed, strictly confined to the household? The answer lies in their participation in conversation and society. It is society alone, Thomas argues, that can develop the charms of the mind. And while most women in ancient Greece were debarred from society, the courtesans, Thomas explains, lived publicly at Athens, where, constantly hearing about philosophy, politics, and literature, they acquired by degrees their taste for such matters. Their minds must therefore have become more cultivated, and their conversation more brilliant. Hence their dwellings became agreeable schools; the poets drew from them [their] lively taste . . . and the philosophers, the ideas which often might otherwise have escaped them.19 Quite apart from their influence over poets and philosophers, since the courtesans also held sway over the orators and men of eloquence who governed at Athens, these women must, therefore, have had an influence over public affairs. Thus, while the laws of Athens prescribed the confinement of women, imagination, luxury, the taste for the arts and the pleasures, were all in contradiction to the laws. Although the exalted position of the courtesans did not alter the laws governing other women,
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whose manners remained pure, it did, on the other hand, have the effect of corrupting the men. In contrast to the Greek courtesans, the Roman women were as austere and grave as the men, and their manners were in conformity to nature. While Thomas adopts Montesquieus view of the confinement of women in Asia as a form of domestic enslavement20 analogous to a political system of Oriental despotism, he interprets the domestic retreat of the Roman women in terms of an admirable ancient simplicity: Confined to their houses, there, in their rude and simple virtue, giving everything to nature and nothing to what is called amusement, still barbarous enough to know only how to be wives and mothers, . . . they passed their lives in retreat, to raise up for the republic a race of labourers and soldiers. Far from representing a form of enslavement, this domestic retreat inspired a respect for the female sex that gave the Roman women an enormous degree of influence. Despite the severity of the patria potestas, it was, Thomas insists, the virtuous Roman matrons who ruled over their husbands: It was in vain that the severe laws gave the husbands the power of life and death: more powerful than the laws, the women governed their governors. Such was the empire of beauty, Thomas concludes, before the mingling of the sexes led to the corruption of both women and men, and not incidentally to the decline of the Roman republic.21 Thomass contrast between the Roman matrons and Greek courtesans can be understood in terms of an opposition between nature and society, an opposition to which Thomas returns when, toward the end of his Essai, he takes up the question of the influence of women in eighteenth-century France. Thomas argues that at this time, and largely through the efforts of women, the spirit of society has been pushed to excess and threatens to weaken those sentiments of nature that are born in retirement and can only develop in silence. In a highly unflattering depiction of what is clearly the eighteenth-century salon, where crowds of the half-learned conduct light conversations of profound matters, Thomas decries the combination of a superficial taste for letters and an overactive spirit of society. Where the spirit of sociability is carried too far, he warns, domestic life becomes unknown, and women no longer fulfill their duties as wives and mothers. To be sure, Thomas does not argue for a complete rejection of politeness and learning: he is prepared to offer the sixteenth-century learned lady as something of a standard from which the women of his own day have fallen, and is happy to find that there are still women who might nelon would have have reasoned with Montesquieu, and with whom Fe listened with pleasure. But there can be little doubt that Thomas wants women to be less like the Greek courtesans and more like the Roman matrons.
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The Essai closes on a note of moral urgency. Having alerted them to the dangers of excessive sociability, Thomas ends by pleading with his female readers to follow the example of those women who are not ashamed to follow the dictates of nature. Even in this corrupted age, Thomas urges, We have wives, young and beautiful, who honour their duties, and in the most tender of connections offer an enchanting spectacle of innocence and love. We still have mothers who dare to be mothers. We see in many houses Beauty occupied with the most tender cares of nature, pressing by turns in her arms and to her lips, the children whom she nourishes with her own milk, while the husband, watching in silence, divides his fond regards between the children and the mother. Oh! that such sweet examples could return us to nature and manners!22 While society would then be less busy, Thomas concedes, there would be more tranquillity and more domestic peace. With this recommendation of the natural manners of the domestic over the artificial manners of society, Thomas thus concludes his survey by promising a blissful escape from the contingencies of history into the tranquil sameness of nature if only his reader would reform herself in accordance with his ideal. Thomass negative assessment of sociability did not go unchallenged. In addition to the criticisms expressed by Mme DEpinay in a private letter to her friend Galiani, Diderot came out with a very public rejoinder when he published his Sur les femmes (1772) two months after the appearance of the Essai. Jaime Thomas, Diderot began, praising the authors proud spirit and noble character before offering an extremely harsh appraisal of his Essai. For the most part, it should be noted, Diderot faults the Essai not so much for its substance as for its style of address: Thomas, Diderot complains, writes as a hermaphrodite (in a later version, as a eunuch [castrat]), with neither the nerve of a man, nor the softness of a woman. But he also charges Thomas with ingratitude for failing to acknowledge the advantages of the commerce of women for a man of letters, who learns from his female companions a style of conversation that allows him to treat even the driest and thorniest matters with lightness and clarity.23 Beyond this specifically French debate, moreover, Thomass account of womens role in society also received an implicit critique in the improvement of the text that was produced by William Russell. EDINBURGH: RUSSELLS ESSAY ON WOMEN If Thomass Essai sur les femmes emerged from the context of the Parisian salon, William Russell sought to translate the text into something that would appeal to the ladies of Great Britain. In the preface to his Essay on Women, Russell revealed a highly self-conscious sense of the needs and demands of his readers a perspective that can no doubt be attributed to
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his early experience in the book trade, first as journeyman apprentice to an Edinburgh bookseller, then as print corrector for Londons eminent Scottish-born printer William Strahan, and finally as overseer of a London printing house.24 While Thomass Essai was, Russell informed his audience, indisputably the most elegant, and the most philosophical treatise, on the female mind and female character, the work required a good deal more than translation to make it satisfactory to the English reader. Thomass sentences were often complicated and his paragraphs tedious, and the Essai had none of those larger divisions, which are so necessary to relieve the mind, nor any of those inferior ones, which are not less essential to that perspicuity of reasoning. With the aim of making the work more readable, Russell therefore decompounded it. He broke up Thomass lengthy paragraphs, divided the work into separately titled parts and sections, omitted such things as seemed foreign to the subject, and which can only loge, and added material that would interest a Frenchman, and a lover of e particularly appeal to an English reader.25 Russells rather loose notion of translation allowed him to take considerable liberties with the text of his French author. In revisiting the querelle des femmes, for example, Thomas had included a lengthy footnote with brief sketches of a number of sixteenth-century learned ladies. Russell moves these women from margins to centre by reproducing the contents of the Essais footnote as part of the main body of the English Essay, where he assures the reader that the list could easily have been doubled. In a further improvement of the passage one that would have appealed to his patron, the Jacobite Lord Elibank26 he embellishes the Essais account of Mary Stuart, whom Thomas described as the most beautiful woman of her century and one of the most learned, who wrote and spoke six languages, and produced accomplished verses in ours; and who, at a very young age, gave a discourse in Latin to the court of France, where she proved that the study of letters sat well with a feminine character.27 Russell makes a point of moving Mary Stuart from the French to the Scottish court. We behold in Scotland Mary Stuart, heir of that crown, he begins, before reproducing Thomass description, and then adding his own praise of her delicate taste and feminine and courtly manners to ensure that the sketch of Mary Queen of Scots is the lengthiest of Essays accounts of learned ladies.28 One of the most striking of Russells alterations and another example of an anglicization that might better be described as a scotticization is the incorporation of Scottish conjectural history into Thomass narrative. At several points in his translation, Russell supplements Thomass account with extended passages from Adam Fergusons An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) and John Millars Observations concerning the Distinction of Ranks (1771). In the Introduction, for example, lengthy quotes by Ferguson and Millar lent support to Thomass claims concerning the cruel treatment of women among the savages both passages, it should be
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noted, would be reprinted in the Pennsylvania Magazines Occasional Letter on the Female Sex. At the end of a fairly faithful translation of the Essais discussion of chivalry, to cite another example, Russell explains that while Thomass account of the origins of chivalry seems naturally to arise but out of the history of the times, and is founded upon the authority of the best early writers, there are, on the other hand, two late writers, of so high, and so justly merited reputation, that it would be an injury to the public to omit their opinion, and a crime against genius, to alter their expression: they shall therefore speak for themselves; for the women; and for us. This break in Thomass narrative is followed by a short passage from Fergusons Civil Society and a lengthy selection from Millars Ranks. It is the Scottish historians, Russell seems here to imply, who are the real authorities in the history of women and manners and who are, indeed, authorized to speak not only for themselves but also for the women. Such changes introduce an English, or rather an Anglo-Scottish, element to the Essay on Women without fundamentally challenging the interpretative framework of Thomas. But with the addition of his own chapter, Of the Progress of Society in Britain, and of the Character, Manners, and Talents of the British Women, Russell not only adds to but also significantly revises the account of women and society found in the French Essai. Here Russell draws upon two very different historical works to rewrite Thomass account of societal progress in specifically British, and substantively different, terms. Charting the progress of society in Britain from the reign of Henry II to the Revolution of 1688, Russell borrows liberally, and without acknowledgment, from David Humes History of England, often paraphrasing but sometimes taking passages verbatim from the pages of Hume. At many points in his narrative, moreover, he relies on George Ballards Memoirs of Several Ladies of Britain (1752) to supply specific examples of female politeness and learning. In his reliance on Humes History, Russell of course drew upon one of the most successful and influential examples of eighteenth-century British historiography, an Enlightenment tour de force that integrated a classical political narrative with the periods newer interest in the history of manners. Its political orientation remains a topic of debate amongst contemporary scholars and was the subject of much controversy in Humes own day: while Tory readers took exception to his obvious support of the Revolution of 1688, Whig readers were no less offended by his sympathetic portraits of the Stuarts.29 In addition to a narrative of Englands political and constitutional developments, Hume also offered accounts of manners, customs, laws, and commerce, sometimes interweaving such matters into the main narrative, but also providing separate chapters and several lengthy appendices exclusively devoted to such non-political themes. If Humes
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self-described combination of Whig principles and Tory prejudices30 encouraged widely differing interpretations of his political leanings, no such ambiguity surrounded his account of manners. In this area Hume came down firmly and unmistakably on the side of the progress of politeness and civility, describing the Anglo-Saxons, for example, as a rude, uncultivated people, ignorant of letters, unskilled in the mechanical arts, [and] untamed to submission under laws and government, and dismissing the clan system of sixteenth-century Scotland as a society in which rapine and violence were celebrated rather than proscribed.31 In addition to Humes History, Russells chapter also drew upon on a very different form of historiography represented by George Ballards Memoirs of Several British Ladies. In a two-volume work that he described as both a catalogue of learned women and a history of female learning, Ballard sought to preserve from oblivion the memory of sixty-four learned ladies from the fifteenth to the early eighteenth centuries. His subjects are largely pious and respectable women, most of them drawn from the gentry or nobility, many of them educated in the classical languages, and almost all of them with interests in devotional and theological literature. Although he would vehemently deny that he was partial,32 Ballard whose work was inspired by the Anglo-Saxon scholar and Jacobite sympathizer Elizabeth Elstob and whose patrons included the Nonjuring antiquarian scholar Thomas Hearne and the Jacobite Richard Graves frequently betrays his strong bias in favour of High Anglican Toryism. While royalist women are explicitly identified as such and are highly praised for their loyalty to the Stuarts, women of Whig sympathies are included in the Memoirs if they can be seen to endorse an appropriate version of Anglicanism, but are never characterized, much less praised, in terms of their political allegiance.33 Throughout the Memoirs, moreover, Ballard expresses a decided antipathy toward all forms of Protestant dissent, dismissing the Puritans as those voracious saints,34 referring to Cromwell as the usurper and to the Interregnum as the usurpation, and, in his sole entry on a dissenting woman, offering not praise but rather a denunciation of Katherine Chidley as a most violent independent [i.e., Congregationalist].35 Taking his examples of British women worthies from George Ballards unmistakably Tory Memoirs, Russell also selectively appropriates the Tory elements of Humes political narrative to produce a somewhat confused but distinctly pro-Stuart account of societal progress in Britain. Russells chapter lingers, for example, over the dismal fanaticism of the Commonwealth, when all liberal knowledge, ornamental learning, gentility of manner, [and] elegance of dress . . . were proscribed and nothing was to be heard but groans, sighs, prayers and spiritual songs. More tellingly still, Russell presents the downfall of Mary Stuart at the hands of Protestant fanatics in terms of a series of political disasters the death of the lovely Mary, of the pious Charles, . . . [and] the expulsion of the royal
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house which threw a cloud over the manners and the studies of that country, which two centuries have scarcely been able to dispel. In this depiction of Mary Stuart as the embodiment of Stuart virtue in distress, Russell invoked one of the most powerful symbols in what Jayne Elizabeth Lewis terms the pathetic and cyclical historiography of eighteenth-century Jacobitism: the demission of her Scottish crown in 1567 rehearsed the expulsion of the Catholic James II from the English throne in 1688, while her execution in 1587 presaged that of her grandson Charles I in 1649.36 While his account is Tory in its political sympathies, however, Russell relies on the whiggish and progressive notion of society which underlies Humes History and which runs directly counter to the tendencies of the French Essai. Both Thomass Essai and Russells Essay follow the eighteenth-century tendency to equate society with women: Thomas, as we have seen, attributes excessive sociability to the influence of women, while Russell takes it for granted that an account of the progress of society is equivalent to a history of the Character, Manners, and Talents of women. Russells own chapter on this theme follows immediately upon a translation of one of the Thomass several critiques of the spirit of society, the last line of which complains that France has arrived at such a state of sociability and general intercourse that manners and character are sacrificed to elegance and politeness, while virtue and sentiment are exchanged for pleasure and amusement. With the next line of the English Essay, the chapter on the progress of women and society in Britain opens as follows: What polished nations understand by society, appears to have been little known in England before the reign of Henry VIII. This backwardness may in some measure be ascribed to our continual wars with France and with Scotland; by our quarrels with the one we were shut out from foreign intercourse, and by our hostilities with the both we were diverted from cultivating the arts of peace. Here the reader encounters the measured cadence of the judicious historian, whose authority is supported through the use of carefully qualified assessments (appears to have been little known, may in some measure be ascribed) that avoid anything excessive or extreme. This calm deliberation does not preclude the necessity of historical judgement: clearly, what polished nations understand by society is to be preferred to the backwardness of perpetual wars and hostilities. But the tone here is in marked contrast to the strain of moral urgency which runs throughout the original Essai. Although Russell occasionally echoes Thomass concern over excessive sociability, for the most part it is this Humean notion of society that runs through his chapter. Russells strange and sometimes rather strained mixture of Hume and Ballard exemplifies the kind of pastiche that is characteristic of much
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of the periods female-oriented literature. Under Charles I, he writes in a paraphrase of Hume, a good taste in letters, in arts, and in society, began to prevail. The king himself was both a judge and an example of fine writing; and he was a lover of painting, music, and architecture; all of which he liberally encouraged. But the religious and political disputes, which early in this reign divided the nation, and which brought about the death of the king, and the subversion of monarchy, diverted the thoughts of men from every elegant pursuit.37 None of this makes any mention of women, which is of course the topic at hand. In a typical move, Russell fills in this blank with examples of women worthies culled from Ballards Memoirs. In this case, Russell asserts, the most distinguished women of this period, in Britain, were the Duchess of Newcastle, Lady Pakington, and Lady Halket. Since William of Orange, to cite another example, was of a gloomy temper, and had a dislike to the company of women, writes Russell in a paraphrase of Hume, the intercourse of the sexes was little countenanced in his reign. But this had a happy effect of freeing up the women for worthier pursuits. By these means, Russell explains, drawing upon Ballards catalogue of learned ladies, the ladies had more time for the pursuits of learning and knowledge; and they made use of it accordingly. Many of them became adepts in the sciences. Lady Masham, and Mary Astell, in particular, discussed with judgement and ability the most abstract points in metaphysics and divinity. The result of this unusual and sometimes rather awkward combination of Hume and Ballard is an account which endorses manners, politeness and the progress of society and which celebrates the achievements of women in British society. To be sure, toward the end of his chapter Russell returns to Thomass theme of corruption and decline. After celebrating the reign of Anne as something of a golden age, a short but glorious period which produced a host of literary ladies who were learned without pedantry and who joined the graces of society to the knowledge of letters and the virtues of domestic life,38 Russell presents the history of his own century in terms similar to those of Thomas, but oriented toward a British context. Here the general corruption of the age is attributed to the Whig ascendancy, under which the peers of the realm became stock-jobbers and all ranks and conditions, and even women, resorted to Change Alley. Given the corruption of the Hanoverians, Russell warns, there is reason to fear that our British ladies, once so remarkable for modesty, chastity, and conjugal fidelity, will soon equal their sisters in France in impudence, levity, and incontinence.39 Yet Russell was apparently reluctant to end his survey of Britain on such a negative note. But the fears of virtue are often groundless, he declares, We have dwelt long
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enough some may perhaps think too long on the dark side the picture. There are, Russell is pleased to report, in an anglicized translation of Thomas, in this age, in this island, and even in this city, women who would have done honour to any age or country; who join a refined taste and cultivated understanding to a feeling heart, and who adorn their talents and their sensibility with sentiments of virtue, honour, and humanity. We have women who could have reasoned with Locke, who might have disputed the laurel with Pope, and to whom Addison would have listened with pleasure.40 In the end, then, Thomass pessimism about the state of society in France provides Russell with a point of comparison for his patriotic celebration of the progress of British women in learning and polite accomplishments.
PHILADELPHIA: PAINES OCCASIONAL LETTER ON THE FEMALE SEX I would like to end this discussion by briefly returning to the point at which we began, namely with the Pennsylvania Magazines Occasional Letter on the Female Sex. This article has been reprinted in no less than three recent anthologies, all of which not only attribute the work to Thomas Paine but also present the piece as a founding document in the history of American feminism. In their collection of classical readings in social and political theory, for example, Michael Kimmel and Charles Stephen find the radical Paine making the almost unheard of argument that if women were equally individuals, they were thus entitled to equal rights.41 Joan Hoff reaches a similar conclusion when she asserts that, Only a most-radical male revolutionary like Thomas Paine asserted that revolutionary women be treated like men when, in his famous 1775 An Occasional Letter on the Female Sex he had a hypothetical female speaker proclaim: If we have an equal right to virtue, why should we not have an equal right to praise? There is, however, nothing in the Occasional Letter about individuals, male or female, no mention of revolutionary men or women, and the only right to which the article refers is a right to praise. In the words of the hypothetical female speaker who was the creation of Thomas, If we have the right to virtue like you, why do we not also have the right to praise? The female speaker goes on to justify womens right to praise on the grounds that to cite from the Russell translation of Thomas that was reprinted in the Pennsylvania Magazine We are wives and mothers. Tis we who form the union and the cordiality of families.42 The piece does indeed grant women a loge, but on the basis of the very different and suitably kind of equality of e feminine virtues appropriate to wives and mothers.
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This paper has traced the Pennsylvania Magazines revolutionary and protofeminist article back to a decidelly less-than-revolutionary and less-than-feminist contribution to the debate over the role of women in the French salons. But the route from Paris to Philadelphia was of course an indirect one, and the work reached an American audience through the efforts of an intermediary at Edinburgh. Here the work received the improvement of a chapter which combined pro-Tory nostalgia with a whiggish faith in progress to offer a Humean corrective to Thomass critique of the role of women in the cultivation of politeness and sociability. Though this commitment to the progress of manners endorsed a kind of social equality between the sexes, the interpretation of the Occasional Letter in terms of a revolutionary programme for womens emancipation can scarcely be supported by the text and clearly stems from the mistaken attribution of authorship to Thomas Paine. The point is not so much that the attribution is incorrect (though this is obviously the case, and the mistake, first recognized by Frank Smith in 1930, should surely be corrected) but rather that the revolutionary interpretation rests on a misunderstanding of the conditions of eighteenth-century print. As a case study in the international dimensions of Enlightenment print culture, the transnational and intertextual translation of Thomass Essai for an Anglo-American readership illustrates the openness, not to say the intellectual and commercial opportunism, that characterized the production and circulation of much of the periods literature. Attention to the origins of the Occasional Letter demotes Paine from author to editor, and deflates claims for the uniqueness of his article. Instead of a single author as singular champion of women, we find an assortment of diverse and sometimes conflicting authorities, from Rousseau and Montesquieu to Adam Ferguson and John Millar. In place of a revolutionary concern with the rights of women in America, we discover an anglicized (or scotticized) reworking of the debate over the role of women in the social sphere of the French salon. In broad terms, the scotticisation of Thomass Essai points away from an American exceptionalism in the direction of broader ties to the Enlightenment in Europe. More specifically, the travels of this text from Paris to Edinburgh to Philadelphia suggest that fair-sexing it, to adopt Swifts phrase,43 was a transatlantic concern, a comparatively neglected but potentially highly significant form of exchange in that transatlantic traffic in ideas through which the French Enlightenment was imported into America via Scotland.44
NOTES AND REFERENCES Mary Catherine Moran works on gender and the Scottish Enlightenment and teaches in the Core Curriculum at Columbia University. She is editing the reprints of two works by Henry Home, Lord Kames: Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion and Historical LawTracts.
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1 Thomas Otway, Venice Preserved, 1681, Act I, Scene I. 2 An Occasional Letter on the Female Sex, The Pennsylvania Magazine: or, American Monthly Museum, August 1775, pp. 3624. 3 William M. Van der Weyde, The Life of Thomas Paine, The Life and Works of Thomas Paine, 10 volumes (Thomas Paine National Historical Association, New Rochelle, NY, 1925), vol. 1, pp. 234. Van der Weyde echoes the language of Moncure Daniel Conway, who described the essay as the earliest American plea for woman (The Life of Thomas Paine, With a History of his Literary, Political and Religious Career in America, France, and England, G. P. Putnams Sons, New York, 1892, p. 45) and who included it in the fourvolume Writings of Thomas Paine, Putnams Sons, New York, 1894). The essay was also included in Philip S. Foners two-volume Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, Citadel Press, New York 1945. 4 Audrey Williamson, Thomas Paine: His Life, Work and Times, London, 1973, p. 68. 5 Joan Hoff, Law, Gender, and Injustice: a Legal History of U.S. Women, New York, 1991, p. 65. 6 Against the Tide: Pro-Feminist Men in the United States, 17761990, a Documentary History, ed. Michael Kimmel and Thomas Mosmiller, Boston, 1992. The Paine article is also reprinted in Social and Political Theory: Classical Readings, ed. Michael Kimmel and Charles Stephen, Boston, 1998, and in Womens Rights in the United States: a Documentary History, ed. Winston E. Langley and Vivian C. Fox, Westport, CT, 1998. 7 Giles Gunn, Thomas Paine (17371809) in Early American Writing, New York, 1994, p. 484. 8 Frank Smith, The Authorship of An Occasional Letter on the Female Sex, American Literature 2: 3, November 1930, pp. 27780. The correction was reiterated by A. Owen Aldridge in 1975, in a review of three then-current biographies of Paine: Eighteenth-Century Studies 8: 4, summer 1975, p. 493. 9 Russells histories include: History of America, from its Discovery by Columbus to the Conclusion of the Late War, Fielding and Walker, London, 1778; History of Modern Europe. With an Account of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; and a View of the Progress of Society, from the Fifth to the Eighteenth Century. In a Series of Letters from a Nobleman to his Son, G. Robinson; J. Robson; J. Walter; and J. Sewell, London, 1779; and History of Ancient Europe; With a View of the Revolutions in Asia and Africa. In a Series of Letters from a Nobleman to his Son, G. G. J. and J. Robinson, London, 1793. At the time of his death Russell was working on a three-volume History of England, for which the bookseller Thomas Cadell had offered him 750. 10 This omission cannot be explained in terms of Aitkens lack of copyright to the work. English copyright laws did not extend to America, where booksellers were free to reprint British books for their own markets so long as they did not export the books back to England or Scotland. onard Thomas is taken from a brief 11 Biographical information on Antoine-Le biographical sketch by Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: a Cultural History of the French Enlightenment, Ithaca, NY, 1994, p. 311, and from the Nouvelle Biographie Generale ` res, fils et cie, Paris, depuis Les Temps Les Plus Recules Jusqua Nos Jours, Firmin Didot fre 1866, vol. 45, pp. 2226. 12 The David Hume Library, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton, Edinburgh, 1996, p. 132. 13 In addition to William Russells version, another translation of Thomass Essai sur les femmes appeared in 1781 (reprint 1800): An Essay on the character, the manners, and the understanding of women, in different ages. Translated from the French of Mons. Thomas, by Mrs. Kindersley. With two original essays, J. Dodsley, London, 1781. The two original essays that Kindersley appended to her translation of Thomass Essai offer a comparative perspective on female manners, a theme that she had already explored in her Letters from the Island of Teneriffe, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope, and the East Indies, J. Nourse, London, 1777. 14 John Gregorys A Fathers Legacy to his Daughters is a prime example of a work that quickly slipped beyond the grasp of its publishers control. First published posthumously in 1774 (by the London booksellers William Strahan and Thomas Cadell, along with their Edinburgh partner William Creech), the work ran through six editions of 1,000 copies each between 1774 and 1776 alone, and was reprinted well into the nineteenth century. It was frequently excerpted in periodicals and miscellanies, was published alongside other works such as Hester Chapones Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1773) and Lord Chesterfields
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Letters to his Son (1774), and was translated into French, Italian, and Russian. In addition to the inevitable Dublin piracies (in 1781, Strahan, Cadell and Creech successfully prosecuted a coterie of Edinburgh booksellers for printing pirated copies of Gregorys Legacy for the British market), the work was also endlessly reprinted in America, where it served as a staple of such conduct compendia as Parental Legacies and The Way to Get Married. One bookseller in upstate New York printed a version that placed Gregorys Legacy alongside Humes Of the Study of History: A Fathers Legacy to his Daughters; The Study of History Recommended to the Ladies, from Humes Essays; Edwin and Angelina. By Oliver Goldsmith, W. and J. Disturnell, Troy, NY, 1825. onard Thomas, Essai sur le caracte`re, les murs, et lesprit des femmes dans 15 Antoine-Le les differens sie`cles, Paris, 1772; reprint, ed. Colette Michael, Paris, 1987, p. 4. sirer un homme pour ami dans les grandes occasions; 16 Il faudroit donc peut-e tre de sirer lamitie dune femme: Thomas, mais pour le bonheur de tous les jours, il faut de Essai, p. 56. te , ce quelles sont, et ce quelles pourroient e 17 On verra ce que les femmes ont e tre: Thomas, Essai, p. 4. 18 Lieselotte Steinbru gge, The Moral Sex: Womans Nature in the French Enlightenment, transl. Pamela E. Selwyn, Oxford, 1995, p. 35; Mary Trouille, Sexual/Textual Politics in the Enlightenment: Diderot and DEpinay Respond to Thomass Essay on Women, Romanic Review 85: 2, March 1994, p. 192. te seule peut de velopper les charmes de lesprit; et les autres femmes en e toient 19 La socie ` nes, ou exclues. Les courtisanes vivant publiquement dans Athe ` sans cesse elles entendoient ` -peu tous ces gou parler de philosophie, de politique et de vers, prenoient peu-a ts. Leurs esprits , et leur conversation plus brillante. Alors leurs maisons devenoient devoit donc e tre plus orne coles dagre ment; les Poe ge ` res de ridicule et de des e tes venoient y puiser des connoissances le es qui souvent leur eussent e chappe a ` eux-me gra ce; et les Philosophes, des ide mes: Thomas, Essai, pp. 910. 20 Thomas refers to the domestic enslavement of women (lesclavage domestique des femmes) and claims that the whole of Asia is covered with these prisons where beauty enslaved ` re est couverte de ces prisons ou attends to the caprices of a master (LAsie entie ` la beaute esclave attend les caprices dun ma tre), Essai, pp. 26, 2. 21 Thomas, Essai, p. 12. pouses tendres, qui jeunes et belles, shonorent de leure devoirs et dans le plus 22 Il y a des e ` res doux des liens offrent le spectacle ravissant de linnocence et de lamour. Enfin il y a des me ` res. On voit dans plusieurs maisons la Beaute soccupant des plus tendres soins qui osent e tre me ` -tour pressant dans ses bras ou sur son sein le fils quelle norrit de son lait, de la nature, et tour-a poux en silence partage ses regards attendris entre le fils et la me ` re. Oh! si ces tandis que le exemples pouvoient ramener parmi nous la nature et les moeurs!: Thomas, Essai, pp. 845. 23 Thomas ne dit pas un mot des avantages du commerce des femmes pour un homme de ` mettre de lagre ment et de la clarte lettres, et cest un ingrat . . . . Elle nous accoutument encore a ` res les plus se ` ches and les plus e pineuses. Diderot, Sur les femmes [1774], dans les matie reprinted in Qu-est-ce quune femme?, ed. Elizabeth Badinter, Paris, 1989, pp. 1845. 24 According to the DNB, after an apprenticeship to an Edinburgh printer that began in 1756, Russell proceeded to London in 1767 as a man of letters, but spent several years working in the book trade, first as a corrector of print for William Strahan, then as printing overseer to Messrs. Brown & Adlard. 25 William Russell, Preface to Essay on the Character, Manners, and Genius of Women in Different Ages. Enlarged from the French of M. Thomas, by Mr. Russell. 2 vols, R. Aitken, Philadelphia, 1774, vol. 1, pp. ivv. Russell divided the Essay into two main parts, Of the Women of Antiquity and Of the Women of modern Nations, and further subdivided each Part into such thematic sections as Of the Grecian Women (Part I, Section II) and Of the Inundation of the Barbarians, and the Effects of Chivalry on the Character and Manners of Women (Part II, Section I). 26 Patrick Murray, fifth Baron Elibank (17031778) was a close friend of David Hume and Lord Kames, and the patron of a number of young Scottish writers. Although the DNB reports that he rallied to the house of Hanover on the accession of George III, contemporaries such as Alexander Carlyle and John Ramsay of Ochtertyre recorded that he maintained his Jacobite sympathies to the end of his life. Elibanks brother Alexander Murray was a political exile in Paris who played a part in the Jacobite Elibank Plot of 17523. While working as a journeyman printer, William Russell became a member of Edinburghs Miscellaneous
32
Society, through which he met Lord Elibank. Elibank invited Russell to spend some time at his home in East Lothian and encouraged him to pursue a literary career. ` cle, et une des plus instruites, qui e crivoit et 27 Marie Stuart, la plus belle femme de son sie ` s-bien des vers dans la no ` s-jeune, prononc ` la Cour de parloit six langues, faisoit tre tre; et tre e a tude des Lettres sied bien aux femmes: Thomas, France un discours latin, ou ` elle prouve que le Essai, fn. 18, 35. 28 Russell, Essay, vol. 1, p. 104. 29 For a brief summary of this debate, see David Wootton, David Hume, the Historian, in The Cambridge Companion to Hume, ed. David Fate Norton, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 281312. 30 As Hume once explained in a letter to a friend, My views of things are more conformable to Whig principles; my representations of persons to Tory prejudices: David Hume to John Clephane, 1756, The Letters of David Hume, 2 vols, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, Oxford [1932], vol. 1, p. 237. 31 Hume, History, vol. 1, p. 185; vol. 3, p. 117. 32 I dare challenge any man, Ballard wrote to Lord Lyttelton, whether Protestant, Papist, or Dissenter Whig or Tory (and I have drawn up and published memoirs of women who professed all these principles) to prove me guilty of partiality. George Ballard to George Lyttelton, 22 May 1753; quoted in Ruth Perrys introduction to George Ballard, Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain who have been celebrated for their writings or skill in the learned languages, arts and sciences, 1752; reprint, ed. Ruth Perry, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1985, p. 44. 33 Thus, Katherine Phillips, for example, earns high praise for abandoning the Presbyterian faith of her childhood as soon as she became capable of judging for herself , at which point she became a great royalist and faithful daughter of the Church of England, while Lady Halket deserves our sympathy because she was a very great royalist, and and a great sufferer on that account. On the other hand, in an entry which commends Elizabeth Burnett for her great knowledge of theology and her devotion to the truest interest of the Church of England, Ballard briefly notes that Burnett and her husband returned from Holland to England around the time of the revolution, but neglects to inform his readers that Burnett and her husband were in fact ardent supporters of William of Orange, pp. 268, 327. 34 Ballard, Memoirs, p. 278. 35 Ballard, Memoirs, pp. 2645. 36 Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, Hamiltons Abdication, Boswells Jacobitism and the Myth of Mary Queen of Scots, ELH 64: 4, 1997, pp. 1,0691,090. 37 Before the civil wars, learning and the fine arts were favoured at court, and a good taste began to prevail in the nation. The king loved pictures, sometimes handled the pencil himself, and was a good judge of art . . . [but] the wretched fanaticism, which so much infected the parliamentary party, was no less destructive of taste and science, than of all law and order. Hume, History, vol. 6, pp. 149150. 38 Hume, History, vol. 2, pp. 1012. 39 On the debate surrounding women as shareholders, see Susan Staves, Investments, votes, and bribes: women as shareholders in the chartered national companies, in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Hilda L. Smith, Cambridge, 1998, pp. 25978. 40 Women Writers, pp. 1124. 41 Social and Political Theory: Classical Readings, ed. Michael S. Kimmel and Charles Stephen, Boston, 1998, p. 69. pouses et me ` res; cest nous qui formons les liens 42 In Thomass version, Nous sommes e et la douceur des familles: Essai, p. 3. 43 Quoted by Kathryn Shevelow, Fathers and Daughters: Women as Readers of the Tatler, in Gender and Reading, ed. Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patricinio Schweickart, Baltimore, 1986, p. 107. 44 For an overview of the enormous literature on the Scottish Enlightenment in America, see Samuel Fleischacker, The Impact on America: Scottish Philosophy and the American Founding, in The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Alexander Broadie, Cambridge, 2003, pp. 31637.

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LEssai sur les femmes/Essay on Women: an Eighteenth-Century Transatlantic Journey

by Mary Catherine Moran

History Workshop Journal