This dissertation focuses on mid-eighteenth-century British periodicals and their claims to educate middle-ranked women in natural philosophy, modern history, and vernacular literature. I argue that articles published in female-penned periodicals are comparable to articles in male-penned periodicals and therefore allowed women to pursue an informal education through reading. I propose that female periodicals also illustrate how women formed counterpublics of learning through correspondence that rivaled the conversations that took place in the male-dominated public spheres, such as in coffee houses and meeting halls. As formal classical education was reserved for elite men, women learned through reading books and periodicals, and through conversation. Given the cost of books, periodicals became the main source for informal learning for middle-ranked women. I call attention to the periodical form that allowed women to complete feasibly short lessons between their daily domestic duties and amusements. Female-penned periodicals encouraged women to diversify their interests by deploying literary depictions of the moral pitfalls of women’s focus on the beautification of the body. Driven by the financial and social rise of the merchant class, middling-ranked women with small dowries sought to gain advantage in the marriage market by distinguishing themselves as suitable wives for merchant or even gentry husbands. Periodicals thus made an economic as well as a moral case for their single female readers to balance fashionable amusements with intellectual pursuits.
By examining not only how mid-century female-penned periodicals defined themselves in relation to male-penned periodicals but also the impact of broader changes in formalized education, my thesis uncovers an important and under-discussed aspect of the rise of the middling ranks in eighteenth-century Britain. I show how female-penned periodicals encouraged women's involvement in discussions about the development of the modern disciplines of education. My thesis is organized chronologically and follows the work of three notable periodical editors and authors with chapters on Eliza Haywood's The Female Spectator (1744-46), Frances Brooke's The Old Maid (1755-56), and Charlotte Lennox's The Lady's Museum (1760-61). The purpose of my thesis is not only to chart the changes in representations of women's learning over time, but also to reveal how Haywood, Brooke, and Lennox propose that women share their proto-disciplinary knowledge beyond their counterpublics in order to encourage intellectual discussions between like-minded males and females in the public spheres.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/44320 |
| Date | 30 November 2022 |
| Creators | Sutton, Karenza |
| Contributors | Landreth, Sara, De Bruyn, Frans |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
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