KAREN O'BRIEN. Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain.

Having dismantled the old unitary ‘Enlightenment’, scholars have constructed in its place a plurality of distinctive, if overlapping, national and regional enlightenments. Thus Karen O’Brien, who deftly situates her argument within this burgeoning of enlightenments, speaks of the creation in England of a ‘Whig Anglican Enlightenment’ (p.27), one of several such sub-enlightenments that she identifies. She traces the development of a social history of human nature, and particularly the history of women in society, in British writers from Locke to Malthus. Her ‘enlightenment’ is neither anti-clerical nor secularising. On the contrary, for many of the writers she discusses, religious beliefs and values remained important. All the enlightenments were dominated by men. Numerous women wrote books in eighteenth-century Britain, but chiefly novels, plays, and poems. Though most of their work was long neglected, feminist and other critics have recently disinterred much of it. Few women wrote history, philosophy, or even essays (this changed after about 1800, as O’Brien shows). In part, O’Brien’s book is thus a work of recuperation, drawing attention to the forgotten or neglected contributions of women in these genres. Such recovery, however, is only part of O’Brien’s aim. Rather than attempting to construct an alternative canon of ‘enlightenment’ writings by women, she situates women’s contributions within the wider debate: for example, the responses to Locke of Mary Astell and Damaris Masham; and the women who treated Malthusian themes. Only one woman writer gets a chapter to herself, Catherine Macaulay, the most eminent female historian of the century. (Not that she needed recovery, having always been an iconic figure, if latterly little read.) Macaulay is an interesting case, as in her History of England she seems determined to suppress her gender, cultivating an authorial persona that was aggressively ‘masculine’ (hence her sobriquet, ‘the republican virago’). O’Brien infers from Macaulay’s reflections on the proper qualifications for citizenship that some women, even as society was then constituted, would qualify (p. 170), but this seems not to be an explicit claim in Macaulay’s text. Perhaps, however, the implication was as far as she thought she could credibly push her argument.

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