Bluestocking

History

The word is translated from English blue stocking and indicated at the beginning accustomed of a literary living room chaired by a woman, Elizabeth Montagu (1720-1800), which joined together at it, once by week, of the friends which shared its literary tastes. The men were allowed with their meetings, and among them, it, some appears Benjamin Stillingfleet, which was presented one day in blue bottoms after its hostess had ensured to him that its living room was opened to people of spirit, and not with the elegant ones. The small club was called by joke “the circle of blue bottoms”, without really pejorative connotation since the poem of Hannah More, Bas-bleu , is a homage to these cultivated hostesses of the 18th century, Mrs Vesey or Elizabeth Montagu. However the practice taken in these living rooms to open with the merit without reference to social origin raised criticisms and towards the end of the 18th century century this Social diversity evoked a freedom of tone annoyingly close to the novel ideas come from the continent, ideas which had in England of the sympathizers like the first romantic ones, William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, or of the philosophers like Thomas Paine.

In France the term knew the same fate as that of invaluable at the 17th century century to become a criticism. It was adopted by the conservatives and the reactionaries to stigmatize with the women like Sophie Gay, George Sand, Delphine of Girardin, and in general all the women who posted literary or intellectual claims. Gustave Flaubert devotes to it an ironic article in its Dictionnaire of the generally accepted ideas : Bluestocking: Term of contempt to designate any woman who is interested in the intellectual things. To quote Molière with the support: “When the capacity of its spirit is raised” etc In the chapter V of Works and men at the XIXe century (1878), entitled the Bluestockings , Barbey d' Aurevilly written:

the women who write are not any more of the women. They are men, - at least of claim, - and missed! It is of Bas-bleus.

Such a virulence is explainable only because the conservatives saw mentalities changing. Since 1829, Honore de Balzac, in its Physiology of the marriage , tackled the misogyny reactionary and asserted the right for the women to be equal intellectual men while declaring: “A woman who received an education of man has, with the truth, the most brilliant faculties and most fertile in happiness for it and her husband; but this woman is rare like happiness even. ” In 1869, English John Stuart Mill published constraint of the women to denounce the situation which was made with its fellow-countrywomen.

However, if the term is employed in way misogynist, it can be in charged with a criticism of class by targeting them through ridiculous middle-class women. It is the case in particular in the series of the bluestockings published in the Charivari where Daumier attacks false intellectual (1844).

the expression is always with the masculine, thus will say one of a woman “it is a bluestocking”.

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