We are kept like birds in our houses not suffered to fly abroad to see the several changes of Fortune and the various humours ordained and created by nature, and wanting the experience of nature, we must needs want the understanding and knowledge, and so consequently prudence and invention of men.146

  These years also see the rise of diaries written by elite women. They are not a reliable picture of normal women’s lives: there is no recorded diary or journal written by a poor woman before 1660 (which is not to say that none were written – just not valued enough to be kept).147 Some were edited by friends and family. Some were spiritual exercises, with sins and omissions exaggerated for effect. They all report that the only way to complete their spiritual exercises and stay on top of their long, arduous working days is to rise very early and go to bed late. Mary Rich, the Countess of Warwick, was responsible for the running of her home at a manor house in Essex; she personally supervised the dairy and the henhouse, as well as the management of the entire estate, and raised her husband’s three nieces. She kept the account books of household and estate, working as the lady of the house and the estate manager. Her neighbour Elizabeth Walker, who also kept a diary, did very similar work, as well as physically labouring on her land.148

  The diaries show some elite women enjoying the seclusion and protection of a marriage in which the husband represented the family in the wider world of business, law and politics, and his wife undertook the burdens of running estate and house. But some women, such as Lady Anne Clifford, wanted more: ‘All this time my Lord was in London where he had all and infinite great resort coming to him . . . I stayed in the country having many times a sorrowful and heavy heart . . . so as I may truly say I am like an owl in the desert.’149

  Since the diaries were often written as a spiritual exercise, they emphasise spiritual life and sometimes an intense emotional – even sensual – relationship with God. The Countess of Warwick wrote of ‘warmth’ and ‘fire’ in times of spiritual emotional intensity. Some wives explicitly recorded that their marriages were unhappy, and some wrote of deep relief at the death of the husband.150

  Katherine Philips (1632–64) was a poet, translator and dramatist who refused to publish but circulated her poems among friends and family. The poems were published without her permission to her distress: ‘Tis only I . . . that cannot so much as think in private, that must have my imaginations rifled and exposed to play the Mountebanks, and dance upon the Ropes to entertain all the rabble.’151

  Despite her aversion to publication, Philips became known as the ‘Matchless Orinda’ as she used classical names for her friends. Passionate female friendship was her principal theme, and she was regarded as one of the great poets of her day. Her friend Sir Charles Cotterell intended a compliment in his backhanded praise in 1667: ‘Some of [her works] would be no disgrace to the name of any Man that amongst us is most esteemed for his excellency in this kind, and there are none that may not pass with favour, when it is remembered that they fell hastily from the pen but of a woman.’152

  Almost every topic was open to the female author of the early 1700s, including criticism of the condition of women and speculation about the alternatives to marriage. The only subject that women authors avoided completely, until the end of the century, was contraception, it being ‘obvious’ that the first duty of a wife was to produce children.153

  Hannah Woolley (1622–75), daughter of a woman physician, founded her own girls’ school in Hackney, teaching genteel craft skills, and wrote A Gentlewoman’s Companion, arguing that a lady should know all the practical tasks of the household including physic and medicine. She burst out: ‘Man is apt to think that we were merely intended for the world’s propagation and to keep its humane inhabitants sweet and cleane; but by their leaves, had we the same Literature he would find our brains as fruitful as our bodies.’154

  Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century authors were defensive about women: their titles spoke of ‘sanctuaries’ and ‘protections’ for women. But by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, authors had become bolder, speaking of ‘female advocates’ and ‘ladies’ defences’.155 Increasingly, women authors argued that if women received an equal education to men they would be their equals, even superiors.156

  The first periodical specifically aimed at women was launched in 1693 with The Ladies’ Mercury, and was followed by many others, mostly edited by professional women writers, some of them successful novelists, providing an opportunity for freelance women writers and inspiration to women readers. They tended to be short-lived, squeezed out by the more established, and more prestigious, men’s publications, especially the Gentleman’s Magazine.157

  The first woman to make a living from writing was the notorious playwright, novelist and sometime royalist spy Aphra Behn, who published 16 plays in 19 years from 1670. Her 1682 novel Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister ran to 16 editions. She wrote bawdy, witty plays for the women actors who now took to the stage, including the new king’s mistress Nell Gwynn. Behn, who claimed that arranged marriages were little better than prostitution, would be widely condemned for the sexual freedom of her writing; but she was hugely successful.158

  With rare exceptions, early women authors found it hard to make a living from writing. Those who had no family support turned their hands to all sorts of authorship: journalism, pamphleteering, research and factual writing, other forms of fiction and publishing serials. Writers such as these, trying to earn a living from ‘hack’ work – named for the London parish of Hackney where they lived – found themselves forced to take writing commissions from any publisher that would pay them. Such female authors lost status by being women for hire, unlike genteel authors who could pass off their writing as an elegant hobby. Jane Barker (1652–?), one of the first women to make a living from her writing, supplemented it with the sale of her own patent medicine, and gave herself a doctor’s title: Dr Barker’s Famous Gout Plaister. Eliza Haywood (1693–1756) salvaged her reputation as a runaway wife, playwright and novelist of bawdy love stories by turning to novels about female suffering and female sexual restraint.

  The new form of fiction – the novel – developed through many early literary experiments in form and genre from about 1720, until it became the dominant voice of Romanticism. Readers were said to prefer female authors for novels, many of which were published anonymously – by ‘A Lady’. Some of them may even have been ladies. A survey of titles between 1750 and 1769 shows more women than men authors in 11 of the 19 years; but few women were as well paid as men.159

  Women writers could face criticism for speaking out, since the convention that they should be silent and above all ‘modest’ remained strong, and was growing. Some women tried to avoid censure by claiming to write only for their own sex, or chose a subject that was appropriate for women, such as domestic skills or devotion to God. Some developed a habit of apologising for publishing and blamed an inadequate education for any flaws in their work, in the hope of making male critics more generous in their criticism. A study of prefaces to poetry between 1667 and 1750 revealed that half apologised for the author being a woman, reassuring the reader that she was not a professional poetess and had not intended to publish.160

  But by writing and publishing under their own names, women challenged the belief that they were naturally unintelligent, incapable, incoherent, overly emotional. The seventeenth-century women writers – by their very presence – contradicted the conventional assumptions and increasingly loud assertions about women’s lack of abilities, lack of intelligence and their restricted opportunities. The 1660s see the first consciously feminist thinking, with women authors declaring that there was no justification for restrictions on women or their lack of opportunities: not in the Bible, nor in the nature of women. An author calling herself ‘Esther Sowerman’ turned the Creation story around to prove the superiority of the woman, claiming ‘that women were superior to men as they were created from Adam’s rib and not from dust’.161

  Mary Astell (1666–1731) argued that there could be no logical reason for male dominance, that men were not born free and women were not born slaves.162 Her book A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694) proposed residential centres for single women as places of education and refuge – like Protestant nunneries – where women could live apart from men. She took inspiration from Queen Anne, her patron, and her friends included Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Judith Drake, Elizabeth Elstob and many others. They were the forerunners of the eighteenth-century ‘bluestocking salons’ – women-organised gatherings of intellectuals in London, whose leading lights would be Hester Thrale, Hester Chapone, Elizabeth Montagu and Elizabeth Carter: all writers who supported other women writers.163 Other women corresponded with male philosophers and scientists.

  Mary Astell’s book on marriage, Some Reflections on Marriage (1700), suggested that a union could become a relationship of tyranny and slavery.164 A wife had chosen a ‘monarch for life’, with nothing to do but ‘please and obey’.165 She urged readers that there was nothing terrifying about the name ‘Old Maid’ and that they could be ‘absolute Monarchs in their own Bosums’.166

  Astell challenged the idea of the superiority of men by citing the paradox of the ‘Queen’s footman’, an example of how inequality based on sex (the footman was superior to the queen) conflicted with inequality based on class (the queen was superior to the footman): ‘If every Man is by Nature superior of every Woman, it would be a sin in Woman to have Dominion over any Man, and the greatest Queen ought not to command but to obey her footman.’167

  Sport

  After twenty years’ of Parliamentary suppression of sports, the Restoration heralded a return to public exhibitions of women footracing, pitching the bar, playing football, cricket and fighting in public competitions for wagers, challenges or prize money. Samuel Pepys watched girls running for wagers at the Bowling Green, London, in 1667. In Manchester 1681, three women raced naked for the prize of a Holland shift – a typical prize of a petticoat or an overgown of good quality ‘Holland’ material. In Lancashire in 1696, at a horse race meet, girls ran a race for a smock and a guinea. In Berkshire a year later, at another race meeting, women raced each other for a smock.168

  By the middle of the eighteenth century, several women’s annual footraces had been organised across the country, with winners from one race excluded from the others, the first example of a set of interrelated women’s races. Many were so-called ‘smock or shift’ races with dresses or petticoats for the prize. Women raced barefoot, wearing white waistcoats and drawers, and sometimes naked. Women runners dominated the sport, running the same distances as men, and often further. Fast runners became famous, challenging each other: in 1712, ‘The Flying Milk Woman of Ormond-Street’ ran against ‘The Mad Bess of Southwark’ for 5 guineas a side on Hounslow Heath.169

  Record crowds gathered in the windows and balconies of the houses on Pall Mall for a race in 1732 that was won by Hannah Williams, who scooped the prize of a fine Holland smock. Hannah’s husband made her sell her prize and buy two of ‘coarse thread’ in its place.170

  Women were renowned for their skills as boxers and prizefighters. Elizabeth Wilkinson Stokes was called a championess, even though the most able male boxer James Figg was not called a champion.171 She published a challenge in the London Journal in June 1722: ‘I, Elizabeth Wilkinson, of Clarkenwell, having had some words with Hannah Highfield and requiring satisfaction, do invite her to meet me on the stage and box with me for three guineas, each woman holding half a crown in each hand, and the first women that drops her money to lose the battle.’172

  Hannah replied: ‘I, Hannah Highfield of Newgate Market hearing of the resoluteness of Elizabeth Wilkinson will not fail, God willing, to give her more blows than words, desiring home blows, and of her no favour. She may expect a good thrumping.’173

  Elizabeth Wilkinson introduced rules and a dress code to women’s matches, with fighters expected to wear ‘cloth jackets, short petticoats coming just below the knee, Holland drawers, white stockings and pumps’. Although famous for her fist-fights, she also fought with swords, knives and quarterstaff. A spectator at a fight in 1728 described:

  a small Englishwoman, full of fire and very agile . . . she wore red ribbons. They began to fight with ‘a sort of two-handed sword, three or three and a half feet in length; the guard was covered, and the blade was about three inches wide and not sharp only about half a foot of it was, but then that part cut like a razor.’ After some sparring, the Irishwoman was cut across her forehead and the fight was stopped for the wound to be sewn up by a surgeon, and a plaster applied to it. She then took ‘a big glass of spirits to revive her courage’ and the fight resumed, this time with each fighter ‘holding a dagger in her left hand to ward off the blows.’ The Irishwoman was wounded again, and again the fight was stopped for her to be sewn up. When it was recommenced, the women held wicker shields for defense, but the Irishwoman received ‘a long and deep wound all across her neck and throat,’ which again was sewn up but she was too badly hurt to continue. With ‘the combatants . . . dripping with perspiration, and the Irishwoman also with blood,’ the fight came to an end, and coins were thrown to the fighters.174

  Elizabeth Wilkinson was known as the prime English fighter until her name fell from the record in the last years of the nineteenth century, when boxing became known as a male sport and she was forgotten.175

  ‘The greatest cricket match that was played in this part of England,’ according to the Reading Mercury of 1745, was between the Bramley maids in blue ribbons and the Hambledon maids with red ribbons on their heads: ‘The Bramley girls got 119 notches and the Hambledon girls 127. There was of bothe sexes the greatest number that ever was seen on such an occasion. The girls bowled, batted, ran and catches as well as most men could do in that game.’176

  The earliest report of a game of football with modern-style rules is of a women’s match. In 1726, women were reported playing a ‘friendly’ match of six-a-side football at the Bowling Green, Bath, on a weekday, but playing professionally for money on Sundays on a pitch before paying spectators.177

  Romanticism

  From about 1740, the Enlightenment insistence on the superiority of thought (male) over feelings (female) started to be challenged by a new insistence on the merit of strong feelings and the revelation of deep truth in deep emotion. This was ‘sensibility’.178 Only the upper classes possessed sensibility. Adam Smith, father of the Enlightenment, declared that it was ‘much beyond what is possessed by the rude vulgar of mankind’.179

  A whole new gulf was opened up between women, separating those who were stoical and unresponsive from those who were highly strung. Ladies were supposed to be born with a refined sensibility that prompted them to virtue, while working-class women were the ‘rude vulgar of mankind’. People came to believe that women of the aristocracy, gentry and rising middle classes were so different from women of the labouring classes as to have almost nothing in common, almost another species. Even their biology – physical strength, sexual response, pain threshold – was said to be different.180

  Of course, this confirmed courtly love ideas about the delicacy and frigidity of elite women, and was supported by the conduct books which had taught for more than a century that ladies should be non-productive, sexually cold and inactive. These hard-taught traits were now observed in genteel ladies as if they had occurred naturally – and were described as the ‘natural’ difference between ladies and lower-class women. Observers noticed a complete difference between virtuous upper-class women and the untutored bawdy women of the lower classes.181

  The research in women’s sex organs was used to confirm women’s difference from men, their inferiority to men, and their general unfitness for life. By the end of the 1600s, the belief that upper- and middling-class women’s nature was maternal, tender, emotional and illogical, and that they were physically frail or at least inactive, implied that ladies were obviously unfit for public office or responsibility outside the home.182 Working-class women were excluded from authority on the grounds that they were ignorant and ill-judging through lack of education, and ‘naturally’ inconsistent and unreliable because female.

  Novels replaced conduct books as the most popular way of teaching literate women the qualities they needed to demonstrate gentility. Passionate feelings about Nature or Art could shake a lady and move her to tears or even faintness; but sexuality was completely repressed. Heroines in the eighteenth-century novel were highly emotional but never sexually voracious. They felt passionately; but they did not lust. In life, and in literature, almost all the interest in female behaviour focused upon how a woman repressed sexual appetite; and a woman’s ‘virtue’ came to mean nothing more than her sexual inactivity.183

  The stories initially followed the literary tradition of ‘histories’ – fictionalised biographies. As the many anonymous and named women authors made the form their own, they developed it to suit their own particular tastes and based it on their experience. No longer would the heroine be a woman of classical times, or a royal mistress in France; the elite English women authors set the fictions in the place they knew best: the imaginary English home and the imaginary English countryside. This was far from the real English upper-class home, which was arduously supported by the underpaid work of an army of domestic servants, financed by the underpaid labourers in a distant factory and slaves in a distant land. This was not the real English countryside: increasingly a place of struggle for women being driven from the land to earn a living. It was a fantasy England from an imaginary golden age of good lordship, happy peasantry and ladies in a big house or castle.