Introduction

The bluestockings established a set of literary, civic and political discourses that provided a framework for the opening up of literary and political movements, including the Bloomsbury Group and the suffrage movement. Habermas's (1989: 55–6) understanding of the ‘bourgeois public sphere’ is central in this respect. He distinguished between two forms of ‘public’. Firstly, ‘the world of letters’, where Habermas described ‘privatized individuals in their capacity as human beings [who] communicated through critical debate and secondly the “political realm”’, which Habermas described as ‘private people in their capacity as owners of commodities [who] communicated through rational-critical debate’. Guest (2003: 65), drawing on Hannah More, notes that by the late 18th century there was a social world of the educated elite. She notes that this could go beyond the bluestockings and ‘constituted something resembling Habermas's notion of the literary public formed by the educated class’.

Guest (2003: 78) shows that the bluestockings’ distance from politics epitomizes the gendered character of the public sphere in the 18th century: ‘the feminine right to Habermas's public world of letters seems to be confirmed by its juxtaposition with the political realm’. Guest skilfully draws on Habermas's relationship of the educated classes with the bourgeois political public sphere to understand the way in which bluestocking society established the potential of a feminine political voice. As Guest (2003: 80) shows, it: ‘may have made it possible for more explicitly political writers such as Macaulay, Wollstonecraft and later Hays to think about gender as a collective identity in ways that were more directly and explicitly political.’

Pohl and Schellenberg (2003: 11), in their analysis of Habermas's contribution to an understanding of 18th-century writings, state that

A variety of feminist scholars (Landes, 2013; Meehan, 2013; Wilson, 1995, among others) are critical of Habermas's model as hegemonic, exclusive and gendered.