The John Kay sketch that adorns the cover of this book depicts five unnamed people standing on Edinburgh's North Bridge. The men look to each other as if in conversation, while the women stand between them, with one facing away from the viewer. The women appear as listeners rather than as discussants themselves. They are present and yet they are relatively passive. In many respects this image is symbolic of women's place in Scottish Enlightenment culture.

As this book has demonstrated, women did play a part in the Scottish Enlightenment, but it was a peripheral one. They were excluded from the intellectual societies that were crucially important to the development of Enlightenment thinking in Scotland, and this position was the same in other manifestations of the public sphere, especially convivial clubs and their usual home, taverns. As with women elsewhere in eighteenth-century Britain, Scotswomen participated in the Enlightenment in an informal sociable capacity, discussing ideas with male literati over tea and in private correspondence. They were able to do this because female education was not entirely neglected during the eighteenth century and, like men, women had access to Enlightenment ideas via the expanding world of print. Yet, unlike in England, women in Scotland did not make a significant contribution to the world of publication until the beginning of the nineteenth century. This was due in part to a close-knit male culture in Edinburgh, with its close connections to the male-defined institutions of the universities and courts, and the lack of opportunities for female intellectual networking compared with that available in London.