The Persona of the Woman Philosopher in Eighteenth‐Century England: Catharine Macaulay, Mary Hays, and Elizabeth Hamilton

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Notes

¹ Elémens de philosophie de Neuton (‘Londres’, 1738), modern edition by R. Walters and W. H. Barber (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1992), hereafter cited as Walters and Barber.

² Voltaire, Elémens, 9. English translation by J. Hanna, The Elements of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy (London, 1738), 2. See also Walters and Barber, 548.

³ ‘La philosophie […] est compatible avec la culture des belles‐lettres, et même avec ce que l’imagination a de plus brillant […] Elle s’accorde encore très bien avec l’esprit d’affaires, pourvu que dans les emplois de la vie civile, on se soit accoutumé à ramener les choses à des principles, et qu’on n’ait point trop appesanti son esprit dans les détails’ (Walters and Barber, 192).

⁴ French philosophes were casualties of the marginalization of non‐systematic forms of philosophizing in the nineteenth century. See K. Haakonssen, ‘The History of Eighteenth‐Century Philosophy: History or Philosophy?’, in K. Haakonssen, The Cambridge History of Eighteenth‐Century Philosophy, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), vol. 1, 19.

⁵ In his Reflexions sur les ouvrages de littérature (1737). See Walters and Barber, 186ff. and 544ff. for both versions of the verses. Voltaire also sent a copy to Thiriot and to Frederick of Prussia (Walters and Barber, 186).

⁶ ‘A Madame la Marquise du Chastelet’, vol. l. 17; 187.

⁷ For Du Châtelet, see J. P. Zinsser, La Dame d’Esprit. A Biography of Madame Du Châtelet (Viking Penguin, 2007) and R. Tâton’s entry in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography (1971), vol. 3, 215–17. Also S. Hutton, ‘Women, Science, and Newtonianism: Emilie du Chatelet versus Francesco Algarotti’ in Newton and Newtonianism, edited by J. E. Force and S. Hutton (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004), 183–203; S. Hutton, ‘Emilie du Châtelet’s Institutions de physique as a document in the history of French Newtonianism’, Cambridge Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 35 (2004), 515–31.

⁸ ‘La philosophie est de tout état et de tout sexe; elle est compatible avec la culture des belles‐lettres, et même avec ce que l’imagination a de plus brillant, pourvu qu’on n’ait point permis à cette imagination de s’accoutumer à orner des faussetés, ni de trop voltiger sur la surface des objets.

‘Elle s’accorde encore très bien avec l’esprit d’affaires, pourvu que dans les emplois de la vie civile, on se soit accoutumé à ramener les choses à des principles, et qu’on n’ait point trop appesanti son esprit dans les détails.

‘Elle est certainement du ressort des femmes, lorsqu’elles ont su mêler aux amusements de leur sexe, cette application constante, qui est peut‐être le don de l’esprit plus rare.

‘Qui jamais à mieux pourvu que vous, Madame, cette vérité? Qui a fait plus d’usage de son esprit et plus d’honneur aux sciences, sans négliger aucun des devoirs de la vie civile? Votre example doit encourager ou faire rougir ceux qui donnent pour excuse de leur paresseuse ignorance, ces vaines occupations qu’on appelle plaisirs, ou devoirs de la société’ (Voltaire, ‘A Madame la Marquise du Chastelet. Avant‐Propos’, Elémens de philosophie de Neuton, first published 1738, modern edition edited by R. Walters and W. H. Barber, 192).

⁹ Elémens de la philosophie de Neuton. Contenant la métaphysique, la théorie de la lumiere, & celle du monde (‘Londres’, 1741).

¹⁰ ‘Votre exemple doit encourager ou faire rougir ceux qui donnent pour excuse de leur paresseuse ignorance, ces vaines occupations qu’on appelle plaisirs, ou devoirs de la société’ (Walters and Barber, 192).

¹¹ ‘Those who see you at court will hardly look upon you as a commentator on philosophy; and the learned, who are learned enough to read your writings, will still less conceive that you can stoop to transitory amusements, with the same ease that you soar to the most sublime truths’ (The Newtonian Philosophy compared with that of Mr Leibnitz (Glasgow, 1764), v).

¹² J. Broad, Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Virtue, Liberty and Toleration. Political Ideas of European Women, 1400–1800, edited by J. Broad and K. Green (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007); L. L. McAlister, Hypatia’s Daughters (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1996); E. O’Neill, ‘Disappearing Ink. Early Modern Women Philosophers and their Fate in History’, in Philosophy in a Feminist Voice, edited by J. A. Kourany (Princeton: University Press, 1996), 17–62. Also, editions of their writings: e.g. C. T. Cockburn, Philosophical Writings, edited by P. Sheridan (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2006); M. Astell and J. Norris, Letters Concerning the Love of God, edited by D. E. Taylor and M. New (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004).

¹³ F. Poulain de la Barre, De l’égalité des deux sexes (1673), English translations by Desmond Clarke’s Introduction to his translation, The Equality of the Sexes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990); V, Bosly, Three Cartesian Feminist Treatises, with an introduction by M. M. Welch (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002). On Poulain, see S. Stuurman, François Poulain de la Barre and the Invention of Modern Equality (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2004).

¹⁴ G. Ménage, Historia mulierum philosopharum (Louvain, 1690), English translation by B. H. Zedler, The History of Women Philosophers (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984).

¹⁵ e.g. T. Amory, The Progress of the Female Mind (London, 1765), Bibliographium Faemineum. The Female Worthies or Memoirs of the Most Illustrious Ladies of All Ages who have been eminently distinguished for their Magnanimity, Learning, Genius, virtue, Piety and other excellent endowments, 2 vols (London, 1766), W. Alexander, The History of Women from the Earliest Antiquity, to the Present Time, 2 vols (London, 1779).

¹⁶ It was Anne Dacier’s translation of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, Réflexions morales de l’empereur Marc Aurèle Antonin (Paris, 1690), that prompted Gilles Ménage to dedicate to her his Historia mulierum philosopharum (O’Neill, ‘Disappearing Ink’, 29). Elizabeth Carter was nicknamed, ‘Epictetus Carter’, on account of All the Works of Epictetus, which are now extant […] translated by Elizabeth Carter (London, 1758).

¹⁷ Both were printed anonymously. M. Astell, Letters concerning the Love of God (1695); D. Masham, Occasional Thoughts (1705).

¹⁸ See my ‘Virtue, God and Stoicism in the Thought of Elizabeth Carter and Catharine Macaulay’ in Virtue, Liberty and Toleration, edited by J. Broad and K. Green (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 137–48.

¹⁹ C. Macaulay, A Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth (London, 1783), 290. This is probably also a comment on the rational style of religious discourse with which she was familiar at this time.

²⁰ See, inter alia, N. Clarke, The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters (London: Pimlico, 2004).

²¹ Although the English bluestockings did not agree that woman’s destiny, as Sophie’s was to serve men, the education of Julie, which encouraged development of an independent mind, was an altogether more attractive proposition. There was much else about La nouvelle Héloise with which they could identify. See M. S. Trouille, Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment (New York: SUNY Press, 1997), 45–60.

²² Carter in M. Pennington, Memoirs of the Life of Mrs Elizabeth Carter, with a new edition of her Poems, to which are added Some Miscellaneous Essays in Prose together with her Notes son the Bible and Answers to Objections concerning the Christian Religion, third edition (London, 1816), vol. 2, 157.

²³ Carter, Memoirs, vol. 2, 156

²⁴ Carter, A Series of Letters Between Mrs Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot (London, 1819), vol. 2, 281.

²⁵ Letters of Elizabeth Montagu with some of the Letters of her Correspondents, edited by M. Pennington, 4 vols (London: T. Cadell, 1813), vol. 2, 124.

²⁶ Mrs Montagu, ‘Queen of the Blues’. Her Letters and Friendships from 1762–1800, edited by R. Blunt, 2 vols (London: Constable, 1923), vol. 2, 125.

²⁹ Emile, 4: 768, as quoted in Seidman‐Trouille, Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment.

²⁷ J. S. Murray, On the Equality of the Sexes, in Rossi, 18–22.

²⁸ Mrs Montagu, edited by Blunt, vol. 1, 63.

³⁰ Notably by Burke, in his Reflections on the Revolution in France.

³¹ C. Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James I to the Brunswick Line, 8 vols (London 1763–91). Her political pamphlets include, Observations on a Pamphlet entitled Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770); Observations on the Reflections of the Right Honourable Mr Edmund Burke on the Revolution in France (1790). On Macaulay, see B. Hill, The Republican Virago. The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Catherine Macaulay: Patriot Historian’, in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, edited by H. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 243–58; S. Hutton, ‘Liberty, Equality and God. The Religious Roots of Catherine Macaulay’s Feminism’, Women, Gender and Enlightenment, edited by S. Knott and B. Taylor (London: Palgrave, 2004); K. Davis, Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren: the Revolutionary Atlantic and the Politics of Gender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); B. Hill and C. Hill, ‘Catharine Macaulay’s History and Her Catalogue of Tracts’, The Seventeenth Century, 8 (1993), 269–85; B. Hill, ‘The Links between Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay: New Evidence’, Women’s History Review, 4 (1995), 177–92.

³² For further discussion, see my ‘Virtue, God, and Stoicism in the Thoughts of Elizabeth Carter and Catharine Macaulay’, in Virtue, edited by Broad and Green, 137–48.

³³ Anon, A Bridal Ode on the Marriage of Catherine and Petruchio (London, 1779).

³⁴ Her publications include a six‐volume Female Biography (1803) and Memoirs of Queens (1821), as well as Historical Dialogues for Young Persons (1806). Gary Kelly is of the opinion that Letters and Essays, ‘stake Hays’s claim to a revolutionary feminism more philosophical than Wollstonecraft’s’ (Kelly, Women, Writing, Revolution, 1790–1827 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 109).

³⁵ J. M. S. Tompkins, cited by M. Brooks, in The Correspondence (1779–1843) of Mary Hays, British Novelist, edited by M. L. Brooks (Lewiston, Queenstown, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2004), 381.

³⁶ Cited in G. Kelly, Women, 110.

³⁷ A modern edition edited by C. Grogan, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2000).

³⁸ Letters on Education (1801–2), Letters on the Elementary Principles of Education (1802), Letters addressed to the Daughter of a Nobleman on the Formation of Religious and Moral Principles (1806); A Series of Popular Essays, illustrative of principles essentially connected with the improvement of the understanding, the imagination, and the heart, 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1813). On Elizabeth Hamilton, see G. Kelly, Women, chs 4 and 8; E. Ty, ‘Female Philosophy Refunctioned: Elizabeth Hamilton’s Parodic Novel’, Ariel, 22:4 (1991), 111–29; F. Price, ‘Democratizing Taste: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and Elizabeth Hamilton’, Romanticism, 8:2 (2002), 179–96.

³⁹ G. Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel, 1780–1805 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).

⁴⁰ When challenged by Mary Hays, Elizabeth Hamilton denied that Hays was the object of her satire, claiming that the book was written before she ever read Godwin’s Political Justice. Hays herself was not convinced by the denial. See Elizabeth Hamilton to Mary Hays, 1797, in Hays, Correspondence, edited by M. Brooks, 314.

⁴¹ The two studies of Hamilton, by F. Price and E. Ty (cited at n32) which discuss the philosophical themes of her book focus on Godwin, but not Rousseau.

⁴² Bridgetina ou les philosophes modernes (Paris, 1802).

⁴³ Kelly, Women, 267.