The Bluestockings: A History of the First Women's Movement

It is a delight to read this vividly fresh celebration of mid-eighteenth-century scholars, intellectuals, and conversationalists, who dared to deviate from gender norms, a new breed of womanhood preceding Mary Wollstonecraft's claim for 'a new genus.' Susannah Gibson, an eloquent storyteller, offers a novel approach to group biography with a series of telling chapters on salons, friendship, motherhood, and love.--Lyndall Gordon, author of The Hyacinth Girl
Brilliant, earnest, quietly unconventional, the Bluestockings are the unsung pioneers of early British feminism. Their networks empowered women while their salons, stressing conversation and civility, opposed the misogynous, boozy male culture of the eighteenth century. Blending story, history, and delicious anecdote, Susannah Gibson's book opens a sparkling window onto this extraordinary society of engaged, energetic, and very witty women.--Janet Todd, author of Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden
Susannah Gibson's important, fluidly written book brings vividly to life the salons and communes, friendships and mentorships and rivalries of some of the most important figures of the English Enlightenment. It is an alien world, in some ways: of women who invite writers to move in with their families, and who throw parties every night for the leading painters and writers and politicians of their time. But it is also a magnetically attractive world, and one that shapes our own. I am so grateful for this book.--Benjamin J. B. Lipscomb, author of The Women Are Up to Something
Spirited, lively, and scholarly....A close-up view of some notable bluestockings leaves the reader gasping at their energy.--Miranda Seymour "Literary Review"
The author's engaging account honors the determination and charm with which her subjects seized as much freedom as society would allow them. Vivid popular history illuminating some neglected feminist pioneers.-- "Kirkus Reviews"
Scholarly but accessible, vividly rendered, and a font of inspiration for the modern woman thinker.-- "The Millions"
As the Irish writer and historian Susannah Gibson shows in her intelligent and engrossing new book, The Bluestockings, their insistence on women's rationality as the basis for equal treatment could make the Bluestockings quite punitive toward any among them who strayed from the straight and narrow...But let's give them the credit they're due, as Gibson does, persuasively and without special pleading.--Margaret Talbot "The New Yorker"
Fast-paced and intimate...Gibson conjures palpably the all too ephemeral achievement of the Bluestockings: their sparkling conversation, wafting out through high windows, to be borne down the centuries by the London breeze.--Francesca Wade "New York Times Book Review"
A revelation...Susannah Gibson tells a group history about these fascinating women, people who launched intellectual salons, founded communes, ran their husband's business better than he could and so on, all while facing the opprobrium of society.--Michael Glitz "Parade"
A vivid and absorbing series of interwoven biographies of some of the era's most fascinating and accomplished females...Among the many pleasures of The Bluestockings is the reminder that history doesn't consist of the churning of vast impersonal forces but has at its heart the personalities and ambitions of singular men and women.--Meghan Cox Gurdon "Wall Street Journal"