Quotes from Amanda Vickery

Indubitably, eighteenth-century literature contains much that nineteenth-century historians might identify as 'domestic ideology', yet these themes were far from revolutionary. The dialectical polarity between home and world is an ancient trope of western writing; the notion that women were uniquely fashioned for the private realm is at least as old as Aristotle.

Public life for Georgian gentlemen invariably assumed the taking of office, but there was no formal place for their wives in the machinery of local government. However, this rough division between private and public could be applied to almost any century or any culture–a fact which robs the distinction of its analytical purchase. 19

While not above the occasional exhibition of an almost theatrical feminine inferiority when petitioning for favours, the habitual self-projection of most was of upright strength, stoical fortitude and self-command.

Too often the manuscripts of Georgian commercial families have been studied without reference to the surviving records of their landed neighbours. By reading the personal papers of commercial families in conjunction with those of the landed gentry, a neglected aspect of the pyramid of local society is revealed.

the rapid increase of wealth permitted the wives of prosperous men to withdraw from productive activity.

the spread of capitalistic organization concentrated manufacturing on central premises–separating the home and workplace, with devastating consequences for female enterprise.

Wives of the middle and upper classes increasingly became idle drones. They turned household management over to stewards, reduced their reproductive responsibilities by contraceptive measures, and passed their time in such occupations as novel reading, theatre going, card playing and formal visits … The custom of turning wives into ladies 'languishing in listlessness' as ornamental status objects spread downwards through the social scale. 4

Scholars of English literature have tried to chart the construction of domesticated femininity, although there is a certain confusion as to whether the new domestic woman was the epitome of bourgeois personality, or was an ornament shared by the middling ranks and the landed.

the book is not an exhaustive account of all aspects of female experience, but a concentrated examination of the concerns that privileged women were prepared to commit to paper (two topics that were virtually never canvassed, for instance, were spirituality and sex).

the extraordinary eighteenth-century proliferation of literature which glamorized romantic experience.

Do not marry a very young man, you know not how he may turn out; it is a lottery at best but it is a very just remark that "it is better to be an old man's darling than a young man's scorn".

These were the women who, in Eliza Haywood's understanding, were not 'placed so high as to have their actions above the Reach of Scandal', but those 'who have Reputations to lose, and who are not altogether so independent, as not to have it their Interest to be thought well of by the World'.

As Pollock has astutely observed 'it is uncoerced consent which lies at the heart of our marital system not unconstrained choice'. 10

Nobles who threw away All For Love remained the deluded exception, for as the wits put it 'Love in a cottage? … Give me indifference and a coach and six.' 8

Yet because few historians have concerned themselves with the lesser gentry, the case studies which would settle the issue are scarce.

Interestingly, single women were prominent amongst rentiers, investors and money lenders, suggesting that wealthier women had long found trade an unappetizing option. 11

Human motivation rarely boils down either to pure, disinterested emotion or to scheming, material strategy. 11 In any case, that the eighteenth century witnessed a great surge of romantic emotion which washed away all mercenary stains is unlikely in the extreme.

After all, in their fears about the vicious consequences of wealth, writers fell back upon stereotypical images of devouring, unreasonable womanhood, images that were as old as Eve herself–something which suggests we might better view such accusations as testimony to the persistence of male anxieties, rather than a simple guide to female behaviour. 13

In 1790s ladies' debating societies were still deliberating 'In the Marriage State, which constitutes the greater Evil, Love without Money, or Money without Love?' 12