Scholars and critics of autobiography have generally either assumed or claimed to discern a peculiarly feminine sensibility in the autobiographical writings of women. Their attempts at deigning this quality have been sometimes penetrating, sometimes vague, sometimes silly, and frequently confusing and contradictory. Anna Robeson Burr, as we have seen, proclaims that "there is no sex to the autobiographer,"¹ but she goes on to add that:

The great self-student may be either man or woman; it is only required that he be thoroughly the one or the other. Equipment for this task is as much woman’s as man’s; each has his special candor, each his temperamental reticence. As regards memory alone, the woman’s is usually more intimate, more personal, more limited and more complete; and the data furnished by both may be used without undue attention to the fact of sex. Comparative study tends to show, at least, that those powers of memory which bring about and confirm the autobiographical impulse, belong to both sexes, and place the results of self-study equally within the reach of both.²

The difficulty of determining precisely her position on the subject is compounded by the difficulty of determining her meaning. The question she raises, that of memory, seems in itself to be a rather peculiar angle of attack, and I think there may be more to be gained from posing the question in other terms. Another odd assertion--odd because it doesn’t really bear up when applied to actual cases--is Lord Butler’s remark:

. . . I should like to ask why there have not been more women autobiographers. This I think is because they are usually more interested in other people than they are in themselves. One cannot imagine a female Rousseau or a woman like Montaigne. Santa Theresa is perhaps an exception, but there is a reticence which is not found in the true male egotist. . . .

There is no female Pepys, much less Boswell. Women are shrewder observers of others than of themselves. This observation of the rest of the world is too precious to leave time for introspection. As V. S. Pritchett has put it, they have not by nature the degree of egotism ‘which allows a man to split in two and follow one part of himself like a devoted dog.’³

While it is true that women have traditionally been trained in an ethic of service to others, the prejudice against women writers is more than sufficient to account for the relative scarcity of female autobiographers. And as an egotist, Margaret Cavendish, for one, stands up with the best of them, with Charlotte Charke not far behind. If one cannot imagine a female Rousseau or Montaigne, neither can one very well imagine, in their respective periods, an English Rousseau or Montaigne. On the whole, it seems wise, at least at this point, to be a little more conservative about stating what men or women, or Englishmen or Frenchmen, are like "by nature." Joyce M. Horner, speaking primarily of novelists and moderately lucid on the subject of masculine and feminine characteristics in writing, is more sensibly cautious:

It would be interesting to look back from a point in the future to see how far women’s work has changed as their experience has widened. Then, indeed, we might be able to judge between the feminine mind and the feminine tradition.⁴

Donald A. Stauffer, while not very specific, suggests a more manageable method of dealing with autobiographies by women (in the seventeenth century):

As a class they are far more interesting and important than the autobiographies of men--more personal, informal, and lifelike. Where the men tend to digress on questions of history, or grow prolix in controversial accounts, the women remain self-centered and confidential, engrossed in the more enthralling problems of their own lives.⁵

Paul Delany extends and refines Stauffer’s observations:

To discuss female autobiographers separately, discarding the categories previously used, is a choice which requires explanation and, perhaps, defence. This choice stems from the observation that English women of the seventeenth century lacked, because of their subservient social position, that firm identification with profession or occupation which was typical of their male counterparts. . . . Often their experience of wider horizons than simple domesticity came from identification with their husbands’ careers and interests--at best, a second-hand participation.

Perhaps as a result of this relatively weak vocational interest, female autobiographers strike the modern reader as having, generally, a more ‘unified sensibility’ than their male counterparts: their lives seem less compartmentalized, they have a wider range of emotional responses to everyday events and more awareness of concrete realities.⁶

All this sounds very good; but is it true? His isolated examples support his thesis, but one is left to wonder whether they are really representative. What, for example, are we to make of the following observation:

Lady Fanshawe’s memoirs showed how anecdotes from the world of society and politics could be enlivened and humanized by the addition of small, but significant, details such as the feminine eye did not scorn to notice and record--the colour of the cabin-boy’s cap, for example, in the passage quoted on p. 161.⁷

Pouncing upon the single word "blue," he proceeds to infer a whole concept of the "feminine eye." I do not wish to denigrate the value of such impressions, especially when formed by a sensitive scholar who has immersed himself in his subject. But there is nonetheless a tendency in such circumstances to see what one expects to see--especially when the subject itself is so encrusted by traditional notions and unquestioned assumptions. Nor do I wish to deny the existence or importance of stylistic differences between the autobiographies of men and women. The whole subject of whether there is actually a woman’s style that is independent of the time or place in which she is writing is a very interesting one, and one to which feminist literary criticism is only beginning to address itself. Much of it harks back to Virginia Woolf, who contends in A Room of One’s Own that the great women novelists of the nineteenth century were handicapped by the lack of a feminine tradition in style.⁸ But the question of whether it is possible to distinguish the whole body of autobiographies written by women before 1800 from those written by their male contemporaries on the basis of style alone, and the related question of whether these hypothetical distinctions are to be attributed to innate or environmental differences, is enormously complicated and outside the scope of such a study as this. My suspicion is that it would be rather difficult to do so.

A difference which is at once more obvious and more crucial is the difference in subject matter. Shulamith Firestone, the radical feminist Marxist thinker, has pointed out that:

. . . the difference between the "male" approach to art and the "female" is not, as some like to think, simply a difference of "style" in treating the same subject matter (personal, subjective, emotional, descriptive vs. vigorous, spare, hard-hitting, cool, objective) but the very subject matter itself. The sex role system divides human experience; men and women live in these different halves of reality; and culture reflects this.⁹

And indeed, the larger part of most women’s autobiographies, especially those which are primarily secular in orientation, are taken up with matters which men usually relegate to a few sentences or omit altogether as not being germane to an evaluation of who and what they are--namely, domestic connections and intimate interpersonal relationships.¹⁰ Such a difference in subject matter is no more trivial than the difference in subject matter between Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Donne’s Holy Sonnets. If women were relegated to hearth and home, they compensated for their lack of worldly experience by actively cultivating their interest in the human drama. What for man was mere background in his overall conception of his life became for woman the main event. Moreover, the constellation of myths that produced the cultural idea of woman was so perverse that it affected every woman’s idea of what she was: man is the norm, woman is the other.

Such sweeping generalizations cannot be made without the qualifying statement that the outlooks and interests which can be said to characterize women underwent a considerable change of focus over the course of the period. For example, every woman autobiographer, on some level, accepted the proposition that she was a member of the subordinate sex, but her interpretation of and attitude toward this postulate altered considerably. My aim, as stated in chapter I, was to trace the development of the feminine sensibility as expressed in women’s autobiography, a genre which implies a conception of the author’s life as an organic whole and not merely as a series of events. A general assessment of the works discussed in this study will perhaps help us to draw some tentative conclusions about this development, and to perceive the shifting patterns in women’s awareness of themselves.

If the mood of women in the seventeenth century as expressed in their autobiographies can be summed up in a single word, that word would be "accepting." Because the old traditions of order and female subordination are still workable within this social context, women can engage fairly comfortably in conventional relationships and can submit to a subordinate role without being overwhelmed by a sense of oppression. For Lucy Hutchinson, it was simply a matter of following the natural order of things:

. . . never man had a greater passion for a woman, nor a more honourable esteem of a wife; yet he was not uxurious, nor remitted he that just rule which it was her honour to obey, but managed the reins of govermant with such prudence and affection that she who would not delight in such an honourable and advantageable subjection, must have wanted a reasonable soul.¹¹

Especially after the political turmoil of the Civil Wars, clinging to the old patterns may actually provide an element of serenity and stability in a world where the sanctity of these patterns can no longer be simply taken for granted.

As the following passage from Margaret Cavendish suggests, the differences between males and females, and the importance of perpetuating those differences through education, were part of a larger pattern of order in society which was necessary for human happiness:

As for my breeding, it was according to my birth, and the nature of my sex; for my birth was not lost in my breeding. For as my sisters was or had been bred, so was I in plenty, or rather with superfluity. Likewise we were bred virtuously, modestly, civilly, honourably, and on honest principles. As for plenty, we had not only for necessity, conveniencey, and decency, but for delight and displeasure to a superfluity; it is true we did not riot, but we lived orderly; for riot, even in kings’ courts and princes’ palaces, brings ruin without content or pleasure, when order in less fortunes shall live more plentifully and deliciously than princes that lives in a hurly-burly, as I may term it, in which they are seldom well served. For disorder obstructs; besides, it doth disgust life, distract the appetites, and yield not true relish to the senses; for pleasure, delight, peace, and felicity live in method and temperance.¹²

The superiority of males simply was not questioned. Alice Thornton casually remarks on her husband’s hopes for a son.¹³ When one of her sons dies, she explains to her four-year-old daughter that her husband grieves so because "being a son he takes it more heavily."¹⁴ Women not only accepted their subordination but actually found it a positive virtue, one which they could constructively work to achieve. Lucy Hutchinson proclaimed herself:

. . . a faithful mirror, reflecting truly, though but dimly, his own glories upon him, so long as he was present; but she that was nothing before his inspection gave her a fair figure, when he was removed, was only filled with a dark mist, and never could again take in any delightful object, nor return any shining representation. The greatest excellency she had was the power of apprehending and the virtue of loving his; so as his shadow she waited on him everywhere, till he was taken into that region of light which admits of none, and then she vanished into nothing.¹⁵

They take pride in their husbands’ accomplishments. In the following curious passage from Anne Fanshawe, her husband is even given credit for successfully delivered children, while she takes the blame for the abortions: "My dear husband had six sons and eight daughters, born and christened, and I miscarried of six more. . . ."¹⁶ Mary Penington desires to be "serviceable" to her husband and finds a kind of exaltation in sacrificing for him: "I gave up much to be a companion to him in . . . his suffering."¹⁷

As one reads these words, one senses that the feeling of subordination sat relatively lightly on these women because the social system still allowed them a kind of dignity. They were not simply thrust under the thumb of any man who could successfully barter for them; they played an essential role and saw themselves as essential to the completion of the social unit. Anne Fanshawe calls her husband her "better half" with no irony and asserts "we never had but one mind throughout our lives. Our souls were wrapped up in each other’s; our aims and designs one, our loves one, and our resentments one."¹⁸ There was still a sense of connectedness with their husbands, a sense of linked and shared fates. She was not simply a part of him; rather, they were both a part of something larger. Though Anne Clifford clearly had great difficulty with both of her husbands, she not only defends them but identifies herself with them and their families.

It may also be that subordination was less onerous than it might have been because, as is evident from the autobiographies of the period, the social system permitted upper-class women to take some legitimate pleasure in their own achievements. Many of them evince self-satisfaction in their early precocity. And though a declaration of timidity is practically a badge of membership in the female sex, there is a certain amount of pride in Ann Halkett’s description of herself fending off enemy soldiers; in Mary Rich’s journey unaccompanied through the embattled countryside; in Anne Fanshawe’s facing Turkish pirates at her husband’s side. Though these pleasures were in a sense anomalous, they were not perceived as such, perhaps because the husbands of these women, secure in their high birth, were self-confident enough to be supportive, and perhaps because such exploits offered a kind of escape valve to keep the sense of subordination from becoming oppressive. As long as women were willing and able to operate within the system of female subjugation, to see evidence of their own excellence as exceptional, individual marks of courage or intelligence did not threaten the social fabric and perhaps even reinforced it.

Moreover, the single life was still seen as an acceptable way of life, for the unmarried female relative could still be a productive member of a household. Almost every seventeenth century female autobiographer eventually married, but before doing so many professed great aversion to the married state; "I did dread marriage," said Margaret Cavendish, "and shunned men’s company as much as I could."¹⁹ To be sure, such reluctance is not shocking in view of the realities of marriage: it represented not only a great burden of responsibility, but also the pain and extreme danger of repeated childbirth. But women also had genuine and positive feelings about the unmarried state for its own sake, not simply for the absence of the problems imposed by marriage. Mary Rich enjoyed "living so much at my ease that I was unwilling to change my condition, and never could bring myself to close with any offered match";²⁰ and Alice Thornton asserts "I was exceeding satisfied in that happie and free condittion, wherein I injoyed my time with delight abundantly in the service of my God, and the obedience I owed to such an excelent parent, in whoes injoyment I accounted my daies spent with great content and comfort. . . ."²¹

Since the single life at least appeared to be a genuine option, the decision to marry became a matter of choice rather than necessity. Even though marriage was, for the woman, a clear-cut matter of self-surrender--Mary Rich described her commitment as having "given away myself to him"²²--the act of choice is of itself a kind of self-ratification. Certainly financial pressures often exerted great influence in the selection of mates, but not as extensively and as explicitly as was to occur in the eighteenth century. Though women may not have been very free to choose their mates, they accepted by and large the cultural myth which said that they were.

For seventeenth century English women, much more than men, love acted as a defining force. Although it is not possible to say whether love was inherently more important to women than to men, we can assert with confidence that it was more crucial to the way women saw themselves, especially among women whose orientation was primarily secular. The self, we may say, is largely defined by the choice one makes; but we must recognize that the choices realistically open to a woman were far more limited than those open to a man. The professions were virtually closed to women. For a woman to sustain any sort of a position of independence required a more radical social and intellectual posture than most human beings are willing to take. In other ways, too, women’s lives were more restricted than men’s. Because they lived in a world where men made the rules, and had for centuries, women were bound much more oppressively by tradition and prescriptions for behavior. Even biologically their lives were less under their own control. Sex within marriage meant pregnancy after pregnancy, a life of "female troubles," and very possibly early death from puerperal fever; sex outside marriage meant all these things and severe social stigmatization to boot; the alternative was celibacy. On every social level, however unfree the men were, the women were more unfree. But loving was something a woman could legitimately do.

Either because they weren’t expected to or because they didn’t have to, men simply did not define themselves in this way. Even those men whose marriages we know from other sources to have been happy and fulfilling make little or no mention of it. For example, Sir Richard Baxter, the great Puritan divine, has left in his Reliquiae Baxterianae a lengthy and thoughtful "Narrative of the Most Memorable Passages of his Life and Times"; he has also left a penetrating and sympathetic biography of his wife Margaret--a work which stands as a touching memorial of his affection and respect for her. Yet it is significant, I think, that the two were conceived as separate works, and no hint of the latter appears in the former.

An unusual example of a male autobiography in which love plays an extensive role is Sir Kenelm Digby’s Loose Fantasies, and autobiographical work thinly disguised as a romance, dealing largely with his love affair and subsequent marriage to the notorious Venetia Stanley. The narrative was a bit of a private scandal in its day, as was the marriage it chronicled; and though its focus on love as a sexual fantasy represents a departure from the usual male autobiography, it bears stylistic and philosophical affinities to Euphues and the Arcadia:

" . . . I, by soaring up to perfections above me, do daily refine myself, whilst you are fain to let yourself down, unless it be when your contemplations, rolling like the heavens about their own centre, do make yourself their object."

"Fie, fie", said Stelliana, "stop that mouth, which were it any other but whose it is, I would call it a sacrilegious mouth, that thus blasphemeth against the saint that I adore".

"If I have sinned", replied Theagenes, "then sanctify it with yours; and if you fear it should blaspheme . . . here take you the merit of preventing the issuing of any sacrilegious words!" The last of which he breathed into her mouth; for joining his lips fast to hers, all other language was stopped between them both, whilst their souls, ascending to the very extremities of their thongues, began a mystical discourse, which ended not till Theagenes, thinking he was too prodigal of heaven’s blessing to let time slide away whilst he contented himself with the possession of but half of that which maketh lovers happy, did bid his hands speak for him, in their dumb language expressing what it was he desired.²³

It need hardly be said that there is nothing remotely comparable to this in any of the autobiographical writings of seventeenth century women which have come down to us. Strictly speaking, there is also little of this sort of thing in works by men. But love and sexual love, insofar as they are mentioned at all, are frequently synonymous in the works of men. Thomas Raymond tells us "I was soe pestered by the foolish blynde boy with a young defte wench that waited on my aunte that I could not rest for it. And this being the proper age for love matters, I had a greate and vexatious share of them."²⁴ Such "loves" are easily dispensed with: "still I had some pangs of the boy Cupids tricks about me for that pretty wench, but left hir now the more litly for my deere friend, honest J. Bouillon, whoe was almost madd for hir. We had some turnes aboute hir by letter. . . ."²⁵

More often, a man will scarcely touch on his intimate or domestic relations. One can thumb through index after index in works by men and find only the most cursory references, if any, to wife and children. Clarendon, if we are to believe his protestations, was most shaken by the death of his first wife; yet he disposes of courtship, remarriage, and the death of his wife in a few lines:

. . . to call home all straggling and wandering appetite, which naturally produce irresolution and inconstancy in the mind, with his father’s consent and approbation he married a young lady very fair and beautiful, the daughter of sir George Ayliffe, a gentleman of a good name and fortune in the county of Wilts, where his own expectations lay, and by her mother (a St. John) nearly allied to many noble families in England. He enjoyed this comfort and composure of mind a very short time, for within less than six months after he was married, being upon the way from London to his father’s house, she fell sick at Reading, and discovered themselves, and (she being with child) forced her to miscarry; and she died within two days. He bore her loss with so great passion and confusion of spirit, that it shook all the frame of his resolutions, and nothing but his entire duty and reverence to his father kept him from giving over all thoughts of books, and transporting himself beyond the seas to enjoy his own melancholy; nor could any persuasion or importunity from his friends prevail with him in some years to think of another marriage.²⁶

Perhaps it will be argued that this marriage lasted only a few months; yet Clarendon, barely a page later, gives us scarcely more of his second wife, "by whom he had many children of both sexes, with whom he lived very comfortably in the most uncomfortable times, and very joyfully in those times when matter of joy was administered, for the space of five or six and thirty years. . . ."²⁷ He adds that from "the time of his marriage he laid aside all other thoughts but of his profession, to the which he betook himself very seriously. . . ."²⁸ However much he may have loved his wives, it is clear that he vies the primary function of marriage as providing him with a stable sex life, so that his libido will not distract him from his career. Clarendon, of course, is of lasting interest as a distinguished historical figure; but even men whose careers seem to provide less matter for autobiography do not dwell on their domestic relations. Sir John Bramston tells us matter-of-factly that "On the 19th of Nouember followinge, I married, in the parish church, St. Diones Backchurch, London, vnto Alice, the eldest daughter of Anthony Abdy, alderman of London."²⁹ After the marriage we hear nothing of her beyond a list of the miscarriages and births of their children, until she dies. On this subject, he waxes more eloquent than most male writers do; still, the whole sequence of events from his marriage until his wife’s death takes up some ten pages in a book over 400 pages long. These ten pages, nonetheless, are a volume compared with Sir John Reresby’s only mention of his wife in an account almost as lengthy: "But to resume other things, I married, and was thereby prevented from being an eye witness of the Dutch war; and so I shall only say that his highness obtained a glorious victory over that republic."³⁰

It hardly seems necessary to multiply examples of men not mentioning their home lives. The point is that for women, and not for men, the domestic choices were, partly by default, a medium for self-expression; and as men began gropingly to write about their public lives, so, amazingly, did a few women write about their private lives. The idea that oneself, one’s feelings, one’s spouse and domestic relations were properly and innately worth writing about was essentially a female idea, however tentatively conceived at the time; there is little or no precedent for such a notion, at least in English, in male thinking or practice--though a century later it was espoused and elaborated upon by so eminent a man as Samuel Johnson.

Apart from interpersonal relationships, the other area in which women could operate with relative freedom was religion. The role of religion, even in the accounts we have been describing as primarily secular, is clearly an extensive one. For one thing, it provides an explanation and consolation for the grief, pain, and loss that were inevitably associated with life of that period but most particularly with childbearing. Nothing that can happen is so devastating that it cannot be justified or redeemed by being the will of God. Moreover, seventeenth century Christianity by its nature dispelled most stirrings of a sense of injustice, for justice was to be sought in the next world rather than this; and women were effectively encouraged to cultivate a kind of undifferentiated piety. It is also obvious, especially among a large number of the Quaker autobiographies, that religion provided an emotional outlet and a legitimate alternative to humdrum existences; women often turned to religion to find the mystery and excitement that was not provided in the course of their daily lives; and converts to Quakerism could rebel against their families without dooming themselves to social isolation, for Quakers existed in sufficient number to provide companionship and support.

It is certainly significant that the women who wrote primarily secular autobiographies in this period came without exception from upper-class backgrounds, for their relatively comfortable circumstances undoubtedly mitigated some of the most overt causes of oppression. The preponderance of religious autobiographies strongly suggests that introspective women whose lot was less favored tended to retreat to religion rather than dwell upon the inequities of life in this world. Potential protest was muted, for women were propelled by the force of privilege and tradition to find the causes of any dissatisfaction within themselves and to interpret any restlessness as a failure of piety.

The eighteenth century saw many alterations in this picture. Economic developments and social dislocations began to disturb the equilibrium maintained by the force of centuries of tradition. In effect, the disparities between the traditional picture of women and the realities of their existence became too great to gloss over easily, and vague rumblings of dissatisfaction began to be heard.

To begin with, new elements of society found voices: women whose lot in life was less sheltered and whose married lives were less idyllic than those of their aristocratic sisters; women for whom a religious commitment was not an adequate substitute for domestic satisfaction. Such women undoubtedly existed before the eighteenth century, but they were largely isolated and unheard; there was no joining of voices, no sense of a shared fate. The growth of literacy and of the publishing industry created a non-elitist audience and a tribe of authors eager to satisfy its tastes. Many female authors of the period were people who were forced to live either by their wits or their bodies to keep the two together and who found that they could make a shift to support themselves by writing.

As I have already observed, eighteenth century England was not an easy time or place to be a woman. As single women became more and more of an economic burden to their families, the social stigma attached to the single state for women increased considerably. It was around this time that the term "old maid" came into vogue and the term "spinster" acquired its negative connotations.³¹ We no longer find women considering in a leisurely fashion whether or not to marry; the pressure on them to do so was tremendous and the life of an unmarried woman an unenviable one in which she was the butt of constant joking or denigration.

At the same time, it became more and more difficult to make a satisfactory marriage. As I mentioned above, the 1801 census showed a preponderance of women, a situation which had probably existed throughout the eighteenth century and which created what was perceived as a marriage crisis. Moreover, women were much more dependent upon men than men on women. These factors made marriage more than ever a men’s market. Marriages were more blatantly mercenary, as parvenus struggled to consolidate their newly acquired wealth and older families to maintain or strengthen their position. Mary Granville’s reaction to Mr. Pendarves, strikingly reminiscent of Clarissa’s physical aversion to Mr. Soames, did not deter her connections from pressing her into an uncongenial marriage. Repeatedly autobiographers comment that the forces which impel them to marry are often other than love; more often it is a need for financial security or for assurance that they are attractive and worthwhile. T. C. Phillips is a typical example:

. . . among the various Passions in Female Nature, Love is not always the principal one to which their Views are directed: How many more Instances of Fair Ones may we remember, who have fallen Victims to their Interest, their Pride, their Vanity, their Credulity, their Revenge &c. than to the rare and honest Simplicity of a mutual Inclination? And unless a Woman be endued with an uncommon Share of Understanding and Prudence, she inevitably becomes a Sacrifice to some of these.³²

Love as choice became diminished, a less potent force for self-definition than it had been in the seventeenth century.

Women who couldn’t snag a husband or who couldn’t make a marriage that guaranteed economic security were frequently forced, especially in an urban setting, to take their wares to the market place to maintain a decent existence. Such a life was extremely precarious. As M. Dorothy George observes of women:

. . . there can be little doubt that the hardships of the age bore with especial weight upon them. Social conditions tended to produce a high proportion of widows, deserted wives, and unmarried mothers, while women’s occupations were over-stocked, ill-paid and irregular.³³

Scarcely any profession in which women were allowed to engage had more than a very marginal respectability attached to it. The trajectory of a woman’s life as it emerges from several of the autobiographies of the period is one of early peaking, when the woman is still fresh and pretty enough to attract men who will support or assist her temporarily; after that the path goes downhill, with monotonous episodes of frantic scrabbling for money and frequently with periods spent in debtors’ prison.

Love and marriage were still a woman’s subjects, as they had been in the seventeenth century; this field was seldom extensively invaded by men: Gibbon, who "sighed as a lover, obeyed as a son,"³⁴ is almost a parody of male restraint and coolness. But the attitude of women has changed. Domestic love has in some ways fallen into disrepute and is not invested with much importance or dignity. As has frequently been observed, many of the major intellectual figures of the period--Swift, Pope, Gibbon, Burke, and so forth--never married at all; and the eighteenth century produced little lyric poetry of lasting value. Moreover, as the disenfranchised started making themselves heard, the stories they told of their less sheltered marriages were at odds with the domestic idylls of the seventeenth century aristocrats. Women, as Con Phillips’ lawyer gleefully told her, had no legal rights, and unless their husbands were men of good will, they could be subjected to monstrous indignities. The Countess of Strathmore was actually kidnapped and imprisoned by her husband. In some quarters the restraints of family tradition were breaking down; Con Phillips’ husband was a Dutch merchant whose family lived in Holland, too far away to have any understanding of what was going on between their scion and his wife. Women like Laetitia Pilkington felt that they were formed for domesticity but had been thwarted in their true calling. Marriage had become so debased that in most cases the connectedness, the sense of a shared fate that characterized seventeenth century secular autobiography, was lost.

So instead of love in domestic circles, we frequently find love taking its chances in the tougher world outside the home. There the antagonistic nature of relations between the sexes becomes far clearer. The growth of the novel, with its structural demand for conflict, undoubtedly helped to throw the adversary relationship between men and women into sharper focus; there is no more succinct statement of the model for interaction between the sexes which the eighteenth century had inherited from the past and elaborated upon in its own way than Lovelace’s: "Men are to ask; women are to deny."³⁵ Men were excused or even approved for being creatures of ungovernable passions. Any method of lying or playing on a woman’s weakness was a fair tactic. Kidnapping and even rape, as we have seen, do not appear in most cases to have been indictable offenses, though they may have raised a few eyebrows; the experiences of Con Phillips, George Anne Bellamy, and the Countess of Strathmore prove that Richardson’s kidnapping episodes were not merely the fantasies of a repressed male. "Men in general are rascals," the actor James Quin told George Anne Bellamy.³⁶ The idea of male virtue and premarital chastity was so laughable that it formed the basis for Fielding’s parody of Pamela in Joseph Andrews. Women, on the other hand, were to resist as though life depended upon it; for so, in effect, it did. A single slip for whatever reason and under whatever pressure, meant a lifetime of dishonor; if she was drugged, intoxicated, or raped, she was still defiled. To succumb to passion was to be a whore, nothing less; it often meant resigning any possibility of achieving the security of marriage. Such a woman, said George Anne Bellamy, was truly "the martyr of an unguarded moment."³⁷ A growing sense of the injustice of these disparities made resentment of the double standard and even outright hostility towards men a significant element in the autobiographies of eighteenth century English women. "What is not a Crime in Men is scandalous and unpardonable in Woman,"³⁸ Mrs. Manley remarked early in the century, and this theme is picked up and elaborated upon by a number of women later in the century. Or contempt may be shown indirectly; Catherine Jemmat, one of the bitterest, compared her potential rapist to a whole zoo full of animals within the space of two paragraphs quoted earlier in this study.

The other important women’s topic, religion, still looms large in eighteenth century autobiography. It accounts for a smaller proportion of the total output, however, and many of these works seem largely to be going over old terrain rather than breaking fresh ground. The general secularization of life, abetted perhaps by the increased availability of consumer goods, seems to have promoted a change of emphasis from the after life to the here and now. The new religions growing up, such as Methodism, were less committed to female participation than some of the earlier radical sects. Quakerism, however, still deserves a special note, for if its adherents were less likely to break new spiritual ground, they were more likely than ever to seize the opportunity to go far afield in the literal sense. As travel in America became somewhat less hazardous, missionary excursions became an increasingly common feature of the Quaker experience; many women traveled extensively, unaccompanied by men, and lived to tell of their adventures.

It would be a misleading anachronism to speak of woman’s movement in the eighteenth century; there was no organized movement, no role models for excellence outside their assigned sphere to emulate (even Mary Wollstonecraft in her most utopian visions cannot conceive of a society in which women operate on an equal basis with men). There were severe social and economic consequences for deviation from the normal expectations. The treatment of women as sex objects and the race for husbands tended to divide women from one another, so that when they were discarded, locked into an uncompanionable marriage, or otherwise deprived of intellectual stimulation, they found themselves without class consciousness and with few friends among women. Several autobiographers of the period express their reservations about members of their own sex in general. Men were quick enough to foster this separation; the classic example is Swift’s "Letter to a Very Young Lady on her Marriage," in which he advises that young person to eschew the company of her own sex and sniffs that he "never yet knew a tolerable woman to be fond of her own sex."³⁹ Except on the most superficial level, women did not challenge the supposition that their subordinate position in society was divinely and biologically ordained. Any evidence of superiority in a woman was declawed by being taken as exceptional; Dryden praised Elizabeth Thomas by contrasting her to other women and setting her against her own sex. These attitudes probably do not represent a conscious conspiracy on the part of the individual men; as Basil Willey has observed:

. . . it is almost insuperably difficulty to become critically conscious of one’s own habitual assumptions; "doctrines felt as facts" can only be seen as doctrines, and not facts, after great efforts of thought, and usually only with the aid of a first-rate metaphysician.⁴⁰

There is, however, much evidence in the autobiographies of the period of widespread feelings of dissatisfaction, isolated voices speaking out, and a burgeoning sense of (often unwanted) independence. There is an increasing disparity between what women are told they should be and life as they are actually experiencing it. The economy did not require and therefore did not value productivity within the home; the qualities needed to snare a husband were not skill and intelligence but rather such passive attributes as youth, beauty, submissiveness, and wealth. Yet the realities of existence often demanded something quite different, as even genteel women were often forced by a bad marriage, widowhood, or no marriage at all to enter the labor force or in some way to live by their wits. By the same token, there was an increasing awareness of the difference between what men are and what they are supposed to be; Catherine Jemmat, looking at her husband, comments:

. . . as the unhappy victim I cannot refrain mentioning, that night after night, like a poor submissive slave, have I laid my lordly master in his bed, intoxicated and indefensible: day after day have I received blows and bruises for my reward: in short, I thought I had married a man, I found I had married a monster.⁴¹

Though there is little direct challenge to the old system of subordination, many women cite educational differences as the primary basis for male superiority, and a few even flirt with more radical notions of social equality. George Anne Bellamy relates, only half-jokingly, the following anecdote:

One day, as I sat reading Dryden’s Virgil, on a bench in Lord Essex’s park, an old gentleman came and seated himself by me. After sitting a little while, he asked me the subject of my studies? Upon my telling him, he seemed to be surprised that a girl of my age should have either taste or erudition enough to understand works of that kind. Piqued at this supposition, I undertook to vindicate my sex from the want of knowledge in literature generally imputed to them. I told him there would not be the least room for such a reflection, did not the lords of creation take care that we should not eclipse them in this respect. The old gentleman then said, "As that is your opinion, I suppose you would have a female parliament." To which I replied, "I do not know that the present is much better, for I do not hear of any thing that is done among them, but scolding like old women."⁴²

By the end of the eighteenth century women are beginning to realize that they will have to look elsewhere than to love and marriage for satisfaction and self-fulfillment. The bitter pill of subordination is no longer sugar-coated with protection, attentiveness, and the self-respect that goes with the knowledge that one is making a positive contribution to the functioning of the household. This situation can be contrasted with that of Anne Clifford, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, who, though her marriages were clearly less than harmonious, took great satisfaction in overseeing the restoration of the familial estates.

The novel, as we have seen, contributed to this new awareness by helping to expose the assumptions underlying the traditional model for relations between the sexes. Perhaps equally important was its function as a medium for the spread of the cult of sensibility. To some extent the contribution may have been negative, since it tended to substitute a strong emotional response to tragedy and injustice for positive action to rectify them. But self-justification and self-pity, for all their excesses, led women to an examination of the forces outside themselves which contributed to their problems and promoted self-forgiveness. By the end of the eighteenth century, autobiographers such as Mrs. Gooch had become quite sophisticated in analyzing the apportionment of blame between self and society for their shortcomings and lapses. Moreover, the shift of attention from the object to the subject of love--to their own feelings--encouraged women to analyze the effect of the more cruel aspects of male behavior upon themselves; from here it is only a short step to a consideration of the psychology of subordination, as we find in Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women. Finally, the exaltation of friendship could hardly fail to stir reflections about the limitations placed by society and by accepted male behavior upon the possibilities for friendship between a man and woman; George Anne Bellamy comments wistfully than the distinction between friendship and love is "beyond the comprehension of the million" and that only a "truly delicate mind" will perceive it.⁴³

With the increasing discontent came a shift in the social framework for expressing that discontent. The idea of natural rights superseded the soul as the basis for justice and equality. The American and French revolutions and the spread of democratic ideals affirming the rights of man inevitably raised the question of the rights of women. Though such radical notions are beyond anything expressed in women’s autobiographies of the period, it is clear that women are becoming more interested in finding satisfaction in this world than in deferring until the next.

Within the context of this general ferment, Mary Wollstonecraft’s outburst represents a distinct advance but not an entirely surprising one. The traditions which were still working after a fashion in the seventeenth century were breaking down in the eighteenth, shaken by major social and economic changes. It would be pleasant to report that once Mary Wollstonecraft had articulated the sources of female discontent and suggested a theoretical basis for social change, women were immediately spurred to free themselves from oppression. As we all know, no such thing happened. This history of women, as I observed in the beginning, has always been retrogressive. The nineteenth century saw, if anything, a backlash; the fluffy, kittenish child-women in Dickens’ novels sink below anything portrayed in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Repudiation of Mary Wollstonecraft became, in early nineteenth century autobiography, a way of establishing the respectability of the writer’s views and forestalling or propitiating male criticism, much as a woman today might say "I’m no women’s libber, but. . . ." It is interesting to speculate whether the peculiar violence of British feminism, when it finally erupted in the twentieth century, might have been caused by a revulsion against the image of women promulgated in nineteenth century England.

But that is a tangential issue. What, finally, can we say of autobiography in the eighteenth century? On the whole it is more varied, revealing more vigor and independence, than that of the seventeenth century. Yet in one sense the eighteenth century showing is disappointing; unlike the century before, the truly outstanding names in autobiography are no longer those of women. Women with a serious, comprehensive world view seem to have channeled their energies largely into other forms. The novel and the autobiography grew up together; yet women produced novels that were the equal of any written by men, whereas there is nothing comparable to Gibbon among women’s autobiographies of the eighteenth century. The answer, I suspect, lies in the nature of the form itself. Dr. Johnson’s "compliment" to Fanny Burney and Mrs. Thrale may give us a clue: "’Tis a terrible thing that we cannot wish young ladies well, without wishing them to become old women."⁴⁴ The traditional view of women is antithetical to the crucial motive of autobiography--a desire to synthesize, to see one’s life as an organic whole, to look back for a pattern. Women’s lives are fragmented; they start as young women and are successively transformed from without into either spinsters, demimondaines, wives, mothers, or matriarchs. The process is not one of growth, or evolution; rather, they enter each stage as a failure of the previous stage. Earlier and more decisively than for a man, the curve of a woman’s life is seen by herself and society to be one of deterioration and degeneration. Men may mature, but women age. It is significant that the eighteenth century novel often ended with the marriage of the heroine; the author’s vision of life is not forced to accommodate the fate of the heroine as she ages. Time after time, the eighteenth century autobiographies of women make energetic and entertaining starts, but dwindle in the end to overly-drawn-out sagas of dreariness and debt. The seventeenth century author of secular autobiography escaped this dilemma by defining herself entirely as a wife and creating within the domestic theatre a little stage for growth and maturation. The simplicity of such a limited solution was evidently less accessible to the eighteenth century women who wrote autobiography. Nevertheless, the autobiographies of the period are well worth reading, from both a literary and sociological point of view. Their authors may not yet have found a way to integrate their lives into a society which discouraged women from doing so, but they were gamely groping.