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“Brilliant Women: Eighteenth-Century Bluestockings” National Portrait Gallery, until 15th June.

On Thursday evening I stood in a packed room at the National Portrait Gallery. Men and women of all ages jostled to get a look at a three-quarter length portrait of an eighteenth-century writer. This was Catharine Macaulay, author of a radical history of England; essays about the politics of the American and French Revolutions; and an important educational treatise which argued, among other things, for women’s intellectual equality.

Robert Edge Pine, Catharine Macaulay (c.1775). National Portrait Gallery.

In the gallery with Macaulay, several other “brilliant women” were displayed. There was Elizabeth Carter, whose translation of Epictetus was received, in mid-eighteenth century Britain, as a national triumph. There was Hannah More, the important moralist and playwright, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, literary essayist, political pamphleteer, and author of the wonderful, mordant poetry her contemporaries recognised as the best of the age. These were women whose writings were the focus of international acclaim. They were eighteenth-century celebrities. And yet their fame had nothing to do with their faces or their bodies. They were women whose significant intellectual achievements were regarded as proof that the age of enlightenment had finally arrived.

The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain. Page after Richard Samuel (1777)

Unfortunately we now seem to live in a less enlightened age. For how else are we to read Brian Sewell’s recent complaint in the London Evening Standard that Catharine Macaulay just wasn’t pretty enough? Sewell, who clearly requires that images of women address his senses rather than his intellect, dismisses this important exhibition as “blowing feebly on the dying embers of feminism.” According to Sewell, “almost everything the sane man needs to know about bluestockings is to be found in the Oxford English Dictionary.” It’s a shame that he didn’t bother to look at the catalogue accompanying this edifying and carefully curated exhibition, or he might have learnt something that would lead him to question the sanity of his entrenched prejudice. But clearly Sewell has, at one time or another, actually read something other than the dictionary, as he is able to trot out every sexist assumption ever levelled at women of learning. One of the key points of this exhibition is to show how British women intellectuals were, in the eighteenth century, the focus of celebration and esteem as much as they ever were of satire. They may well have provided fodder for misogynistic caricaturists like Sewell, but they were also thought to add value to the stock of national achievement. Sewell displays a predictably sad masculine response to women of learning by, like eighteenth-century satirists, castigating their sex rather than engaging with the troubling matter of their intellects.

Macaulay as Libertas (Liberty). Giovani Battista Cipriani (1765)

Faced with the imposing and assured portrait of Catharine Macaulay by Robert Edge Pine Sewell writes: “It is a long time since my reaction to a picture was a burst of laughter, but it happened here, in front of the amazingly Plain Jane that Catharine Macaulay was in her mid-forties.” In this superbly bold image, Macaulay self-consciously associated herself with the figure of Minerva, who inspires, as Freud reminds us, the fear of emasculation. Perhaps this was the source of Brian’s anxious giggles. But not content with damning the wise and defiant Macaulay as unlovely, Sewell is daft enough to question her intellect. According to him, Macaulay’s production of an eight-volume History of England was a freakish and pointless activity: freakish simply because she was a woman and pointless because the men who came after her told the same story: “if we have forgotten Catharine Macaulay’s history it is because the other Macaulay, Thomas Babington, covered the same ground.”

Sewell is — despite himself — right: we have forgotten Macaulay’s history because she was a woman, and because other historians wrote other histories. But this is not because her monumental achievement in The History of England from the Accession of James the First to that of the Brunswick Line was either freakish or pointless. It is because the men who came after her found the historian and her history challenging, both intellectually and politically. Men like Sewell—conservative men, men of small minds and small-minded adherence to the normative status quo—found Macaulay’s writing deeply worrying. For she dared to say that it was fine to kill a king; to establish a democratic republic in his stead; to extend the franchise to those who worked to buy their bread; for colonies to declare their independence from the empire; and for women to claim equal rights as rational creatures. Sewell knows nothing about Macaulay because of the success of men like him in erasing and forgetting women’s intellectual achievements generally, and their articulate questioning of the establishment in particular.

It is actually hard to overestimate just how famous Macaulay was, or just how influential her arguments were during the eighteenth-century’s revolutionary decades. While her face was, as Lord Lyttleton put it, “on every printsellers counter”, her words were on the lips of every radical in London, Newcastle, or Sheffield then engaged in the popular struggle for parliamentary reform. In 1770, the town of Boston wrote and asked her to intervene on its behalf with the British government. Every self-respecting son of liberty along America’s Eastern seaboard had read her History and regarded Macaulay as the personal spokeswoman of their rights. Two decades later, as the French Revolution shook Europe, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote and told her how she entirely “coincided” with Macaulay’s “opinion respecting the rank our sex ought to attain in the world.” Macaulay didn’t live to applaud women’s attaining of that rank, or see the kind of constitution that she had imagined for America. In 1790, a few months before she died, she told the editor of the Monthly Review how well she knew that her “democratic spirit” and her “recommendation of a learned education for women” meant that her publications would be relegated by conservative men to “the lining of trunks, or other ignoble purposes.” For more than two centuries this was unfortunately the case.

Print after Katharine Read’s portrait of Catharine Macaulay (1769)

But the wonderful exhibition in which Macaulay now features at the National Portrait Gallery has already attracted several thousand visitors. An associated conference, organised by the team of brilliant women who curated the exhibition, was massively over subscribed. All of this suggests an encouraging level of interest in the achievements of the learned women of the past. And yet Brian Sewell’s review, which includes a gleeful rubbing together of grubby hands at the demise of Women’s Studies as a separate discipline in British universities, is depressing evidence that the struggle Catharine Macaulay fought—and suffered for—is far from over.

A while ago I won the designer knits ‘Knitting in the Wild’ competition for this photo of me knitting atop Ben Lomond. (Roll on Spring weather, and more mountain knitting). Today a nice prize package arrived, containing this lovely skein of Araucania

. . . this lantern moon keyring . . .

. . . and these knitting notecards.

Hurrah! Thanks Irene!

I have been working like a mutha of late, so little time for crafting. But on trains and in the evening I have managed to fashion this.

a woolly eggbox?

a collection of knitted bobbles?

no, its Norah Gaughan’s Jyri scarf.

Made in cashmerino aran from my stash it is incredibly soft and squishy. The ‘mountain’ stitch pattern is satisfyingly sculptural, with no need for blocking. The texture also echoes that of shibori felt, in a way I find very pleasing.

Titch is here. As usual, he is laden with intriguing Japanese snacks. He gave me one for my lunch.

could it be. . . .

. . . no, really . . .

indeed, it *is* a green kit kat.

It is supposed to be green tea flavoured but tastes more like a weird caramac.
Still, I fared slightly better than Mr B:

. . . his gift-snacks are strangely intestinal, both in name and appearance.

Here is some miscellaneous Good Stuff from the past few days.

First, some delayed stuff for a messy tuesday. We finally bottled the winter lager, which has been cold-stored for the past few months. There was some satisfying mess-making:

. . . an even more satisfactory tasting. . .

. . . and finally, the beer-drone (i.e. me) applied the bottle caps.

Next: having so far stuck to my pledge not to buy any new clothes in 2008 (those who know me will testify that this is a remarkable feat), I somehow felt I should congratulate myself with the purchase of a necklace made by Bronwen Deane, a Newcastle-based jewellery designer.

Deane’s work features cranes, high rises and factories, reproducing these familiar images and icons of industrial Tyneside in a new and unexpected context. On her website, Deane writes that “combining these images of brutal architecture with the delicacy and preciousness of jewellery encourages the viewer to examine these familiar landmarks and reconsider them.” I really love her work, and am very pleased indeed with my new necklace.

Finally, some really Good Stuff arrived in the post from the wonderful Felix

A whole bundle of treats from the Missability palace of dreams. This is a fantastic project and I urge everyone who hasn’t done so to check out the website, which includes details of the fabulous second knitted walking stick cosy competition, closing on May 1st.

Thanks Felix x

We went on a jaunt to the National Museum of Costume outside Dumfries, to see the “Hip Knits” exhibition. In the Museum’s permanent collections, there were some fabulous nineteenth-century dresses and shoes on display, but my favourite thing of the day was this:

incredibly fine linen whitework, backed with pink silk, and made by one Jenny Grant in 1724.

I have to say that the so-called knitting exhibition was something of a disappointment. As it was being held in a branch of the National Museum of Scotland, and given the rich variety of knitting traditions Scotland has to boast, I was hoping to see at least something about the history and techniques of Scottish knitting. But no. There was not a Sanquar glove, a Shetland shawl, or a Fair isle Sweater to be seen. The emphasis of the exhibition was firmly on the contemporary commercial appeal of machine knitted and woven woollen products. This would have been fair enough if there had been some sort of curatorial direction as to how to interpret the objects on display. But the viewer wasn’t given any sort of context to aid understanding of the small range of garments arranged about the room. A catalogue, or display cards, might have told us, for example, about the history of machine knitting and weaving; the emergence of distinctively Scottish modes of textile production; the evolution of industrial techniques; the importance of different regional knitting traditions, and so on. But there was very little of this nature for the viewer to get a handle on. There was no exhibition catalogue, and the information on the display cards told us only, in the briefest of terms, about the designers and producers of particular garments.

Donna Wilson’s Cuddly Clouds

While there was an overkill of the sort of brightly coloured, machine knit cashmere that tourists to Scotland seem to find endlessly appealing, objects and artefacts made in distinctive locales by innovative new Scottish designers were relegated to the edges of the exhibit. The most interesting things there (for me at least) were Donna Wilson’s witty machine knitted objects (Wilson also collaborates with the successful Orkney company Tait & Style) and Andrea Williamson’s beautiful muffler, influenced by both Shetland and Scandanavian design traditions. I liked looking at these things, but I wasn’t sure, in the end, what sort of relationship I was meant to conceive between these objects and the Vivien Westwood suit made up of jigsaws of woven tweed, or the pair of turquoise cashmere knickers. And while one could buy, in the musuem gift shop, Sarah Dallas’s Scottish Inspirations , in the exhibition proper one saw very little Scottish hand knitting at all. In the end, all these “hip-knits” said to the viewer was: here are a few woolly things that happen to be made in Scotland. And given how vital and intriguing the contemporary world of Scottish textiles is at the moment, that’s not really saying enough. . .

On a different sort of wool-front, the spring fields were alive with sheep and lambs all the way from Edinburgh to Dumfries. I ate this non-woolly one.

There has been a veritable orgy of sewing today. I decided to re-seat a chair. I removed the dirty rags, sorry, old seat covers….

… and sewed up a new one. I made a whole new chair! thrilling!

I recently threw out several cushions (or in transatlantic parlance, pillows) that had suffered years of terrible claw abuse from Jesus (the cat). In preparation for making Belle’s quilts I have been practising piecing and quilting several new covers. My mother has a house full of cushions (or, as my dad calls them, creatures) most of which were sewn by her. We all tend to wind her up about the sheer numbers of these in the house, and regard them in a similar manner to her enormous collection of greetings cards — symptoms of an obsession of near-pathological proportions (sorry, Mum). However, I am beginning to understand. Its just like making those bloody pincushions. I must watch out. Anyway, I turned out two today: a log cabin-y one for the living room

(I am particularly fond of the print with bare branches, a Joel Dewberry fabric)

. . .and here is a rather more jolly one for the work-pod:

(the hippo print is an Ikea fabric)

Here also is a knitting wip. It will be a lacy shrug in 4 ply soft and it is taking me an aeon to knit up.

It is being made with a specific outfit in mind. I think I will like it more when I have finished it.

No news on the tam. I took a walk down the cycle path on my way out on Friday night, and saw that my notice was still there. But the owner has not seen it, or perhaps does not want to find the tam. . . By chance, this afternoon I heard a programme on radio 4 about things lost and things found. There was much easy philosophising on the programme about how things that get lost are meant to get lost, and suchlike. Not sure I believe that, though . . .

I have been getting troubled by the tam. It is a nice tam. After passing it a few times, abandoned on the path, I just couldn’t leave it for the rain to rain on and the dogs to piss on. But it isn’t mine. And how will its owner find it again?
So I made a sign:

. . . I put my details on it, and I went and put it where I found the tam.