 | "The Bluestockings (Les Bas-bleus) were not a specific organization. Originally the term referred to a group of female scholars and writers who owed their nickname to a certain blue-stockinged Mrs. Stillingfleet, a literary lady prominent in London around 1780. By the mid-ninteenth century, Daumier and his contemporaries used the term to mean any emancipated woman from the bourgeois class, which, being their own class, posed the greatest threat and inspired the strongest defenses. |
 | "Since bourgeois married women revolted naturally not against employers, but against their husbands (who were not recognized as employers since housework was unpaid), marriage was the focal point of the emancipation efforts of the caricaturists' Bluestockings....ambition drives Daumier's Bluestockings to take the first steps out of the house and found organizations limited only to their own sex. They are either gaped at or hooted as salon socialists; they change the function of the ladies tea party and meet as a circle of drinking companions who parrot revolutionary ideologies. At a meeting to found their journal The Women's Literary Sans-Culotte, Bluestocking journalists discuss the contents of their first issue: `What do we want to wreck first: For a beginning, let's smash everything!' .... |
 | "Blue-stockingism", 1877 (see below): "When I was young, it was not thought proper for young ladies to study very conspicuously; and especially with pen in hand. Young ladies...were expected to sit down in the parlour to sew, --during which reading aloud was permitted, --or to practice their music; but so as to be fit to receive callers, without any signs of blue-stockingism which could be reported abroad." --Harriet Martineau's Autobiography, Vol. 1, 1877, p. 77 |
Isn't this just history?...that was then, this is now?
"My female friends have to soften their ambition in a way my male friends don't have to.... The fear of strong women isn't confined to anecdotes; there's reams of evidence for it. A study by Oxford University psychologists in 2006 found that having a high IQ is a boon for men in finding a partner - and for women, it is an obstacle. For each 16-point rise in IQ, a man is 35 percent more likely to find a partner - while for women, the same IQ bump reduces their odds by 40 percent. This is why so many clever women mask their intellects, in pubs and offices across the country.
This dynamic spreads to politics too. There's a famous experiment called 'the Goldberg paradigm', where a group is given a speech and asked to rate how effective, intelligent and persuasive. Every time this is run, if they are told it is by a man, they invariably rate it ten to twenty points higher than if they are told it is by a woman. "
Where Have All the Strong Women Gone? , by Johann Hari , The Independent UK ,Thursday 27 March 2008
Where Have All the Strong Women Gone? , by Johann Hari , The Independent UK ,Thursday 27 March 2008