Back to the historical world, which at least has the virtue of the pain, frustration and anger being muted by time …

Elizabeth Elstob, the great Saxon scholar, was unable to win permission for her friend, George Ballard, to dedicate his Memoirs of Several Ladies (1752) to her employer, the Duchess of Portland. (She had been reduced to being a governess.)

She wrote:

“I am sorry to tell you the choice you have made for the Honour of the Females was the wrong’st subject you could pitch upon. For you can come into no company of Ladies or Gentlemen, where you shall not hear an open and Vehement exclamation against Learned Women, and by those women that read much themselves, to what purpose they know best … The prospect I have of the next age is a melancholy one to me who wish Learning might flourish to the end of the world, both in men and women, but I shall not live to see it.”

(from a rather quaint volume: A Galaxy of Governesses, Bea Howe, Derek Verscoyle, 1954, p. 51)

Today is out the first report of Shere Hite’s new book, about how women put down other women: the more things change …

On a more cheerful note, while I’d love to buy a copy of Ballard I haven’t found an excuse for the expenditure, but his biography of Anne Killigrew, poet and artist, is on the Net.

An interesting piece on Baudrillard and the “spinning” of George Bush. (It reminds me of the media treatment of Joh Bjelke-Petersen, an Australian provincial politician who, it was subsequently recognised, was greatly boosted by the media, which cleaned up his quotes and edited his interview to make him look a great deal more coherent than he was. And it was either too cowardly or too involved to expose the corruption of his government.)
He was in many respects a precusor to Pauline Hanson. Interesting that we tend to think of populists as being charismatic performers, from the Greek demagogues onwards, yet something about the modern world (the modern media?) seems to be removing even this requirement.

Last night I was reading London Gazettes of the 1670s during a quiet patch at work, when I came across this:

“Lost on Saturday last, in New Kings-Street near St. James’s, a little black Spaniel, rough hair, white neck. Whoever shall bring the said Dog, or give notice where he is to be found, to the Angel in the same street, shall have 20 s. reward.”

(From No 1040, Nov 8, 1675)

As is still the case with many modern local papers, the classifieds make the most interesting reading; it’s a salutory lesson for journalists to realise they are why many readers buy newspapers.

This was brought home to me in Australia many years ago when I kept getting complaints about how terrible the spelling in my paper was. I couldn’t work this out, since although we had the odd howler, they were pretty rare. Then I looked at the classifieds, and all of the “quite” ponies. I never did manage to get them to get it right

… and there is nothing new about complaints about a “drinking culture”.
This from The English Alehouse: A Social History 1200-1830, P. Clark, Longman, London, 1983:

By the 1630s there was estimated to be one alehouse for every 89-104 inhabitants in England (and that doesn’t count taverns and inns!) By the 1690s the figure was about 1 to 87. (p. 44)

In London: “In 1618 the city fathers complained that the multitude of alehouses and victualing houses within this city increasing daily are grown so dangerous and enormous as it is high time to suppress the number of them”. (p.49)

Within the city proper 924 alehouses were licenced in 1657, 1 for every 16 houses, with a higher density in the poorer wards such as Farringdon without (where it was 1 in 6), but illicit premises were particularly numerous in the city.
Dekker remarked in 1638 that in some streets there was “not a shop to be seen between a red lattice”, this pattern, painted on the wall, (or a chequerboard), was used by smaller premises that had not hanging sign of their own).(p. 68)

Female visits were possible within the limits social convention. Thus women might go with their husbands, particularly when they were on a journey or there was a family or neighbourhood celebration. A group of married women might go together after a christening or a churching. “An unattached woman who went to alehouses on her own was usually regarded as promiscuous and might well be accosted or assaulted.” (p. 131)

… to whom I never did really take.

It seems that all those men sitting around in coffee and chocolate shops in the 17th century were more often joined by women than he acknowledged.

An excellent article in the journal The Seventeenth Century suggests that working-class women, at least, often went into coffee shops, while middle-class women might well have done this, in addition to using them to transact business just as the men did.

The more “genteel” chocolate houses were where higher class women were more likely to be found, although the line was a thin one: the article notes that Mary Somerset, Duchess of Beaufort, went to the Temple Coffee House for a botanical club meeting(p.261).

Of course women could be there for other reasons: “There being scarce a Coffee-House but affords a Tawdry Woman, a wanton Daughter, or a Buzome Maide, to accommodate Customers …” (quoted from ‘Well-willer’ The Men’s Answer to the Women’s Petition Against Coffee, 1674, p. 2.)

(H. Berry, “‘Nice and Curious Questions’: Coffee Houses and the Representation of women in John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury“, Vol XII, No 2, Autumn 1997, pp. 257-276.)

Various minority communitites have reclaimed pejorative words about themselves and chosen to use them with pride; I think women should do the same with “virago”.

The OED gives two definitions

2. a. A man-like, vigorous, and heroic woman; a female warrior; an amazon. Now rare.

Citing the example:

1885 19th Cent. May 472 She [Vittoria Colonna] was a virago, a name which, however misapprehended now, bore a different and worthy signification in her day.

or the far more common use:

3. A bold, impudent (or [obsolete sense] wicked) woman; a termagant, a scold.
c1386 Chaucer Man of Law’s T. 359 O Sowdanesse, roote of Iniquitee, Virago,
thou Semyrame the secounde [etc.].
1680 C. Nesse Ch. Hist. 178 God sets this black brand upon this virago Jezabel.
1865 Trollope Belton Est. xxvii. 329, I believe Lady Aylmer to be an
overbearing virago, whom it is good to put down.

I came to this from a curious but interesting piece of semi-feminist history writing, Uncrowned Queens: Women Who Influenced Manners and Moulded the Society They Lived In, by Amy Latour, first published in English in 1970 (in French in 1967). Its main characters include Isabella D’Este (who she calls in flattering terms a virago), Madame de Rambouillet and Madame de Scudery; Madame Geoffrin and Madame du Deffand; “Mrs Montagu and the Blue Stockings”; Rahel Varnhagen, Princess Cristina di Belgiojocso; Juliette Adam ; and Gertrude Stein.

I’m ashamed to confess that there was several in that list previously unknown to me; a reminder about how limited the Anglo-Saxon academic approach can be.

(Thanks to Simon from copyediting-L for the OED info). It is, by the way, a great community if you are interested in words.

P.S. It has just been pointed out to me (thanks Hal from CEL-ery) that there is already Virago Press, so the campaign has been started already: we just need to carry it forward.