Women, the republic of letters, and the public sphere in the mid-seventeenth century

Merton College, Oxford

Notes

For valuable comments and criticisms I am grateful to participants of the MLA session "When Is a Public Sphere? II," on December 30, 2002, and also to the conference on "Religion and the Early Modern Public Sphere," University of Keele, June 20-22, 2003, where a revised version was presented.

(1.) Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989). In an incisive critique, Joad Raymond, "The Newspaper, Public Opinion, and the Public Sphere in the Seventeenth Century," in News, Newspaper, and Society in Early Modern Britain, ed. Raymond (London: Frank Cass, 1999), 109-40, both argues for the 1640s rather than 1695 as the crucial watershed and rejects Habermas's general model as over-idealizing. Habermas himself, however, has remained unpersuaded by such antedatings: Jurgen Habermas, "Concluding Remarks," in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 465.

(2.) Habermas claims that "as a result of the Reformation ... religion ... became a private matter." Structural Transformation, 11.

(3.) For Habermas on Arendt, see Jurgen Habermas, "Hannah Arendt: On the Concept of Power," in Philosophico-Political Profiles, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (London: Heinemann, 1983), 171-87, and cf. Joan B. Landes, "The Public and the Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration," in Feminists Read Habennas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse, ed. and intro. Johanna Meehan (New York: Routledge, 1995), 91-116 (199-101). For all Habermas's republican pedigree, however, a leading historian of republicanism, Quentin Skinner, has identified in his utopianism a quintessentially Protestant note, tartly observing that reading him "is extraordinarily like reading Luther, except that the latter wrote such wonderful prose." Skinner, "Habermas's Reformation," New York Review of Books, October 7, 1982, 38.

(4.) Marie Fleming, Emancipation and Illusion: Rationality and Gender in Habermask Theory of Modernity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997); Johanna Meehan, ed., Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the subject of Discourse (New York: Routledge, 1995).

(5.) Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, British Freewomen: Their Historical Privilege (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1894), chap. 7.

(6.) Hilda L. Smith, All Men and Both Sexes: Gendo; Politics, and the False Universal in England, 1640-1832 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002); Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Oxford: Polity Press, 1988); for various often critical accounts of the public-sphere model in relation to gender in a later period, see Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Cliona O Gallchoir, and Penny Warburton, eds., Women, Writing, and the Public Sphere, 1700-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). On France, of. Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).