Gender and the politics of the public sphere

This chapter examines the relationship between gender and the politics of the public sphere. The bluestockings were instrumental in framing a set of literary and political discourses that opened the door for a range of political movements where women occupied leading positions, including the Bloomsbury Group and the suffrage movement. The chapter then distinguishes between two forms of public sphere. The first is the world of letters, where ‘privatized individuals in their capacity as human beings communicated through critical debate’. The second form is the political realm, where ‘private people in their capacity as owners of commodities communicated through rational-critical debate’. Despite the significance of women writers within the public sphere through elite groupings such as the bluestockings, their role was still limited. While the bluestockings were actively involved in literary and political debates, their distance from the political sphere highlights the gendered character of the 18th-century public sphere.