Bluestocking
Bluestocking – an ironic name for intellectual women wholly absorbed in scholarly, literary, and similar interests.
The expression bluestocking originated in England in the late eighteenth century in the circle associated with the writer and salonnière Elizabeth Montagu. The soul of this salon was the botanist and translator Benjamin Stillingfleet, who, paying little attention to his clothing, wore blue stockings with his black attire. This greatly amused the salon ladies, who nicknamed the absent-minded scholar “bluestocking.” When, for some reason, he did not arrive at the appointed hour, everyone became anxious and repeated: “Today the conversation will go badly — there are no blue stockings!”
Soon this nickname began to refer to all the participants of this circle, where conversations on scholarly and literary topics took place.
According to another version, the name Bluestockings was given to Lady Montagu’s circle by the Dutch admiral Edward Boscawen during his stay in England.
The expression became common in England after the poet George Gordon Byron wrote a satire on Lady Montagu’s salon in 1820 and called it The Blues.
Soon the expression also passed into France, where bas bleus, or “blue stockings,” came to denote a particular type of woman — one absorbed in scholarly work and literature to the detriment of home and family. From France, the expression entered Russia, and already P. A. Vyazemsky, a contemporary and friend of A. S. Pushkin, spoke reproachfully of “our blue- and red-stocking women”.
From the perspective of gender and feminist theory, the figure of the bluestocking is significant because it reflects the cultural suspicion directed at educated women and women’s intellectual independence. The term has often been used ironically or pejoratively to suggest that women’s scholarly and literary interests are incompatible with femininity, marriage, domesticity, or family life. At the same time, feminist interpretation may read the bluestocking not as a comic deviation from “proper” womanhood, but as an early image of women’s claim to education, authorship, public conversation, and intellectual authority.
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