Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750-1810.(Book Review)

Publication: CLIO

Publication Date: 22-MAR-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne

By Harriet Guest. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000. 350 pages.

The title of this book refers simultaneously to eighteenth-century women and to small, incremental, and yet crucial alterations in domestic ideology. As Harriet Guest explains, "because eighteenth century women are seen to be like small change in their virtues, their habits of mind, they enter into every area on which scholars gain a purchase" (2). Yet her book also takes up "small changes that take place across a range of discourse and genres" (15). In her opening pages, Guest positions herself in relation to an existing debate that occurs largely in the United Kingdom. She explicitly responds to scholars such as Hannah Barker, Elaine Chalus, Keith Baker, Leonore Davidoff, Catherine Hall, and (back in the United States) Kathleen Wilson to argue that women's status in eighteenth-century England is more problematic than existing scholarship suggests. Or, "domesticity is always a contested proposition" (15). Indeed, by the end of the century, the situation is such that, in the writings of Elizabeth Hamilton and others, "an apparently uniform consensus conceals, and thus perhaps makes it possible to articulate, significantly divergent definitions or notions of domesticity, and the femininity appropriate to it." In other words, "In the post revolutionary decade, what looks like `a celebration of ... different and separate spheres' turns out, on closer inspection, to be the polite form of debate and dissension about them" (314-15). An oppositional discourse may even exist within the apparent celebration of the separation of spheres, as Hamilton's letters demonstrate (339).

Thus Guest's argument often concerns itself...

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