Brilliant women.(Report from Europe)(Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings)

In the 1750s a group of men and women known as the bluestocking circle began to meet in the London houses of certain fashionable hostesses to nurture a sense of intellectual community and potential. The guests included the leading literary, political, and cultural figures of the day, and their primary interest was to create a model for rational Enlightenment forms of sociability in which friendship, charity, and women's education were celebrated. The name came about following a visit to one of the gatherings by the botanist Benjamin Stillingfleet. Instead of the formal silk hosiery usually worn by professional men of the day, he made a point of wearing the blue woollen stockings associated with workingmen.

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The early participants included the scholar and classical translator Elizabeth Carter, novelist Fanny Burney, artists Frances Reynolds and Angelica Kauffmann, historian Catharine Macaulay, astronomers Margaret Bryan and Caroline Herschel, and author Hannah More. With the exception of the wealthy patron and hostess Elizabeth Montagu, most of them made a living from their work.

Originally the term bluestocking applied specifically to these informal and intimate gatherings, but it later came to denote learned women generally. It was intended to celebrate women as ...