“…the rising movement of romanticism, with its characteristic idealism, one that tended toward a black-and-white view of the world based on those ideas, preferred for different reasons that women remain untinged by “masculine” traits of learning. Famous romantic writers such as Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Hazlitt criticized the bluestockings. …and Hazlitt declared his 'utter aversion to Bluestockingism … I do not care a fig for any woman that knows even what an author means.' Because of the tremendous influence that romanticism gained over the cultural mind-set, the term bluestocking came to be a derogatory term applied to learned, pedantic women, particularly conservative ones. ... Furthermore, learned women did not fit in with the romantic notion of a damsel in distress waiting to be rescued by a knight in shining armor any more than they fit in with the antirevolutionary fear of progress.” CultureReadingWomenEducationKnowledgeLearningCriticsIntelligenceAuthorWriterIdealismShockingRomanticismFemale EmpowermentFrench RevolutionFemale EducationLord ByronHannah MoreRomantic EraSamuel Taylor ColeridgeBluestockingWilliam HazlittAnti EducationAnti Female EducationFear Of ProgressShocking Criticism Book:Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More—Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist Source: Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More—Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist
“Even in their reading, More charged, too many women were prone to superficiality. In search of a passing knowledge of books and authors, many read anthologies of excerpted works, that selected the brightest passages but left out deeper contexts—eighteenth-century Reader’s Digest were quite popular. More cautioned against a habit she viewed as cultivating a taste only for “delicious morsels,” one that spits out “every thing which is plain.” Good books, in contrast, require good readers: “In all well-written books, there is much that is good which is not dazzling; and these shallow critics should be taught, that it is for the embellishment of the more tame and uninteresting parts of his work, that the judicious poet commonly reserves those flowers, whose beauty is defaced when they are plucked from the garland into which he had so skillfully woven them.” ReadingWomenEducationKnowledgeBooksIntelligenceSuperficialHannah More Book:Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More—Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist Source: Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More—Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist