Margaret Talbot has a New Yorker review (archived) of Susannah Gibson’s “intelligent and engrossing” new book, The Bluestockings: A History of the First Women’s Movement; the origin of the term is explained in this section:
The Bluestockings might be best known today, if they’re known at all, as conveners of salons, as hostesses who created the ideal conditions, often in sumptuous homes, for heady conversation. The frequent guests at the salonnière Elizabeth Montagu’s gatherings included diplomats, painters, politicians, and writers, who batted around matters of philosophy, literature, history, art, foreign affairs, and science. The usual festive staples—card playing, tippling, and sexual shenanigans—were forbidden, replaced by tea and lemonade, and witty, erudite talk. The lexicographer Samuel Johnson might chat with the young novelist Frances Burney, the painter Joshua Reynolds with the self-taught classical scholar Elizabeth Carter, the celebrated actor David Garrick with the botanist Benjamin Stillingfleet. It was Stillingfleet, randomly, who bequeathed the name Bluestockings to the group. When he made a beeline from field work to Montagu’s parlor, he’d often neglect to change his casual, blue worsted stockings for the silken white ones that men usually donned for such occasions. The term caught on, Gibson writes, “to imply a kind of informality, a way of valuing intellectual endeavours above fashion,” but it stuck like a burr specifically to women with intellectual aspirations. In time, like other words used to classify unorthodox females, it would acquire a pejorative cast. Later still, that negative connotation would be turned inside out by second-wave feminists of the nineteen-sixties and seventies who gleefully adopted antiquated taunts like “virago” and “shameless hussy” and “Bluestocking” to name their bookstores and presses and journals. (Until reading Gibson, I had no idea that “Bluestocking” owed its origins to the sartorial carelessness of a male botanist; I’d vaguely imagined that it referred to women far wilder than the real Bluestockings, women who might have lifted their skirts and flashed actual ink-splattered indigo tights, preferably with runs in them.)
Like her, I had no idea the term originally referred to a man, and I imagine many of my readers will also be surprised by the information. The OED (entry revised 2013) says:
In sense A.2 [sense 1 is Bluestocking Parliament, “Now historical. The nominated assembly of 1653 […], the members of which wore puritanically plain clothing”] also originally with allusion to blue stockings as worn by men, specifically cheap blue worsted stockings as opposed to more expensive and formal white silk stockings; in early use apparently particularly associated with the attire of Benjamin Stillingfleet, an attender of social assemblies or salons hosted by Elizabeth Montagu (compare 1757 at sense A.2a). The expression came to be used more generally in allusion to social assemblies or literary salons hosted by Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Vesey, and Frances Boscawen, among others, which were characterized by social informality and intellectual exchange. The emphasis on the encouragement of female intellectuals in this circle led to the association of the term blue stocking (and its derivatives) specifically with the involvement of women in the intellectual world. This was later reinforced further by the increasing identification of stockings as an item of female rather than male attire (compare stocking n.²).
By the way, here’s an interesting tidbit about one of the women so nicknamed:
Elizabeth Carter lived at home much of her life, tending to her widowed father, but she also learned Latin, Greek, Italian, Hebrew, German, and Spanish; when she wanted to learn Arabic and couldn’t find instructional books, she made her own Arabic dictionary.
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