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.
Redstockings is a contemporary women’s liberation group named partially in honor of Bluestockings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redstockings
https://www.redstockings.org/
i can enthusiastically recommend nyc’s Bluestockings Coop, which has been a fantastic feminist bookstore for more than twenty years, and a worker-owned cooperative for about five!
and i’m thrilled and entertained to now know where the term came from, and to be introduced to stillingfleet!
I learned it (синий чулок) early but only as an antiquated word for female nerds, where antiquated means before the present epoch which was Soviet back then.
Of course in our enlightened Soviet times there were not bad words for female nerds, only for males (очкарик, “glass-wearer”).
Now it is two! I mean, it is two epochs old. But only in Russia.
“no idea that “Bluestocking” owed its origins to the sartorial carelessness of a male botanist;”
Actually it is more or less how I imagined it, just female. I think only once I met a woman who matched my own image. I’m afraid, the only female stranger I ever exchanged phone numbers with:)
Some previous discussions of bluestockings and their wear.
German Blaustrumpf in my experience is mostly slightly pejorative. It was already obsolescent when I grew up; nowadays it’s rarely used outside historical descriptions and novels / period films.
I never even found out what it was supposed to mean beyond being a slightly pejorative term for some kind of woman – and it was so rare (I read it maybe three times) that I didn’t care.
When Johnson offered to teach her Latin, her father Charles Burney (well known for his writings on 18th century European music) didn’t allow her to accept this offer (at the time she was in her mid-twenties and a best-selling novelist).
I’m ashamed to say that I wasn’t aware of the history of blåstrømpe in Norwegian, but I can see that it goes back to the 19th century in the meanings “feminist, suffragette”. I was only aware of blåstrømpe, used by self-declared feminists with a borgerlig (center-right) outlook, as a recent coinage after rødstrømpe “redstocking” = “left wing/Marxist feminist”.
Interesting. I don’t think rødstrømpe was felt as containing the left wing rød when I learned it, it just meant “critical feminist”. In the 70s you couldn’t be a critical feminist and vote for the center-right, of course, but that was a fact of life and not part of the word. AFAICR we also had blåstrømper a little later so clearly they felt that being a rødstrømpe implied being a socialist, but by then most people just said feminist anyway.
In a non-feminist context, that storied minor-league baseball team the Utica Blue Sox disappeared from history a bit over two decades ago when the team relocated south to Maryland and became under new ownership the Aberdeen IronBirds, who now have their own fame and fortune but did not preserve the historic name. The internet asserts that the name has been revived (I suspect any trademark claim had lapsed so it was free for the taking …) and applied to a team in one of those college-kid summer leagues, but it’s not really the same thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Game_Collegiate_Baseball_League
Richard Hershberger on Facebook quotes the Manchester Guardian of July 31, 1874: “The two clubs to which the players belong are the Boston Redstocking and the Philadelphia Athletic (Bluestocking) Clubs.” He comments:
@Lars: No, it didn’t feel as the left-wing rød to me either, but it obviously did to those who (re-)coined blåstrømpe after the seventies.
But just as the reinvention of blåstrømpe was a deliberate alteration of rødstrømpe, the invention of rødstrømpe was a deliberate alteration of the old blåstrømpe. I do wonder how it was conceived if it wasn’t political color. Red for rage?
Supposedly the Danish rødstrømper took their name from the New York Redstockings, who were explicitly left wing and distinguished themselves from the bluestockings by using the red of Socialism. The program in Denmark also included the equation of women’s rights with class struggle, but that never really got through the noise because talking about class struggle was just what people did if they weren’t on the side of the status quo.