The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678-1730

Paula McDowell’s The Women of Grub Street examines the period roughly 1678 and 1730, a moment generally regarded as preceding the celebrated and ubiquitously documented emergence of the public sphere. But the usual kudos surrounding, for example, the storied “rise of the novel” ca. 1740, or the rationalist promises of what Jürgen Habermas called “the human as such,” or the emergence of proto-democratic social interaction that would reach its apogee with the Corresponding Societies of the French Revolutionary period—such Enlightenment standards as these are implicitly questioned by The Women of Grub Street. It is a book that produces a material history of writing with a keen and careful regard for print culture as a matter of labor. Writing, that is, is re-written here as foremost a matter of production and market dissemination within a pre-public literary subculture that originated beneath the omniscient liberal-consensualist radar. The work of writing on this order, it turns out, is women’s work, and, in McDowell’s stunning historical account, it is work by which the category of “women” itself is properly re-oriented by the lost pressures of the “street.”

The public sphere as influentially described by Habermas in the later 1960s, McDowell rightly assumes, is standard fare for literary theorists and mass-cultural historians today. A liberal model of civil society on this order, to risk repeating, favored the rational, impartial turf of coffee-house critical exchange over the contamination of affect within knowledge, let alone the show of overt social resistance in the cityscape of teeming and tumultuous London. Against the representative publicness of absolute monarchies, as much as against the immanent unrest of the masses, civic-mindedness rested (indeed, commanded) a new take on family and state. This particular socius configured “subjecthood” and “subjectivity” such that power and authority were allegedly minimized.

Thus on the procedurally neutral terrain of communicative reason, and for the first time historically, “polite” forms of female public participation were encouraged within the formerly male medium of socio-political and aesthetic debate. In short, writing, or at least, appropriately “literary” modalities of reading, helped make the two genders newly generalizable. Only from there could the equality of genders be something civil society might one day aspire to achieve.

But for the “impolite” Grub Street women whom McDowell chooses to examine as an alternative subject—women “workers,” she says—equality on the order of generalizable womanhood is where the Enlightenment went decidedly wrong. As Part I of the book on women in the book trade shows, hers is a more critically fine-tuned investment than a feminist scholarship of recovery, assimilation, and inclusion into liberal modernity. Just as “Hogarth placed the hawker in the center of his crowd scene in Industry and Idleness” (26), the institutional chaos of the early print market afforded women economic agency and literary ownership before the institutional mechanisms of copyright (1709), or the immaterial discipline of belles lettres. Grub Street women in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century were working tradespeople, first. Whatever else civil society required after 1730 would come later and at a high ontological cost.

Focusing on the largest category of women’s writing in the period (religio-political works), Part II of the book argues that identity was less generically crucial for women’s active participation in social and political life than were the collective social identifications they attempted to construct as writing’s producers and distributors in the most thoroughly material sense. The “non-elite women” examined here, McDowell writes, “all envisioned the self in more traditional ways as collective, social, and essentially unsexed” (125). The statement is meant to remind us that, for Grub Street women, “modern notions of the gendered subject, like that of the gendered self, can only be anachronistically applied” (125). Other unities, bygone forms of collective agency for which hallowed Enlightenment categories like individual and public have substituted, are made available by the alternative history McDowell has dared to produce. Thus in 1689 the marginal Quaker figure Joan Whitrow regards her body—one thinks of Gerrard Winstanely as much as Spinoza—as “‘a sign of the multitude’“ (160). Few books in eighteenth-century studies are prepared to read such a sign.

The final part of The Women of Grub Street, Part III, is a highly original reading of Delarivier Manley. This section of the book offers a characteristically rich empirical account of “one woman’s strategy as a political writer” (17). Linking “gossip,” female agency, and the press, McDowell puts final pay to the notion that reasoned, and therefore affect-less, literary-critical discourse is modernity’s most important communicative game.

Thus two general consequences to the original thinking that animates this indispensable book arise. Yes, The Women of Grub Street fits nicely under the broad heading of feminist scholarship on print culture and the public sphere. The socio-political legacy of the long eighteenth century and its relevance, by implication, to contemporary democratic promise is duly noted and fairly regarded. McDowell mines the archives in extraordinarily docile and elegant ways. And in doing so she reveals a new topography for the origins of modernity as a problem central to popular culture, and popular culture to it. But this brilliant book is not merely a confirmation of what, since the enabling work of the British left historians of plebian experience (Hill, Thompson, et. al.), we now know are undeniable connections between writing, politics, and the masses. There are further consequences to The Women of Grub Street. The book critically interjects Grub Street women’s collective political agency into a long lineage of masculine repetitions of modernity’s whole sense of itself.

McDowell’s work thus looks in many directions at once. It is as close as academic writing gets to “streets.” Her decision to begin the study of women and writing in the seventeenth century joins Grub Street modernity to the England of the Revolutionary ’40s, a moment arguably as much about communicative reason as about affective labor, the multitude, a mind and body for the poor. Grub Street women are joined less to developed capitalism and its liberal analogues, polite letters and consensual chat, than to the “civil unrest” McDowell patently refuses to disclaim. Call this a Digger ontology still waiting to be understood.

In sum, The Women of Grub Street leans in a more decidedly nuanced and radical direction than so far modernity is capable of having. McDowell’s historical agents are producers as much as disseminators in the literary market place, where the distance between writing and work is less pronounced than politeness and literary taste would allow. For that the “streets” are again a woman’s place and are central to the histories we still have to write.