Editing Bluestocking (section)

==History==
The [[Blue Stockings Society]] was a literary society led by [[Elizabeth Montagu]] and others in the 1750s in England. Elizabeth Montagu was a social anomaly in the period because she took possession of her husband’s property when he died, allowing her to have more power in her world.<ref>Beckett, J. V. "Elizabeth Montagu: Bluestocking Turned Landlady." Huntington Library Quarterly 49, no. 2 (1986): 149–64.</ref> This society was founded by women, and included many prominent members of English society, both male and female, including [[Harriet Bowdler]], [[Edmund Burke]], [[Sarah Fielding]], [[Samuel Johnson]], and [[Frances Pulteney]].<ref>{{citation|author=Louis Kronenberger|title=Kings and Desperate Men|page=75}}</ref> ''[[M.P. (opera)|M.P.]]'', an 1811 [[comic opera]] by [[Thomas Moore]] and [[Charles Edward Horn]], was subtitled ''The Blue Stocking''. It contained a character, Lady Bab Blue, who was a parody of bluestockings.

A reference to bluestockings has been attributed to [[John Amos Comenius]] in his 1638 book, where he mentioned ancient traditions of women being excluded from higher education, citing the [[Bible]] and [[Euripides]].{{clarify|date=January 2019}} That second reference, though, comes from Keatinge's 1896 translation and is not present in Comenius's Latin text.{{efn|Comenius cites Euripides' tragedy ''Hippolytus'', where Hippolytus says, "I detest a bluestocking. May there never be a woman in my house who knows more than is fitting for a woman to know.", to which Comenius answers: "These opinions, I opine, stand in no true opposition to our demand. For we are not advising that women be educated in such a way that their tendency to curiosity shall be developed, but so that their sincerity and contentedness may be increased, and this chiefly in those things which it becomes a woman to know and to do; that is to say, all that enables her to look after her household and to promote the welfare of her husband and her family." {{citation |title=Didactica Magna (The Great Didactic, translation by M.&nbsp;W. Keatinge, London: Adam and Charles Black, 1896) |year=1633–1638 |author=John Amos Comenius |page=220}}}} The name may have been applied in the 15th century to the blue stockings worn by the members of the ''[[Compagnie della Calza]]'' in [[Venice]], which then was adopted in Paris and London; in the 17th century to the [[Covenanter]]s in [[Scotland]], who wore unbleached woollen stockings, in contrast to the bleached or dyed stockings of the more affluent. In 1870 Henry D. Wheatley noted that [[Elizabeth Montagu]]’s coterie were named “blue stockings” after the blue worsted stockings worn by the naturalist [[Benjamin Stillingfleet]].{{efn|'Benjamin Stillingfleet, the celebrated naturalist, who is described by [Thomas] Gray as living in a garret in order that he might be able to support some near relations, died at his lodgings opposite to Burlington House on 15 December 1771 at the age of sixty-nine. It was his blue worsted stockings that gave the name "blue stocking" to the ladies of Mrs Montagu's coterie.' Henry D. Wheatley, ''Round About Piccadilly And Pall Mall'', London: Smith Elder (1870), p. 42.}}

[[William Hazlitt]] said, “The bluestocking is the most odious character in society...she sinks wherever she is placed, like the yolk of an egg, to the bottom, and carries the filth with her”.<ref>{{cite book|author=Elizabeth Eger|title=Bluestockings: women of reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=LFomAQAAMAAJ|year=2010|publisher=Palgrave Macmillan|isbn=9780230205338|page=206}}</ref>