Satirists in petticoats : affect and form in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British women's satire

Satirists in Petticoats examines seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British women’s satire, with a specific focus on the period known as the Golden Age of Satire (ca. 1670-1740s). Scholars have long argued that the restrictive literary climate of this satiric era simply precluded women from writing satire. Its aggressive nature, they argue, sat uncomfortably with notions of eighteenth-century appropriately gendered decorum. This dissertation, however, questions this assumption and offers the first sustained history of women’s satire as a larger phenomenon. At the same time, it constructs a history of cultural assumptions about women’s satire and questions gendered assumptions embedded within current definitions satire and how these have limited our ability to locate and study women’s satire. This dissertation’s argument is two-fold. First, it argues that debates about the construction of womanhood and theories of satire mutually shaped each other. As one of the most public, aggressive, and morally authoritative forms of writing during the period, satire was the site of intense and revealing debates about constructions of femininity and women’s literary production. Second, this dissertation argues that such a more thorough understanding of intimate entanglement between satire, women and gender invites larger questions about the stories we tell about eighteenth-century satire: what did it look like? And how did it operate? The literary forms women used to offer satiric critique and the affective and emotional registers they took towards their satiric objects were influenced by and influenced developing of acceptable femininity. By focusing on the interplay between affect and form in women’s satire, this dissertation interrogates common assumptions about satire that we have taken for granted, such as the formal or generic dimensions of satire or the affective valence of satiric attack and aggression. Ultimately, such an approach demonstrates the extent to which women contributed centrally to the rise and development of satire across this period, a phenomenon often overlooked by scholars of eighteenth-century satire.