The Idea of the Female Club: The Case of An Account of the Fair Intellectual-Club (Edinburgh, 1719)

Abstract

Associational culture in the eighteenth century has been the subject of sustained attention in modern scholarship of the period, but relatively little attention has been paid to female clubs and associations. Usually this is because of the lack of evidence that female-only societies existed, and because research of this kind has been broadly uninterested in fictional clubs. This essay considers the specific case of ‘The Fair Intellectual Club’ of Edinburgh c.1717-1719, a Club whose putative existence is proposed by one published Account (Edinburgh, 1719). In a close examination of the print and club contexts in which this pamphlet was published, this essay revisits previous considerations of the work and situates it in relation to the ‘Athenian Society’ of Edinburgh, with which it was closely associated, and to the idea of a female club, circulating in printed, often ephemeral, texts in the early decades of the eighteenth century. The ‘Fair Intellectuals’ are contrasted with representations of other female clubs of the period, in Edinburgh, Dublin and London and with broader ideas of exclusively female assembly as explored in the writings of Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell. Although the Account of the Club appears not to have been reprinted after 1720, references to the Club from the 1790s onwards suggest that its challenge to alternative conventions of male homosocial and polite heterosocial assemblies, as also to the misogyny of satirical female clubs, is significant, not least in the way in which its reception would eventually outpace the apparent ephemerality of its publication.