Power Over Themselves

This book is a detailed exploration of the literary controversy surrounding female education in Britain from 1660 to 1820. The prevailing belief of the time was that the world was as it should be: a class-based patriarchy, relegating women and other lesser beings to certain societal and familial duties and denying them education beyond their prescribed role.

The author, Veena P. Kasbekar, examines the attitude towards women as a key to the consideration of possible outcomes of educating women. She discusses theories about education and makes use of a variety of types of literature from the late 17th, the 18th, and the Regency decades, not just treatises on education. Female authors such as Mary Astell, the Bluestockings, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah More, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, and many others are discussed and quoted throughout the book.

Since the literature of the time concentrated on upper-class women, this comprehensive research focuses on gentlewomen, but also includes women of the middle and lower classes. Four prevailing philosophies of thought, labeled Conservative, Progressive, Reactionary and Radical, are employed to divide the book into chapters analyzing 18th-century attitudes toward women and their education. These four traditions subtly informed and changed one another until the beginning of the 19th century. In the final chapter, the author illustrates the ways the four interacted to create cautiously merging attitudes to increased education and social change for women.

Power Over Themselves is a labor of love, born of the desire to add to the compendium of material dedicated to the literary discussion of the status of women in history. It is a valuable resource for those looking to understand the time and place as well as the evolution of thoughts and ideas on respecting women's minds and capabilities through a more robust education.