In the Bridgerton universe, everyone follows the scandalous gossip columns of Lady Whistledown. The revelation that the sharp-tongued Lady Whistledown is actually the ever-courteous Penelope Featherington was a surprising twist, but it has historical roots. In the 18th-century print landscape, there were remarkable cases of women, like Featherington, using affordable print—such as magazines and periodicals—to deliver powerful satirical commentary against the male-dominated establishment. They also used these platforms to show solidarity with other women quietly conforming to societal norms.
Eliza Haywood (1693-1756) was one such woman. Her most famous novella, Fantomina (1725), narrates the tale of a young woman who falls for a charming gentleman who, unfortunately, dislikes sleeping with the same woman more than once. To be with him repeatedly, our protagonist adopts various disguises. Fantomina challenges the norm by questioning why society demands “constancy” from women but not men, as the heroine satisfies her desires without losing her reputation. Ultimately, when she becomes pregnant, she is sent to a convent abroad. The story suggests that vice remains vice, even if it remains unnoticed. Hence, the story circulated as conduct literature, a genre aimed at instructing mainly women on proper behavior.
Nonetheless, Haywood subtly highlights a significant double standard. Haywood wasn’t the only one inserting subversive ideas into conduct books. In 1753, Jane Collier released An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting, a manual for women on how to annoy their husbands. According to Collier, a genuine tormentor doesn’t kill their adversary, but instead gradually exhausts them by teasing, nagging, and embarrassing them over time. She writes, “The cat doth play” before “later slays.” From 1741 to 1746, Haywood managed a monthly periodical called The Female Spectator, attracting a female readership. This practice was disparagingly termed “fair sexing” by the writer Jonathan Swift, as it targeted a second-hand audience of women who might read the paper after their husbands. However, The Female Spectator proudly positioned itself as a magazine by women for women, with Haywood consciously advocating for female readers and promoting female education. Following The Female Spectator, Haywood introduced The Parrot (1746), a periodical narrated by a green parrot. By the time readers meet the parrot, it has lived for decades and been owned by numerous people worldwide.
This experience has given it a cynical perspective on humanity, whom it sees as overly focused on judging people based on appearances. Often dismissed as a “pretty prattler” capable only of repeating words without understanding, and valued primarily as an object if not ignored, the parrot empathizes with women. The parrot admits that women are not flawless, but they do what is necessary to survive in a male-dominated world, arguing that “whatever faults [women] are guilty of in this kind, ought, me thinks, in a greater measure to be imputed to the men”. Between 1760 and 1761, Scottish author Charlotte Lennox published The Lady’s Museum, a periodical aimed at educating and entertaining female readers. Her publication anticipated Mary Wollstonecraft’s famous critique in the Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) of the “false education” historically teaching women their inferiority to men. Lennox declared that “we live no longer in an age when prejudice condemned woman [to] shameful ignorance.”
However, while Lennox viewed this emerging print culture as a chance for female education, she also cautioned against assuming that women of the past were not capable thinkers. There have always been women, she noted, who refused to conform to fashion’s limitations, who dared to “think justly and speak with propriety,” and who were “not ashamed of being more learned than the idle man of fashion.” Lennox assured her readers that such women existed throughout history; they simply needed to be “found.”