Blue Stockings Society
The Blue Stockings Society was an informal women's social and educational movement in England in the mid-18th century. The society emphasized education and mutual co-operation rather than the individualism which marked the French version.
The Society was founded in the early 1750s by Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Vesey and others as a women's literary discussion group, a revolutionary step away from traditional, non-intellectual, women's activities. They invited various people to attend, including botanist, translator and publisher Benjamin Stillingfleet. One story tells that Stillingfleet was not rich enough to have the proper formal dress, which included black silk stockings, so he attended in everyday blue worsted stockings. The term came to refer to the informal quality of the gatherings and the emphasis on conversation over fashion.
Read more about Blue Stockings Society: History, Purpose, Notable Members
Famous quotes containing the words blue, stockings and/or society:
“Two wooden tubs of blue hydrangeas stand at the foot of the stone steps.
The sky is a blue gum streaked with rose. The trees are black.
The grackles crack their throats of bone in the smooth air.
Moisture and heat have swollen the garden into a slum of bloom.
Pardie! Summer is like a fat beast, sleepy in mildew....”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
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And with a look so piteous in purport
As if he had been loosed out of hell
To speak of horrors.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.”
—Frantz Fanon (1925–1961)