'An Essay on Woman' - Mary Leapor

‘...with ten thousand follies to her charge

Unhappy woman’s but a slave at large.’

Mary Leapor (1722-1746)

‘An Essay on Woman’ (written before 1746)

Although her life was cut tragically short by an attack of measles at the age of 24, Mary Leapor left behind a splendid array of excellent poetry. One of her most brilliant works is ‘An Essay on Woman’, a fiery feminist attack on the narrow role allotted to women in eighteenth-century British society. It begins with delicious sarcasm by playing directly into the stereotypes:

   Woman, a pleasing but a short-lived flower,

Too soft for business and too weak for power:

A wife in bondage, or neglected maid;

Despised, if ugly; if she’s fair, betrayed.

‘Tis wealth alone inspires every grace,

And calls the raptures to her plenteous face.

The situation of women is, she suggests, impossible: they are ‘too soft’ and ‘too weak’ for any useful work, but their sole asset of beauty is only ever ‘short-lived’. Good-looks are also a curse leading to the ‘bondage’ of marriage or the betrayal of a seducer, but without them a woman will only be ‘despised’. The only way a woman can gain social advantage is through marriage, and thus the archetypal woman herself is presented as only interested in securing ‘wealth’ in a future partner, since it is this ‘alone’ which ‘calls the raptures to her plenteous face’. A catalogue of attractive feminine attributes follows, raising this model woman to the level of a ‘sparkling Venus’: until Leapor warns, marriage ‘Dissolves her triumphs, sweeps her charms away, / And turns the goddess to her native clay’ (line 10 & lines 17-18).  The total potential of her life fulfilled, there is nothing left for woman to do but to decline.

Examples of classical women are then used to further demonstrate the hopeless limitations of women’s position in society, for example the clever Pamphilia:

 Pamphilia’s wit who does not strive to shun,

Like death’s infection or a dog-day’s sun?

The damsels view her with malignant eyes,

The men are vexed to find a nymph so wise:

And wisdom only serves to make her know

The keen sensation of superior woe.

Whilst the ‘men’ here are described through a term that solidly embraces their gendered humanity, the woman is denoted as a ‘nymph’, an idealised and ethereal being derived from classical mythology (typically female and very attractive).  If Leapor’s vexed ‘men’, like the Flavia’s male admirers in Montagu’s ‘Saturday’, are only interested in a woman being beautiful then for them intelligence in a woman would only be an unnecessary and thus irksome addition.  The point of the poem is not that Leapor herself believes woman to be ‘a pleasing but a short-lived flower’; rather it is an expression of profound frustration that this is the function to which they are limited. It’s a frustration with which Leapor would have been only too familiar, as her own mother had felt obliged to try to curb her poetic talent as a child because of fears this kind of clever behaviour would only make her a social outcast (in Leapor’s case not just because of her gender but also because of her working-class background).

The final section of Leapor’s Essay on Woman represents a weary capitulation as she feels herself to be ultimately powerless in combat against such firm and deeply held social oppression of women.  She writes:

[…] whether sunk in avarice or pride,

A wanton virgin or a starving bride;

Or wond’ring crowds attend her charming tongue,

Or, deemed an idiot, ever speaks the wrong;

Though nature armed us for the growing ill

With fraudful cunning and a headstrong will;

Yet, with ten thousand follies to her charge,

Unhappy woman’s but a slave at large. (lines 53-60)

The symmetrical balance of ‘wanton virgin’ with ‘starving bride’ is a powerful expression of these terms as ultimate antithetical signifiers.  A woman is either one or the other, married or unmarried, her whole usefulness and function defined by her marital status.  Addressing the stereotypical ‘cunning’ and wilfulness of women Leapor suggests that this was nature’s way of ‘arm[ing] us’ against social oppression.  Yet in spite of such ‘follies’, Leapor sadly admits, ‘Unhappy woman’s but slave at large’.  Always defined by their relationships with men, women are here allowed only a delusion of freedom.

Obliged to work as a kitchen maid during her teenage years, Leapor was keenly aware of the restrictions she faced because of both her gender and her class. Fortunately for us, she did not let this stop her from writing poetry, and when she later returned home to keep house for her widowed father the efforts of her new friend Bridget Fremantle meant that the publication of her poetry became a real possibility. The production of  two-volume anthology was funded via subscription publishing, a system through which interested patrons could basically preorder one or more copies of a work before it ever went to the press, with the money then being used to fund the printing costs.  Sadly Leapor herself died of measles before their plans could come to fruition but, in accordance with Leapor’s dying request, her poems were published after her death ‘for the benefit of her father’.  The posthumous subscription garnered almost 600 signatories.    

 

You can find this poem:

You can find scans of Leapor’s original volumes of poetry on Archive.org here:
https://archive.org/details/poemsuponseveral01leapiala (Volume 1)

https://archive.org/details/poemsuponseveral02leapiala (Volume 2)

Modern typed versions of some of Leapor’s poetry are available on this fab free resource, Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive. A short biographical note is also included, along with some information about additional reference works if you want to find out more:

http://eighteenthcenturypoetry.org/authors/pers00154.shtml

Sources used in this blog post:

Roger Lonsdale (ed.), The New Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)

(This fantastic resource should be on the shelf of every eighteenth-century poetry enthusiast!)