Glossary

accomplishment: That is a kind of sneer-word when MW uses it writing about the ‘accomplishments’ that women are trained to have. To ‘accomplish’ something can be to complete or finish it; a few decades ago some young women were sent to a ‘finishing school’ before being launched into society.

address: skill, elegance, dexterity; usually thought of (by MW at least) as something learned, practised, contrived—not natural. See here.

amuse: In MW’s time ‘amuse’ had a central meaning which it now has only at the margins: to ‘amuse oneself by. . .’ was to pass the time by. . . . A child who is ‘amusing herself’ by dressing her doll (here) needn’t be taking much pleasure in this.

animal spirits: These figured in a theory, popularised by Descartes: they were supposed to be an extremely fine-divided liquid or gas—much less lumpy than water or air—that could move with great speed and get in anywhere; among their roles was to transmit causal influences from the sense-organs to the brain, almost instantaneously.

brute, brutal: A brute is a lower or non-human animal. A brutal or brutish way of behaving is one that falls below a minimum standard for being human—e.g. the ‘brutal’ behaviour of a mother [here] who indulges her child without thinking about the effects of her conduct on the child’s later development or on •other people.

docile: Strictly and originally this meant ‘able to learn’ and/or ‘willing to learn’. In MW’s usage, as in ours today, a ‘docile’ person is one who is easy to manage, persuade, manipulate, etc. One who is biddable.

education: In MW’s time this word had a wider meaning than it tends to have today. It wouldn’t be far wrong to replace most occurrences of it by ‘upbringing’. See MW’s discussion of ‘education’ starting here.

genius: In the present work this means something like ‘extremely high-level intellect’; similar to the word’s present meaning, but not as strong.

he or she: MW never uses ‘he or she’, ‘his or hers’ or the like. These occur in the present version to avoid the discomfort we feel in her use of ‘it’, as when she says ‘every being’ can become virtuous by the exercise of ‘its own reason’.

(im)mortal: MW ties •being immortal to •having reason and to •being anwerable to God.

mistress: In this work, a ‘mistress of’ a family is in charge of a family; and a ‘mistress of’ a man is a sexual partner of a man. The word is not used here except in those two kinds of context.

person: When MW refers to a woman’s ‘person’ she is always referring to the woman herself considered as sexually attractive. A man’s interest in a woman’s ‘person’ is his sexual interest in her body, though clothing and jewellery may also come into it.

prescription: In several important places MW uses ‘prescription’ in its sense as a legal term, now obsolete, referring to something’s being accepted or unchallenged etc. because it has been in place for so long.

sceptre: An ornamental rod held in the hand of a monarch as a symbol of royal authority. MW uses the word several times, always as a metaphor for power or authority: ‘beauty is woman’s sceptre’ means that beauty is woman’s source of power.

sense: MW speaks of ‘a man of sense’ she means ‘a fairly intelligent man’ or, in her terms, ‘a man with a fairly enlarged understanding’.

sensibility: Capacity for refined emotion, readiness to feel compassion for suffering, or the quality of being strongly affected by emotional influences. MW uses the adjective ‘sensible’—e.g. here—in pretty much our sense of it.

sentimental: This meant ‘having to do with feelings’; the implication of shallow and unworthy feelings came after MW’s time. Here ‘sentimental lust’ presumably means ‘intense hankering for various kinds of feelings’.

sex: For MW ‘sex’ is a classificatory term—e.g. ‘I speak for my sex’ meaning ‘I speak for all women’. (The use of ‘sex’ as short for ‘copulation’ is of more recent vintage.) See the striking example here. MW uses phrases about ‘giving a sex to X’ meaning (here) treating X as though it related to only one of the sexes, or (here, here and here) treating X as though there were one version of it for females and a different one for males.

subtlety: In MW’s usage this means something close to ‘address’ (see above).

vice, vicious: For an 18th century writer vice is simply wrong conduct, with no necessary implication of anything sexual (except perhaps here); and a vicious person is simply someone who often acts wrongly, with no necessary implication of anything like savage cruelty.

virtue: On a few occasions in this work MW uses ‘virtue’ with some of its older sense of ‘power’. One example is here. Here MW personifies virtue as feminine.

voluptuous: Having to do with sexual pleasure.

vulgar: In MW’s day ‘vulgar’ as applied to people meant ‘common, ordinary, not much educated, not very thoughtful’. More generally, ‘vulgar x’ meant ‘the kind of x that would be associated with vulgar people’.

woman: This version follows MW exactly in her uses of ‘woman’, ‘women’, ‘lady’, ‘female’ and ‘feminine’, and in her use of the masculine counterparts of these.