Where Are the Women?:
Pseudonymity and the Public Sphere, Then and Now

At the same time, popular publishing became a political arena. In the seventeenth century, the lead up to the English Civil War had been accompanied by an explosion in populist printing: there were two pamphlets published in England in 1640, but 1,996 in 1642.¹ Despite periodic censorship during the rest of the century, political shifts to Commonwealth and then back to monarchy brought about, for the first time, the sense of a politically aware reading public. When Charles II returned to the throne in 1660, his authority was limited by a Parliament newly aware of its own power. This power depended on public opinion in ways that monarchy had not; members of Parliament were elected, and suddenly formal political parties and public debate were an integral part of government. Although the press were (and remain) commonly subjected to criticism, the fact was that “the party system required an active press.”² Newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsides—the periodical ephemera of political news and debate&mdashtherefore created an enduring association between publishing, politics, and the public interest.

Thus, for the first time in history, early eighteenth-century England had an established, permanent reading public. Urbanization and colonial trade were giving rise to a growing middle class. People could purchase inexpensive reading material, there were new coffeehouses where they could pick up a paper or discuss what they read, they had enough leisure to enjoy light reading and enough political and economic power to feel compelled to keep up with foreign and domestic news. The modern public sphere was founded on print publication.

To these new readers of the eighteenth century, the emergence of modern print culture felt as revolutionary and innovative as the shift to online publication and digital technology seems to us. Probably more so: in the twenty-first century, the shift from paper to online publication is primarily a shift in medium and access. But for eighteenth-century readers, the entire concept of publication, reading, and the public sphere were new inventions. Many of the arguments and objections we now hear about the revolutionary nature of blogging—that it shifts political power away from party elites to common people, that it allows almost anyone a public voice, that the proliferation of periodicals/blogs puts good writing on the same level with bad—were made then. In 1711, John Gay complained of “whole Swarms of little . . . Scriblers.”³ In 2006, David Brooks—employing a metaphor from Gay’s era, no less—takes issue with “the land of the Lilliputians.”⁴ Each man represents the less established writers to whom new publishing forms give voice as trivial, small, irritating.

Brooks’s criticism of bloggers is incidental to his criticism of Kos (Markos Moulitsas Zúniga) as a new “Kingpin” of “self-importance.” In contrast, Gay dismisses the “swarms of scribblers” specifically in order to praise Richard Steele and Joseph Addison’s new essay periodical, The Spectator. But both rely on an implicit contrast between named writers (Zúniga, Steele and Addison) and the anonymous horde; the implication is that anonymity or obscurity signifies deficiency.

There’s an important difference between Brooks’s focus and Gay’s, though. Brooks is speaking of political blogs specifically, while Gay refers to essay periodicals, a genre that explicitly disassociated itself from party politics. The first of the type, Steele’s Tatler, began by satirizing “politic persons, who are so public spirited as to neglect their own affairs to look into transactions of State” and ended with an apology for “the least excusable Part of all this Work . . . That I have, in some Places in it, touched upon Matters which concern both the Church and State,” i.e., “Politicks.”⁵ In fact, Steele’s Tatler was pseudonymously published by “Isaac Bickerstaff,” rather than Steele himself, in order to allow him to publish opinions at a remove from his official position as the editor of the government-approved Guardian. Throughout the eighteenth century, essay periodicals lifted themselves above newspapers by claiming a literary status that transcended the merely political and ephemeral; in the twenty-first century, blogs are widely perceived as less reliable or important than newspapers and magazines. (The latter, as it happens, are considered by historians of journalism as the direct descendants of essay periodicals.)

But these two genres—essay periodicals and blogs—do share some important and characteristic formal features. Blogs encourage and publish readers’ comments, while essay periodicals, unlike their newspaper contemporaries, solicited and published readers’ letters. Both forms also offer, not an official authoritative voice, but an informal and personal one. These attributes are crucially important to arguments that blogs or essay periodicals are inherently democratizing. They lie behind Jürgen Habermas’ declaration that it was essay periodicals specifically that “transposed ‘public spirit'” into the spirit of the age.⁶

Pseudonymity, or the potential for pseudonymity, underpins both the author/reader dialogue and personal voices that characterize these two genres. Authors and readers of blogs and essay periodicals use pseudonyms as a matter of course. Pseudonymous authorship allowed periodical essayists to blend personal voices with public commentary. To those familiar with eighteenth-century precedents, this is one of the most striking resemblances between periodical essays and today’s blogs.

A pseudonymous persona draws attention to the problem of authorship; the absence of a “real” name draws attention to the fact that the text is written by a real, absent person. Hence a pseudonym prevents a text from being impersonal, from pretending to objectivity. At the same time though, by hiding an author’s real name, a pseudonym makes a text more fully public. To the eighteenth century, hiding an author’s status and political connections placed more weight on readers’ judgment of the text itself, without regard to their opinions of the author. For twenty-first century readers, the claim is that “on the internet, no one knows you’re a dog,” as the cartoon puts it.⁷

Which brings us to the particular problem of gender. It’s widely perceived that women bloggers are far more likely to be anonymous.⁸ Similarly, the essay periodical canon is traditionally male; it’s been argued that the genre created national consensus by creating a typical figure—male, white, and propertied—who represented an imagined national average.⁹ Indeed, critics of Habermas’s idea of the public sphere have pointed out that his idea of its inclusiveness is deeply flawed in that the public sphere has long excluded women along with ethnic minorities, the uneducated, and other disenfranchised people.¹⁰

But this argument, like the belief that women don’t blog and didn’t write essay periodicals, relies in part on a form of erasure. My research in eighteenth-century essay periodicals has convinced me that the genre was, in fact, more democratic, more truly public, than either Habermas’ critics or the traditional canon have recognized. In fact, by rejecting overly political content, essay periodicals feminized themselves: Bickerstaff claims to have named his paper The Tatler “in honour of the fair sex,”¹¹ and Gay praises Steele for rescuing wit “out of the hands of Pedants” and making it “a most welcome guest at Tea-tables.”¹² The Tatler’s most successful rival was The Female Tatler. There were also The Young Lady, Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator, Frances Brooke’s Old Maid—all successful, long-lived titles— as well as many other papers which had the shorter runs that were typical of most essay periodicals.

1. Asa Briggs, A Social History of England, 3rd ed. (London: Penguin, 1999), 146. [↩]
2. Richmond P. Bond, Studies in the Early English Periodical (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1957), 9. [↩]
3. John Gay, “The Present State of Wit (1711),” in Essays on Wit, facsimile of the original edition with an introduction by Donald F. Bond (Los Angeles: Augustan Reprint Society). [↩]
4. David Brooks, “Respect Must Be Paid,” The New York Times, June 25, 2006, http://select.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/opinion/25brooks.html. [↩]
5. Richard Steele, The Tatler, 1709-1711, 3 vols., ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). [↩]
6. Habermas, 93. [↩]
7. Peter Steiner, cartoon in The New Yorker, July 5, 1993, 61. [↩]
8. The following list of posts is just a sample: Academics Anonymous, Against My Better Judgment, Anonymous Female Academic Blogging: A Parallel Blogosphere?, On the Internet, No One Knows You’re a Dog, Women Bloggers (And Other Quiet People) [available by password only]. There’s even a blog with the title Anonymous is a Woman. [↩]
9. Shaun Lisa Maurer, Proposing Men: Dialectics of Gender and Class in the Eighteenth-Century English Periodical (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). [↩]
10. Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). [↩]
11. Steele, 17. [↩]
12. Gay, “The Present State of Wit.” [↩]