Wool Works: the blue sock story

The blue sock story

[Editor's note: this was provided by Vivienne Shen.]

This was originally posted to the list sometime in Jan. 1996 by Mardi Halvorsen, who got it from her friend Lisa. I don't know if this is the real reason the list has a blue sock as its identifier, but I think it is really interesting! Enjoy.

Mardi, I asked a good friend of mine who is also in grad school in English, and she said ....

Here's what my good ol' Webster's says:

bluestocking:: [After the *Blue Stocking* Society, a nickname for a chiefly female literary club of 18th cent. London.] A scholarly or pedantic woman.

Word history: The term bluestocking seems always to have been one of contempt and derision, for it originally signified one who was informally and unfashionably dressed in blue worsted rather than black silk stockings.

Such informal wear was common at literary and intellectual gatherings in 18th-century London, which were scornfully dubbed "bluestocking" societies by those who preferred parties where they could play cards and indulge in other idle amusements in their best and most fashionalbe clothes. Since the literary gatherings were organized and attended primarily by women, the term bluestocking was transferred, sneer and all, to any woman with pretensions or aspirations to literature and learning.

From the Feminist Dictionary, edited by Cheris Kramarae and Paula A. Treichler, 1985:

"Viewy women who gather for artistic, literary, intellectual and witty exchanges. Critics have used the term to refer to learned, and thus in their minds, unfeminine and pretentious women. The origin of the term is in dispute but was evidently first used in the 1750s to refer to women and men in London who gathered for conversation; one of the people attending wore blue worsted instead of black silk stockings. The women who attended were first derisively called bluestockingers and Blue Stocking Ladies and later Bluestockings and Blues. The terms were thus first used to denote informal or homely dress and then to refer to intellectual, literary, or learned women. To "wear your blues" became a metaphor for evenings of intellectual and witty conversation. As the term bluestocking associated with the women who held salons and who put their energies and emotions into work with each other, it became a term of abuse, with connotations of snob and misfit. The bluestockings, excluded from politics, law, education and employment because they were female, formed an alternative, knowledgeable, supportive, competent and intellectually self-sufficient group. There are many bluestockings today, learning, reading, writing, and exchanging ideas in women's groups. (Susan Conrad 1976; Seon Manley and Susan Belcher 1972; Barbara Schnorrenberg and Jean E. Hunter 1980; Dale Spender 1982b; Edith Rolt Wheeler 1919b) "He has left off his old friends and his blue stockings." (Lady Mary Wortley Montague 1757, Oxford English Dictionary)

P.S. [from Mardi]: my friend lisa does not knit. Feel free to quote any of this if you have a need. She listed her sources!

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Mardi Halvorsen
cully@gnn.com
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