It's My TV….It's My Peanut Butter

Cammy:  Okay, so, I’ll admit that until today the only Elizabeth Carter I knew was a girl a few years ahead of me in high school.  But, in combing through Wikipedia to see who of interested has a birthday this week, I ran across Carter and her buddies in a group known as the Bluestockings….and yes, I totally want to have coffee with her.  In the absence of higher education (or much of any education of substance) for women in the 18th century, Elizabeth was a polyglot, mastering multiple languages, including Ancient Greek.  She translated, wrote and apparently, could make a decent pudding and sew, to boot.  She and the rest of the Bluestockings would get together, share ideas, hear lectures and generally improve their minds, which, for the time, made them a pretty bad-ass group of gals.  So, what would one Elizabeth (once touted as the most learned woman in England) have to say about where we are in education now?  Would she see more value in the presence of women in the lecture hall….or in our conversations in dorm hallways (at least the kind of conversations that happened in the dorm hallways where Kristy and I lived)?  How about the drop of in studying the Classics?  Is there a need for a modern day Bluestocking movement?

Kristy:  Oh heck yes!  I didn’t know any more about her than Cammy until tonight, but yes, she sounds like someone it would be fascinating to have coffee with.  Like Cammy I’m interested to hear what she has to say about education, in particular women’s education, at the present day.  I’m also interested in the comments about her ability to excel at typical “womanly” activities such as cooking and embroidery as well as the spheres which were dominated by men in her day such as translation and science.  I personally appreciate this since I like to think my enjoyment of cooking and crocheting doesn’t hinder my ability to be a feminist/post-modern woman.  But I have to wonder whether she cooked and sewed because she enjoyed them, or because they were essential skills for ladies of her day?  Inquiring minds want to know.