‘Too Severe on the Female Sex’?
This chapter explores how Stephen Duck negotiated the competing hierarchies of gender and class as he sought to establish himself as a poet who moved in courtly circles. In both his narrative and occasional verse, Duck’s writing about, and addressed to, women was informed by his own unique and unprecedented position as a former thresher who had been brought to live at the periphery of the royal court. As several contemporary commentators noted, women and labouring-class men were often considered to be similarly—though not equally—circumscribed when it came to accessing literary and intellectual culture. Duck repeatedly made use of this supposed equivalence in order to bolster his own position against that of women who were, by birth, above him in the Georgian social strata. Now a labourer no more, Duck used the hierarchy of gender to trump the hierarchy of class. As this chapter shows, Duck’s misogyny was a product of the culture in which he was writing, but it was also a tool that he could strategically deploy in a variety of circumstances in the service of establishing his own credentials as a would-be gentleman.