Summary Of A Legacy For Young Ladies By Barbauld

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The shifting borderlines in Barbauld 's writings between persistence on knowledge for all and acceptance of feminine boundaries epitomize her culture 's ambiguities about nature, gender, and knowledge. Women could and did pursue natural history in its descriptive, aesthetic, and non invasive modes; they became serious students of science, taught the young, and produced successful books for general readers. But women were not encouraged to become experimental or theoretical scientists, the producers and "shapers" of new knowledge. Barbauld 's very phrasing is suggestive: as she writes in A Legacy for Young Ladies, women were "excused" from the professions, but "nothing [would] excuse" them from their domestic

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