bluestocking

plural bluestockings · alternative blue-stocking

1. derogatoryusuallyA scholarly, literary, or cultured woman.

   Many of her ladyship’s letters were the most whimsical rhodomontades that ever blue-stocking penned.

   1844 August, Fitz-Boodle [pseudonym; William Makepeace Thackeray], “Barry Provides for His Family and Attains the Height of His Luck”, in “The Luck of Barry Lyndon; A Romance of the Last Century”, in Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, volume XXX, number CLXXVI, London: G[eorge] W[illiam] Nickisson, page 235, column 1

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   But Isabel was no blue-stocking; she was full of vivacity and life, and her conversation was sprightly and agreeable, even when turning upon those serious subjects.

   1846, George W.M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of London, volume 1, London: George Vickers, page 109

   And let none cast in my teeth[…]the remark of Hippolytus in Euripides: “I detest a bluestocking. May there never be a woman in my house who knows more than is fitting for a woman to know.”

   1896, Maurice Walter Keatinge (tr.), The great didactic of John Amos Comenius, London: Adam and Charles Black, translation of Didactica Magna by John Amos Comenius

   He knows what is what, and he says that it is a remarkable book. But you think that it^([sic]) is a bluestocking. Not at all.

   1904 [1878], chapter 9, in Leo Wiener, transl., Anna Karénin, Boston: D. Estes & Company, translation of Анна Каренина (Anna Karenina) by Leo Tolstoy, part 7, page 219

   “Heavens!” exclaimed Nina, “the blue-stocking and the fogy!—and yours are pale blue, Eileen!—you’re about as self-conscious as Drina—slumping there with your hair tumbling à la Mérode! Oh, it’s very picturesque, of course, but a straight spine and good grooming is better.[…]”

   1907 August, Robert W[illiam] Chambers, “A Novice”, in The Younger Set, New York, N.Y.: D. Appleton & Company, →OCLC, page 359

   Bragg was a Massachusetts-born bluestocking, a New Woman of the Progressive Era who changed not only the cultural face of Charleston but also the nation's approach to museum education.

   2001, Louise Anderson Allen, A Bluestocking in Charleston: The Life and Career of Laura Bragg, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, →ISBN, →OL

   Synonyms: basbleu

2. historicalA member of an 18th-century Blue Stockings Society.
3. historicalA member of the English parliament of 1653, more commonly called the Barebones Parliament.