Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) and Alexander Pope (1688-1744) were two of the most important British authors in the early 18th century, known especially for their satires– a literary form that uses humor to critique vice or folly. Swift was the author of Gulliver’s Travels and the infamous essay “A Modest Proposal,” in which he proposed that the poor in Ireland should eat their children to survive the potato famine; Pope authored the mock-epic “The Rape of the Lock” and the poems “An Essay on Criticism” and “An Essay on Man.”

Recent generations of readers/scholars have characterized Swift and Pope as misogynists, as women were often targets of their satiric wit. But during their lifetimes, literacy rates for women were slowly on the rise, especially in the aristocratic classes, and in the 1730s, a pair of “good frienemies,” Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) and Anne Ingram, Viscountess Irwin (1696-1764), wrote poems mimicking the men’s forms and refuting their critiques, one with sharp humor and the other with powerfully logical argumentation.

In Part I, we will look at Swift’s poem “In a Lady’s Dressing Room” and Montagu’s parodic takedown entitled “The Reasons That Induced Dr. Swift to Write a Poem Called the Lady’s Dressing Room.” In Part II we will discuss Pope’s “Epistle 2. To a Lady (Of the Characters of Women” and Irwin’s more earnest and finely crafted response entitled, “An Epistle to Mr. Pope: Occasioned by his ‘Characters of Women.’” Each lecture will briefly introduce the social and political context and relevant biographical details of the respective authors.

Dr. Allix Wee received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Minnesota in 2004, specializing in British literature from the Victorian and Modernist periods. A literary historian at heart, Dr. Wee has conducted extensive research in the archives of the British Home Office exploring that government's history of literary censorship, work that encompasses her ongoing commitments to gender and sexuality studies. Her most recent publications focus on teaching literature and gender in the context of the Lutheran educational mission. She has also taught Ancient Greek literature, environmental literature, and young adult literature, and designs all her courses to hone students' critical thinking, reading, and writing skills. Before coming to Cal Lutheran in 2008, Dr. Wee taught at several strong private liberal arts institutions in the Midwest where she grew up, including Carleton College in MN, Denison University in OH, and Grinnell and Luther Colleges in IA.