During the eighteenth century, women in England experienced economical, domestic, social, and relational inequality.  However, the institution of marriage proved to be the source of greatest oppression for them.  Mary Leapor’s “An Essay on Woman” not only identifies the entrapment that a married woman in the eighteenth century experienced on a day-to-day basis but also accurately captures the hidden truth behind the marriage covenant.  Although Leapor’s poem discusses the many facets of a woman’s bondage, the prevailing views of marriage during the time reveal more clearly the depth and pervasiveness of a woman’s entrapment.  
     In “An Essay on Woman,” Leapor takes a controversial stance and argues that marriage, rather than liberating women, serves as another form of subjugation.  The majority of women during the eighteenth century considered marriage a necessity and believed it to be a liberating institution and the only means to a prosperous lifestyle.  Since Leapor’s poem directly contradicts society’s views, her ideas were generally rejected by the public during the mid-eighteenth century, specifically by the male audience.  One male publisher returned one of her manuscripts having spilled wine on it, a physical display of his refusal to publish such a challenging text (NAEL 1: 2603).
     Before readers can accurately examine Leapor’s claims regarding married women, her personal life must first be examined, for it provides the foundation on which she can express her radical views.  Leapor had little direct experience with marriage, for she never married and, hence, never personally witnessed the downfalls of marriage that she so readily attests to in her poem.  Also, the repeated rejection by publishers and the lack of a supporting audience would appear to only discourage her from writing.  It would, therefore, seem that she had little authority to write on a subject she had not experienced and little promise of fame or fortune to motivate her.  However, Leapor found other means, besides mass approval and marriage experience, to inspire her writings on the subject.
     As a single working-class woman with little financial means to support herself, Leapor was most likely discouraged by her inability to gain a leading literary voice in the male-dominated British society.  She found a patron and mentor in Bridget Freemantle, another single woman and one of Leapor’s closest friends, who both supported Leapor financially and also encouraged her to write despite the obvious hindrances.  According to Richard Greene, “Freemantle not only provided Leapor with a receptive audience for her mature work but actively promoted it” (18).  Freemantle’s singleness undoubtedly inspired Leapor to write as well, since she would not have felt as alone and invalidated.  
     Although Leapor received encouragement to write from Freemantle, her lack of personal marriage experience could not have provided the motivation needed to write so critically on marriage.  Her writings on the entrapment of women were clearly inspired by the writing of other authors from the era, specifically Alexander Pope.  Widely familiar with Pope’s poetry, Leapor wrote “An Essay on Woman” seemingly in direct response to his “Epistle to a Lady.”  Pope’s influence is evidenced in Leapor’s text in that she copies his metaphor of a flower to represent females and refers to the names Simplicus and Pamphilia, names shockingly similar to two characters in Pope’s text (Greene 66).  Since Pope describes women in a somewhat less-than positive light, Leapor refutes his argument in her own writing and intentionally models her text after Pope’s.  In addition, Leapor titled her poem “An Essay on Woman,” which was, ironically, nearly identical to one of Pope’s poems called “An Essay on Man.”  Since her poem directly rebuts Pope’s ideas, his writing proved to be the igniting spark behind her poem and the main source of Leapor’s inspiration.
      With personal encouragement, financial support, and an argument to rebut, Leapor began penning “An Essay on Woman” in hopes of revealing to a blinded and stubborn society the truth regarding marriage.  She first attacks the overriding goals and motivations behind marriage when she asks, “What small advantage wealth and beauties bring?” (line 20).  This line is rather ironic and certainly provocative to her readers, considering that wealth and beauty were two of the main motivations behind marriage.  
      During the eighteenth century, a woman’s wealth guaranteed her a comfortable life.  A man gravitated to women whose families could provide the largest dowry since a sizeable dowry ensured his ability to firmly establish himself in society (Olsen 38).  He placed more emphasis on the size of the dowry than on any other wifely attribute, as the following rhyme reveals: “What care I how black I be? / Twenty pounds will marry me; / If twenty won’t, forty shall, / For I’m my mother’s bouncing girl” (qtd. in Olsen 38).  Having a large sum of money or property assured a prosperous marriage; hence, women viewed wealth as a means to freedom.  Leapor acknowledges her society’s emphasis on money when she writes, “‘Tis wealth alone inspires every grace, / and calls the raptures to her plenteous face” (lines 5-6).  Her use of the word “alone” reveals that monetary advantage was the sole motivation behind marriage.  Leapor elaborates when she explains, “What numbers for those charming feature’s pine, / If blooming acres round her temples twine?” (lines 7-8).  Since “acres” refers to property, these lines further indicate the importance placed on a woman’s money and possessions, for they attracted large “numbers” of men.
      Although Leapor recognizes that wealth appeared to liberate women, she then claims that it only served as a further means of subjugation.  She shocks her readers in line 20 when she claims that wealth merely brought “small advantage” to women.  Even though women believed wealth to yield protection and stability, Leapor challenges them to consider whether or not wealth actually provides such freedom.  Upon marriage, a woman had virtually no control over her personal life.  Any property, wealth, or debt she had before marriage immediately became her husband’s as soon as they said their vows.  Any inheritance or wages she acquired after marriage were also under the ownership of her husband.  In describing this further, Kirsten Olsen remarks, “Nothing in her husband’s home, not even her own undergarments, technically belonged to her, nor could she give anything away or bequeath anything in a will without his consent” (43).  By asking the readers to honestly evaluate whether or not wealth truly benefited women, Leapor correctly identifies the obviously paradoxical idea that wealth could both yield freedom and bring further entrapment.  
      By coupling wealth and beauty together, Leapor reveals that beauty, like wealth, was also a great indicator of a successful marriage.  Between two women of equal economic status, the differences in their outer beauty served as the determiner of their futures.  True beauty, however, consisted not only of physical attractiveness but also of femininity and “gave physical evidence” (Nahoum-Grappe 89) to the legitimacy of other virtues.  Hence, women strived hard to become beautiful, for ugliness was associated with vice.  Going against the culture’s predominant view, Leapor reveals that beauty does not actually generate freedom.  She describes a woman’s impeccable beauty and then recognizes that “her partial husband tires [of her face], / and those bright eyes, that all the world admires” (lines 25-6).  Even though beauty might originally be praised, it does not ultimately better a woman’s state.  In line 4, Leapor blatantly identifies the entrapment beauty can bring when she writes that a woman is “Despised if ugly; if she’s fair – betrayed.”  Whatever physical attributes a woman had, whether good or ill, the end result was negative; therefore, beauty, like wealth, did not provide the liberation women believed it would.  
      After deconstructing the view that wealth and beauty bring freedom, Leapor then explains the entrapping nature of marriage by showing that it silences women.  Marriage forced women into a role void of the slightest glimpse of individuality and into a position of almost complete silence.  One historicist remarks, “Once married, [women] became a ghost or shadow – present yet not present” (Olsen 43).  Another author echoes the sudden silence that befalls married women when he writes that marriage “created a kind of invisibility: women were to be men’s shadows” (Porter 36).
     Leapor heavily comments on the silencing of women and agrees with modern historicists that marriage suppressed women’s voice in society, an understanding that many of her contemporaries failed to recognize.  She claims that women are silenced mainly through their inability to express wit.  Although the word “wit” has many possible meanings, in context, it refers to “the faculty of thinking and reasoning” (OED).  Leapor describes the disadvantage that wit brought to the eighteenth-century married woman by comparing a woman’s ability to think and reason to “death’s infection or a dog-day’s sun” (line 28).  The use of these graphic comparisons indicates that Leapor viewed wit both as an infection that eventually results in death and as an unwholesome trait which oftentimes brings madness (OED).  She then says that any attentive woman would “strive to shun” (lines 27-28) wit, for “wisdom only serves to make her know / The keen sensation of superior woe” (lines 29-32).  Therefore, a woman masked her learning, as Lady Montagu said, “with as much solicitude as she would hide crookedness or lameness” (qtd. in Olsen 34).  One particular father of the era wrote a letter in which his “daughters are warned against the dangers of wit, and are advised scrupulously to conceal any special learning or cultivated understanding which might alarm their male friends” (Mason 103); yet, the eighteenth-century society praised a man’s possession of wit.  Leapor reveals that women remained segregated from enjoying the same recognition for their wisdom and learning and were, therefore, silenced from revealing their thoughts.    
      Leapor also recognizes the silencing of women by appealing to a patron for permission to reveal the bondage marriage places on them.  In line 19, Leapor directly addresses a woman named Artemisia.  In ancient context, this name referred to the goddess who fostered the arts; however, throughout Leapor’s writings, the name is symbolic of Bridget Freemantle (Greene 19).  She asks Freemantle’s permission to communicate her ideas when she writes “Artemisia, let your servant sing” (line 19).  This line reveals Leapor’s acknowledgement of her lack of voice as a female poet in society, for she deems it necessary to appeal to another person for credibility and authority.  “An Essay on Woman” acknowledges the silencing and entrapment of women by depicting their assumed inability to create transgressive texts.  
     In addition to addressing the silencing of women, Leapor reveals one more aspect of entrapment that marriage places on women.  She claims that any recognition or honor women might have received prior to marriage proved futile once they married.  She writes that marriage “sinks [woman’s] glories with a fatal nod, / Dissolves her triumphs, sweeps her charms away” (lines 16-17).  Leapor does not depict a woman who is unable to succeed in life; rather, she acknowledges a woman’s ability to possess and create “glories” and “triumphs” for herself.  In the end, however, all the credit and achievement amounts to nothing, for marriage erases such accomplishments.  During the eighteenth century, a husband could snatch away, sometimes intentionally and other times simply because of the nature of the law, whatever accomplishments his wife gained or credit she received.  In one primary example from the time period, the husband of a well-known singer and actress appropriated all of his wife’s earnings and tragically mistreated her, all the while remaining under the protection of the law (Rogers 8).  In a very literal sense, this young woman’s glory in her career and the triumph she received in the form of monetary payment were indeed sunk and dissolved at the hand of her husband.  
     After revealing the obvious entrapment that marriage brought to women, it would seem that Leapor would then encourage young women to dismiss the idea of marriage altogether and instead choose to remain free from its bondage.  However, she again recognizes women’s entrapment by acknowledging that they had little other choice in the matter.  Since marriage provided protection, economic security, and social stability, choosing singleness would not simply be shunned but ultimately result in social suicide (Rogers 7).  Leapor clearly indicates a woman’s lack of alternative in her repeated portrayal of the tension between marriage and singleness.  Whether a woman was “A wife in bondage, or neglected maid” (line 3), “a wanton virgin or a starving bride” (line 54), she remains in an undesirable position with neither option particularly pleasing or beneficial.        
     Although Leapor acknowledges women’s inability to find freedom, she does not portray women as completely powerless.  She comments that “nature armed us for the growing ill / With fraudful cunning and a headstrong will” (lines 57-58).  Leapor again refuses to place blame on women for their entrapment but instead acknowledges their innate characteristics of endurance and shrewdness.  However, she then concedes that such traits offer women no help in changing their entrapping plight.  She ends the poem with the hopeless acknowledgement that “Unhappy woman’s but a slave at large” (line 60).
     In “An Essay on Woman,” Mary Leapor correctly depicts the plight of women within the entrapping and seemingly unavoidable institution that dictated the roles and behavior of women in eighteenth-century England.  She reveals the truth of marriage by showing that it actually does not bring the freedom that the vast majority of society claimed it did.  Rather than attempting to change the treatment of women, Leapor wrote the poem in hopes of removing the veil from women’s eyes in order that they may accurately view the entrapping nature of marriage and acknowledge its inability to liberate them.  

Works Cited

Greene, Richard. Mary Leapor: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Women’s Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993.

Leapor, Mary. “An Essay on Woman.” Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. M.H. Abrams et al. 7th ed. Vol. 1. New York: Norton and Company, 2000. 2603-2605.

M. H. Abrams, ed. “Mary Leapor.” Norton Anthology of English Literature. 7th ed. Vol. 1. New York: Norton and Company, 2000.

Nahoum-Grappe, Veronique. “The Beautiful Woman.” A History of Women in the West. Eds. Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot. Vol. 3. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1993.

Olsen, Kirstin. “‘Twenty Pounds Will Marry Me’: The Family.” Daily Life in 18th-Century England. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999.  

Oxford English Dictionary. 14 Nov. 2005. .

Porter, Roy. English Society in the Eighteenth Century. Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1982.

Rogers, Katherine M. “The Situation of Women.” Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1982.