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Bluestockings

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From: A New Dictionary of Eponyms
Date: 19970101
Author:Morton S. Freeman

Bluestockings The expression bluestocking took root in the mid-eighteenth century after a botanist and sometime poet, Benjamin Stillingfleet, wore blue silk stockings when attending a gathering of women who had decided to forgo card playing for literary pursuits and invite learned such as Samuel Johnson, Horace Walpole, and David Garrick to lecture before them. The usual stockings worn by men to such an affair–in fact it was de rigueur to wear them–were black. Stillingfleet had no black silk stockings. He was told to come anyway, and he wore blue stockings. The ...

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