SOURCE: "The Politics of Sentiment: Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall," in Transactions of the Eighth International Congress of the Enlightment, 1992, pp. 795-98.

Below, Stoddard argues that Sir George Ellison and Millenium Hall are texts that criticize the subordination of women and function as an indictment of other social and economic inequities resulting from the emerging capitalist order in the eighteenth century.

In a review of Janet Todd's book on Sensibility, Claudia Johnson refers to the 'question of whether the ostensibly moralistic and feminine cult of sensibility serves or resists the social conditions that cause the suffering it veritably fetishizes' and calls for 'more sustained attention to the status of sensibility as a political practice' (ECS 22 (1988), p. 112-13).

The political allegiances of sensibility in Millenium Hall are at first analysis confusing. On the one hand, Scott constructs an all-female community comprised of intelligent, practical, active women who purposely refuse to...