The Fair Intellectual Club

In early 18th Century Edinburgh, The Fair Intellectual Club was like Fight Club for teenage women.

Instead of meeting in secret to pummel each other’s bodies in an attempt to re-empower their gender, nine women aged between 15 and 19 pummelled their minds in secret with the latest poetry, philosophy and science in an attempt to escape their gender.

Clio, one of the three founding members, sums up the lot of women in an age where access to education was denied: “It is a curse to be born a woman.”

Lucy Porter, the writer, deserves several bouts of praise for her charming The Fair Intellectual Club. She has brought to attention a little known chapter of Edinburgh’s history, a fact made all the more embarrassing considering the relatively high profile enjoyed by the city’s male-only clubs. I’m looking at you, the Speculative Society.

This is no dry exercise in feminism either. The script fizzes with jokes—Porter is a comedian by trade,  after all—and glides through major issues such as Scottish nationalism, the rise of atheism, and Isaac Newton’s scientific breakthroughs with the elegance of a dancer at a Regency ball.

If its conclusion—that progress has been made, but modern diseases like the Daily Mail website and Twitter trolling still blight and limit women—flirts with ‘what have we all learned’ triteness, its sparkling script and cast more than earns the right.

Unlike one of the points of its own constitution, The Fair Intellectual Club deserves to be talked about throughout Edinburgh’s New Town and beyond.