•Women can't write (good) poetry.
•Women shouldn't write poetry, because it distracts them from their proper duties and makes them unfeminine.
• Corollary: women should be TAUGHT only what they need to fulfill their proper duties
• Women's lives aren't fit subjects for poetry--they're full of petty domestic stuff rather than important things like war and politics.
• Women are morally and intellectually inferior (vain, frivolous, sentimental, sexually voracious, etc.)

•a tradition in which the fore-mentioned cultural assumptions are frequently expressed
• a tradition in which women are objects rather than subjects:

• by convention, muses
• by convention, objects of description--e.g. blazon in the sonnet
• by convention, praised as beautiful rather than intelligent, courageous, etc.
• etc.

•fight back in kind: Montagu against Swift
• accept the charges but dispute the cause: Irwin to Pope--yes, women are triflers, but only because women's education unfits them for serious matters.
• accept the charges and find a niche: Barbauld in "Washing Day": muses lose the buskined step
• ignore the problem and just write: Barbauld in "Meditation"
• dispute the charges

• take the subject role?
• take the object role?

• subvert the tradition
• start a new tradition