Reason's Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists by Hilda L. Smith

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Reason's Disciples:
Seventeenth-Century English Feminists
Hilda L. Smith
University of Illinois Press, Urbana, Chicago, London, 1982

"A number of corollaries flow from the feminist view of women as a sociological group. The view implies the existence of a group, namely men, with the means and desire to establish social and political controls over women's lives. Seventeenth-century feminists, and those who followed, were adamant in arguing that men excluded women from positions of power for their own ends, and that they instituted a "private tyranny" in the home. Men had stressed women's biological and psychological differences to exclude them from training so that females could not compete successfully for dominance within society and could be held to traditional roles of providing sexual and domestic services.
If women's inferior opportunities are socially derived, they are of course not necessarily permenant. Feminists during the 1600s established a pattern, followed by their later counterparts, of arguing that there was nothing sacred, natural, or necessary about women's secondary role within the home or society generally. They insisted that women must better equip themselves, both intellectually and practically, to compete with men. Women must first come to a realization of their own worth and then demand that society alter its institutions to represent their needs and interests more fairly. These early feminists urged their sisters to use their minds to the fullest, while at the same time criticizing society for restricting women's chances in both school and home. And they stressed that men must change - that they must give up their position of domination and share society's rewards more equally with women." p. 8
      "The general social and political turmoil of the English Civil War created a favorable setting for people questioning traditional relationships. Essayists and authors of tracts were continually debating the meaning of tyranny and the rights of freeborn Englishmen. The Levellers criticized the domination of the large landowners in both the national and local political and social structure. Religious sectarians questioned the authority of the ministers and the religious orthodoxy of the Anglican and Presbyterian establishments. The Baconians attacked the universities' rigid academic curricula while expanding the purview of what was properly called learning. Educational reformers, drawing their program heavily from the ideas of Comenius, wanted to open up English education to those outside the triumvirate of grammar school, university, and the Inns of Court. In this time of profound social questioning, it is not surprising that a few women began contemplating aspects of sexual inequality.
      It was a period of intellectual as well as political stirrings, and the feminists could draw upon a wide range of ideas to aid them in formulating a new explanation for women's current status within society. The literature of the mid-seventeenth century was commonly prescriptive, encouraging readers to think in terms of right and wrong and of desirable or possible social change. General essays calling for social or political reforms almost never addressed the status of women, but they obviously helped establish an intellectual milieu which encouraged the questioning of the fundamental principles which bind a society together. the ideas of the feminists were always outside the liberalism or the radicalism of those advocating change during the 1640s and the 1650s, but their political and religious conservatism perhaps made them especially aware of, and pleased to point out, how sexually circumscribed were the glowing definitions of liberty which emerged from that period.
      The political and social writings of the left during the Civil War at once encouraged and restricted the efforts of feminists. The feminists, predominantly royalist and Anglican, were unsympathetic to the viewpoint of most of the country's diverse revolutionaries: Puritans, common lawyers, Levellers, sectarians, and communal groups. Each of theses groups pointed out the threat to English liberties implied by the unjust restrictions placed upon constituencies such as soldiers, small and medium- sized landowners, sectarians, Puritans, lawyers, and freemen generally. Yet none of these reformers concerned themselves with the rights of women, though they deified the rights of individual Englishmen to govern their own families and their own property against the arbitrary power of the king. These Anglican and Tory women could justify their own political, religious, and feminist position by sharply asking why the likes of John Milton. concerned about English freedom, did not "cry up liberty to poor female slaves." in the home. Such rhetoric obviously drew on this revolutionary ideological tradition even while attacking its basic lacunae. Concern for the rights of Englishmen had obscured, not included, those of English women." pp. 9-10
"Although our knowledge of the lives of English women is limited, we have some information about the conditions that angered the feminists. Contemporary historical accounts agree that women were losing some of their social roles they traditionally had held. Social changes decreased upper-class women's useful functions on family estates and encouraged their becoming social ornaments and gadabouts. This wasteful and empty existence was a major target of feminist ire. The same basic process went on at other social levels. With the beginning of professionalization in medicine and the decline of women's status within the guilds, women who were trained as medical practitioners, midwives, or skilled artisans found it more difficult to get a fair wage for their skill or to function as independent workers. Feminists who were midwives or teachers made clear the financial and social plight of this gorup of women. Similarly, the growing specialization of agriculture in some regions lessened the woman's traditional role as a partner in the family enterprise. It was becoming more and more difficult, also, for women to receive a fair economic settlement upon marriage, especially at the highest social ranks, because of the larger number of suitable female partners for upper-class men. Feminists wrote much about the economic powerlessness of women in landowning families. Finally, women at all class levels were more poorly educated than their brothers, and their talents were seldom utilized to the fullest; the waste of women's intellectual talents was a central theme of feminist writings." p. 11
"Seventeenth-century feminism expanded and deepened its feminist perspectives over the course of the second half of the century. The earliest feminist writers - Newcastle, Makin, and Woolley - often wrote cautiously, and, in the case of the duchess, contradictorily. Later feminists, on the other hand, were more systematic and rigorous in their denunciations of women's subordinate role in society. Finally, the feminist poets, writing predominantly between 1700 and 1710, added an element less easily discernible in the earlier works - personal anger and frustration at the unlikelihood of change in either the attitudes of men or the lives of women." p. 12
"Women of the educated classes saw men of inferior social status gaining education they could never receive. While the value of a sound education was widely touted, no woman was able to obtain advanced training. And for many men, training was socially rewarding. Many of the middling classes, after receiving their education, were able to find positions in the expanding professions of grammar school instructor and minister." p. 19
"There was no concern for such institutional improvements for women, and this neglect insured that the gap between men's and women's educational chances steadily widened.
A primary reason for this discrepancy was that humanist education was in large part pragmatic, concerned that intellectual training was to be related to social role." p. 40
Regarding Sir Thomas More's opinion on education, and the education of his daughters and other women specifically, Smith quotes More
"Nor do I think that the harvest will be affected whether it is a man or a woman who sows the field, they both have the same human nature, and the power of reason differentiates them from the beasts; both, therefore, are equally suited for those studies by which reason is cultivated, and is productive like a ploughed field on which the seed of good lessons has been sown. If it be true that the soil of woman's brain be bad, and more likely to bear bracken than corn (and on this account many keep women from study), I think, on the contrary, that on the same grounds a woman's wit is to be cultivated all the more diligently, so that nature's defects may be redressed by industry." p. 45
"More did not question a domestic vocation or wifely obedience for women and praised Margaret for her modesty in wishing to share her learning only with her father and her husband. " p. 46
"The sixteenth century significantly opened public debate on women's education, but within a very confined sphere. those who first discussed female training opposed advanced professional or university training for women. Sixteenth-century views of appropriate female education could never have logically gotten women out of the home and into scholarly pursuits, for that was not their intent. It was precisely the opposite." p. 47
"Seventeenth-century feminists understood that it was not sufficient to argue for the intellectual equality of the sexes while maintaining a family structure which would prevent women from using their equal minds. They would not accept the basic educational and role distinction sixteenth-century humanists made between men and women. The Renaissance emphasis on classical learning allowed gentlemen to move beyond medieval piety in ways that were denied to a woman. He was to develop his intellect and his activities in a more unrestricted way; she was to be pious and domestic. "The free, bright, world into which we step when it is a question of education for boys," Ruth Kelso accurately writes, "vanishes on consideration of girls, and we move in an atmosphere of doubt, timidity, fear, and niggardly concession." p. 48
"While scholars have viewed the Tudor period, and especially the Elizabethan era, as the golden age for the English learned lady, they have seen the Jacobean period as an intellectual wasteland for women. There is as scant justification for the second idea as there is for the first. The writings and actions of James I, the proliferation of misogynist tracts, and the absence of any major women intellectual have caused the negative assessment of the Jacobean age. " p. 48
"A sixteenth-century work attributed to Edward Grosynhyll was one of the earliest printed versions of this kind of attack. A lengthy verse warning against the deadly effect of women, it combined scurrilous attacks on women's supposedly insatiable sexual desires with barbed references to their need to bring all men under their sway. The following lines are representative of the Scholehouse:
Gosynhyll followed his Scholehouse with a work entitled The Prayse of all Women, termed an "apology," in which he proved by biblical example that men often accused women falsely of weakness and dishonesty. Obviously both were merely exercises, the former setting up arguments he could destroy in the latter to produce two lucrative tracts on a universal topic." p. 49
" "As every mans house is his Castle so is his family a private Common-wealth, wherein if due government be not observed, nothing but confusion is to be expected," Braithwait concluded." p. 52
"It was not until the end of that century, in the wake "inalienable rights" theories tied to the American and French Revolutions, that Mary Wollstonecraft's writings urged the enfranchisement of women.
Despite the richness and variety of seventeenth-century political theories, they all proved unhelpful to nascent feminism." p. 57
"One of the central qualities of seventeenth-century feminism grew out of this exclusion form the political realm. Along with their arguments for intellectual-educational parity went a struggle for broader power in the area of the family rather than the state. It was in this limited political arena, they came to see, that power principally touched women and where alone they were regarded as citizens and subjects.
Although the events and writings inspired by the English Civil War did not lend themselves to expanding the rights of women, they probably provided the necessary catalyst which led some women to think about, and feminists to speak out against, the miserable education of women and their unjust portion within the home. Contemporary political theories were not especially useful for the feminists because the relevant political arena for women was the family. Rather, feminists had to develop their own theories, often employing the language of the revolutionaries, about the political nature of husband-wife relationships and their negative impact on women's lives generally. Since a wife was a citizen within the domestic rather than the public commonwealth, one could hardly attack women's exclusion from public life without first attacking subjection to her husband. A woman's husband was her lord, and if she conspired to do him bodily harm she could be convicted of petty treason. Therefore, the feminists' assault on women's subordination within the home was as necessary an act as the Levellers' demand for the vote for all freeborn Englishmen. It acknowledged something feminists articulated only later, that "the personal is political" and that to deny the political aspect of familial relations was to curb those of women's rights which were external to the family." p. 59
"Feminists need a system of thought which could provide them with a framework for arguing the legitimacy of women's intellectual interests and developing an ideology of the intellectual equality of the sexes. They could not use the political ideologies of the time, for these failed to confront the issue of sex relations and, conversely, stressed the importance of male independence and the integrity of the family unit constructed upon a dominant-subordinate husband-wife relationship. They could not use the arguments of legal or educational reformers which focused on changes within institutions from which women were excluded and never questioned women's general subordination within society. They could not build upon the radical religious or political groups of the revolution because the policies and organizational structures of these groups assumed the traditional social sphere of women. What these women needed was a set of ideas which, while not necessarily focused on the issue of sexual roles, would lend itself to analyzing such roles. They also required ideas that were sufficiently abstract and separate from contemporary institutions so that they could be used in new ways. Finally, these ideas had to be susceptible to formulations of fundamental principles. Science provided some limited impetus and justification for their questioning of customary beliefs and relations, and in rationalism they found the ideology that best answered their desire to assert equality and to develop a framework for questioning the status quo." p. 60
"Faith in reason was central to the development of seventeenth-century feminism. The feminists' belief in reason's power to ferret out the truth was strong, and the use of rational thought as a tool to combat the evils of custom was a constant theme among them. Yet they used reason in a special way. To them reason not only revealed the proper use of women's minds but was also the quality which allowed them to escape the petty existence society had ordained for them. To reason meant to be serious, and this alone offered escape from women's being the simple, social fools the world demanded. Reason for feminists was both an effective tool to destroy the irrational bases for women's oppression and an uplifting activity which women could follow after they recognized the error of their lives as mere social butterflies. They were strong evangelists for intellectual pursuits." p. 65
"The feminists' love of reason, which they pursued with emotional intensity, grew from their understanding of women's status. Because of the primacy of their concern for women, feminists pursued reason in a unique fashion. Mary Astell accepted Cartesian dualism, but she was not really a member of the Cartesian school in the same way that another seventeenth-century follower of his might be so categorized. Feminists generally did not accept or employ scientific or rationalist concepts in a sophisticated or even orthodox manner but as an impetus suggesting what women could and should do with their minds. Highly critical of society's social relationships, they were indirectly encouraged in their probing by an age in which social and intellectual questioning was endemic. Yet their specific concerns were not those of their society, and this reality creates ambiguities in placing them in social and intellectual categories. They were mavericks, operating in a largely hostile environment, who employed bits and pieces of the social and intellectual criticisms they found about them to understand and to change women's lives." p. 65-66
"Often their feminist concerns were restricted to particular fields of interest or expertise: Bathsua Makin and Hannah Woolley on education, Margaret Fell Fox on religion, and Jane Sharp and Elizabeth Cellier on midwifery. Another woman, however, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, offered a very wide-ranging and penetrating, in inchoate, survey of the way sexual stereotypes infiltrated and influenced society. " p. 75
"No work of a seventeenth-century feminist poses so many interpretive problems as the writings of the first of their number, the duchess of Newcastle. Her views were at once the most radical and far-reaching and the most contradictory. She appears to have understood, better than any of her sisters, the multifaceted nature of women's oppression. She noted their poor education, exclusion from public institutions, political subordination within the home, physiological dictates of childbirth, and society's pervasive vision of women as incompetent, irresponsible, unintelligent, and irrational. Yet she often suggested that society's perception was correct; women had made few contributions to past civilization, not because they were ill educated but because they had less ability than men. She could denounce the unjust treatment accorded to women as vehemently as anyone, but she could also be as critical of her sisters as the staunchest misogynist. None of the feminists considered sex roles more broadly than the duchess and none proved so reluctant to offer unambiguous conclusions." p. 75 - 76
Again referring to Margaret Cavendish,
"Her greatest contribution to feminist thought was the degree to which questions of sex division dominated her work. No matter what her subject, no mater what the context of a particular piece, the duchess introduced the fact that she was a woman and explained how this influenced her work." p. 78
"The duchess's longest sections of feminist commentary occur in the "Female Orations" section in Orations of Divers Sorts." p. 81
"The "Female Orations" began with the feminist argument which set the tome for the remainder of the debate:
Ladies, gentlewomen, and other Inferior Women, but not less Worthy; I have been industrious to Assemble you together, and wish I were so Fortunate, as to persuade you to make frequent Assemblies, Associations, and Combinations amongst Our sex, that we may unite in Prudent Counsels, to make ourselves as Free, Happy and Famous as Men: whereas now we Live and Dye, as if we were produced from Beasts, rather than from Men; for, Men are happy, and we Women are miserable; they possess all the Ease, Rest, Pleasure, Wealth, Power, and Fame; whereas Women are Restless with Labour, Easeless with Pain, Melancholy for want of Pleasures, Helpless for want of Fame. Nevertheless, Men are so unconscionable and Cruel against us, that they endeavour to bar us of all sorts of Liberty, and will fain bury us in their houses or Beds, as in a Grave. The truth is we live like Batts, or Owls, labour like Beasts, and dye like Worms." p. 82
More about the duchess:
"The woman had no family name to pass on once she married, and no estate "according to the laws and customs of this countrey." After undergoing the risk of bearing children and the burden of raising them, mothers could not "assure themselves of Comfort or Happiness by them" for sons continued the male line "whereas Daughters are but Branches which by Marriage are broken off from . . . whence they Sprang, & Ingrafted into the Stock of an other Family, so that Daughters are to be accounted but as Movable Goods or Furnitures that wear out." p. 90
"The lives of the other women raising feminist issues between 1650 and 1680 were more obscure than that of the duchess, and their writings were much more limited to specific social interests. Yet those interests spilled over at times toward general areas of women's status and centered on questions of vast importance to women, many of which were basic to the concerns of later feminists." p. 95
"Bathsua Makin dedicated her work to all "ingenious and vertuous Ladies," particularly Princess Mary, daughter of the future James II. In urging better education for young gentle women, Makin insisted that the prevailing view that women were intellectually incompetent had evil results for society. Makin wrote anonymously and in the persona of a man, which gave a conservative tone to much of her essay. When she spoke most explicitly as a male the work was most conservative: one man who tried to convince his brothers that their position would not be threatened if they allowed their wives or daughters to become educated. This masculine mask seemingly tempered her work, for the introductory materials, before she assumed a male perspective, were more feminist in tone: "Custom, when it is inveterate, hath a mighty influence: it hath the force of Nature itself. The Barbarous custom to bread Women low, is grown general amongst us, and hath prevailed so far, that it is verily believed (especially amongst a sort of debauched Sots) that Women are not endued with such Reason, as Men; nor capable of improvement by Education, as they are." Such foolish views led foolish men to fear learned women as a "comet, that bodes Mischief, whenever it appears." Liberal female education, they feared, would "make Women so high, and men so low, like Fire in the Housetop, it will set the whole World in a Flame." (p. 3)
Even though Makin ridiculed antifeminist views, there was more appeal than denunciation or demand in this work. Women must be educated to make a better world, but such education must recognize the natural subordination of women. Everyone, she argued, would gain from women's education: "Women would have Honour and Pleasure, their Relations Profit, and the whole nation advantage" (p. 3). " pp. 102-103
"An increased respect and independence for women, based on their improved education but within the patriarchal structure, was at the heart of the earlier feminist writings of the seventeenth century. There were occasional outburst of anger and general condemnations of the status quo throughout these writings, but they were offset by specific support of a hierarchical structure within marriage. The authors were unhappy with women's lot, but these early feminists hesitated to attack the institution of marriage or the reality of male dominance. Their work was to reflect on and create a deeper consciousness of sex-related prejudices and injustices that later feminists would more clearly probe and protest." p. 109
"There were at least two other examples of feminist expression which were influential during the second half of the seventeenth century. Those were the works of Henry Cornelius Agrippa (originally written during the mid-sixteenth century), which appeared under two separate titles in mid-seventeenth century editions, The Glory of Women (1652) and Female Pre-eminence (1607), and of Francois Poulain de la Barre, The Woman as Good as the Man (1677), published originally in French during the same decade." p. 116
"Because of her theological commitment to traditional marriage, Astell might not have written on the institution extensively had not a friend's particular case directed her toward public treatment of the subject. The duchess of Mazarine had left France and moved for a divorce because of her husband's well-known and often outrageous liaisons with other women. She, however, was criticized for living alone and for possible romantic engagements, while her husband's more notorious actions were often ignored. This classic example of the sexual double standard led Astell to defend Mazarine's case in Some Reflections upon Marriage, even though she did not totally approve of her friend's conduct. As always Astell moved from the specifics of this case to the generalities of women's social reality, so that this one instance of a bad marriage propelled her from the particular evil to an understanding of a system that put all the power of both law and custom in male hands, where it was likely to be abused, sometimes most grossly so. Her failure to attack marriage frontally did not detract from the breadth or the vigor of her criticism of the commonplace realities related to its essential power structure (pp. 56-58, 70).
Marriage, she began, was ordained by "the great Author of our Being, who does nother in vain," for the good of mankind. Yew what ought to have been a blessing frequently became a curse, what "was appointed for mutual Comfort and Assiatance" often took a "contrary Effect through our Folly and Perverseness: (p. 17). Part of the reason for this transformation lay in the way "modern pretenders to wit" cast scorn on the institution rather than recognizing that it was "too sacred to be treated with Disrespect, too venerable to be the Subject of Raillery and Buffoonery." People who indulged in this "loose Talk of the Town" impiously undercut "a Divine Institution," and, as with so many other aspects of marriage, women were the main targets and sufferers from such drivel. It was there shallow wits who spread the idea that "a Wife is nothing better than a Domestick Devil" (pp. 17-18).
"Everything about Astell's work created the impression that she did not believe man's authority was justified, at least as it was commonly exercised, but her religious convictions would not allow her to encourage revolt on the part of the wife. To abandon marriage as ordained by God would surely be a sacrilege." (p. 136 - remember Astell never married.)
      "Astell's essay on marriage was, in many ways, the most modern of her feminist writings and the one most clearly relevant to later feminism, but it was the Serious Proposal which attracted the greatest attention during her lifetime. . . .
      John Evelyn suggested in his Numismata (1697) that Astell in her Proposal tried "to show by her own Example what great things and Excellencies" her sex was capable of. Evelyn not only described the Proposal, but supported it as well because he had never seen any "solid reasons" advanced against it. Bishop Burnet also praised the book, if not the project, and George Hickes suggested it should be read by all serious young women. Daniel Defoe specified Astell's work as the inspiration for his "Academy of Women," and in a lesser-known tract, A Protestant Monastery (1698), George Wheler noted his debt to Mary Astell.
      Still, most of the comments seems to have been negative. " p. 137
"The introductory remarks to An English-Saxon Homily on the Birth-day of St. Gregory contained the major part of Elstob's published feminist thought." p. 142
      "One of the most vigorous feminist writings of the late 1600s was An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (1696) "written by a lady." Who this lady was remains unknown. . .
      The tone of this attack on the commonplace antiwoman tracts was certainly more irreverent than the Serious Proposal, in many ways closer to Poulain's The Woman as Good as the Man. The author apologized for her limitations as defender of her sex, in that she knew only French and English, but showed her ability to use her native tongue effectively in her sex's cause. Hers was not the systematic and practical plea of Astell or Elstob's scholarly defense of woman's scholarly potential, but a vigorous presentation of ideas that now needed less to be justified or proved than to be driven home. The arguments which the early feminists broached and Astell and Poulain unified were her treated as self-evident.
      The book's steady point of attack was "the Usurpations of Men; and the Tyranny of Custom (here in England especially)" which ensured that few women were well enough educated to defend themselves intellectually and that no "man of Wit should arise so generous as to engage in our Quarrel, and be the Champion of our Sex against the Injuries and Oppressions of his own." Men were the enemy "by Interest or Inclination," and even those unlikely to engage in antiwomen diatribes were not willing to endanger their power and prerogatives by defending women's general character and competence. Because women were naturally equal, men had found it necessary to establish institutions to enforce social injustices that contributed to male power and comfort.
      What Astell found in Descartes, this author found in Locke, who had given the world "a treatise on the art of Reasoning" and her a foundation for her belief in equality of the sexes. Learned men had always said that all souls were equal and alike, and now it was clear "that there are no innate Idea's, but that all the Notions we have, are deriv'd from our External Senses, either immediately, or by Reflection" (pp. 11-12). Thus one was compelled to look at nature to discover any supposed sexual differences. In the animal world, she contended, females of the species were not inferior. In humans, sexual inequality was more obvious among the wealthy than the poor, which proved that social rather than natural barriers accounted for differences." p. 144 - 145
"The Defence provided the perfect counterpart to Astell's Proposal, the emotional opposites of a single argument. If these two books of 1694 and 1696 are taken together, Descartes and Locke, logic and polemic, the conciliatory and the aggressive joined to argue more vigorously and unambiguously than ever before that women were men's natural equals but social victims, who would continue to be so until society's attitudes, institutions, and especially its educational pattern radically altered." p. 148
"All four poets - Anne, Countess of Winchilsea; Lady Mary Chudleigh; Elizabeth Singer Rowe; and Sarah Fyge Egerton - shared feminist views and a willingness to defend their sex, but their poetic and feminist emphases varied. Winchilsea and Chudleigh most wholly followed in the pastoral paths Philips had opened. Aristocratic and, like mart Astell, devoted Anglicans, these two women tended to stress the pleasures of female friendship and of intellectual and moral contemplation." p. 158
"Her [Chudleigh's] favorite theme, elaborated in numerous poems, was the joys of female friendship, based on shared moral goodness and similar intellectual pursuits." p. 163
"Chudleigh expanded her attack on Sprint in The Ladies defense to include a broader feminist vision." p. 167
From The Ladies defense
"In passing from the crudities of Brute and Sprint to the conventionalities of Loveall, Chudleigh made her strongest case against the vapidity of cultural values that transformed what was despicable in human conduct, both male and female, into its farcical parody." p. 168
"The note of a sad and complex understanding in The Ladies Defense disappeared in Chudleigh's other feminist poem, "To the Ladies." However truly wise and rewarding it would be for men to relinquish their control over women, Chudleigh had no delusions that they would do so. Hence women had to choose between marriage and the pursuit of knowledge and fulfillment." p. 169
"Her [Chudleigh's] strong belief that all types of men - beaux, clergymen, and gentlemen - were fundamentally untrustworthy on the issue of developing women's potential, and her view of the unequal and unfair structure of marriage in seventeenth-century England, led her to argue that only single women could freely pursue intellectual interests." p. 169
"By implication at least her [Fyge Egerton's] argument went further than that of Defoe in his "Academy for Women," in the Essay upon Projects (1697), where women's formal modesty was contrasted with an internal understanding or justification for proper behavior." p. 181
      "The strands of feminism among these women poets was impressive. While not leading to a new interpretation of women's position, they revealed a rich and varied literature arguing, crying, and raging against women's various prisons. The poets provide a fitting climax to a seventeenth-century feminism, which began with the duchess of Newcastle's critique of women's lives, in enrich feminist perception was offset by her numerous attacks upon her sex. Mary Astell, in the latter part of the century, argued vigorously that women's deficiencies were not innate but socially induced, an assumption that had become standard by the time the feminist poets wrote. Astell, to a greater extent than the earlier feminists, linked all aspects of women's lives together in a pattern of subjugation. Domineering husbands, male-dominated institutions, and a society which wanted women to remain docile and to entertain themselves with trifles were partners in the oppression of women.
      The feminist poets built on this understanding and enriched it with their personal longings. They felt less need to argue their case than to find words for it, to express their problems and their hopes in evocative terms. Anne Winchilsea and Lady Mary Chudleigh particularly shared Astell's Tory-Anglican principles and her stress on female friendship as an alternative to male domination. In a basic sense their use of the female pastoral was a poetic and personal equivalent to the female college, a setting where women's mutual support would make possible women's full development.
      Elizabeth Singer Rowe and Sarah Egerton, in part because feminist ideas were so generally acceptable in their separate circles of female friends and in part because of the relative freedom from the Anglican-Tory vision of most feminists of the day, carried feminism into some new areas, especially into a franker handling of heterosexual relations and of the relation of passion to women's freedom. Elizabeth Johnson's introduction to Rowe's poems connected feminism to the English radical political tradition, perhaps because of Rowe's closer ties to dissenting circles. And Sarah Egerton endowed her feminism with a passionate and uncompromising skepticism that gave the ideology a personally radical cast it had in no other writer's works.
      Concern about women was central to their work, the real theme of introductions and verses on every conceivable subject. They each had distinct interests - Anne Winchilsea's nature poetry, Lady Mary Chudleigh's feud with John Sprint, Elizabeth Rowe's use of mock-pastoral wit, and Sarah Egerton's passionate skepticism,- but each one continually returned to the plight of women. The manner in which these poets viewed the success or failure of their own lives, or the benevolence or vindictiveness of society, was inextricably tied to their view of women as a sociological group." pp. 186-187
      "The ideas of seventeenth-century feminism were traceable in other ideas of the age. Though, as always, cause and effect, influence and result were not easily segregated, certainly some of the writings of the 1690s and early 1700s showed some themes and concerns common to the feminists. Individual men in the 1690s wrote defenses of women, notably William Walsh, A Dialogue Concerning Women (1691), and Nahum Tate, poet laureate, playwright, and contributor to the Athenain Mercury, A Present for the Ladies (1639). These two works were less important for their originality than as indicators of a certain general interest in aspects of feminism. Walsh's book borrowed much from Poulain de la Barre's. especially in its discussion of women's education and masculine motives for female exclusion, while Tate drew heavily on Agrippa's views about the excellency of the female sex. Poulain and Agrippa were sources that later women feminists drew on also, and, if uninventive, the works of Tate and Walsh doubtless gave exposure to, as well as showed general concern with, the issue of women's place in society. Tate's book, given his social and literary prominence, was perhaps the best proof of some establishment susceptibility to feminist concerns in the age.
      A more significant literary figure who share feminists' interests, and with greater originality, was Daniel Defoe. Defoe acknowledged Mary Astell's influence on his "Academy for Women," in his 1697 Essay upon Projects, but the plan of education he outlined for women was more wholly secular than Astell's and less tied to the kind of philanthropic work often associated with women's special sphere, even though it did include more of the normal finishing-school trappings. Defoe's Conjugal Lewdness; or, Matrimonial Whoredom, published in 1727 but written in the 1690s, offered a feminist view of the need for fairer relationships within marriage. It criticized the use of women, either before or after the wedding ceremony, exclusively for the sexual pleasure of men. And his Moll Flanders, while far from a feminist tract, took its heart from the uneven social conditions a woman faced, and her resilience, competence, and intelligence in meeting the various hard knocks fate and society visited upon her.
      While a handful of men took at least partially feminist positions in books, others did so, even more ambiguously, in periodicals and compilations. In the latter cases, the motivation was apparently as much profit as promotion of social justice, but perhaps the baser motive suggested the greater feminist success. Feminists had helped create a female audience large enough and intellectual enough to support publications that took seriously women's mental capacities and interests. The Athenian Mercury, which began publication in 1690, The Ladies Diary, which appeared during the first three decades of the eighteenth century, and The Ladies Library, a compilation of items of interest to women published by Richard Steele in 1714, all took modified feminist stances in their pursuit of an increasingly large female reading public." pp. 192 -194
"Yet even this reply suggested the limitations of the Mercury's support of women. They should have every chance to learn, but the fact that God ordained general male dominance circumscribed any advance within the home, church, or state." p. 196
"John Tripper, the editor of the Ladies Diary, was of a different stripe than the intellectually enthusiastic authors of the Mercury. His annual Diary made clear that he set up the journal because a broad female reading public enabled him to make a profit from his venture. Tripper included in his almanacs material which he believed would hold particular interest for women, such as "The History of Famous Women," explanations of scientific phenomena, and enigmas and mathematical questions for readers to decipher." p. 197
      "Tripper was no educational reformer interested in spreading learning to women but an enterprising businessman who recognized profit to be made from the growing numbers of educated women and their hunger for mental stimulation, a wholly unidealistic testimonial that some feminist concerns were taking root.
      Richard Steele's motives for publication of The Ladies Library fell somewhere between those of the authors of the Mercury's and Tripper's. In his introductory comments, Steele stressed that he supported the expansion of female learning, but his three-volume compilation of writings was obviously put together haphazardly. It was, in many ways, an unusual mixture of the types of writings assumed to be of interest to women. It had the tenor of mid-seventeenth-century guidebooks leading women along the proper moral, domestic, and religious paths, yet it included as well materials which were highly critical of women's traditional guides and role. The work borrowed from a number of contemporary texts, including feminist ones. For instance, the materials in the chapter on "ignorance" were taken from Astell's Serious Proposal to the Ladies, though she was nowhere given credit, and Steele's third volume on religion also used materials from her work.
      Steele claimed the Library was "written by a lady" and that he merely acted as "Gentleman-Usher" to both the compiler and the female reader. Probably there was no lady author, but that Steele chose this facade suggested a belief that women would more readily accept a woman writer." pp. 198-199
"The seventeenth-century feminists were notably isolated, in ideals and in fact, from the mainstream of the male literary world, and this exclusion gave them the freedom to speak their minds more fully on sexual relationships than could the bluestockings, who held an uncertain position within the inner sanctum of London literary circles. The restraint placed upon women who had gained this partial acceptance was made clear in the letters of Lady Mary Montagu.
During her youth she had been an acquaintance of Mary Astell's and a strong supporter of her projected women's college, noting angrily that there was "hardly a character in the World more Despicable or more liable to universal ridicule than that of a Learned Women," and that women were "permitted no Books but such as tend to the weakening and Effeminateing the Mind." After she married and as she grew older she did not give up her desire "to improve our Reason" but softened her insistence on women's needs. Having experienced ridicule and holding her position through grace and tact, she warned young women that they should display their knowledge only with caution. Concerning her granddaughter's education, Montagu wrote to her daughter, 'The second caution to be given her (and which is most absolutely necessary) is to conceal whatever Learning she attains, with as much solicitude as she would hide crookedness or lameness." Montagu had not changed her views on the proper education of women as she grew older; in this same letter she outlined a rigorous curriculum for her granddaughter's study. But now she felt women could safely be intelligent only by overtly accepting rather than fighting society's discrimination." pp. 206-207
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last updated February 6, 1999