A Royalist during English Civil War, Margaret Lucas was Maid of Honor to Queen Henrietta Maria from 1643 to 1645. While in exile with the Queen, Lucas met and married William Cavendish, a leader of the Royalist forces and thirty years her senior¹. After the Restoration, the Cavendishes, now the Duke and Duchess of Newcastle, retired from court life. Happily married by all accounts to an emotionally and financially supportive husband, Newcastle nonetheless chafed at the educational and professional opportunities available to women and railed against the unequal power in domestic relations.

      Newcastle wrote a total of fourteen works on a broad selection of topics: scientific and philosophical treatises, science fiction, a biography, an autobiography, essays, letters, poetry, "orations", and several plays, including one that featured a lesbian relationship, The Convent of Pleasure. The first aristocratic woman in England to defend the female sex, Newcastle continually reminded her readers that she is a woman and that she writes about issues from a woman's perspective. George Ballard in his Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain Who Have Been Celebrated for Their Writing or Skill in the Learned Languaged, Arts, and Sceince² lists her published and unpublished works and gives a short description of each work.

      Newcastle wrote about a wide variety of feminist topics even though her writings were at times conflicting or critical of women. Without earlier feminist theorists to use as a guide and lacking any contemporary feminists with whom to discuss her theories, Newcastle's writings were often confused, contradictory, or faltering. Her isolation from others of similar thought only sharpened her understanding of the limitations imposed upon women by their exclusion the community of scholars. Treated by her contemporaries as an eccentric and ridiculed by her opponents, Newcastle continued to pioneer new directions in feminist thought and analysis. She wrote on many topics of concern to contemporary feminists: "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"³. Introducing the highest social and economic classes to feminist thought and women's concerns, Newcastle set the stage for later feminists including Bathsua Makin, Aphra Behn, Mary Astell, and the 18th century Bluestockings.

From Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655)

To the Two Most Famous Universities of England

Most Famously Learned,

      I here present to you this philosophical work, not that I can hope wise school-men and industrious laborious students should value it for any worth, but to receive it without scorn, for the good encouragement of our sex, lest in time we should grow irrational as idiots, by the dejectedness of our spirits, through the careless neglects and despisements of the masculine sex to the female, thinking it impossible we should have either learning or understanding, wit or judgment, as if we had not rational souls as well as men, and we out of a custom of dejectedness think so too, which makes us quit all industry towards profitable knowledge, being employed only in low and petty employments, which take away not only our Abilities towards arts, but higher capacities in speculations, so as we are become like worms, that only live in the dull earth of ignorance, winding our selves sometimes out by the help of some refreshing rain of good education, which seldom is given us, for we are kept like birds in cages, to hop up and down in our houses, not suffered to fly abroad, to see the several changes of fortune, and the various humors, ordained and created by nature, and wanting the experience of nature, we must needs want the understanding and knowledge, and so consequently prudence, and invention of men; thus by an opinion, which I hope is but an erroneous one in men, we are shut out of all power and authority, by reason we are never employed either in civil or martial affairs, our counsels are despised, and laughed at, the best of our actions are trodden down with scorn, by the over-weening conceit, men have of themselves, and through a despisement of us.

      But I considering with my self, that if a right judgment and a true understanding, and a respectful civility live any where, it must be in learned universities, where nature is best known, where truth is oftenest found, where civility is most practiced, and if I find not a resentment here, I am very confident I shall find it no where, neither shall I think I deserve it, if you approve not of me; but if I deserve not praise, I am sure to receive so much courtship from your sage society, as to bury me in silence, that thus I may have a quiet grave, since not worthy a famous memory, for to lie entombed under the dust of an university will be honor enough for me, and more than if I were worshipped by the vulgar as a deity. Wherefore, if your wisdoms cannot give me the bays, let your charity strew me with cypress; and who knows, but, after my honorable burial, I may have a glorious resurrection in following ages, since time brings strange and unusual things to pass, I mean unusual to men, though not in nature; and I hope this action of mine is not unnatural, though unusual for a woman to present a book to the university, nor impudent, for it is honest, although it seem vain-glorious; but if it be, I am to be pardoned, since there is little difference between man and beast, but what ambition and glory makes.

1. Smith, p. 87-88
2. Ballard, p. 277-283
3. Smith, p. 76

References

      George Ballard, Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain Who Have Been Celebrated for Their Writing or Skill in the Learned Languaged, Arts, and Sceince, 1752, reprinted [Detroit: Wayne State Press, 1985] pp 277 - 282

      Moria Ferguson, First Feminists: British Women Writers 1578 - 1799 [Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1985] pp 84-101

      Hilda L. Smith, Reason's Disciples, Seventeenth-Century English Feminism, [Urbana: University of Illinois, 1982] pp 75-95

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