Possibly youngest feminist polemicist on record, Sarah Fyge was 14 years old when she began writing a response to Robert Gould's misogynist tract A Late Satyr Against the Pride, Lust, and Inconstancy, etc. of Woman. Her work, published in 1686 without her consent, the only major feminist polemical tract of the 1680s, caused her to be banished from her parent's home. Undaunted, Fyge expanded and polished her work and had it reprinted in 1687. Shortly thereafter, she married a London attorney.

      In 1700, by now widowed, she married her much older widowed second cousin whose children were already grown, the Rev. Thomas Egerton, but was involved in a useless petition for divorce, on the grounds of cruelty, only three years later. Her second volume of work, Poems on Several Occasions, was published in 1703.

      As exemplified by the verses her friends wrote as an introduction to her volume of poetry, Egerton lived in a mutually supportive circle of women friends. The friendships were bound together, in part, by a mutual recognition of the oppression of women by men. From the mid 1680s until the mid 1710s, women wrote on "the woman question" as never before and Fyge was a fearless and staunch supporter of women from her childhood until her death. Along with other great feminists of the period, Bathsua Reginald Makin, Mary Astell and Lady Mary Chudleigh in England and Marie de Gournay in France, these early feminist were beginning to create a feminist consciousness and to define women as a coherent social group whose subordination, neither ordained by God nor part of women's natural biological makeup, must be challenged. Together, they challenged the claims to women's intellectual inferiority, demanded educational opportunities for women, railed against the limited life options open to women, spoke out against the double-standards for men and women, denounced the ill-treatment of women by their husbands and the unfairness of the marriage relation, and debated the religious arguments that held women to be morally inferior creatures. In short, the issues they addressed would be well recognized by contemporary feminists.

The Female Advocate, or An Answer to a Late Satry
Against the Pride, Lust, and Inconstancy, &c. of Woman (1683)

Blasphemous Wretch! How canst thou think or say
Some curst or Banisht Fiend Usurpt the Sway
When Eve was Form’d? For then’s deny’d by you
God’s Omnipresence and Omniscience too:
Without which Attributes he could not be
The greatest and supreamest Deity:
Nor can Heav’n sleep, tho’ it may mourn to see
Degen’rate Man speak such vile Balsphemy.

When from dark Chaos Heav’n the World did make,
And all was Glorious it did undertake;
Then were in Eedn’s Garden freely plac’d
Each thin that’s pleasant to the Sight or Taste,
‘T was fill’d with Beasts & Birds, Trees hung with Fruit,
That might with Man’s Coelestial Nature suit:
The World being made thus spacious and comleat,
Then Man was form’d, who seemed nobly Great.
When Heav’n survey’d the Works that it had done,
Saw Male and Female, but found Man alone,
A barren Sex, and insignificant,
then Heav’n made Woman to supply the want,
And to make perfect what before was scant:
Surely then she a Noble Creature is,
Whom Heav’n thus made to consummate all Bliss.
Tho’ Man had Being first, yet methinks She
In Nature should have the Supremacy;
For Man was form’d out of dull senceless Earth,
But Woman had a much more Noble Birth:
For when the Dust was purif’d by heaven,
Made into Man, and Life unto it given,
Then the Almighty and All-wise God said,
That Woman of the Species should be made;
Which was no sooner said, but it was done,
‘Cause ‘twas not fit for Man to be alone.

Thus have I prov’d Woman’s Creation good,
And not inferior, when right understood,
To that of Man’s; for both one Maker had,
Which made all good; the how could Eve be bad?
But then you’l say, tho’ she at first was pure,
Yet in that State she did not long endure.
‘Tis true; but yet her Fall examine right;
We find most Men have banish’d Truth for spight:
Nor is she quite so guilty as some make,
For Adam most did of the guilt partake;
While he from God’s own mouth had the Command,
But Woman had it at the second hand:
The Devil’s strength weak Woman might deceive,
And Adam only tempted was by Eve:
She hd the strongest Tempter, and least Charge;
Man’s knowing most, doth make his Sin more large.
But tho’ that Woman Wam to Sin did lead,
Yet since her Seed hath bruis’d the Serpent’s Head:
Why should she thus be made a publick scorn,
Of whom the Great Almighty God was born?
Surely to speak one slighting word, must be
A kind of murmuring Impiety:
But yet their greatest Haters still prove too much;
And from the Proverb they are not exempt,
Too much Familiarity has bred Contempt.
And as in Adam all Mankind did die,
They make all Base for one’s Immodesty;
Nay, make the Name a kind of Magick Spell,
As if ‘twould conjure married Men to Hell.

References:

      Moria Ferguson, First Feminists: British Women Writers 1578 - 1799 [Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1985] pp 156- 160

      Virginia Blain, Isobel Grundy, Patricia Clements, The Feminist Companion to Literature in English, Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present, [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990]

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

Return to Women's History Month 1999 Table of Contents

e-mail sunshine@pinn.net