A generation after Speght, Sowernam, and Munda began English women's response to the misogynist writings in the debate on the woman question, women writers were still rare and mostly confined themselves to writing devotional booklets. Indeed, it would be another 2 generations before Aphra Behn opened the world of writing to English women. Nonetheless, although feminist writers still wrote using pseudonyms, their work took on a new boldness and a new sauciness. Women discovered a new weapon in to use in the pamphlet war: humor.

      No longer content to allow men to set the terms of the debate, Tattlewell and Hit-him-home went on the offensive, lambasting men's morality, listing infamous men from antiquity to the present time, critiquing the institution of marriage itself, railing against the sexual double standard, and denouncing the limited educational and career opportunities for women. Oh, they addressed the typical misogynist arguments, biblical restrictions on women, questions on women's mental and moral capacity, and quasi-legal arguments about the appropriate role of women, too, weaving a biting humor throughout their entire pamphlet.

      Their interpretation of the creation story in Genesis is one of the funniest in my collection. To summarize it, men were created from the clay and dross and filth of the earth, while women were made from the finest material possible, Adam's rib after Adam had been sanctified by God. And everyone knows that the quality of the finished product depends strongly on the quality of the raw materials. The excerpt below is from their commentary on sexual continence. I'm sure even the most radical feminists of today would be hard pressed to come up with a more radical proposal to solve problems of infertility.

      Excerpt from The women's sharp revenge or an answer to Sir Seldom Sober that writ those railing Pamphlets called the Juniper and Crabtree Lectures, etc. Being a sound Reply and a full confutation of the Books, with an Apology in the case for the defense of us women by Mary Tattlewell and Joan Hit-him-home, spinsters (1640)

      Moreover, women were so chaste that, though they did marry and were married, it was more for propagation of Children than for any carnal delight or pleasure they had to accompany with men. They were content to be joined in Matrimony with a greater desire of Children than of Husbands; they had more joy in being Mothers than in being Wives. For in the old Law it was a curse upon Women to be Barren; and surely if there had been any lawful way for them to have had Children without Husbands, there hath been, and are, and will be a numberless number of Women that would or will never be troubled with wedlock nor the knowledge of man. Thus good and modest Women have been content to have none or one man (at the most) all their whole lifetime, but men have been so addicted to incontinency that no bounds of Law or reason could restrain them. For if we read the Story of the Kings of Judah, there we may find the wisest that ever reigned, Solomon, had no fewer than three hundred Wives and seven hundred Concubines, and that his Son Rehoboam had eighteen Wives and sixty Concubines by whose he begat twenty-eight Sons and three-score Daughters. There have been some good women that, when they could have no Children, they have been contented that their Husbands should make use of their Maidservants, as Sarah and Rachel and Leah did. But I never heard or read of any man that, though he were old, diseased, decrepit, gouty, or many and every way defective and past ability to be the Father of any Child, hath been so loving to his wife as to suffer her to [be] made a Teeming [pregnant] Mother by another man. There was once a Law in Sparta amongst the Lacedaemoninas that if the husband were deficient for propagating or begetting of Children, that then it was lawful for the wife to entertain a friend or a Neighbor. But the women were so given to chastity that they seldom or never did put the said Law in practice, and I am persuaded that the Decree is quite abolished and out of use and force all the World over.

      Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus, Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540-1640 [Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985]

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