Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition

The body of scholarship on the political opinions and party sympathies of British women writers during the early modern period and Enlightenment is now considerable, as is the scholarship devoted to women writers’ intellectual relationships with colleagues and patrons. Scholarship on the status of women in the history of political thought is becoming more familiar, thanks to the work begun by Susan Moller Okin (Women in Western Political Thought, 1978) and Carole Pateman (The Sexual Contract, 1988), yet still relatively little attention has been accorded the study of women as political actors. The seventeen essays in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition–the product of a 1995 Folger Institute conference–contribute significantly to these several areas and more broadly to the fields of British and European women’s history, primarily in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

It is commonly known that queens regnant exercised authority despite patriarchal institutions or by manipulating those institutions to political advantage, while queens consort and powerful noblewomen helped to shape the course of history by wielding influence and dispensing favors at court. But less is known about other ways in which early modern women participated in politics. In order to broaden the ostensibly narrow scope of women’s political agency and influence, several essays in this volume extend the traditional definition of politics.

The volume opens with a comparative perspective—both in terms of national and historical coverage—provided by Berenice Carroll in her overview of Christine de Pizan’s early fifteenth-century political and military writings and their influence not only in France but on the British court of Henry IV. Susan Staves makes a carefully argued case for women’s political influence beyond court circles in her essay on women as shareholders in the chartered national companies. She first establishes the political nature of the South Sea and East India Companies and then reviews women’s stock ownership and their participation—including voting—at shareholders meetings. Staves discusses the efforts to lobby women shareholders and considers the story of one woman who acted as a lobbyist and agent on behalf of her family. She further examines the extent to which women controlled stock on their own behalf (as opposed to a family’s holding stock in trust for women) and the relative lack of women’s writings about the market and its political effects.

In an essay that surveys some of the many interesting religious and political tracts produced by British women of the middle and lower-middle orders during the British Civil Wars and beyond, Lois Schwoerer redefines the practice of politics to include printed petitioning, topical pamphleteering, and other non-governmental forms of civic participation. The volume’s editor, Hilda Smith, offers an engaging analysis of an early eighteenth-century court case that upheld a widowed woman’s election, through the support of women’s votes, to the office of sexton in a London parish. She situates this case in the broader context of the history of women’s access to private and public office and voting rights and, more broadly still, to the sometimes gender-exclusive and other times “falsely universal” language of landmark legal documents and court opinions, with a particular focus on the 1832 and 1867 Reform Bills. If the volume were to have considered the American political scene, which it understandably does not, it might have been interesting to hear about the women who were enfranchised in the state of New Jersey from 1776 to 1807.

Among the contributions to the volume that center on prominent women’s intellectual relationships or on their political views and writings, we find Anna Battigelli’s convincing discussion of the influence of Hobbes’s political thought on Margaret Cavendish, especially as it helped to shape her pessimistic view of human nature and her preoccupation with the restoration of political order in the aftermath of the Civil Wars. Although Hobbes appears to have rebuffed Cavendish’s overtures toward friendship, he had a longstanding acquaintance with Cavendish’s husband, the Marquess (later Duke) of Newcastle, and once entertained an invitation to join the household. In her nuanced essay on the Tory politics of Aphra Behn’s drama and fiction in the decade leading up to the Glorious Revolution, Melinda Zook traces Behn’s rising sense of political insecurity by examining the way her leading male cavalier characters evolve from “merry rover to cunning rake to sacrificial martyr-hero” (78). Behn’s dismay over the contemporary political scene and Stuart failure is described against the backdrop of her experience of the loss of honor in her society, a loss that inspired the creation, in 1688, of her best-known tragic hero, the enslaved African Oroonoko, a prince among knaves.

Patricia Springborg’s essay describes the participation of two women closely associated with the Cambridge Platonists—Mary Astell, best known for her writings on women’s education and marriage, and the lesser known Lady Damaris Masham, the companion to John Locke and daughter of Ralph Cudworth—in a religious and philosophical debate that centers on the Platonist critique of the materialist epistemologies of Hobbes and Locke. Springborg astutely emphasizes the political implications of this debate, particularly with respect to social contract theory. John Pocock’s provocative essay on Catherine Macaulay as “patriot historian” redirects our attention from the usual scholarly focus on the political pamphlets to the eight-volume History of England, wherein the sad legacies of a not-so-glorious 1688 revolution include the corruptions of court patronage, the professional army, and the system of public credit. Pocock establishes Macaulay in the tradition of thinkers for whom liberty inheres in the exercise of public virtue and is not to be confused with an ideal of equality or inclusion.

Judith Zinsser offers a discussion of the gender politics of scientific salon culture in early eighteenth-century France in her compelling essay on the life of Emilie du Châtelet, whose research interests included calculus, optics, mechanics, and astronomy and whose French translation of Newton’s Principia remains standard. Madame du Châtelet’s career was cut short by her death, at age forty-two, resulting from complications following the birth of a child she conceived with Voltaire. We are reminded yet again of the harsh biological realities of eighteenth-century women’s lives as we turn to the two essays by Wendy Gunther-Canada and Mary Lyndon Shanley on sensibility and politics in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft. This rights-of-man and rights-of-woman philosopher, who died as a result of childbirth, considered motherhood to be “one of women’s primary roles” (149), as Shanley reminds us. However, it is worth emphasizing that, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft also wished to see the day when women might enter the professions and that she encouraged breast-feeding partly on the grounds that lactation inhibits conception.

The volume is rounded out with essays that examine the legal and political realities of women’s lives—Sarah Hanley on women and sovereignty in early modern France, Merry Wiesner on citizenship in the Holy Roman Empire, and Barbara Todd on married women and parish law in England—and essays that delve into the status of women in British political thought. Jane Jacquette’s essay on women in Hobbes and Gordon Schochet’s essay on women in Filmer and Locke both challenge elements of Carole Pateman’s famous indictment of the sexual contract, and Pateman herself offers a fierce response to these arguments in the concluding chapter of the book. The impressive range of topics and the many well-researched contributions should make this volume indispensable to scholars working on women and political history.