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  Another prophetess, Anna Trapnel, experienced some kind of revelation at a Baptist church in London. By 1652, she had joined the Fifth Monarchists, and in 1654, she accompanied a male preacher to Whitehall, where she fell into a trance that lasted for 12 days. Crowds gathered to hear her prophecies – and her harsh criticisms of Oliver Cromwell and his government – which were recorded in Strange and Wonderful News from Whitehall and The Cry of a Stone. She insisted – in verse – that God’s message was minism

  addressed to women as well as men:

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  John though wilt not offended be

  That handmaids here should sing,

  That they should meddle to declare

  The matters of the King . . . .

  The authorities labelled her as mad, but still brought her to trial.

  ‘The report was that I would discover myself to be a witch when I came before the justices, by having never a word to answer for myself ’, she said. But her sheer volubility defeated the court, and she continued, undeterred, with her prophecies. Cromwell’s government undoubtedly took this kind of prediction seriously; several times, he and his council were interrupted by, and seriously listened to, prophets, several of whom were women.

  The appeal to divine inspiration was probably of limited value as a means of female emancipation; the feminism of the future would 14

  depend less on the assertion of women’s spiritual equality and more on natural rights, and a denial that there is any intellectual difference between the sexes.

  But there were political implications to this outburst of religious fervour. In the 16th century, the Anabaptists had recognized women as equal to men, and allowed them to pray and speak in meetings.

  Women from the congregations who styled themselves Levellers seem to have been particularly active on a larger stage, and showed considerable political shrewdness. The sect encouraged women’s activity, believing in the equality of all ‘made in the image of God’. In the 1640s and early 1650s, when many of their husbands were in prison, Leveller women repeatedly turned up en masse at Westminster – staging what sounds very like contemporary Th

  ‘demonstrations’ – to demand freedom for their husbands, but also e religiou

  to complain bitterly about their own, consequent hardships. They were usually treated harshly, and rebuked for meddling in things s roots of feminism

  beyond their understanding. The crowds of women who petitioned for peace in 1642 and 1643 were dismissed contemptuously as

  ‘Whores, Bawds, Oyster women, Kitchen maids’. Three hundred women, who presented another petition to the House of Lords, were rejected out of hand by the Duke of Lennox. ‘Away with these women,’ he exclaimed, adding, with a jeer, ‘we were best have a Parliament of women.’ In May 1649 yet another petition for the release of the Leveller prisoners was turned away sarcastically: ‘It was not for women to Petition, they might stay at home and wash the dishes.’ To which the women, unabashed, retorted, ‘we have scarcely any dishes left us to wash’.

  Later in that year, they tried again. As many as ten thousand women signed yet another petition, asking:

  We cannot but wonder and grieve that we should appear so despicable in your eyes as to be thought unworthy to petition to represent our grievances to this honourable House. Have we not an equal interest with the men of this nation in those liberties and 15

  securities contained in the Petition of Right, and other good laws of the land? Are any of our lives, limbs, liberties or goods to be taken from us, no more than from men, but by due process of law . . .

  A thousand women carried it to the House with sea-green ribbons pinned to their breasts. Once again, they were dismissed scornfully.

  But among the Quakers, particularly, women found the chance to develop their skills as administrators. Regular women’s meetings were set up alongside the men’s meetings in the 1650s; and though, from the beginning, women seem to have concentrated on traditionally feminine areas, such as welfare and moral problems, they had the chance to develop their own, very effective organization, which in fact handled considerable sums of money.

  However, historians have suggested that there was a gradual reduction in the scope of their concerns; by the 1680s, they were confining themselves to ‘womanly’ matters. In these later years, they concentrated on ‘such things as are proper to us, as the poor more minism

  especially and the destitute amongst us’. These included helping Fe

  young men to find apprenticeships or work, and instructing younger women ‘to all wholesome things’, which included looking after their husbands, children, and homes, and always behaving in a manner that was ‘discreet, chaste, and sober’.

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  Chapter 2

  The beginning of

  secular feminism

  Secular self-assertion, perhaps inevitably, developed more slowly; it was one thing to act in ‘unfeminine’ ways if divinely inspired, not quite so easy to act unconventionally out of personal ambition.

  Speaking in public, or writing, was all very well when it was in the Lord’s cause, and could be claimed as the product of divine inspiration: ‘I am a very weak and unworthy woman . . . I could do no more of myself than a pencil or pen can do when no hand guides it’, acknowledged one 17th-century female author. Moreover, many women, Quakers and members of other sects, obviously gained confidence from being part of a supportive community with whom they shared beliefs and values.

  Worldly ambition was something else. There had of course been, within living memory of many, a great queen of England, who was learned and well read. Working with the scholar Roger Ascham, Elizabeth became fluent in Latin, Greek, and French; he remarked, approvingly, that ‘her mind has no womanly weakness, her perseverance is equal to that of a man’. But for all her self-assertiveness, she was hardly supportive of other women. Her famous speech to the troops at Tilbury in (1588) made a sharp distinction between her role as woman and as monarch: ‘I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too.’ But her mere existence was probably an encouragement, at least, to some 17

  Englishwomen, to trust in their own talents, and to accept their own

  ‘unfeminine’ ambition. There were certainly Royalist women who –

  in the absence of their husbands during the Civil War – struggled bravely to defend their families and homes. Anne Bradstreet (an English-born poet who later emigrated to America) wrote, 40 years after the Queen’s death:

  Let such as say our sex is void of reason

  Know ’tis a slander now, but once was Treason.

  An anonymous work entitled The Woman’s Sharpe Revenge (1640) argued, provocatively, that women’s exclusion from learning was

  ‘devised by men to secure their own continued domination’.

  Bathsua Makin, who was governess to a daughter of Charles I and who later founded and ran a school for women, insisted in her Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen in Religion, Manners, Arts and Tongues on the importance of women receiving a solid education. ‘Let women be fools’, she remarked, ‘and you will minism

  make them slaves.’ Her book was probably, in part at least, an Fe

  advertisement for her school and its curriculum; and it was aimed at well-off women. Interestingly, she offered women the (still rare) chance to study the classics. But she reassured her readers by making it clear that she would not ‘hinder good housewifery, neither have I called any from their necessary labour to the book’.

  And, with a hint of anxiety, she insists that ‘my intention is not to equalize women to men, much less to make them superior. They are the weaker sex.’

  But Bathsua Makin warmly praised the role played by Royalist women during the Civil War: they ‘defended their houses and did all things, as soldiers, with prudence and valour, like men’. And she was generously appreciative of her learned contemporaries, including Anne Bradstreet and the Duchess of New
castle. The biblical story of how Eve brought sin into the world by eating the forbidden apple, so often used against women, is, Makin argues, merely the earliest example of a need for adequate education.

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  Christine de Pizan

  Christine de Pizan, born in 14th-century Italy but raised in France, has been described as the first Western woman to live by her pen. Well educated by her father, she began writing aged 25, after her husband died, earning enough to support three children, a niece, and her own mother. Her most famous work, The City of Ladies (1404), criticizes learned books that spread ‘so many wicked insults about women and their behaviour’; three allegorical women – Reason, Recti-tude, and Justice – discuss the roots of misogyny. ‘The man or the woman in whom resides greater virtue is the higher’, Th

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  she argued; ‘neither the loftiness nor the lowliness of a person lies in the body according to the sex, but in the perfection of conduct and virtues.’

  g of secular feminism

  In 1599 Marguerite de Navarre published the Heptaméron, defending women against misogynous attacks. Marie de Gournay’s Egalité des hommes et des femmes (1622) asserted women’s intellectual equality with men: ‘happy are you, Reader, if you do not belong to this sex to which all good is forbidden’. And in 1640, Anne Marie van Schurmann’s On

  the Capacity of the Female Mind for Learning insisted that

  ‘whatever fills the human mind with uncommon and honest delight is fitting for a human woman’.

  Many early secular writers seem to have had a hard time. In 1621

  Lady Mary Wroth (a niece of the poet Sir Philip Sidney) was engaged in writing a sonnet sequence, which she left unfinished. It was not printed until the 20th century, when women literary critics analysed the interesting and refreshing slant she brought to that usually intensely masculine form. But when Wroth had the temerity 19

  to publish a prose romance, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, it was greeted with hostility, and, on the grounds that it slandered contemporaries, withdrawn from sale. Her rank offered no protection. ‘Work, Lady, work,’ Lord Denny advised Lady Mary, condescendingly, ‘let writing books alone/For surely wiser women ne’er wrote one.’

  The difficulties – indeed, the outspoken scorn – confronting any woman who actually dared to publish her writings are clearly indicated by the experiences of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. Born into a family of well-established, Royalist East Anglian landowners, she went to court as a young woman, then accompanied Queen Henrietta Maria into exile in Paris, where she met and married the Marquess, later the Duke, of Newcastle. Her privileges – rank and riches – certainly protected her; but they also, along with her flamboyantly eccentric personal style and, most of all, her unconcealed literary ambition, made her an easy target for malicious and denigrating gossip. She was fortunate in her minism

  marriage; the Duke, much older than his wife, encouraged her Fe

  endeavours, and, after one of the many attacks on her work, remarked: ‘Here’s the crime, a lady writes them, and to entrench so much upon the male prerogative is not to be forgiven.’

  Though her situation was, in many respects, very different from that of most other women, she wrote very movingly about women’s common fears and griefs, particularly about their children: ‘the care for their well being, the fear for their ill doing, the grief for their sickness and their unsufferable sorrow for their death’. These were concerns that might afflict any woman, whatever her status.

  Cavendish began to write philosophical verse when she and her husband returned to London; as a modern biographer remarks, she felt torn between ‘the (feminine and Christian) virtue of modesty’

  and her own ambitions. She rightly took her work very seriously, but she was often forced to retreat into defensive, and self-deprecating, justifications. Writing was, she remarked apologetically, the 20

  ‘harmlessest pastime’ for leisured women; much better than, say, sitting around gossiping about the neighbours. It was a ‘proper and virtuous’ activity, and men who disapproved, she argued, should hope their own wives and daughters ‘may employ the time no worse than in honest, innocent and harmless fancies’.

  However, Cavendish certainly never regarded her own work as harmless fancy. Though she was critical of the exclusive arrogance of the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, she courageously dedicated two books to them. In 1653, when she published Poems and Fancies, she claimed that she wrote because ‘all heroic actions, public employments, powerful governments and eloquent pleadings are denied our sex in this age . . . ’. The implication being that writing in itself may be a heroic activity; and for any woman of Th her generation, it probably was. Moreover, in her 1655

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  Philosophical and Physical Opinions, she complained that g of secular feminism

  we are kept like birds in cages to hop up and down in our houses, not suffered to fly abroad . . . 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 overweening conceit men have of themselves and through despisement of us.

  But in nature, she argued in the preface to The World’s Olio, written when she first returned to London but published in 1655, ‘we have as clear an understanding as men, if we were bred in schools to mature our brains and to mature our knowledge’.

  But for all her ambition and her persistence, she had few illusions and sometimes, inevitably perhaps, her courage failed her; she gloomily predicted readers’ responses to her autobiographical True Relation: ‘Why hath this lady writ her own life, since none cares to know whose daughter she was or whose wife she is, or how she was bred, or what fortunes she had, or how she lived?’

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  minism

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  2. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, was an intellectually astute writer who spoke out eloquently against the hostility directed at any woman regarded as outspoken or ambitious.

  And, indeed, readers were often unkind. The diarist Samuel Pepys, intensely and maliciously curious, spent weeks in 1667 tracking her around London, then, after reading her life of her husband, condemned her as ‘a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman’. And though Cavendish hopefully dedicated two prefaces specifically to women readers, urging them to spend time ‘on anything that may 22

  bring honour to our sex, for they are poor, dejected spirits that are not ambitious of fame’, she admitted that convention, in constraining women’s talents, made them jealously critical of each other’s achievements, and that she would probably ‘be censured by my own sex’. As she often was. Her contemporary Dorothy Osborne’s response to Newcastle’s Poems and Fancies is sadly revealing about the extent of disapproving prejudice – even amongst intelligent women – against women’s writing. Dorothy was enjoyably shocked when she heard about the Duchess’s book, and wrote to her fiancé, Sir William Temple:

  For God’s sake, if you meet with it, send it me; they say ’tis ten times more extravagant than her dress. Sure, the poor woman is a little distracted, she could never be so ridiculous else as to venture at Th

  writing books, and in verse too. If I should not sleep this fortnight I e beginnin

  should not come to that.

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  She wrote again shortly afterwards, telling Temple not to bother, as she had already obtained and read the book, ‘ . . . and am satisfied that there are many soberer people in Bedlam’. But, ironically and rather sadly, Osborne’s own letters to her fiancé reveal a lively, observant, articulate woman; as Virginia Woolf remarked, ‘what a gift that untaught and solitary girl had for the framing of a sentence, for the fashioning of a scene’. In another age, she implies, Osborne might have made a novelist.

  Intriguingly, the seedy and cynical world of Restoration London provided some unexpected opportunities for women. They might work as actresse
s, though that was hardly a socially respectable profession; they were often treated as if they were, in essence, merely prostitutes. But in addition, a number of women emerged as playwrights: Catherine Trotter, Mary Manley, and Mary Pix all had plays produced – and were cruelly mocked in a play by a certain ‘W. M.’ which was staged in 1696. Mary Manley, in the prologue to her first play, foresaw the difficulties they would all face:

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  The Curtain’s drawn now by a Lady’s hand

  The very name you’ll cry bodes Impotence,

  To Fringe and Tea they should confine their sense.

  Aphra Behn is the best-known of these women who were finding the courage to break new ground, and to face down this kind of jeering criticism. Virginia Woolf glimpsed something of Behn’s importance, describing her as

  a middle class woman with all the plebeian virtues of humour, vitality and courage; a woman forced by the death of her husband and some unfortunate adventures of her own to make her living by her wits, she had to work on equal terms with men. She made, by working very hard, enough to live on. The importance of that fact outweighs anything she actually wrote.

  More recent readers have taken what Behn ‘actually wrote’ much more seriously – she was a skilful and often challenging dramatist –

  minism

  while some critics have found her life almost as interesting as her Fe

  plays. Before becoming a writer, she had travelled widely – perhaps to Surinam in South America; certainly, as a government spy, to the Low Countries. Though she is best known as a playwright, she also penned Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister. A recent biographer has convincingly argued that this neglected tale is in fact a great erotic novel, which is also a profound exploration of the potency and the perils of romantic fantasy.

  She was often attacked – as male playwrights were not – for bawdiness. Alexander Pope was the most famous of those who sneered at her immorality: ‘The stage how loosely doth Astraea tread/ Who fairly puts all characters to bed.’ Behn defended herself eloquently: