Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition

Cambridge University Press, 3/26/1998
EAN 9780521585095, ISBN10: 0521585090

Hardcover, 408 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.7 cm
Language: English

This collection of essays includes studies of women's political writings from Christine de Pizan to Mary Wollstonecraft and explores in depth the political ideas of the writers in their historical and intellectual context. The volume illuminates the limitations placed on women's political writings and their broader political role by the social and scholarly institutions of early modern Europe. In so doing, the authors probe legal and political restraints, distinct national and state organisation, and assumptions concerning women's proper intellectual interests. In this endeavour, the volume explores questions and subjects traditionally ignored by historians of political thought and little considered even by current feminist theorists, groups who give slight attention to women's political ideas or place women's writings within the social and intellectual structures from which they emerged and which they helped to shape.

Introduction
Women, intellect and politics
their intersection in early modern Britain Hilda L. Smith
Part I. Women's Political Writings, 1400–1690
1. Christine de Pizan and the origins of peace theory Berenice A. Carroll
2. Political thought/political action
Margaret Cavendish's Hobbesian dilemma Anna Battingelli
3. Women's political voice in England
1640–1740 Lois G. Schwoerer
4. Contextualising Aphra Behn
plays, politics and party, 1679–89 Melinda Zook
Part II. Women's Political and Philosophical Writings, 1690–1800
5. Astell, Masham and Locke
religion and politics Patricia Springborg
6. The politics of sense and sensibility
Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay Graham on Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France Wendy Gunther Canada
7. Emilie du Châtelet
genius and intellectual authority Judith Zinsser
Part III. The Intellectual Context and Economic Setting for Early Modern Women
8. Contract and coercion
power and gender in Leviathan Jane S. Jacquette
9. The significant sounds of silence
the absence of women from the political thought of Sir Robert Filmer and John Locke (or 'Why can't a woman be more like a man') Gordon Schochet
10. Catharine Macaulay
patriot historian J. G. A. Pocock
11. Investment, votes and 'bribes'
women as shareholders in the chartered national companies Susan Staves
Part IV. Legal and Political Prescriptions for Early Modern Women
12. The politics of identity and monarchic government
the debate over female exclusion Sarah Hanley
13. The Holy Roman Empire
women and politics beyond liberalism, individual rights and revolutionary theory Merry Wiesner-Hanks
14. Women as sextons and electors
King's Bench and precedents for women's citizenship Hilda L. Smith
15. 'To be some body'
married women and 'the hardships of the English laws' Barbara A. Todd
Conclusion
women's writing, women's standing
theory and politics in the early modern period Carole Pateman.