ABSTRACT
The commonly received opinion that woman’s mental ability is inferior to man’s derived partly from the force of Aristotelian tradition and humoral biology, and partly from theological tradition. Regarding her as an imperfect man the former expected her to be possessed of less able faculties. This is the starting point for Margaret Cavendish’s apologia in 27. That woman was created second raised theological difficulties concerning the precise sense in which she was formed in the image of God rather than of man (see Paul in I Cor. xi.7, alluding to Gen. i.26-7). Her spiritual status could hence be regarded as problematic: in Eph. iv.13 the apparently exclusive ‘man’ (in the Vulgate Latin version, vir, man, not homo, human being) is used to designate a regenerate and perfected person (Maclean (1980), pp. 12-14). Consequently, ‘problems were made, whether or no/Women had souls’ (193). This issue is generally raised with witty or rhetorical rather than serious theological point, as it is by Donne (23), but in the English Midlands in 1647 the Quaker leader George Fox encountered it as a convinced opinion (24). Rationality was regarded as a property of the human soul; if woman’s spiritual status is in any doubt, so must her mental be. John Winthrop’s cautionary anecdote (25) is typically confident of the difference between the mental abilities of the sexes. Educated and intelligent women themselves internalized this ideological prejudice (26). This seems to be the case even with that remarkable and individualistic woman Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (for whom see Jones (1988); Todd (1989), pp. 55-68). The contrariness and tonal uncertainty of the extract from the preface to The Worlds Olio (27; discussed in Hobby (1988), pp. 190-1, 195-7) illustrate the tension which arises when an imaginative and impassioned female intelligence is wedded to political and social conservatism. The Duchess advances a ‘feminist’ argument to the effect that ‘in Nature we have as clear an understanding as men’, only to agree that ‘there is great difference betwixt the masculine brain and the feminine’ and to adduce an extended list of evidences of women’s inferiority and incapacity.
