Introduction

In what ways can we conceive of early modern women as politically active? We are not the first to ask this question, or to struggle to answer it positively. Remarkably, in England two women held supreme power from 1553-1603, but despite this extraordinary state of affairs women were largely excluded from the early modern public sphere. They could not serve as jurors, lawyers, magistrates, counsellors or as members of parliament. They did not study in the universities or at the inns of court; nor did they write treatises about, or debate publicly, constitutional or theological matters. As the painstaking efforts of many feminist scholars have established, in this period women of aristocratic and middling rank did write prolifically. Yet this often took the form of ‘private’ devotional works as well as poems and plays intended for circulation among family and friends. When women did venture to publicise their thoughts through the medium of print, they risked infamy (Krontiris 1992: 17-18). A notable exception to women’s removal from public life, of course, is the interventions made by female religious radicals and political activists in the 1640s and 1650s, figures such as Elizabeth Poole who related her visions to the Army Council in 1648 and 1649, the Fifth Monarchist Anna Trapnel who spoke out against the ‘pomp of Cromwell and the rulers of England’ in 1654 (Crawford 1996: 137) and the leveller women who petitioned Parliament in the 1640s about a range of issues (Higgins 1973: 200-18). However, female petitioning was frequently

met with ridicule and hostility. Ann Hughes describes the response to the leveller women who petitioned parliament on 23 April and 7 May of 1649, initially to secure the release of leveller men from prison, the second time for the ‘right’ to petition and to represent their grievances. Contemporary newsbooks record that the Speaker responded belatedly to the first petition to the effect that he had already made his answer to their husbands and that they should go home and manage their domestic affairs (Hughes 1995: 163). In this case, such an injunction was not successful because, as Hughes notes, the leveller women ‘considered themselves as citizens as well as wives, mothers and widows’ (1995: 164); hence the second and stronger petition in May.