ABSTRACT
Ferguson considers the economic origins of the ideal of chastity, as well as the larger systems of meaning which equated female speech with sexual promiscuity. Ferguson employs a materialist feminist perspective in her analysis of the social constructions of gender which restricted female speech and writing. More than five hundred years separate Christine de Pizan from Virginia Woolf; the parallel between their autobiographical accounts of being textually defined by men serves, to indicate the historical continuity in certain aspects of the Western sex-gender system. Many of Christine's portraits of female martyrs stress the heroines' learning and powers of speech. Like Pizan, Cary both interrogates and in some sense affirms the ideological link between unruly female bodies and unruly tongues. The poem offers a witty protest against and an unconventional analysis of the normative Renaissance definition of woman as chaste, silent and obedient.
