ABSTRACT
Women of evident intelligence themselves accepted this divorce between the private (feminine) and public (masculine) spheres (cf. 92) and, despite the recent precedents of Mary Queen of Scots, Mary Tudor and Elizabeth, they shared the age’s ‘distaste…for the notion of woman’s involvement in politics’ (Maclean (1980), p. 60). Public affairs were not for her, even when (perhaps especially when) her husband was involved in them (cf. 28, 94). Lucy Hutchinson, herself very well-informed on current affairs and vehemently partisan in her interpretation of them, is nevertheless scathing about ‘hands that are made only for distaffs’ affecting ‘the management of sceptres’, discounting the example of Elizabeth (127). Margaret Cavendish wished posterity to believe that it was her bashfulness which commended her to her future husband and is deeply resentful when compelled by the exigencies of the Civil War and its aftermath to act on his behalf in a public arena (128). Just as Lucy Hutchinson is prepared to attribute the outbreak of that war to Henrietta Maria’s usurping the dominant masculine role, so Margaret Cavendish ascribes it in large part to the unruliness and insubordination of
women: ‘temperance and quietness are strangers to our sex’ (129). Crossdressing appalled precisely because it blurred this clear demarcation of duties and spheres of activity (see chapter 14).
