ABSTRACT
Early Modernists have long noted the intersections of prophecy and politics in seventeenth-century Britain, even though the definition of what is 'political' in prophecy and the extent to which its agency legitimized women as active political subjects has been difficult to elucidate. Hilda Smith reinstated women as political subjects in the seventeenth century since they had a "real presence in political and economic structure", and traced the road map from political existence to awareness, participation, and political tenure. Mihoko Suzuki places women's political participation and the "symbolic deployment of gender" as part of the larger discourse of the "subaltern". This chapter explains the reasons for an apparent lack of women's leverage in political matters, for example, as the patriarchal glass ceiling of Locke's contract theory or the resistance to populism of the privileged class that equated prophecy with disorder and egalitarianism, even though the economic status, the educational background, and the religious-political affinities of women who prophesied were fairly diverse.
