Feminism (3 page)

‘Let your women keep silence in the churches, for it is not permitted to them to speak’, he instructed the Corinthians. And again, in the epistle to Timothy, ‘if they will learn anything let them ask their husbands at home: for it is shame for women to speak in the church’.

Gradually, a few women found the confidence to defy these scriptural prohibitions. Some offered dissenting interpretations of Genesis, arguing that Adam was, after all, as much to blame for the Fall as Eve. So, in 1611, Aemilia Lanyer reminded her readers that Christ

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was begotten of a woman, born of a woman, nourished of a woman, obedient to a woman . . . he healed women, pardoned women, comforted women . . . after his resurrection, appeared first to a woman.

And Rachel Speght sardonically remarked in 1617: If Adam had not approved that deed which Eve had done, and been willing to tread the steps which she had gone, he being her head would have reproved her, have made the commandment a bit to restrain him from breaking his master’s position.

Others insisted that God had signalled his forgiveness by making Mary, a descendant of Eve, the mother of Christ.

In the course of the troubled 17th century, particularly among the sects, the many and various small groups that rejected the established Church in favour of purer forms of worship, women
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found more freedom. Some, at least, felt inspired to preach or to
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prophesy. Modern historians have pointed out the important role of women among the religious separatists who fled persecution in late Elizabethan England by emigrating to America or to Holland, as well as their activity as preachers. Women were active, too, among the small dissenting groups that managed to survive underground in England, until, during the Civil War and Interregnum, they emerged dramatically and vocally. Keith Thomas lists some of these independent congregations: Brownists, Independents, Baptists, Millenarians, Familists, Quakers, Seekers, Ranters. Whatever their theological differences, they all believed the necessity for spiritual regeneration in
every
individual. The experiencing of what Quakers called the ‘Inner Light’ was more important than external observance – and that light knows no sexual distinction. As one contemporary writer claimed, ‘one faithful man, yea, or woman either, may as truly and effectually loose and bind, both in heaven and earth, as all the ministers in the world’.

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Various independent congregations had, for some time, been allowing women to debate publicly and to vote on matters of Church business; by the 1640s some, particularly among the Quakers, were going further. In 1659, the Quaker Fox argued that

‘Christ is in the male as in the female, who redeems from under the Law . . . Christ in the male and female, who are in the spirit of God, are not under the Law.’

‘Might not the spirit of Christ, that is begotten of God in the female as well as the male . . . speak?’ asked Katherine Evans and Sarah Chevers. Increasingly often, women felt moved, divinely inspired, to speak in meetings and even at service, though they were often greeted with bitter opposition. They were criticized for being ‘puffed up with pride’ and ‘vainglorious arrogance’, and even worse, for
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‘usurping authority over men’. In 1646, for example, John Vicars
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complained bitterly about ‘bold impudent housewives . . . without all womanly modesty who take upon them . . . to prate . . . most
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directly contrary to the apostle’s inhibition’.

John Bunyan was totally opposed to this active participation by women, arguing that Satan, inevitably, tempts the weaker Eve, rather than Adam: ‘the man was made the head in worship, and the keeper of the garden of God’. He referred to women as ‘that simple and weak sex’. Citing the first epistle to the Corinthians, he argued that women are ‘not the image and glory of God as the men are.

They are placed beneath.’ He disapproved of separate women’s meetings, which did nothing but encourage ‘unruliness’. ‘I do not believe they [women] should minister to God in prayer before the whole church,’ he insisted, adding sarcastically, ‘for then I should be a Ranter or a Quaker.’ In any public gathering, ‘her part is to hold her tongue, to learn in silence’.

Even in the 1670s, that courageous Quaker Margaret Fell still felt the need to defend women’s independence of conscience, and their right to play an active part in worship. In a tract called
Women’s
Speaking Justified
, she argued emphatically: ‘Those that speak 11

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1. The scene is viewed with a hint of satire – though is it directed at the
earnest speaker or at the inattentive audience? One is actually sleeping,
others demonstrate disapproval.

against . . . the spirit of the Lord speaking in a woman, simply by reason of her sex . . . speak against Christ and his Church, and are of the Seed of the Serpent.’

The prophet Joel was sometimes cited as an answer to Saint Paul’s prohibition spirit upon all flesh:

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. . . and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions: And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my spirit. And I will shew wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood and fire, and pillars of smoke.

Joel’s ecstatic vision seemed, to many, particularly relevant during the great upheavals caused by the Civil War and the Interregnum; there was a widespread feeling that apocalypse was, indeed, imminent. The sect who styled themselves Fifth Monarchists, for example, believed that the world’s four great secular empires –

Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome – having passed away, the fifth –

Christ’s Kingdom and the rule of the saints – was close at hand. In this feverish and volatile climate, prophets, many with
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revolutionary ideas, flourished.

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In this area, a woman’s supposed passivity, her receptivity to
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outside influence, could, ironically, be claimed as an advantage: she might prove more receptive, more open, to becoming a channel for the voice of God. The Belgian prophet Antonia Bourigue, who was widely read in England, produced a disconcerting and double-edged justification: ‘they ought to let God speak by a woman, if it be His Pleasure, since he spoke in former times to a Prophet by a Beast’.

But the line between prophetic inspiration and lunacy, between possession by God and by the devil, was a narrow one. In 17th-century England, women were still being tried for witchcraft.

Moreover, female prophets could easily be dismissed as merely crazy. Lady Eleanor Davis, for example, had been claiming divine inspiration for years; early one morning in 1625, she heard ‘a Voice from Heaven, speaking as through a trumpet these words, There is nineteen years and a half to the Judgement Day’. She went on to publish tracts that were interpreted as predicting, amongst other things, the death of Charles I. Her husband burned her books; and she was often the butt of jokes. An anagram of her name –
Dame
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Eleanor Davis: Never so mad a ladie
– was gleefully circulated. But her visionary fervour put her at real risk; even her rank could not protect her from charges of treachery. In 1633, after being charged before the High Commission that ‘she took upon her (which much unbeseemed her sex) not only to interpret the Scriptures . . . but also to be a prophetess’, she was fined and imprisoned in Bedlam.

But she came into her own during the Interregnum, when many of her prophecies seemed to have been realized. She went on to publish at least 37 tracts between 1641 and her death 11 years later.

Another prophetess, Anna Trapnel, experienced some kind of revelation at a Baptist church in London. By 1652, she had joined the Fifth Monarchists, and in 1654, she accompanied a male preacher to Whitehall, where she fell into a trance that lasted for 12 days. Crowds gathered to hear her prophecies – and her harsh criticisms of Oliver Cromwell and his government – which were recorded in
Strange and Wonderful News from Whitehall
and
The
Cry of a Stone
. She insisted – in verse – that God’s message was
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addressed to women as well as men:

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John though wilt not offended be

That handmaids here should sing,

That they should meddle to declare

The matters of the King . . . .

The authorities labelled her as mad, but still brought her to trial.

‘The report was that I would discover myself to be a witch when I came before the justices, by having never a word to answer for myself ’, she said. But her sheer volubility defeated the court, and she continued, undeterred, with her prophecies. Cromwell’s government undoubtedly took this kind of prediction seriously; several times, he and his council were interrupted by, and seriously listened to, prophets, several of whom were women.

The appeal to divine inspiration was probably of limited value as a means of female emancipation; the feminism of the future would 14

depend less on the assertion of women’s spiritual equality and more on natural rights, and a denial that there is any intellectual difference between the sexes.

But there were political implications to this outburst of religious fervour. In the 16th century, the Anabaptists had recognized women as equal to men, and allowed them to pray and speak in meetings.

Women from the congregations who styled themselves Levellers seem to have been particularly active on a larger stage, and showed considerable political shrewdness. The sect encouraged women’s activity, believing in the equality of all ‘made in the image of God’. In the 1640s and early 1650s, when many of their husbands were in prison, Leveller women repeatedly turned up en masse at Westminster – staging what sounds very like contemporary
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‘demonstrations’ – to demand freedom for their husbands, but also
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to complain bitterly about their own, consequent hardships. They were usually treated harshly, and rebuked for meddling in things
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beyond their understanding. The crowds of women who petitioned for peace in 1642 and 1643 were dismissed contemptuously as

‘Whores, Bawds, Oyster women, Kitchen maids’. Three hundred women, who presented another petition to the House of Lords, were rejected out of hand by the Duke of Lennox. ‘Away with these women,’ he exclaimed, adding, with a jeer, ‘we were best have a Parliament of women.’ In May 1649 yet another petition for the release of the Leveller prisoners was turned away sarcastically: ‘It was not for women to Petition, they might stay at home and wash the dishes.’ To which the women, unabashed, retorted, ‘we have scarcely any dishes left us to wash’.

Later in that year, they tried again. As many as ten thousand women signed yet another petition, asking:

We cannot but wonder and grieve that we should appear so despicable in your eyes as to be thought unworthy to petition to represent our grievances to this honourable House. Have we not an equal interest with the men of this nation in those liberties and 15

securities contained in the Petition of Right, and other good laws of the land? Are any of our lives, limbs, liberties or goods to be taken from us, no more than from men, but by due process of law . . .

A thousand women carried it to the House with sea-green ribbons pinned to their breasts. Once again, they were dismissed scornfully.

But among the Quakers, particularly, women found the chance to develop their skills as administrators. Regular women’s meetings were set up alongside the men’s meetings in the 1650s; and though, from the beginning, women seem to have concentrated on traditionally feminine areas, such as welfare and moral problems, they had the chance to develop their own, very effective organization, which in fact handled considerable sums of money.

However, historians have suggested that there was a gradual reduction in the scope of their concerns; by the 1680s, they were confining themselves to ‘womanly’ matters. In these later years, they concentrated on ‘such things as are proper to us, as the poor more
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especially and the destitute amongst us’. These included helping
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young men to find apprenticeships or work, and instructing younger women ‘to all wholesome things’, which included looking after their husbands, children, and homes, and always behaving in a manner that was ‘discreet, chaste, and sober’.

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Chapter 2

The beginning of

secular feminism

Secular self-assertion, perhaps inevitably, developed more slowly; it was one thing to act in ‘unfeminine’ ways if divinely inspired, not quite so easy to act unconventionally out of personal ambition.

Speaking in public, or writing, was all very well when it was in the Lord’s cause, and could be claimed as the product of divine inspiration: ‘I am a very weak and unworthy woman . . . I could do no more of myself than a pencil or pen can do when no hand guides it’, acknowledged one 17th-century female author. Moreover, many women, Quakers and members of other sects, obviously gained confidence from being part of a supportive community with whom they shared beliefs and values.

Worldly ambition was something else. There had of course been, within living memory of many, a great queen of England, who was learned and well read. Working with the scholar Roger Ascham, Elizabeth became fluent in Latin, Greek, and French; he remarked, approvingly, that ‘her mind has no womanly weakness, her perseverance is equal to that of a man’. But for all her self-assertiveness, she was hardly supportive of other women. Her famous speech to the troops at Tilbury in (1588) made a sharp distinction between her role as woman and as monarch: ‘I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too.’ But her mere existence was probably an encouragement, at least, to some 17

Englishwomen, to trust in their own talents, and to accept their own