Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth Century: English Women Writers and the Public Sphere (review)

Katharine Gillespie seeks to add to the "history of liberal ideas" (15) of seventeenth-century England by arguing that several fundamental liberal ideals — individualism, privacy, tolerance, and the separation of the religious sphere from political control — evolved not only through the political philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke but also through the works of several non-elite English Puritan women who advocated their own revolutionary doctrine, fighting (sometimes painfully) against traditional patriarchal control in order to preach and prophesy and, ultimately, to "domesticate the privileged discourse of political theory" (15). The result is a book that adds significantly to our knowledge of the period's available texts: it discovers and analyzes the rhetoric of some founding "mothers" of liberalism (262), while incorporating Milton, Locke, Hobbes, and a host of current critical theorists with insight and depth.

Chapter 1 situates itself within the debate between antiliberal and proliberal postmodern feminist views of the relative harms/benefits women drew from emerging republican politics. Gillespie hopes that "this book will lead to the conclusion that something called 'feminism' should neither reject something called 'liberalism' out of hand as an inherently sexist tradition, nor should it settle for seeking out the ways in which [such thinking may have] benefit[ed] women down the line" (30). Instead it might "work to recover what other women before them had already practised and preached: an individualistic claim to rights and property as opposed to a republican emphasis upon duty or a collectivist emphasis on . . . the 'community'" (30–31).

The subsequent chapters include biographies of the women writers, discussion of political and critical theory relevant to their published tracts, and thorough analyses of their language. Chapter 2 examines how Katherine Chidley and Anna Trapnel built upon definitions of femininity to attempt to "safeguard the home against intrusive attempts by authorities to subvert the new forms of female religious and political authority that were rising from within the ranks of the 'private'" and, thus, "began the process of building a 'feminist theory of the state'" that would "'recognize' a woman's 'right' to preach and prophesy" (66). After an examination of contract theory, chapter 3 analyzes Elizabeth Poole's prophetic tracts, which actually anticipated Locke by decades and drew upon "alternative sectarian beliefs and practices to appropriate [for the individual] certain powers traditionally granted to the King alone, namely, the power to critique and alter (or 'cure') the very form of the body politic" (131). Gillespie shows how Poole envisions the individual as a "soul" or "spirit" who cannot be silenced, ultimately advocating a "radical individualism" (160) that includes freedom not only from an abusive physical state (marriage, monarchy) but also even from "every marker of social identity, including that of the separatist church" (155). In chapter 4 Gillespie discusses "popular sovereignty" and demonstrates Sarah Wight's and Anne Wentworth's extension of the image of the sovereign individual into the spiritual dimension, escaping or countering the "ideological tradition defined by the very idea that female subjectivity was embodied and hence discontinuous and fragmented" (171). Wight's words spoken in trance — "'God hath two Thrones, one is in the highest Heavens, the other is in the lowest hearts'" (167) — exemplify much of Wight's and Wentworth's writings, which "demonstrate the interest that women had in ironically using congregationalist precepts of sovereignty to position the individual, not the congregation or any other community, as the ultimate repository of self-determination and empowerment" (209). Chapter 5 seeks to complicate those critical arguments that have located Mary Cary's pamphlets within socialist and totalitarian doctrines. Gillespie argues that Cary's rhetoric evokes images of a "free market" ministry accomplished through "grass-roots communication, voluntary association, and persuasion through free preaching [which] should supercede statism as the means by which revolutionary change was to come about" (216).

As sophisticated in its analyses of texts as...