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Historians, W o m e n and the Civil War Sects, 1640 1660 The history of women in the Civil War sects in England has, to date, been understood in the context of women's search for equality with men. Horrified contemporaries laid the foundation for much of the subsequent discussion with their stories of women in the sects being out of control, probably sexually promiscuous and consequently a danger to society. Later commentators have shared some of these earlier assumptions about the weaker nature of women and their tendency to emotionalism and hysteria. To women's hystericd nature Weber attributed the greater appeal of religious movements with something of the messianic in them.1 The most serious discussion of the phenomenon of religious enthusiasm was that of R.A. Knox published in 1950 in which the author echoed some of the earlier anxieties. 'The history of enthusiasm,* he wrote, 'is largely a history of female emancipation, and it is not a reassuring one'.2 Not reassuring to whom? W e are accustomed to analyzing seventeenthcentury men's attitudes to women, but the prejudices of twentieth-century sociologists and historians were not widely questioned until relatively recently. One aspect of the challenge of academic feminism since the 1970s has been to reved the assumptions behind much of the apparently objective discussion of women in the past. Twentieth-century economic change, women's increasing access to education, employment and birth control have all evoked fears of femde escape from male control. Mgr. Knox, a Jesuit father in the Roman Catholic church, empathized easily with outraged males of the early modem period who feared women's involvement in religious sects, but had little sympathy for the self-important, foolish females. Consequently, his book is more about responses to female enthusiasm than it is about the women themselves. His chronological span and frame of learning have commanded widespread respect and his book has become a classic. Yet since his clever, entertaining prose is redolent of hostitity to the disorderly femde, it is a partisan account Another partisan version, of a different kind, comes from Noncomformist historiography. Since women were prominent in the early history of various sects, and were persecuted with men for their beliefs, then they have a place in *Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, 4lh ed., London, 1965, 104-6. 2 R.A. Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion with Special Reference to the xvii and xviii Centuries, Oxford, 1950, 20. 20 p. Crawford the annds of suffering.3 Nevertheless, denominationd historians have been uncomfortable with the behaviour of some of these radical women. Consequently, they have written of them in various normalizing ways. In addition to celebrating them as heroines, exceptional women who could not be models for others, they have depicted them as founding mothers. Margaret FeU, for example, the wife of George Fox, 'the founding father', became the 'mother' of Quakerism.4 The language of maternity brought women into a family model, subordinating their roles to those of men. A further stereotype was that of the bad woman who was blamed for leading astray men who otherwise were worthy. Martha Simmonds is the classic case of this in Quaker historiography. By blaming her for the excesses of James Naylor's entry into Bristol in the guise of Christ, Quaker historians deflected attention from the more significant issue of Naylor's chaUenge to Fox's leadership.5 Other twentieth-century causes have influenced the historiography of women in the early modern sects. Supporters of religious toleration have seen how women's unconventional religious behaviour provided an opportunity for critics. Thus Gertrude Huehens concluded that the women in Boston in the 1630s 'ldd open their cause to perversion and attack' and so retarded the cause of democracy.6 Women's radicdism was counterproductive. The twentieth-century struggle of some women to enter the ministry has both stimulated interest in early modem women preachers and dienated some other potentid sympathisers.7 Even in the 1970s, Joyce Irwin, who edited a collection of documents about women inradicalreligion, followed Thomas Edwards' earlier uncorroborated attack on the woman preacher, Mrs. Attaway, saying that she deserted her husband. Irwin dismissed Eleanor...

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