Gender and Boyle's Law of Gases

5. The Intersection of Class and Gender Politics

5 The Intersection of Class and Gender Politics In this chapter we will see the beginnings of a radical threat to the status quo that included both class and gender threats: the radicals threatened a redistribution of decision-making authority as well as a redistribution of wealth. And the activities of women during the Civil War posed a threat to decision-making authority not just in the family or private sphere, but also in the public sphere. This threat began within the sectarian community, i.e., the “gathered” churches, but extended to the streets and ultimately to the state. The culmination of the English Civil War is sometimes referred to as the Puritan Revolution, because the ¤ght was religious as well as political and economic and because many of the political and economic issues were debated in religious terms. The very name “Puritan Revolution” tells who won: the Puritans defeated the royalists, but they also defeated the radicals. The radicals were included among several groups of “masterless men” (and women) composed, ¤rst, of rogues, vagabonds, and beggars ; second, of casual laborers in London, such as dock workers, watermen , building laborers, and journeymen, as well as ¤shwomen— all those people who made up “the mob,” as it was called; third, of the rural poor, including cottagers and squatters on commons and in wastes and forests; and, ¤nally, the Protestant sectaries: townspeople, often immigrants, who were small craftsmen, apprentices, and “serious -minded laborious men” who rejected the state church. Instead of the hierarchical society supported by the doctrines of the Church of England, the sectaries preferred a more democratic society, supported by their belief that God is in all his “saints” (as they called themselves), so they do not need priests of the established church to mediate between them and him. In chapter 11 we will discuss the metaphysics underpinning sectarian religious beliefs and political aspirations . Here we need only note that for sectaries, each individual 53 has access to God; each is responsible to God for his or her own soul.1 We are not surprised, then, to learn that political and religious groups often overlapped. For example, Brailsford describes the Levellers as a “middling sort of people,” including “craftsmen, cobblers, weavers, printers and lead miners, together with some well-to-do tradesmen,” some journeymen, and on occasion a professional man. Some attended Independent churches, but large numbers of them, if not the majority, were sectaries.2 On the other hand, many sectaries shared “leveling” views but did not belong to any political organization. Sectarian emphasis upon the individual soul had important implications for sectarian women. The seventeenth century saw the development of the ideal woman as a bourgeoise who was to marry and to stay at home minding the house; while married, she was to own no property. She had no voice in the church or state. Puritan marriage manuals continually reinforced the view that “the man when he loveth should remember his superiority”3 and William Gouge, in his popular manual Of Domesticall Duties of 1622 and 1634, ®atly declared that “the extent of wive’s subjection doth stretch itself very far, even to all things.”4 But the rise of sectarianism, with its view that God is in everything and everyone, threatened the sexual status quo. The Leveller John Lilburne remarked that “Every particular and individual man and woman that ever breathed in the world since [Adam and Eve] are and were by nature all equal and alike in power, dignity, authority and majesty, none of them having (by nature) any authority dominion or magisterial power, one over . . . another.”5 Thus, all members of sectarian congregations, including women, debated, voted, prophesied, and even preached. Too, since the sectaries believed that the regenerate must separate from the ungodly, sectarian women were often allowed or encouraged to divorce or separate from their unregenerate husbands. For the Quakers, the principle that the spirit of life is in all creatures found expression in the doctrine of the inner light. “An immediate effect of the experience of the Inner Light was that the recipient recognized the God-within and began immediately to operate out of the assumption that she/he now possessed a spark of divine life.”6 In London , the spirit led many sectarian women to preach and to travel as preachers and missionaries to the university towns as well as to Ire54 Boyle’s Work in Context land and...