Essays in Defence of the Female Sex

Letters, diaries, memoirs, conduct books and early feminist pamphlets: Essays in Defence of the Female Sex: Custom, Education, and Authority in Seventeenth-Century England is a two-part, text-based volume on the pivotal figures and most distinctive, sometimes contradictory, aspects of the querelle des femmes in Stuart England.

Background information is given through male and especially female-authored sources, while the close analysis of [Hanna Woolley]’s, Bathsua Makin’s, Marry Astell’s, Judith Drake’s and Eugenia’s most renowned tracts sheds light on women’s difficult path towards emancipation.

Addressed to both specialist and non-specialist readers, Essays in Defence of the Female Sex will also explain why–and to what extent–early feminist pamphleteering combined theory with practice, tradition with innovation, reality with utopia.