Mary Jo MacDonald

Judith Drake’s Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (1696) is a unique contribution to early English feminist thought. Both scathingly funny and remarkably erudite, the work wades into a variety of philosophical, political, and literary debates, showing how they can be brought to bear on the “woman question.” Today, the text is unfortunately neglected. While her contemporary, Mary Astell, has gained recognition as a feminist critic of Locke, Drake’s admiration for Locke has hindered her recovery. The scant literature on Drake treats her as an inconsistent thinker, unaware of how her Lockean epistemology mars her feminist project. This paper challenges this reading by arguing that Drake is not simply derivative of Locke but offers an original and prescient argument for women’s inclusion in her society. Rather than base sexual equality on a claim that men and women are identical, Drake argues that sexual differences cannot justify the exclusion of women from public life in modern societies. Identifying fundamental changes occurring in her society—including the rise of commerce, developments in print culture, and the emergence of the public sphere—Drake shows how these advancements have provided opportunities for women’s inclusion. Taking Drake seriously on her own terms, and not merely as a proxy for Locke, allows us to appreciate a thinker who sheds light on enduring debates about the relationship between equality, modernity, and inclusion.

Gabrielle Suchon’s Treatise on Ethics and Politics offers surprising descriptions of sexual difference for an ostensibly feminist work. Stereotypically feminine traits—such as excessive emotions, chattiness, and deception—are compared to earthquakes, storms, wildfire, and apparitions. Although these descriptions may seem off-putting to modern readers, I argue that in offering these unflattering descriptions of women, Suchon is making a novel intervention in debates about the nature of sexual difference. In the Renaissance and Early Modern period, the salient question about feminine difference was whether it was a preternatural deformity, and specifically a monstrosity. While most pro-woman authors argued that women were not preternatural, Suchon argues the affirmative, claiming that “persons of the sex are true wonders.” In doing so, Suchon presses on a tension at the heart of scholastic conceptions of women while also provoking an emotional response that might encourage men to reconsider whether patriarchal practices are truly to their advantage.

This paper reads Margaret Cavendish’s play Bell in Campo (1662) as an implicit critique of Hobbes’s own depiction of the Amazons. In the play, Cavendish adopts a Hobbesian conception of equality and, like Hobbes, uses the Amazons as evidence of this natural equality. She departs from Hobbes, however, in setting her Amazon tale in a modern civil war. For Cavendish, Hobbes’s Amazons are insufficiently threatening, as he neglects to show their origins in a rebellion of wives against their husbands. By retelling the Amazon tale in the context of civil war, she reminds Hobbes of the importance of extending the ninth law of nature – that we acknowledge each other’s equality – to both sexes.