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To understand the extent of women's political participation in the early modern period we need to exercise historical imagination to see beyond courts and legislatures to the myriad other institutions in which significant sorts of political power have been exercised. Although the histories of companies are usually thought of as proper subjects for business or economic history, I want to consider here two companies that ought also to be considered subjects of political history: the South Sea Company and the East India Company. Both companies were joint state/private ventures, chartered by the state and given monopoly trading privileges in their respective areas of the world. Both were involved in underwriting the national debt, a fact which produced company leverage on government officials. Government officials were also significantly involved in the affairs of each company. Parliament passed, in addition to the statutes granting and renewing the charters, a series of regulatory statutes concerning each company. A corollary of the fact that these companies were chartered by statute in return for payments to the state was that the companies were dependent upon politicians to introduce bills they wanted, to muster parliamentary support for their passage, to organize the defeat of unwanted bills, and, in general, to see to it that negotiations between the state and company produced results advantageous to the company. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Let us begin by recalling the best-known facts about Catharine Macaulay. She wrote a number of works, of which by far the most prominent is a History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line (i.e., that of George I), which appeared in eight volumes between 1763 and 1771 and, after an interval often years, 1781. During that interval she began a separate history of England from the revolution of 1688 to her own time in a series of letters to a friend; but she fell out with the friend (on account of her second marriage) and only one volume of this appeared, in 1778. She wrote several political pamphlets, one attacking Edmund Burke for not being radical enough in his criticism of the policies of George III in the 1760s, another for being too conservative in his Reflections on the Revolution in France; there is one essay in straight political theory, in the shape of some reflections on Thomas Hobbes, and some reflections on education which show she had been reading Rousseau. This last may be considered feminist in the limited sense that it is concerned with the education of women, but is of course one of many works written on the same subject, by both women and men, of which some are not to be considered feminist at all and several consider history, her chosen subject, as a branch of literature which women should read. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When this Right Honorable Author first threw down the gauntlet, and entering the ground from whence Sir Robert Filmer was forced so shamefully to retire, stood forth the champion of hereditary right, he undoubtedly expected to be opposed by all those men, who in a liberal and enlightened age, had ranged themselves on the side of liberty; but how deeply must it wound the feelings of a chivalrous knight, who owes the fealty of “proud submission and dignified obedience” to the fair sex, to perceive that two of the boldest of his adversaries are women! At the end of the eighteenth century Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay were considered by their contemporaries to be among Edmund Burke's “boldest adversaries.” Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men was the first published reply to the Reflections on the Revolution in France as well as the pioneering feminist's earliest argument for equal rights and democratic government. Macaulay's Observations on the Reflections of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, on the Revolution in France represented the last volley in a war of words between the celebrated republican historian and the famed parliamentarian. In this chapter I argue that by using the notions of sense and sensibility we are better able to understand how Wollstonecraft and Macaulay challenged the gender and class hierarchy of the Reflections. These terms played a central part in each woman's rhetorical strategy and made it possible for both to invert the gender logic of the Reflections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is the “usual work of women either to spin or knit, not to meddle with State Affairs,” observed a commentator in mid-seventeenth-century England. Echoing the point later in the century a writer inquired of his readers: “Do you not think Learning and Politicks become a Woman as ill as riding astride?” These two remarks, themselves typical of many others, express the prevailing view of women in politics in early modern England. This view (although sometimes contested) held that women were not supposed to have a public voice, much less a public political voice. Nonetheless, starting in the 1640s and lasting to the mid-eighteenth century when their voices faded and their public role receded, a growing number of middle- and lower middle-class women in England (as distinct from aristocratic women, who had long exercised private political influence) did “meddle with State Affairs.” Their “meddling” took various forms, none more important than that of printing their ideas on a variety of political, religious, administrative, social, and economic issues. For women the very act of using the printing press was of great significance. It was symbolic – a public defiance of traditional norms; in practical terms, it empowered women as nothing else had ever done, enabling them to make their ideas public, somewhat permanent, and available to a wider audience than would otherwise have been possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent explosion of interest in the seventeenth-century English playwright, novelist, and poet, Aphra Behn, has led to numerous and diverse explorations of her life and work. Behn's colorful if often mysterious life has been the subject of five biographies and the stuff of at least two novels. She has been celebrated as one of the most prolific and popular playwrights of the Restoration and an early practitioner of the novel. Scholars have portrayed her as a thorough-going feminist, a libertine and an opponent of the domestic tyranny of patriarchy, and an abolitionist, writing one of the first anti-slavery novels in Western literature. Despite the recent avalanche of scholarship, little has been written about Behn as a political writer. This is a rather curious omission for several reasons. Scholars have long recognized the highly politicized nature of the theater in the 1680s. Studies of the politics and ideology of male dramatists, particularly John Dryden, abound. Behn, like her male competitors Dryden, Shadwell, Settle, Crown and others, also produced highly political stage plays, bursting with topical references, mired in the controversies of the time. Yet beyond the blanket assertion that Behn was a Tory propagandist, little analysis of her political vision exists. This is particularly surprising for a rare female voice in the loud political cacophony of the 1680s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]