This research examines connections and disconnects between modern feminism and the writings of Katherine Philips (1631-1664) and Margaret Cavendish (1624-1674), two genteel 17th-century English women who have been identified as significant precursors of modern feminism. The research will set forth the historical and cultural context in which nascent or facilitative feminism as formulated in contemporary social critique has been attributed to the work of Cavendish and Philips, and then discuss, more generally, whether and to what extent modern feminist thought may appropriately be classed in sympathy with texts of representative women writers of 17th-century England.
The works of some 17th-century women writers have been analyzed as forms of resistance to the patriarchal doctrine of the time and are credited with expediting proto-feminist thinking. For example, Kendrick cites Rogers's argument that royalist poet and prose writer Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, who sometimes had science as her subject, "turn[ed] the doctrine of spiritualized matter into an antipatriarchal principle, using it as the chief support for a feminist politics." Citing a passage from CCXI Sociable Letters, in which Cavendish looks askance at marriage ("a woman has no such reason to desire children for her own sake. For first her name is lost . . . in marrying, for she quits her own and is named as her husband; also, . . . neither name nor estate goes to her family according to the laws and customs of this country"), as well as her conscious assertion of a woman writer's voice in a male-dominated society, the Penguin Biographical Dictionary of Women explains that she "has an important place in the history of feminism."
Katherine Philips, a younger contemporary of Cavendish who appears to have held royalist sentiment but whose (much older) husband was a Puritan and republican official spared the axe after the Restoration, has been described as ch...