allenging the patriarchal presumptions and values of Cavalier seduction poetry. Her poem "The Virgin," says Scodel in that regard, "idealizes a virgin whose moderation [in sexual activity, flirting] is not subservient to men." The logic of the argument is that Philips's approving attitude toward independence for unmarried women--who unlike matrons would not see their legal rights to property, control of person, and so on subsumed by a husband's rights and social privileges--is a proxy for feminist social critique and anticipates its modern elaboration.
Evaluations of Cavendish, Philips, and other women writers of seventeenth-century England as facilitators of modern feminism have emerged in the context of modern feminism's rediscovery and rehabilitation of their lives and works in ways not inconsistent with Virginia Woolf's 1929 indictment in A Room of One's Own of a social patriarchy that has stifled women's literary expression throughout history. In that essay Woolf laments a whole range of realities inhering in the social subjection of women, saying in particular that "nothing is known about women before the eighteenth century," toward the end of which (1792) Mary Wollstonecraft produced the West's first consciously feminist manifesto, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. On this point, Germaine Greer has written that women poets "deserve less summary treatment" than is typical of critical study of the English literary canon and has commented that, whatever one may judge to be the literary quality of their output, had it not been for efforts of modern feminist scholars, "dead women poets could hardly deserve less attention than they had been getting [from scholarly critics] . . . because they weren't getting any attention at all."
Feminist rehabilitation of dead women poets that began in the 1970s was accompanied by theories of linkage between modern women and their Renaissance and early modern counterparts. Even "exceptio...