Women Feminism And Religion In Early Enlightenment England

A pioneering study of the origins of feminist thought in late seventeenth-century England.

Did women have an Enlightenment? This path-breaking volume of interdisciplinary essays by forty leading scholars provides a detailed picture of the controversial, innovative role played by women and gender issues in the age of light.

An original study of how Enlightenment ideas shaped the lives of women and the work of eighteenth-century women writers.

Patricia Crawford explores how the study of gender can enhance our understanding of religious history, in this study of women and their apprehensions of God in early modern England. The book has three broad themes: the role of women in the religious upheaval in the period from the Reformation to the Restoration; the significance of religion to contemporary women, focusing on the range of practices and beliefs; and the role of gender in the period. The author argues that religion in the early modern period cannot be understood without a perception of the gendered nature of its beliefs, institutions and language. Contemporary religious ideology reinforced women's inferior position, but, as the author shows, it was possible for some women to transcend these beliefs and profoundly influence history.

The essays contained in this volume examine the particular religious experiences of women within a remarkably vibrant and formative era in British religious history. Scholars from the disciplines of history, literary studies and theology assess women's contributions to renewal, change and reform; and consider the ways in which women negotiated institutional and intellectual boundaries. The focus on women's various religious roles and responses helps us to understand better a world of religious commitment which was not separate from, but also not exclusively shaped by, the political, intellectual and ecclesiastical disputes of a clerical elite. As well as deepening our understanding of both popular and elite religious cultures in this period, and the links between them, the volume re-focuses scholarly approaches to the history of gender and especially the history of feminism by setting the British writers often characterised as 'early feminists' firmly in their theological and spiritual traditions.

This book explores the historical context of feminist movements of the 18th century in France and England. Through a detailed analysis of theories on the position of women, the book highlights the beginnings of a feminist movement in France, the position of French women in society, and the feminist and anti-feminist tendencies among English Augustans. Additionally, the book examines qualified feminism through the Bluestockings and radical feminism through Mary Wollstonecraft. It also offers a comprehensive look at the origins of female emancipation and the influential figures that shaped the feminist movement in Europe during the 18th century.

Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith includes essays from diverse disciplinary perspectives to consider the full range of Astell's political, theological, philosophical, and poetic writings. The volume does not eschew the more traditional scholarly interest in Astell's concerns about gender; rather, it reveals how Astell's works require attention not only for their role in the development of early modern feminism, but also for their interventions on subjects ranging from political authority to educational theory, from individual agency to divine service, and from Cartesian ethics to Lockean epistemology. Given the vast breadth of her writings, her active role within early modern political and theological debates, and the sophisticated complexity of her prose, Astell has few parallels among her contemporaries. Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith bestows upon Astell the attention which she deserves not merely as a proto-feminist, but as a major figure of the early modern period.

For women in early modern Europe, the Reformation and the Enlightenment entailed both new freedom and new restrictions. In response to an ideology that immured the female mind and spirit inside the body, women found in religion a hope for individual freedom, a sense of self-identity, and a justification for gender equality. Under the Veil: Feminism and Spirituality in Post-Reformation Europe invokes the veil’s dual significance, as the marker of the religious woman, and as the metaphoric veil separating female interior life from its public construction. This collection of nine essays focuses specifically on the direct links between emergent feminism and religious faith as experienced through wide cultural, geographic, and confessional differences, united by themes of female subjectivity, selfhood, autonomy, and community. The essays range in topic and scope from the early seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries, across Europe, Britain, and North America, through a wide range of experiences and written accounts – its subjects are Philadelphian visionaries and Quaker missionaries, Iroquois leaders and early Canadian nuns, Islamic societies and European female travellers, French mystics and educators, and British writers and intellectuals. These accounts reveal how women across a wide spectrum of formal beliefs and cultural backgrounds found in religion a way to negotiate the restrictions of their outward lives, and a radical source of personal and collective independence and value.

A wide-ranging, thematic survey of women's history in Britain in the 18th and early 19th centuries, with chapters written by both well-established writers and new and dynamic scholars in a thorough and well-balanced selection.