While early modern European culture was, overall, distinctly and adeptly misogynistic, the growth of literacy and print drove the development of female readership, which in turn inspired women writers to see their works into print. The intensity, vitality, and broad purchase of religious and theological debates—which were also debates about individual agency, collective rights, and social management—and the emphasis on the private and book-based piety of Protestantism led to women being modeled as readers in printed texts. The focus on the household as a cultural and economic unit and the growth of trade and the influx of colonial goods inspired intensified focus on domestic practices, and on women’s role as leaders within that realm; cookery, medical, and lay scientific texts were read by women and, in turn, were written by women. Legal genres such as petitions invited women to argue for their individual and collective rights in print, particularly during the collapse of censorship in the middle of the century. Through the period, the possibility of vernacular, printed, literature (poetry, prose, and drama) by women grew steadily, in parallel with the growth in women’s literacy, and we see literary texts and paratexts (such as dedications, letters, and author portraits) representing or by women increase over the period; by the end of the seventeenth-century women as writers are established in print culture. This development is often perceived as the corollary of changes to the status of women in the period, but from the perspective of print, is more properly attributed to the growth of women as a market for printed texts, and the permeability of that market to women writers as a result of its growth and changes in the social capacity to manage and constrain entry into it.