Republican Women Writers

“Republican women writers” sometimes seems to be a category missing from the early modern British canon. Well-known writers who advocated against monarchy and in favor of representative government were usually men (like John Milton), and well-known women writers from the period were usually loyal to the royal family. But this ostensible gap fills up with a diverse array of women and women’s writing when an expansive definition of “republicanism” is considered. Women’s political writing lets us consider not only ancient Greek and Roman models of masculine civic participation, but also religious, philosophical, and native English models of individual liberty and alternatives to centralized monarchical power. Women’s poetry, prose, pamphlets, and prophecy show us the many different ways, both moderate and radical, in which English people conceptualized anti-authoritarian government in the seventeenth century.