| Line | It is an odd but indisputable fact that the |
| | seventeenth-century English women who are |
| | generally regarded as among the forerunners of |
| | modern feminism are almost all identified with the |
| (5) | Royalist side in the conflict between Royalists and |
| | Parliamentarians known as the English Civil Wars. |
| | Since Royalist ideology is often associated with the |
| | radical patriarchalism of seventeenth-century |
| | political theorist Robert Filmer—a patriarchalism |
| (10) | that equates family and kingdom and asserts the |
| | divinely ordained absolute power of the king and, |
| | by analogy, of the male head of the household— |
| | historians have been understandably puzzled by the |
| | fact that Royalist women wrote the earliest |
| (15) | extended criticisms of the absolute subordination |
| | of women in marriage and the earliest systematic |
| | assertions of womens rational and moral equality |
| | with men. Some historians have questioned the |
| | facile equation of Royalist ideology with Filmerian |
| (20) | patriarchalism; and indeed, there may have been |
| | no consistent differences between Royalists and |
| | Parliamentarians on issues of family organization |
| | and womens political rights, but in that case one |
| | would expect early feminists to be equally divided |
| (25) | between the two sides. |
| | Catherine Gallagher argues that Royalism |
| | engendered feminism because the ideology of |
| | absolute monarchy provided a transition to an |
| | ideology of the absolute self. She cites the example |
| (30) | of the notoriously eccentric author Margaret |
| | Cavendish (1626–1673), duchess of Newcastle. |
| | Cavendish claimed to be as ambitious as any |
| | woman could be, but knowing that as a woman she |
| | was excluded from the pursuit of power in the real |
| (35) | world, she resolved to be mistress of her own |
| | world, the immaterial world that any person can |
| | create within her own mind—and, as a writer, on |
| | paper. In proclaiming what she called her |
| | singularity, Cavendish insisted that she was a |
| (40) | self-sufficient being within her mental empire, the |
| | center of her own subjective universe rather than a |
| | satellite orbiting a dominant male planet. In |
| | justifying this absolute singularity, Cavendish |
| | repeatedly invoked the model of the absolute |
| (45) | monarch, a figure that became a metaphor for the |
| | self-enclosed, autonomous nature of the individual |
| | person. Cavendishs successors among early |
| | feminists retained her notion of womans sovereign |
| | self, but they also sought to break free from the |
| (50) | complete political and social isolation that her |
| | absolute singularity entailed. |