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. |