Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.
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In the English early modern era, women were both satirically attacked and defended in several kinds of popular literature, including pamphlets, poems, and plays. In 1540, Edward Gosynhill wrote both an attack and a defense in the same year. His work was part of misogynist literature, a type that evolved in English starting in the Middle Ages with texts like Chaucer’s 1405
Joseph Swetnam’s misogynistic tract,
Many women are in shape angels but in qualities devils, painted coffins with rotten bones
Although women are beautiful, showing pity, yet their hearts are black, swelling with mischief, not much unlike unto old trees whose outward leaves are fair and green and yet the body rotten Then who can but say that women sprung from the devil, whose heads, hands and hearts, mind and souls are evil, for women are called the hook of all evil, because men are taken by them as fish is taken with the hook.
Many authors also defended women against attacks like Swetnam’s, both before and after his pamphlet sparked a war in print. One author known as Jane Anger wrote the most well-known feminist pamphlet of the era. The full title of her 1589 feminist pamphlet was
Although Jane Anger did not respond directly to Swetnam, she was a passionate defender of women. Her style combines the complex sentences made fashionable by John Lyly with many clever insults and quips. Her pamphlet begins with a description of a misogynistic pamphlet she had just finished:
The chief matters therein contained were of two sorts: the one in the dispraise of man's folly, and the other, invective against our sex, their folly proceeding of their own flattery joined with fancy, and our faults are through our folly, with which is some faith
She also describes how women are trapped by men’s attitudes:
If we will not suffer them to smell on our smocks, they will snatch at our petticoats; but if our honest natures cannot away with that uncivil kind of jesting, then we are coy. Yet if we bear with their rudeness and be somewhat modestly familiar with them, they will straight make matter of nothing, blazing abroad that they have surfeited with love, and …telling the manner how.
Another response to Swetnam was the satirical play,
The main plot is a romance about state politics, but the subplot is about Swetnam being tried by women, as the illustration on the title page depicts. The ending of the play depicts Swetnam debating another character, a man disguised as a woman about women’s traits, before an all-male judges’ panel. Swetnam wins, and then lustfully pursues his opponent, to comic ends due to the cross-dressing. Eventually, Swetnam is imprisoned by local women, who force him to recant his misogynist views.
Although the topic was popular, the play was not. Theater historians note that the play was performed again in 1633, but that not other performance records exist and it was not reprinted until 1880.
Several actual women writers also repled to Swetnam’s attack. Rachel Speght was the only one not to have used a pseudonym when writing in defense of her gender,
Another woman responder was Ester Sowernam, which is also likely a pseudonym inspired by the Biblical figure Esther. The writer is presumed to be a woman, likely from the middle class because her response was dedicated to London apprentices.
Yet another woman under the pseudonym