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the Queen’s death:
    Let such as say our sex is void of reason
    Know ’tis a slander now, but once was Treason.
    An anonymous work entitled The Woman’s Sharpe Revenge (1640) argued, provocatively, that women’s exclusion from learning was
    ‘devised by men to secure their own continued domination’.
    Bathsua Makin, who was governess to a daughter of Charles I and who later founded and ran a school for women, insisted in her Essay to Revive the Ancient Education of Gentlewomen in Religion, Manners, Arts and Tongues on the importance of women receiving a solid education. ‘Let women be fools’, she remarked, ‘and you will minism
    make them slaves.’ Her book was probably, in part at least, an Fe
    advertisement for her school and its curriculum; and it was aimed at well-off women. Interestingly, she offered women the (still rare) chance to study the classics. But she reassured her readers by making it clear that she would not ‘hinder good housewifery, neither have I called any from their necessary labour to the book’.
    And, with a hint of anxiety, she insists that ‘my intention is not to equalize women to men, much less to make them superior. They are the weaker sex.’
    But Bathsua Makin warmly praised the role played by Royalist women during the Civil War: they ‘defended their houses and did all things, as soldiers, with prudence and valour, like men’. And she was generously appreciative of her learned contemporaries, including Anne Bradstreet and the Duchess of Newcastle. The biblical story of how Eve brought sin into the world by eating the forbidden apple, so often used against women, is, Makin argues, merely the earliest example of a need for adequate education.
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    Christine de Pizan
    Christine de Pizan, born in 14th-century Italy but raised in France, has been described as the first Western woman to live by her pen. Well educated by her father, she began writing aged 25, after her husband died, earning enough to support three children, a niece, and her own mother. Her most famous work, The City of Ladies (1404), criticizes learned books that spread ‘so many wicked insults about women and their behaviour’; three allegorical women – Reason, Recti-tude, and Justice – discuss the roots of misogyny. ‘The man or the woman in whom resides greater virtue is the higher’, Th
    e beginnin
    she argued; ‘neither the loftiness nor the lowliness of a person lies in the body according to the sex, but in the perfection of conduct and virtues.’
    g of secular feminism
    In 1599 Marguerite de Navarre published the Heptaméron , defending women against misogynous attacks. Marie de Gournay’s Egalité des hommes et des femmes (1622) asserted women’s intellectual equality with men: ‘happy are you, Reader, if you do not belong to this sex to which all good is forbidden’. And in 1640, Anne Marie van Schurmann’s On
    the Capacity of the Female Mind for Learning insisted that
    ‘whatever fills the human mind with uncommon and honest delight is fitting for a human woman’.
    Many early secular writers seem to have had a hard time. In 1621
    Lady Mary Wroth (a niece of the poet Sir Philip Sidney) was engaged in writing a sonnet sequence, which she left unfinished. It was not printed until the 20th century, when women literary critics analysed the interesting and refreshing slant she brought to that usually intensely masculine form. But when Wroth had the temerity 19
    to publish a prose romance, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania , it was greeted with hostility, and, on the grounds that it slandered contemporaries, withdrawn from sale. Her rank offered no protection. ‘Work, Lady, work,’ Lord Denny advised Lady Mary, condescendingly, ‘let writing books alone/For surely wiser women ne’er wrote one.’
    The difficulties – indeed, the outspoken scorn – confronting any woman who actually dared to publish her writings are clearly indicated by the experiences of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of