From Glorious Revolution to Enlightenment: Women’s Political Worlds, 1689–1789

This chapter examines aspects of women’s political activity from the Glorious Revolution to the closing years of the eighteenth century. Until recently this approach would have seemed unusual: early modern political history concerned itself with ‘high politics’, the narrow world of court and government where men held sway, with occasional attention paid to groups such as the Levellers.1 Lately this has been challenged by research that has argued the need for a broader definition of the political in an age when few men had access to governmental institutions. Studies such as those by Wrightson have demonstrated alternative sites for political activity in the everyday world of the early modern parish.2 Women’s historians have expanded these approaches to query the gendering of early modern politics. Women, it has been shown, took part in politics at all levels of society.3 Their participation was not always separate. Lower-class women joined with men to voice concerns over religious, economic and social matters in popular demonstrations and riots throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet, as Mendelson and Crawford have noted, early modern women developed ‘their own objectives in political action,’ which were not always identical to those of men.4 Sometimes these linked directly to their role as wives or mothers. On other occasions religion gave women a public platform. Again this was not unique in a period when state and church were inseparable. Nevertheless, religion ‘authorised women in public political action’, and they often exceeded men in public expression of dissenting beliefs.5 This included direct action; a woman was credited with sparking the rioting against the Scottish Prayer Book which opened the Covenanting Revolution of 1637. Recent research suggests that Jenny Geddes, the servant whose attack on the Dean of Edinburgh initiated the protest, is better understood as a composite of several women, confirming female participation.6 Religious protest was not without risk for women; Covenanting activities led to a number being executed in the 1680s.7