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would attempt their Deliverance and Improvement. No, let them
enjoy the great Honor and Felicity of their Tame , Submissive and
Depending Temperl Let the Men applaud , and let them glory in ,
this wonderful Humility!
It was left to later generations of women to try and devise a way of
solving the problem of the masculine ambition to lead and of over–
coming the apathy of feminine contentment-both are struggles that
still continue . But less ironic and more strident than Mary Astell , the
Duchess of Newcastle could wish she "were so fortunate, as to
persuade you to make a frequentation, association , and combination
amongst our sex , that we may unite in Prudent consuls , to make
ourselves as Free , Happy and famous as Men.... " In fact a number
of groups were formed and though they lacked the larger political
unity and range of reference, such "frequentations" do bear some
resemblance to the small groups which are the distinctive unit of
organization within feminism today .
The seventeenth-century feminists are today frequently criticized
for only wanting the liberation of the women of their own social class .
:=ertainly whenever they explicitly thought of the laboring classes , it
did not occur to them to consider that their own demands for access to
education, the world of business and the professions were strikingly
inappropriate for women (or men) of a lower class. When they talked
of freeing" half the world " they were oblivious of class differences .
Yet I think to criticize them for being blinkered by their bourgeois
vision is ahistorical and inaccurate. Insofar as they came from the
revolutionary class of that epoch and that they pointed out the
oppressions that still existed , they did speak for all women . I said
earlier that at the point where it is challenging an old order a
revolutionary class speaks a universalistic language initially on behalf
of all oppressed groups. If this is true in general it must be true for
women-the seventeenth-century feminists appealed in a universalis–
tic language on behalf of women to the highest concepts of freedom
and humanity of which their society was capable . Even the very
precepts of revolutionary change , in any era, cannot transcend the
social conditions that give rise to them . In demanding entry into a male
world , the end of men 's social oppression of women , and equality
between
the sexes the women were truly revolutionary . They had
explanations but they did not have a theory of how women came to be
an oppressed social group ; but still today we lack any such full
