Abstract
In this chapter, I read Margaret Cavendish as a political theorist, devoting particular attention to her deliberations on the subject of war. Women have a long and rich history of war writing but are rarely perceived to be military experts in their own right, rarely understood to have political knowledge about war and military affairs. Indeed, just as war itself is a deeply gendered human activity, and ideas about natural male and female roles are central to our conceptions of its function and necessity, writing and thinking about war is also deeply gendered. In the discipline of political science, feminist critics of international relations discourse, or strategic studies, have begun to deconstruct the gender order that is central to militarist thinking.1 Resisting simplistic assumptions about men’s and women’s proper roles in, and responses to war, they take issue with the militarization of society, militaristic definitions of leadership and masculinity, and the push for war at the expense of other, peaceful solutions.
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See Cynthia Enloe, The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004);Christine Sylvester, Feminist International Relations: An Unfinished Journey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Brooke A. Ackerly, Maria Stern, and Jacqui True, eds, Feminist Methodologies for International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
For example, Mihoko Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects: Gender, the Political Nation, and Literary Form in England, 1588–1688 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003); Susan Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue: Women, Writing, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Paul Salzman, Reading Early Modern Women’s Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); and Victoria Kahn, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–1674 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
Hilda L. Smith, ‘Women Intellectuals and Intellectual History: Their Paradigmatic Separation’, Women’s History Review 16.3 (July 2007): 353–68; quotation on 357.
Lorraine Code, What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 177.
Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, in A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1998), 158.
Margaret Cavendish, Orations of Divers Sorts, in Political Writings, ed. Susan James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Oration #108, p. 226. Further references are cited parenthetically in the text.
Margaret Cavendish, ‘An Epistle to Souldiers’, Poems and Fancies (London, 1653), 167.
Roger Hudson, ed., The Grand Quarrel: Women’s Memoirs of the English Civil War (Phoenix Mill, UK: Sutton, 2000), xx.
Mihoko Suzuki, ‘Elizabeth, Gender, and the Political Imaginary of Seventeenth-Century England’, in Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500–1700, ed. Cristina Malcolmson and Mihoko Suzuki (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 235.
See, for example, Mary Beth Rose, Gender and Heroism in Early Modern Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects; Claire Jowitt, ‘Imperial Dreams? Margaret Cavendish and the Cult of Elizabeth’, Women’s Writing 4.3 (1997): 383–99; Karen L. Raber, ‘Warrior Women in the Plays of Cavendish and Killigrew’, SEL 40.3 (Summer 2000): 413–33.
Margaret Cavendish, The Worlds Olio (London, 1655), 110. Further references are cited parenthetically in the text.
Wilfred Owen, ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’, in War Poems and Others, ed. Dominic Hibberd (London: Chatto & Windus, 1973), 79.
Margaret Cavendish, A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life, in The Life of the (1st) Duke of Newcastle and Other Writings by Margaret Duchess (London & Toronto: J. M. Dent, 1916), 198.
Diane Purkiss, ‘Dismembering and Remembering: The English Civil War and Male Identity’, in The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted Pebworth (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 221.
Charles Lucas was disinterred and reburied in the family tomb in 1661. Katie Whitaker, Mad Madge (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 146 and 237.
Charles Carleton, Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars, 1638–1651 (New York: Routledge, 1992), 219.
Margaret Cavendish, Sociable Letters, ed. James Fitzmaurice (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2004), #119, p. 174 and #187, p. 253. Further references are cited parenthetically in the text.
Douglas Grant, Margaret the First (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1957), 101.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ch. 13, p. 89.
Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2003), 140.
A term used by Carol Shields to describe the singular creativity of Jane Austen’s novels and which aptly describes Cavendish’s drive to forge her own ideas about war. Carol Shields, Jane Austen: A Life (Toronto: Penguin, 2001), p. 143.
See Lorraine Code, Rhetorical Spaces: Essays on Gendered Locations (New York and London: Routledge, 1995).
Malcolm Wanklyn, Decisive Battles of the English Civil Wars: Myth and Reality (Barnsley, UK: Pen and Sword, 2006).
Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: A People’s History (London: HarperCollins, 2006). See also Sara Heller Mendelson, ‘Stuart Women’s Diaries and Occasional Memoirs’, in Women in English Society 1500–1800, ed. Mary Prior (New York: Methuen, 1985).
David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1999), 380.
Edna Longley, ‘The Great War, History and the English Lyric’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War, ed. Vincent Sherry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 79.
Margaret Cavendish, Bell in Campo, in Bell in Campo; The Sociable Companions, ed. Alexandra G. Bennett (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002, Act IV, Scene 21, p. 69. Further references are cited parenthetically in the text.
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© 2011 Joanne Wright
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Wright, J. (2011). Questioning Gender, War, and ‘the Old Lie’: The Military Expertise of Margaret Cavendish. In: Suzuki, M. (eds) The History of British Women’s Writing, 1610–1690. The History of British Women’s Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230305502_15
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