Early Modern Feminism 1: Jane Anger

An Eclectic Humanist

This episode and the next one lean hard into the “eclectic” side of “Eclectic Humanist.” Following up on the series on Roe v. Wade, I'd like to turn the clock back a few hundred years and look at a couple of examples of Early Modern feminism. There is, after all, an ongoing and unabashed effort from the religious right to turn the clock pretty far back, so it may be useful in the context of women's rights to take a glimpse into the world before the advances made by four centuries of feminist writing and activism . This episode takes us to Elizabethan England. We start with a discussion of women's status in the society of the day, including justifications for the subjugation of women in the words of the men who made them, then look at some specific legal restrictions to which women were subject. The main focus, though, is the writing of the little-known Jane Anger, to my mind the first English feminist. While her work is short, it is rich in terms of both arguments and rhetoric, preempting in some ways the arguments made some 200 years later by Mary Wollstonecraft. What I look at in particular here is her critique of the ways in which theological arguments are used to support misogynist positions, and her rejection not just of the arguments, but of the types of argument, that separate medieval from modern thought.