Women, the republic of letters, and the public sphere in the mid-seventeenth century

Agitation by women did not, however, include a demand for female suffrage, and the Levelers called at most for household suffrage in which women would be represented through their husbands. We can see the failure to cross this particular public/private line as a moment at which an expanding public sphere excludes women; and indeed measures were increasingly taken to formalize that exclusion from different forms of public office, (49) It can also be argued, however, that the strongly religious agenda of English politics, which does not exactly fit the Habermasian model, inevitably led women to place their main pressure for inclusion elsewhere, notably in religious sects. In the 1640s and 1650s we find many women prophets campaigning to have their voice heard. And it is interesting that van Schurman should have been invoked as their champion. In his preface to Mary Cary's apocalyptic The Little Horns Doom and Downfall, the radical Puritan Hugh Peters praised van Schurman, "the glory of her sexe in Holland," as a parallel to Cary. (50) Such praise might at this stage have disconcerted van Schurman, who remained faithful to the orthodox Dutch church, but in her later years she broke with the church and became effectively second in command to the sect of Jean de Labadie, which built up connections with English Protestants, including Anne Conway, and after Labadie's death van Schurman considered leading her group to England. She was in correspondence with the Congregationalist leader John Owen, through whom she may have heard of that significant republican writer--and translator of Lucretius--Lucy Hutchinson. (51) We find the exiled Edmund Ludlow, as representative a case as could be imagined of republican ideology at its most militant, praising "Mrs Schurman that eminent p[er]son for piety, learning and humillity." (52) Somewhere between an invisible church and a republic of letters, there was a significant international community of women intellectuals whose extent still needs better mapping.

But if religious ideologies could lead to a strong sense of female participation in public issues, is it not still the case that the specifically secular constitutional revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, the establishment of a republic, was strongly marked in gender terms? The republic of 1649 did not in practice mark an expansion of the public sphere in England--in many ways it actually functioned to shrink it--but it powerfully established an ideology of universality and the common good against the particular interests of monarchy, and to this extent translated the values of the republic of letters into the public world. John Milton celebrated this concordance in his vigorous Latin defenses of the new republic against Salmasius; and again and again he celebrated republican virility against royalist effeminacy. Milton paralleled Charles's subordination to Henrietta Maria with repeated claims that Salmasius was writing at the behest of his monarchist wife: "naturally you want to force royal tyranny on others after being used to suffer so slavishly a woman's tyranny at home." (53) Salmasius was an early champion and close friend of van Schurman's, so here the political issues seem to follow a clear gender demarcation. Right at the end of her 1648 Opuscula she published warm letters to both husband and wife. In successive editions no later letters appeared, so these stand as her last word on Salmasius, a testimony to friendship in the republic of letters but not necessarily to political agreement.