Women, Publicity, and Print Culture in England, 1670-1770

This dissertation addresses the publicity of women writers in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries within the context of the historical emergence of print capitalism and print culture in England. The dissertation considers to what extent women writers figured themselves as participants in public culture or as public agents, and to what extent they were conscious of this figuring as a potentially ideological or political activity. In addition to examining a variety of texts, genres, and rhetorical strategies, the dissertation offers an interpretive framework through which these texts and strategies may be understood. My research in the publicity of early modern women writers suggests that women writers were aware of their own marginalization as public figures, but that they did not consider this marginalization to be legitimate grounds for their own silence. Instead, they created complex texts and arguments which functioned rhetorically as spheres of inclusion--which functioned, both structurally and thematically, as safe and sheltered spaces from which to write and to speak. We see, in the texts of early modern women writers, evidence both of women writers' participation in constructed public spheres and of their creation of alternative, privatized spheres from which, paradoxically, they are enabled to publicize their texts and voices.

This dissertation examines both primary and secondary texts, with emphases on: the theoretical context of the early modern public sphere; the historical context of print culture and early modern publicity as expressed in the writings of late seventeenth and early eighteenth century women writers; the problem of publicity in relation to the early modern female scholars Anna Maria van Schurman, Bathsua Makin, Mary Astell, and Elizabeth Elstob; Margaret Cavendish's tenuous negotiation for space within the public world of higher academics and the Royal Society, as expressed in her philosophical and scientific writings; the early modern periodical and its relationship to the political agency and publicity of women, as expressed in the political pamphlets and satires of Delariviere Manley and Eliza Haywood; and the relationship between publicity, privacy, and social critique in the pedagogical, utopian novels of Sarah Fielding and Sarah Robinson Scott.