Seventeenth-Century Quaker Women:
Writing Technologies and Feminist Subjects
paper
delivered June 29, 1996
for
the Folger Library Institute on the Graphic Revolution in Early Modern Europe
Katie
King
Women’s
Studies, University of Maryland, College Park
Tracing, trailing, scrutinizing objects of study,
political objects, in their coming-into-being, follows the method devised in my
last book Theory in Its Feminist Travels: Conversations in U.S. Women’s
Movements. So, tracing and scrutinizing “Seventeenth-Century Quaker Women”
as an object of feminist study with feminist political meanings is a logical
follow up. In 1989 I met Elaine Hobby for the first time. Author of Virtue
of Necessity: English Women’s Writing, 1649-1688, Elaine is one of the pioneers
of feminist work in this area and herself a living repository of vast knowledge
of documents and theories about English women writing in the
seventeenth-century.[1] When I met her in the late 80s Elaine
made many comments, in informal gatherings and discussion, and in more formal
presentations, about women’s activities intersecting with writing, and about
the historical issues of sexual identity. A few years later in transatlantic
phone calls, Elaine chided me for taking too uncritically histories about
Quaker women in particular, telling me to reexamine the historical arguments
about women’s meetings and about Quaker pacifism. Elaine’s work is quite
legendary in this field today: almost every new book has acknowledgements that
delineate the intellectual networks she’s established, altered or infiltrated.
Her still-to-come-book about lesbianism in the period is also legendary, as is
her encyclopedic knowledge of manuscripts, rare books and archives. One of the
early members of the Birmingham school, she left that crowd to engage in
archival work; as a radical historian with primarily literary interests and an
emphasis on revolutionary politics she follows but also alters and extends the
work of Christopher Hill. A new generation of her students now are shaping the
tools that configure this object of study “Seventeenth-century Quaker women.”
Second-guessing many of Elaine’s suggestive and deliberately provoking comments
is one of the motors for this paper and my work in this period.
For several years now I’ve been working to think about
the layers of locals (in the plural) and globals (in the plural) that
dynamically interconnect in what I call “Global Gay Formations and Local
Homosexualities.”[2] As I’ve spent my sabbatical trying to
conceptualize a book, I’ve wanted both notions -- the idea of layers of locals
and globals and the specific version Global Gay Formations and Local
Homosexualities -- to structure my investigation of the materials I’ve been
researching and writing about.
I work in a field I call Feminism and Writing
Technologies, which on the one hand looks at histories of various writing
technologies, for example, alphabet, movable type, index, pencil, typewriter,
xerox machine, computer, internet.
On the other hand Feminism and Writing Technologies examines the
ideologies that proliferate around the shifting terms “the oral” and “the
written.” In the course of researching my book on this subject I’ve been
examining the two great, indeed truly mythical moments in the scholarship on
writing technologies: the so-called Printing Revolution and the so-called
Information Revolution.The point of looking at each is to study these “layers
of locals and globals”; that is, rather than posit a binary local and global,
or multiple locals and a single global, I want to describe and understand the
material interactions among layers of plural locals and globals. I mean these
terms to have both synchronic and diachronic meanings: for example, to
emphasize the investments of contemporary gay folk in creating transhistorical
continuities, across time and cultures, to produce objects like “the
homosexual,” but within and accountable to very local, indeed culturally quite
narrow, political meanings and strategies--themselves ephemeral, and soon to be
replaced with other objects of knowledge, with other centers producing objects
of knowledge.
As I decided to write my book on Feminism and Writing
Technologies, and decided to include two “case studies” (for lack of a better
term), one on each of these mythical moments, I wanted to make sure several
threads of concern would be knotted together. The work on the Information
Revolution, or perhaps better, the Tele-Information Revolution is now centered
around global and national tv and tv technologies, women’s involvements in
internet media fandoms and in the domestication of tv and video, computer and
satellite technologies, and in the global circulation of eroticized images with
queer valences. I discussed these materials in relation to the tv show Highlander
a couple of week ago for HistCon.
The complementary study is the one on the printing
revolution--which I’ll be talking about today. In this one I’m looking at
Quaker women’s writings on women’s public speech, in a new
colonial-slash-national formation “Britain,” in the 1640s, 50s, 60s, and 70s.
This takes place during and after the English Revolution and the Commonwealth
and their political-religious upheavals, and during the twenty year de facto
shifting of controls on printing, affecting guild and state control, access to
printing apparatus, shifts in which ideologies are censored, all within a
complex writing technological ecology, highly gendered and classed.
Contemporary feminist scholars have investments in these materials and this
period, questioning what relations Quakers had to any possible
proto-proletarian revolutions of this moment, what positions women had in terms
of power and leadership as well as speakers, writers, printers and prophets in
the periods before Quakerism becomes a bounded sect, and questioning the
meanings of the traveling in pairs Quaker women pursued, to the American
colonies, throughout Europe and to farther places such as Malta and Turkey.
Some U.S., British and European, Australian and New Zealand feminist and
lesbian scholars have contended that Foucauldian periodizations of homosexual
identity are inadequate to account for these Quaker women traveling in pairs.
One of the premises underlying this talk is that an
attention to writing technologies--ours today and theirs in the mid-seventeenth-century--allows
us to see more clearly objects of study like “17th-c. Quaker women”
coming-into-being. The point of examining this process and its technologies is
to understand such “objects” as sites of political struggle, struggles we are
inevitably part of, altogether academic and feminist, global and local in
layers. As a feminist theorist and as a teacher of feminist theory, I’ve become
worried about the decontextualization of theoretical apparatus from political
context. So I’ve worked to develop an apparatus myself that shows the political
struggles in which feminist objects of knowledge are embedded. This theoretical
apparatus is influenced by both bibliographic studies and the history of the
book, and by the social studies of science and technology, most especially the
work of Donna Haraway, and hers and others’ various feminist “diffractions”
about and beyond the work of Bruno Latour.[3] Such forms of inquiry allow
counter-intuitive shifts in analytic focus--requiring material examination of
what at first may appear transparent or even trivial.
Access to materials about English women’s writing in the
mid-seventeenth-c. has long been demanding and laborious. Feminist scholarship
has understandably focused on figures like Aphra Behn, whose plays can be made
to fit into contemporary notions of literary genre and value, and whose work
has a modest history of reprinting over the last three centuries. Accessibility
thus includes not only texts to look at, but also traditions of intelligibility
and scholarly use and consumption. The main tool to “access”--now a term I hope
thus has already become thicker and more felted with meanings and problems--the
main tool to “access” 17th-c. texts has been the English Short Title Catalog,
which has two parts. The first is called “Pollard & Redgrave” and covers
the years 1475-1640. [And this is the first of several “show and tell” objects
I’m going to pass around. PASS] The STC, as it is abbreviated, had its
beginnings in the Catalogue of Books in the Library of the British Museum,
first begun over a century ago, in 1884, and contemporaneous with the
beginnings of the OED. A.W. Pollard, Keeper of Printed Books at the British
Museum, and Gilbert R. Redgrave, an art historian, engineer and architect,
produced its contemporary version in 1927; the second edition appeared in 1986.[4] The second part of the STC is a U.S.
product , called “Wing,” after its compiler Donald Wing, who worked for over
forty years at the Yale University Library. [PASS] Published between 1945 and
1951, it was revised in 1972 and in 1982, suggesting its continuing centrality.[5] Other kinds of useful indexes, for
example Paul G. Morrison’s Index of Printers, Publishers and Booksellers,
are keyed to the STC.[6] [Pass] Such indexes make it possible to
search the STC by interests not accommodated in the exhaustive listing limited
by its codex format (that is, its “book-like binding”).
Feminist scholars have recently produced similar indexes
keyed to particularly feminist concerns. Two of the most valuable and
monumental are Bell, Parfitt and Shepherd’s biographical dictionary and Smith
& Cardinale’s annotated bibliography, each of so-called “women authors,”
both published in 1990.[7] Maureen Bell was a student of Elaine
Hobby’s at Loughbourgh University near Nottingham, and her and her colleagues’,
George Parfitt and Simon Shepherd’s, biographical dictionary not only produces
with greater clarity and specificity this object of study “women authors” but
it also includes stunningly synthetic critical appendices that realign
processes of intelligibility and value. [PASS] These “women authors” have been
laboriously constructed by cross-checking many bibliographic and genealogical
sources for bits and pieces of material, often drawn from entries of women’s
fathers, husbands, brothers and sons to produce information centering the women
themselves. Bell and her colleagues are very savvy about the processes of
commodification that both hinder and enable their work and that they intend
their dictionary politically to realign, pivotally by using the fuzzy inclusive
term “writing” to counter the obfuscating politics of literary commodification
surrounding the term “literature,” the processes of which are now being charted
by feminist literary historians like Margaret Ezell.[8]
Smith & Cardinale’s bibliography is keyed to the
STC, to Wing in particular, and also to the series of UMI microfilms, called Early
English Books, that make the objects referred to in Wing’s short titles
more generally accessible. [PASS] Both parts of the STC say where one
may go to look at an example of the objects listed. Objects not simply texts.
Objects contain more information than just their texts. Still, texts are easier
to circulate in contemporary technologies: I can more easily send to UC Berkeley
for a reel of microfilm which photographs the text in the object, and then
xerox it myself, preserving only the text, while thus reprinting it singly “for
scholarly purposes” as the fair use doctrine in xerox copyright law still
permits--I can do all this more easily than I can drive down to the Huntington
Library and spend a week looking at a fewer number of objects located there.
Indeed, I may have a hard time knowing exactly what’s at the Huntington written
by Quaker women. But the STC is now online, and “accessibly,”
while still not simple, still labor intensive, has shifted a dramatic notch. I
can get more and less coded information from the online version than from the
very carefully condensed and thus esoteric notations in, for example Pollard &
Redgrave--as I’ve shown by printing out the online entry of STC #23 for
comparison--and I can search the online version both by author and by location,
so as to see what I might find when I do get to the Huntington.[9] For, of course, few of these texts are
available in any other forms of publication. It’s important to understand that
these bibliographic tools are some of the actual material resources out
of which this object “17th-c. Quaker women” is constructed, and that their
forms, configurations and availabilities are determined by relations of
political struggle and meanings that the object then comprehends.
Twentyish years after Christopher Hill’s cultural
revolutionary interventions to destabilize terms like “Quaker” for the 1640s
and 50s, and for the 1960s and 70s [Note TEXT #1 on handout], feminists of
quite differing moments and politics have themselves remade this term--and
others, seemingly prior or ancillary, like “woman writer”--for their own
purposes and meanings; and have solidified these new forms in new objects with
new forms, configurations and availabilities. I’ll show you several of them
just to illustrate what I mean here. Although because of time constraints I
can’t do the kind of detailed political analysis of these objects that they would
allow, try to note yourself what sorts of political projects they exemplify and
permit. At first glance all are simply examples from older technologies, indeed
those very roughly contemporaneous with the period in discussion; that is, they
are printed books. Although transparently like the seventeenth-century objects
we call printed books too, they are in fact both very different and yet very
importantly continuous, as the colophon of one: the 1996 Hidden in Plain
Sight will suggest. [PASS] It says the book was composed on a Macintosh
Quadra, and the results printed in an edition of 1500 by a Michigan printer,
Thomson-Shore; a limited local project of some global importance. It contains
works reprinted for the first time after approximately 350 years, edited
by U.S. Quaker feminists of differing religious intentions, published
and distributed by Pendle Hill, a U.S. Quaker publishing house. Compare it to
my xerox of the microfilmed copy of Katharine Evans & Sarah Chevers [PASS],
the Relation of the Some of the Cruel Sufferings, (reprinted in excerpt
in Hidden in Plain Sight), which stands for the 1662 object I saw
recently at the Huntington Library, but stand for it only as a highly mediated,
newly technologized object of far greater “accessibility.”[10]
Compare these to the 1994 Penguin Classics international
mass market edition of Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World [PASS],
whose back cover says how much it costs in the U.K., Australia, Canada and the
U.S., is edited by an Australian feminist poet and scholar with a Ph.D. from
London, and intended for an international school market for whom Margaret
Cavendish is now a commodity for women’s studies classes around a world mapped
by the colonalized British educational system. Also newly reprinted after 350 years,
the text of The Blazing World has been detached from its 1668 location
as an addition to Cavendish’s work of natural philosophy--what today we call
“science”--Observations upon Experimental Philosophy [PASS], a move
presumptively made with an eye to market value, that is, with the assumption
that it will be used more as a utopian tale than as 17th-c. science.[11]
The final object I mention is Emma Donaghue’s Passions
Between Women: British lesbian culture, 1668-1801.[PASS] My edition is the
1993 British paperback from the speciality press in London, Scarlet Press, sold
in a gay bookstore in Washington, D.C. Its colophon makes it a small local
project too, saying “typeset from the author’s disks by Stanford DTP Services,
Milton Keynes. Printed in the EC,” that is, in a newly “Europeanized” Britain.[12] However, the book is now available in
two U.S. editions, a hardback 1995 Harper Collins, and a paperback 1996 Harper
Perennial, suggesting its movement along the lines of global gay formations and
commodifications. Looking back over these objects, you might note that the
Cavendish book is intended to appeal to this global gay market as well, with
back blurb phrases like “exuding ambiguous sexuality,” and “the empowering
possibilities of disguise or masking for women.” Margaret Cavendish, along with
the Quaker pair Katharine Evans and Sarah Chevers, have been the subjects of
feminist questions about 17th-c. lesbianism.
Bell, Parfitt and Shepherd produce in their critical
appendices a series of discussions that synthesize much feminist scholarship
over the last twenty years, in the process reconfiguring past interests and
pointing to and producing new interests. These sections are: “Women’s writing
before 1640,” “After 1640: the prophets,” “Quaker women writers,” “Petitions,”
“Letters,” “Men as ‘gatekeepers,’” and “Women in the book trade.” Maureen
Bell’s own scholarship has focused on women in the booktrade: women printers,
booksellers, and hawkers, for examples. I teach a class in Feminism and Writing
Technologies in my women’s studies program at the University of Maryland, where
we read materials on the history of printing and the book as part of the
course. We read an abridged version of one of the great works of scholarship on
the subject, the monumental 1979 two volume, The Printing Press as an Agent
of Change: communications and cultural transformations in early modern Europe,
by Elizabeth Eisenstein.[13] When I first began teaching this course,
and rereading Eisenstein over and over, I got into the habit of striking
through and thus marking, each use of the generic masculine, in which the book
abounds. Gender is not one of Eisenstein’s scholarly concerns. Over time my
students and I started making lists of these generics and looking for patterns
in their use, in the course of which we also started turning them into research
questions and projects. For example, confronted with “the printer, he” over and
over, we wondered about possible “printers, she.”
Morrison’s printers list, contains around 29 “printers,
she,” pre-1640, while Smith & Cardinale name 112 women printers, publishers
and booksellers listed in Wing. After 1641 state and guild controls on printing
were weakened, and restrictions on the numbers of printers, apprentices and
presses ended. In London illegal printing, piracies, and unregistered materials
all increased. Bell and her colleagues say: “What is particularly striking is
that a large proportion of...[women’s] writing [after 1640] came from women of
a lower social status than the predominately aristocratic and genteel writers
of the preceding sixty years, and much of it was the product of women inspired
by their commitment to the radical puritan movement.”[14]
Looking at books as writing technologies, as material
objects that are sites of political struggle marked by gender, nationality,
religion, race and class, reconfigures the attention that the object “literacy”
has received over the last few decades, as the limit on the visibility,
audibility, intelligibility of women, and of women writers in the 17th, and
other centuries. Books as objects not just texts, have more uses and paths of
connection to women and power than just in being read, let alone in being
written. Previous estimates of women’s literacy, based on signature lists,
underestimate the numbers of women reading, since reading was taught before
writing in the 17th-c. and some folks were able to read, but unable to sign
their name.[15] But even illiterate women hawkers were
shouting and singing the ballad broadsides they sold on the streets, altering
the words and ending up in prison for their political interventions into the
objects and texts. Aristocrats and royalists like Margaret Cavendish were
members of circles of scribal circulation and publication who put their work
into print uneagerly with concern for their loss of control over the texts and
their readerships, and for whom print had low status.[16] So-called “cheap print” was the medium
of the “middling” folk, so named by marxist scholars trying to mark out
proto-bourgeois and working class interests in a period before these terms have
technical currency.
And why Quaker women? How it is that they are new
political “objects” produced by these interests of feminists and by these
knowledge-making technologies? Once a real list of “women writers” has been
constructed we are then free to note that a third (about 200) of the new
authorial subjects produced in Bell’s biographical dictionary are Quakers.
Quaker women’s texts survive probably disproportionately to the numbers of
their writers because of a Quaker system of financing, publication,
distribution and historical preservation of Quaker documents, begun in the
1670s. But only recently have these comparatively numerous texts been
“accessible” to feminist scholars, one might even say, intelligible to
feminist scholars, or for that matter, Quaker scholars, and scholars of
Quakerism. Partly what makes them newly intelligible is even the realization of
a feminist paradox within this system of preservation. As Bell, Parfitt and Shepherd point
out: [Note TEXT #2 on handout]
“Whereas in the early Quaker period access to printing
was organized locally by enthusiastic individuals, the post-Restoration
establishment of a hierarchical organization led to close co-ordination and
centralised supervision. In the 1650s women such as Priscilla Cotton, Mary
Cole, Rebeckah Travers and Martha Simmonds wrote and published as and when they
chose....[But] No work has been yet done to establish how [this
later system of supervision] may have affected, perhaps disproportionately,
women Friends, whose early enthusiasm, enactments of signs and wonders, and
opposition to the increasingly male leadership and its organizational forms
tended to alienate them from [George] Fox [the usually acknowledged founder of
Quakerism]....”[17]
Along with other radical religious sects, Quakers in the
1650s and 60s were millenarians, and the first writings by Quaker women are
euphoric announcements of Christ’s Second Coming, as in TEXT #3 from Dorothy
White’s 1662 tract:
“And now is the last Trumpet sounded, and an Alarm is
given from the Lord God Almighty, proclaiming the Day of Restoration and of
mighty Salvation, and of glad-tydings unto the poor and meek of the Earth. I will blow the Trumpet of the Lord God Almighty
over all Mountains; O let the Heavens rejoyce and sing, for He is come who doth
glad-tydings bring, whose Glory is broken-forth, and the Heavens cannot contain
it, but the Earth must hear the sound of the holy Day, and the dawning thereof
expelleth the mist of the cloudy night which hath been over the Nations, and
the Lord is rending the Vail of the Temple in sunder from the top to the
bottom, and he is rolling away the Stone from the door of the Sepulchre where
the Lord JESUS hath been laid....You Branches of the true Vine, you Spouses of
the Beloved, you Daughters of Sion and Sons of Jacob, rejoyce and sing you
Virgins and Followers of the Lamb.... Oh! Rejoyce forever, and sing Hallalujahs
and Praises unto the God of Power, from whom this is sent and Published;
and in his Dominion and Authority I do send it forth, being faithful unto what
the Lord hath intrusted me with; I do not with-hold but I freely let it go: So in
the Spirit of Life, and Love, and Eternal Peace, I salute all the Faithful in
Heart, and in the Union of the holy Life, I bid you all Farewel./
[signed] D.W.”[18]
Quaker Millenarianism was also expressed in more than
words, as in TEXT #4, a 1662 letter by a Quaker leader Edward Burrough:
“The first day of the seventh month a Friend suffered
some persecution [in and near Smithfield in the Fair-time,] who
was moved to go through the Fair naked, with a pan on his head full of fire and
brimestone, flaming up in the sight of the people, crying repentance among
them, and bad them remember Sodom, [&c. for which some rude
people did abuse him much, and took him to an Officer, but he was not committed
to Prison, but the Lord delivered him out of their hands.]
About the 7th day of the month two Women were committed
to Old Bridewel, [for going into Pauls in the time of their worship;] she
one of them being moved to go at that very time into that place vvith her face
made black, and her hair dovvn vviwth blood poured in it, vvhich run dovvn upon
her sackcloth vvhich she had on, and she poured also some blood dovvn upon the
Altar, and spoke some vvords, [and another Woman being moved to go along vvith
her, they vvere both taken avvay to Bridwel, vvhere they remain to this day,
and vvere not yet tried for any fact, nor any evil yet justly laid to their
charge.”][19]
“Going Naked as a Sign,” as in the incidents described
by Burrough, was made possible by and signified that these early Quakers were
now in a new state of grace, in a new Eden, redeemed from the Fall.[20] Quaker women’s public prophecy, spoken,
written, and enacted by signs, was justified as indeed another signal of the
Second Coming, already in progress. Mapping out how early Quaker ecstatic
practices were the basis for forms of public communication, for subjective
states altering body movements and meanings, and justifications for new forms
of language, community, partnership and political acts has been the work of
recent feminist scholarship, most notably that of Phyllis Mack, and one of the
significant resources now for producing so-called “lesbian subjects” in 17th-c.
England. Quoting the language of private letters between various traveling
Quakers, women and men [Note TEXT #5], Mack draws the conclusion that “Quakers
not only bathed in a sea of polymorphous spiritual nurture and eroticism; they
occasionally wrote as if they had succeeded in floating above gender
altogether.” Indeed they spoke of themselves as “inhabitants of a kind of
spiritual fourth dimension where men might feel themselves transformed into
brides and infants, and where women might speak in the sacred language of male
prophets.”[21] When confronted with
Paul’s injunction against women speaking in church, women defending their
rights to publicly prophesy announced to the male priests, “Indeed you
yourselves are the women that are forbidden to speak in the church, that are
become women.”[22] [Note TEXT #6 in handout]
Mack herself is not especially part of any project to
produce 17th-c. lesbianism, indeed her political concerns are most clearly
invested in detailing the contours of a Quaker figure who becomes more
prominent following the Restoration: the so-called “Mother in Israel.”
“Mystical Housewife” in Mack’s phrase: in early Quakerism preaching in the
streets in the voice of an old testament prophet one moment and at home nursing
babies the next, in later Quakerism the elder of the Women’s Meeting: the
“Mother in Israel” is most lovingly exemplified in the person of Margaret Fell
Fox.[23] The function of the Mother in Israel is
enshrined in the institution of the Women’s Meeting, another object of dispute
among feminists studying Quaker women. Indeed Part Three of Mack’s amazing book
Visionary Women attempts to reclaim “the radical nature of the women’s
meeting,” celebrating but also problematizing the “stable relationship of
benevolent control and loving obedience, as opposed to the earlier, more fluid
and egalitarian images of collective friendship and brotherhood.” Early Quaker
antinominanism--that is, the Edenic millennialism beyond the law--which
provides unusual resources for imagining women and women’s relationships for
one set of feminisms, gives way, as Mack values it appropriately so, to what
she understands to be the more mature adulthood of the Mother in Israel.[24]
But this is also the historical trajectory: a trajectory
most scholars understand as following a Weberian logic: from charismatic
enthusiasm to rationalized institutionalization, and the apparently general
principle in which women’s participations are narrowed and controlled.[25] The Women’s Meeting is understood by
one set of feminisms as the emblem of this control: part of the system of
meeting structures set up by Fox, solidifying his personal leadership, at the
expense of women’s continuing prophetic authority. They understand the Women’s
Meeting to begin a process that Mack details well, in which that “fluid
egalitarianism” gives way to a gender division of spiritual labors. Mack,
however, points out that Fox’s followers, albeit those advocating such
bureaucratizing, uphold women’s public speech while the so-called Separatists,
or antiformalists, do not, and that the Women’s Meeting is a new solution to
such institutionalization, not wholly at the expense of women, “less to
discredit or transcend visionary insight than to contain it within a rational
and orderly context,” what Mack also calls “a mutual penetration of opposites.”
She contends that the importance of this solution for women is that it valued
them as women and give them important forms of authority.[26]
Scholars have historically understood this new system of
meeting structures set up by Fox to be the beginning of modern Quakerism, its
coming-into-being. Mack
persuasively calls it “Fox’s vision of sanctified, familial discipline.”[27] Some scholars believe that Quakerism
would not have survived the terrible persecutions after the Restoration if it
had not been for several strategic shifts (some call them retreats) by Fox.[28] The Peace Testimony in its political
origins had two purposes: the first, of confirming to the Restored Monarchy
that the Quakers were not revolutionaries, as some claim many of them were
originally. It also reconfigured Friends’ political actions. Quakers had always
been victims of violent treatment: their use of language, their clothing, the
visibility of women, had all been profound confrontations with forms of
authority, status and power, and had provoked abusive treatment, from
spontaneous beatings on the street to publicly sanctioned whippings,
confiscation of property, transportation and imprisonment. The violent language
of old testament prophecy and the transgressive enactment of signs had been
both response and provocations to such treatment. Now the Peace Testimony
required Friends not only to not retaliate in any physical violences, but also
to abstain from these powerfully transgressive verbal and bodily violences,
seemingly likely to provoke individual and group persecutions.[29]
Now some folks might be disappointed that I’m not
arguing more literally with historical evidence for 17th-c. lesbianism, Quaker
and otherwise. I was myself very taken with Elaine Hobby’s dissemination of
17th-c. texts that seemed to suggest lesbian meanings seven years ago. [This is
the one she was showing then, now published. PASS] But in fact, gathering such
suggestive texts is no longer an isolated task, despite the recurring citation
of the OED as offering only one reference, for tribade, before the
19th-c.[30] As Emma Donaghue laughingly points out,
the OED is not noted for its exhaustive investigations of erotica and
pornography; and the kind of religious language that Mack points to, and that
Elaine Hobby was showing around, once noted, if at all, as a mystical
sexuality, or an artifact of Biblical allusion, while the passionate letters
among women gentry and aristocrats like Margaret Cavendish and Katharine
Phillips were not cited, already contained within the notion of “female
friendship”--these assumptions are rightfully challenged, if still only
laboriously, with great difficulty. Personally I’m particularly interested in
the resources that the language of ecstatic prophecy offers for 17th-c. women
to speak their religious and their erotic experiences, perhaps to
construct an erotic subject, and I want to know more about how new writing
technologies might have allowed another accessibility to this language for
17th-c. women. Erotic, religious and “friendly” texts are more available to
read now, but continue to be subject to two patterns of political controversy
in feminism: are they about “love” rather than “sex” or, in another register,
are they only textual sources of evidence rather than some kind of behavioral
evidence?
Well, first I want to plead that this is work in
progress! But second, I want to be clear about two things I find especially
interesting about the Quaker women materials in relation to these questions. Indeed I’ve structured this talk this
way so as to make them as close to impossible to NOT consider as I can. The
first one is the fruitful, even amazing fusion, con-fusion, in Quaker practice
among speech, writing, and acts, especially during and because of this
millenarian period, this period of fluidity of language, community and action.
That a so-called “ethnographer of speech,” that is anthropologist Richard
Bauman, would write a book about speech in reference to historical subjects
whose language is accessible seemingly only as written text, is not a stupidity
on his part, but a reliance upon this meaningful confusion. “Language”
in its most inclusive sense--as comprising together symbolic action,
vocalizations and inscription systems--is deliberately conflated, to
allow for this Quaker historical specificity. Indeed, one way I sometimes
describe this field I work in, “Feminism and Writing Technologies,” is as
investigating the politics of making distinctions generating these
endlessly productive reifications “the oral” and “the written.” So, one element
of meaningfulness I extract from the materials making up “17th-c. Quaker
women,” this political object coming-into-being, has to do with the problems of
imposing upon them too unreflectingly distinctions among text, speech, and
action. Not because there aren’t any, but because they are configured in
ways that are not intuitively obvious. For example, there are reasons to make
very interesting distinctions between inscriptions in manuscript and inscriptions
via printing apparatus that reveal important configurations in movements of
power and social organization, in communication and affiliation.
Indeed I hope that considering a historically shifting
object “lesbianism” within such a context of such con-fusion might have useful
clues to offer about sexuality, sexual identities in flux, overlapping
sexualities in history, useful for feminisms today. Which brings me to the
second thing I find interesting about “17th-c. Quaker women,” this political object
coming-into-being. I’ve wanted to make very clear the layers of mediating
technologies--sites of struggle--through which this object is made, to consider
how made and for whose political interests today. I think I’ve already given
away some of my own political interests. For example, my concerns about
sexuality lead me in my contemporary politics to make alliances with such
scholars and political activists as Janet E. Halley, who argue for sexual
actions to be accorded First Amendment Free Speech rights.[31] Because of such political interests I’m
not nearly as concerned to pin down a stability, a transhistorical object
“lesbian” myself as other feminists with other political projects
understandably are. I consider both sides of Global Gay Formations and Local
Homosexualities as not universal, as narrow and ephemeral, without using narrow
and ephemeral to mean “unimportant,” or “trivial.”
Working in this field “Feminism and Writing
Technologies” makes me acutely aware that more feminists will be participating
in the construction of this object “17th-c. Quaker women.” Until recently one
had to serve a long apprenticeship to the materials of this period in order to
engage in meaningful co-production. While as I’ve suggested the materials are
still laboriously engaged, they are also newly “accessible” in many meanings of
this term. On the World Wide Web day before yesterday I found the scholarly
text of 17th-c. Baptist prophet Anne Wentworth recently “published [32] and a popular site called the Isle of
Lesbos for lesbian poetry, which included poems by Katharine Phillips and Aphra
Behn. [I downloaded these bits off the Web. PASS] There are other internet
projects to make scholarly texts available both to classrooms and to
non-specialist scholars going on today, one being the Brown Women Writers
Project.[33] Investments in copyright and
intellectual property on the Web will configure who will offer texts for
downloading, and who will be selling them in various forms.[34] Sophistications of textual editorial
practice will be more requisite for those using and uploading such materials,
but also highly variable. The objects with text now in archives like the
Huntington will have relations to new objects with text produced by and within
other technologies, other “frozen social relations,” to use Donna Haraway’s
eye-opening phrase, as what counts as an archive also multiplies. Networks of circulation have shifted,
such that I could recently email Heather Findlay for her talk including Quaker
women prophets and prophetic lesbians of the 17th-c. and have her send it back
to me from the internet site for her magazine Girlfriends.[35] [PASS]
I intended to talk about many other disputes among
feminists about Quaker women, especially ones concerning women’s leadership in
the 1640s, 50s, and 60s; and also to describe particular women, but of course,
I never have time to do everything I want. So I apologize to some of you for
some misleading forecasts of what I was going to say.
Tracing, trailing, scrutinizing objects of study, political
objects, in their coming-into-being continues to be one method for
understanding “Feminism and Writing Technologies.” Thank you for giving me an
opportunity to try out some of the materials I’ve been assembling for this next
book.
[1] Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English Women’s
Writing, 1649-1688 (London: Virago, 1988).
[2] See
Katie King, "Feminism and Writing Technologies: Teaching Queerish Travels
through Maps, Territories, and Pattern." Configurations 2 (Winter
1994): 89-106; "Local and Global: AIDS Activism and Feminist Theory."
In Imaging Technologies, Inscribing Science. Special issue of
camera obscura 28 (January 1992):78-99.
[3] For
examples of bibliographic studies and histories of the book, see Jerome J.
McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago: UP, 1983) and
Roger Chartier, The Order of Books (Stanford: UP, 1994; French ed.
Editions Alinea, 1992). Donna
Haraway, “Science, the Very Idea! Feminist Diffractions,” talk given at Indiana
University Feb. 7, 1991; and also “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in
Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” in Haraway, Simians,
Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1992). Bruno Latour
and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific
Facts (Beverley Hills: Sage, 1979).
[4] Revised and enlarged, begun by W.A. Jackson and F.S.
Ferguson, and completed by Katharine F. Pantzer. See the the Preface to the
second edition for this history: A.W. Pollard & G.R. Redgrave, A Short-Title
Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland, and of English
Books Printed Abroad,1475-1640 (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1926;
2nd ed., 1976-86) vii.
[5] Donald Wing, Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in
England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America and of English Books
Printed in Other Countries, 1641-1700 , rev. ed. (New York: MLA, 1945-51; 2nd ed.,1972-82.
[6] Paul
G. Morrison, Index of Printers, Publishers and Booksellers in A.W. Pollard
and G.R. Redgrave...1475-1640 (Charlottesville VA: Bibliographical Society
of the University of Virginia, 1961).
[7] Maureen Bell, George Parfitt, and Simon Shepherd, A
Biographical Dictionary of English Women Writers, 1580-1720 (New York:
Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990; Hilda L. Smith and Susan Cardinale, Women and
the Literature of the Seventeenth Century: an annotated bibliography based on
Wing’s SHORT-TITLE CATALOGUE (New York: Greenwood, 1990).
[8] Margaret J.M. Ezell, The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary
Evidence and the History of the Family (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina,
1987) and Writing Women’s Literary History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins,
1993).
[9] Some
collections have web sites describing their contents: see, for example, “The
Quaker Collection” at Haverford College (last updated March 14, 1996). May 20, 1996. Available:
http://www.haverford.edu/library/sc/qcoll.html
[10] Mary
Garman, Judith Applegate, Margaret Benefiel, Dortha Meredith, eds. Hidden in
Plain Sight: Quaker Women’s Writings, 1650-1700 (Wallingford PA: Pendle
Hill, 1996). Also Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers, This is a Short
Relation of some of the Cruel Sufferings (London: Printed for Robert Wilson, 1662) [Huntington
Library, #94144].
[11] Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World and Other Writings,
ed. Kate Lilley (New York: Penguin, 1992). The Duchess of Newcastle [Margaret
Cavendish], Observations upon Experimental Philosophy: to which is added the
Description of a New Blazing World, 2nd ed. (London: Printed by A. Maxwell,
1668).
[12] Emma
Donoghue, Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture, 1668-1801
(London: Scarlet Press, 1993).
[13] Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The printing press as an agent of
change : communications and cultural transformations in early modern Europe
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
[14] Bell, Parfitt, Shepherd, Dictionary, 250.
[15] See
Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and
Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Methuen, 1981).
[16] See
Margaret J.M. Ezell, “Reading Pseudonyms in Seventeenth-Century English Coterie
Literature,” Essays in Literature 21 (Spring, 1994), 14-26; and also
chapter 3, “Women Writers: Patterns of Manuscript Circulation and Publication,”
in Patriarch’s Wife, 62-100.
See also Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeen-Century
England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993) and its review by Gerald MacLean in Modern
Language Quarterly 55 (Dec. 1994): 461-5.
[17] Bell, Parfitt, Shepherd, Dictionary, 285-286.
[18] D.W.
[Dorothy White], A Trumpet of the Lord of Hosts (London: “Published by
me, D.W.,” 1662) [Huntington Library #94165] 5-7.
[19] From
a quoted letter signed E.B. [Edward Burrough] in [George Fox], A brief
relation of the persecutions and cruelties that have been acted upon the people
called Quakers (London: “printed in the year 1662.”) [Huntington Library,
#94153] 5.
[20] Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in
Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: U California,1992), see esp. Part
II: Friends in Eden: Gender and Spirituality in Early Quakerism, 1650-1664,
127-261. See also Richard Bauman, Let Your Words Be Few: Symbolism of
Speaking and Silence among Seventeenth-Century Quakers (Cambridge: UP,
1983; esp. Chap. 6: Going naked as a sign: The prophetic mission and the
performance of metaphors, 84-94.
[21] Mack, Visionary, 157, 308-9.
[22] Priscilla
Cotton and Mary Cole, To the Priests and People of England (London: For
Giles Calvert, 1655) 8; quoted by Phyllis Mack, “Gender and Spirituality in
Early English Quakerism, 1650-1665,” in Witnesses for Change: Quaker Women
over Three Centuries, eds. Elisabeth Potts Brown and Susan Mosher Stuard
(New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1989) 49.
[23] Mack, Visionary, 303, 305.
[24] Mack, Visionary, 289-292.
[25]Bauman,Words, 138-153.
[26] Mack, Visionary, 308, 279, 349.
[27] Mack, Visionary, 295.
[28] See
for example Barry Reay’s discussion in The Quakers and the English
Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1985) 121.
[29] Mack, Visionary, 279. See also Peter Brock, The
Quaker Peace Testimony, 1660-1914 (York: Sessions Book Trust, 1990).
[30]See discussion in section “Widow hood, Celibacy
and Female Friendship,” in N.H.
Keeble, ed., The Cultural Identity of Seventeenth-Century Woman: A Reader
(London: Routledge, 1994) 252.
[31] See
Janet E. Halley, “The Politics of the Closet: Towards Equal Protection for Gay,
Lesbian, and Bisexual Identity,” UCLA Law Review 36 (1989).
[32] Anne
Wentworth, Revelations of Jesus Christ, ed. Sheila Cavanagh. Emory Women
Writers Resource Project. May 20, 1996. Available:
http://www.cc.emory.edu/ENGLISH/classes/Wentworth/Project.html
[33] See
“An Overview of the Brown Women Writers Project.” May 20, 1996. Available:
http://www.wwp.brown.edu/gen/overview.html
[34] See,
for example, the copyright privileges asserted at the WWW site: “Isle of
Lesbos: Lesbian Poetry,” including both Katherine Phillips and Aphra Behn.
(Last revised Jan. 21, 1996). Available: http://www.sappho.com:80/poetry/
[35] Heather Findlay, “Witchcraft, Prophesy, and Sexual Politics,”
ms. sent April 9, 1996. See also Findlay, “Does the Internet Matter?” Girlfriends
(Jan/Feb. 1996) 20-22, 44-5, 47. See also the Girlfriends Web site:
http://www.gfriends.com/index.shtml
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