Representing women in early examples of British feminist writings (1600s-1700s)

Scholars generally identify 1792, the year of the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, as the birth of (British) feminism. However, a closer inspection reveals other instances of feminist writings that precede Wollstonecraft’s work: the seventeenth and eighteenth century witnessed the publication of essays, pamphlets and treatises regarded as important contributions towards the creation and definition of a language of feminism, which then rapidly developed during the following centuries. How women were represented in these texts was, naturally, a key aspect: this paper aims at investigating this portrayal by analysing the use of the word woman in a corpus of 6 texts written by so-called proto feminists throughout the above-mentioned centuries. Among other things, this will shed more light on such recurrent themes as, for example, the defence of women’s education and, more broadly, the evolution of the depiction and definition of women in early examples of feminist treatises across these two centuries.