“Gender wars in England of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” – Nadine Saghir
The foremother of feminism Christine de Pizan (1364-1430) sparked the opening volley of gender debates in European history at the dawn of the fifteenth century. Her feminist tracts and the works of other philogynist male writers dismantled the misogynist tradition of medieval Europe leading to the rise of English women’s voices from the mid-sixteenth century onwards.
In this essay, I will shed light on this new genre of literature emerging in England which is characterized by its lively feminist Querrelle des Femmes, citing in chronological order the pro-women retorts made by ordinary women, women writers, and female monarchs, all of whom rejected the misogynistic views of their time, as well as other examples of male authors who contributed to the pro-woman side of the gender wars.
I will only deal with gender debates that took place in England in the 16th and 17th centuries before the rise of proto-feminist circles and movements in 18th-century England that challenged British laws and claimed equality of gender in all areas.
I. Male writers against Edward Gosynhyll’s satirical Attack Upon Women, 1541
Before analyzing the first gender war in England unfolding among male writers, it is noteworthy to mention the contribution of pro-woman male authors to the defense of woman question in the 16th century, such as the German polymath Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535) and his pamphlet ‘Female Pre-eminence: Or the Dignity and Excellency of that Sex, above the Male’ published in1529 (in Latin), and the English writer Thomas Elyot (c.1490-1546) whose treatise ‘Defence of Good Women’ published in 1540 is regarded by historians as the first printed English book that argued for the moral and political gender equality.
The first gender debate in England was sparked by Edward Gosynhyll who published anonymously The Schole House of Women [1]in 1541.The Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) cited the work connoting that it was “a satirical and humorous attack upon women. The poem, in seven-line stanzas, first appeared without any author’s name in 1541”.[2]
In his satirical poem, the author begins with a prolix critique on the character of women, concluding that most women are fastidious, disputatious, and sharp-tongued, and when married they become quarrelsome and more inclined to gossip. Then, he continues to expound on the subtlety, the loquacity, and the versatility of the feminine spirit, supporting his misogyny with quotations from Solomon and Cicero.
The DNB lays out the subsequent retorts against Gosnell’s misogynistic poem, beginning with A Dyalogue Defensive, written by Robert Vaughan and issued in 1542. “But Gosynhyll himself recanted, [and in] 1542 William Myddylton brought out his Prayse of all Women called Mulierum Pean, a [pro-woman] poem in the same meter as the ‘Scole House,’ in which Gosynhyll claimed the authorship of that diatribe, and sought to make amends for his lack of chivalry”.[3]
Despite Gosynhyll’s recantation on misogyny, another response was made by Edward More of Hambledon in 1560 through his pamphlet: The Defence of Women. Moreover, Gosynhyll’s Scole House of Women was reprinted in 1560 and 1572.
II. Royal ripostes against John Knox’s Blast, 1558-1561
The second misogynist polemic in England was more political and tackled the legitimacy of female rule in the wake of John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, published in 1558. John Knox, who was a hero of the Scottish Reformation, attacked the female Catholic sovereigns of his day, particularly Mary of Guise, Dowager Queen of Scotland, and Queen Mary of England, using them as examples to argue against female rule over men generally. He argued that female rule over men was against God and nature and declared that: “to promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion or empire above any realm, nation, or city, is repugnant to nature”[4].
He also slammed Elizabeth’s half-sister Mary, who was then queen, as “unworthy by reason of her bloody tyranny of the name of woman”[5] .Eventually he refused to recognize a woman’s natural right to be in power, even in cases where there was no male heir to the monarchy.
The female riposte to Knox’ misogyny was only royal, as his harangue set the stage for a tumultuous relationship with four ruling queens: Mary of Guise (1515-1560), Mary Tudor (1516-1558), Mary Stuart (1542-1587), and Elizabeth Tudor (1533-1603).
In 1558, Queen Elizabeth, succeeded to the throne of England and took great offense at Knox’s tract and riposted by denying him permission for passage through England on the way back from Geneva to Scotland.
In 1561, upon hearing of his sermon at St. Giles against her first Catholic mass, Mary Stuart, queen of Scots, “charged Knox with promoting rebellion and sedition, and put forth an argument stating: ‘Ye have taught the people to receive another religion than that which their princes can allow, and how can that doctrine be of God, seeing that God commandeth subjects to obey their princes?..[…] Knox contended that unlawful monarchs could be resisted by force ..[…] Their dispute culminated in a trial before the Privy Council where Queen Mary charged Knox with treason, but the charge was dismissed, and the trial ended in embarrassment for Queen Mary”[6].
III. Jane Anger, the first defense of women’s rights in England, 1589
Jane Anger was a pioneer English feminist woman writer who flourished at the closing of the 16th century, when women did not really write books, apart from religion. In literature history, she has the primacy of writing the first full-length defense of women’s rights in English language.
Very little is known about Jane Anger, mostly a female pseudonym, apart from her French ancestry and that she was from a wealthy family and, therefore, better educated than most females of her time. She is mostly known for her ground-breaking pamphlet which was printed by Richard Jones and Thomas Orwin in London 1589 and was originally entitled: Her Protection for Women. To defend them against the scandalous reportes of a late Surfeiting Lover, and all other like Venerians that complaine so to bee overcloyed with womens kindnesse [7].
Anger moved away from religious language and instead used secular reasoning to argue for equal rights for women. Armel Dubois-Nay notifies that Anger, in her feminist tract, “posits an opponent whose arguments are rebutted…this opponent, whose identity remains uncertain, is considered to be John Lyly [8] in his Cooling Card for Philautus (1578)”[9].
Other critics believe that Anger’s defense was a retort to Thomas Orwin, who published Boke His Surfeit in Love, with a farwel to the folies of his own phantasie in (1588)!
When reading Anger’s defense from Orwin’s edition of 1589, we can perceive that the author endeavored to refute the adversary’s misogynistic views addressing “all Women in general, and gentle Reader whatsoever” and then attacking “the falsehood of men, whose minds go oft a madding, a whole tongues can not so soon be wagging, but straight they fall a tattling. Was there ever any so abused, so slandered, so railed upon, so wickedly handled undeservedly, as are we women? … And herein I conduce all you to aide and assist me in defense of my willingness, which shall make me rest at your commands. Fare you well” [10].
Disproving the opponent’s “slanderous speeches” against women in “the new surfeit of an old Lover [that] came by chance to [her] hands” Anger confirms that “the old Lover…was diseased when he did write it, and peradventure hereafter, when he shall be well mended, he will repent himself of his slanderous speeches against our Sex and curse the dead man which was the cause of it” [11].
Near the end of the work she advised women to avoid friendship and flattery of men, when she connoted:
“Stop your ears when they protest friendship, lest they come to an end before you are aware whereby you fall without redemption……Therefore, take heed of it, which you shall do, if you shun men’s flattery, the forerunner of our undoing…. man’s flattery bites secretly, from which I pray God keep you and me too”[12].
In the conclusion of the tract, she proudly wrote: “We are contrary to men, because they are contrary to that which is good: because they are purblind, they cannot see into our natures, and we too well (though we had but half an eye) into their conditions, because they are so bad: our behaviours alter daily, because men’s virtues decay hourly”[13].
The feminist defense of Anger remains the subject of much scholarly debate, and critics have argued that it may in fact be written by a man posing as a female author. But whoever Jane Anger is, she is considered by feminists to be far ahead of her time, and her work is regarded as a feminist tract before feminism really existed.
IV. Three female ripostes against John Swetnam’s Arraignment, 1615-1621
At the turn of the seventeenth century, a historical debate was triggered by John Swetnam’s misogynist tract: The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women [14], which was published in 1615. In the introduction of the pamphlet, Swetnam addressed “the ordinary sort of giddy-headed young men” in a text rife with bestiary images, such as the “Bearbaiting of women [who] will bark more at me than Cerberus the two-headed dog did at Hercules”.
Then, Swetnam proceeds in his misogynistic views connoting in chapter I of his brief tract that women “were made of the rib of a man, and that their froward nature shows; for a rib is a crooked thing, good for nothing else, and women are crooked by nature”.
Next, he warned men about “fair women” who are a source of pleasure and an inevitable site of anxiety, because “he that has a fair wife and a whetstone, everyone will be whetting thereon”.
Swetnam’s pamphlet provoked three women to respond to him: Rachel Speght, Ester Sowernam, and Constantia Munda.
1- Rachel Speght was the first of his respondents in her pamphlet A Mouzell for Melastomus, published in 1617; followed in 1621 by another feminist tract entitled Mortalities Memorandum, both published under her own real name and were vigorous feminist polemic against Swetnam’s misogyny.
2- Ester Sowernam, a pseudonym, is the second English woman to respond in her pamphlet: Ester Hath Hang’d Haman, published also in 1617, wherein she used secular as well as religious arguments to refute Swetnam’s accusations and reciprocally arraigned the male sex. Like Speght, Sowernam, who refers to herself as a gentlewoman, tried to convince readers that she was well educated by using Latin phrases and references to events of antiquity, the Bible, and law. Thus, by using wit and logic, Sowernam turned Swetnam’s misogynistic arguments against him.
3- Constantia Munda was the third woman to respond to John Swetnam’s misogyny through her feminist pamphlet: The Worming of a mad Dog or a Sop for Cerebus the Jailor of Hell: No Consultation but a Sharp Redargution [Reproof] of the bayter, published in 1617. In her work, she praised Rachel Speght and her feminist work: A Mouzell for Melastomus, when she wrote: “The first Champion of our sex that would encounter with the barbarous bloodhound,…I hear you foam at mouth and growl against the Author with another head like the triple dog of hell, wherefore I have provided this sop for Cerebus, indifferent well steeped in vinegar”[15].
V. The Sharp Revenge of Mary Tattlewell and Joan Hit-him-home against John Taylor’s misogynistic lecture, 1640
Another momentous gender controversy in the seventeenth-century England focused on domestic problems. It was initiated by John Taylor (1580-1653) in A Iuniper Lecture, with the description of all sorts of women, Good and Bad [16], published in 1639 that was riposted to by two English ladies of the epoch, Mary Tattlewell and Joan Hit-him-home in their feminist pamphlet entitled: The Women’s Sharp Revenge [17] published in 1640, wherein the two lady authors, on behalf of a “feminine jury of women”, rejected the misogynistic tract, and depreciated its significance, as its male author “arrived to that Worshipfull Title through favour, rather than desert, and more by voyces than their vertues, meerely by the mad sufrage of the many headed monster Multitude, which consisteth of Man” [18].
Mary and Joan attacked John Taylor claiming that “upon better advice, and more Mature Consideration… that worshipfull worke for which you have beene so much magnified by the Masculines, being now called into question by a Feminine Jury of women. It is thought after a true and just examination thereof to bee meerely villified, and that it is nothing but a meere scandalous report, and therefore most justly condemned by the unanimous assent of all our Sexe”[19].
VI. Sarah Egerton’s attack against misogyny, 1686
At the closing of the seventeenth century, a new gender war was provoked by Sarah Fyge Field Egerton (1670-1723) who wrote in 1686, at the young age of 14 years, a feminist polemic retorting to Robert Gould’s misogynistic tract entitled: A Late Satyr Against the Pride, Lust, and Inconstancy, etc. of Woman, published in 1682, wherein he warned all men to ‘discover all their [women] various sorts of vice and the rules by which they ruin and entice’.
In her scathing poetic riposte entitled: The Female Advocate, or an Answer to a Late Satyr Against the Pride, Lust, and Inconstancy, &c. of Woman, she refuted Gould’s misogynistic claim and posited that women were even superior to men, and exalted Woman whom “Heaven made to supply the want, and to make perfect what before was scant”[20]!
The poem was published in 1686 without her consent, much to the dismay of her father who banished her from family home. Undaunted, she expanded her poetical work to 696 lines and had it reprinted next year. Here are a few lines from the first heroic couplets of the poem:
Blasphemous Wretch! How canst thou think or saySome curst or Banisht Fiend Usurpt the SwayWhen Eve was Form’d? For then’s deny’d by youGod’s Omnipresence and Omniscience too:Without which Attributes he could not beThe greatest and supreamest Deity:Nor can Heav’n sleep, tho’ it may mourn to seeDegen’rate Man speak such vile Balsphemy. [21]
In her second lyrical work, Poems on Several Occasions, which was published in 1703, three years after her second marriage with the Rev. Thomas Egerton, she continued to express her feminist tendencies challenging gender stereotypes of British society and claiming female equality and the right for females to receive education and other social roles, as we can read in her famous poem of 39-line entitled Emulation, wherein her feminist voice was even more audacious than in The Female Advocate, rejecting the ‘tyrant Custom’ that made females ‘in every state a slave’ and indicting ‘Men’ of deliberately placing women in menial roles for fear of excelling them if given the opportunity, concluding that women would eventually educate themselves and end the male monopoly on the intellectual realm, as we can read in these lines:
Say Tyrant Custom, why must we obey,
The impositions of thy haughty Sway;
From the first dawn of Life, unto the Grave,
Poor Womankind’s in every State, a Slave. […]
Submit in Form; but they’d our Thoughts control,
And lay restraints on the impassive Soul:
They fear we should excel their sluggish Parts,
Should we attempt the Sciences and Arts.
Pretend they were design’d for them alone,
So keep us Fools to raise their own Renown; […]
We will our Rights in Learning’s World maintain,
Wits Empire, now, shall know a Female Reign;
And shall these finite Males reverse their Rules,
No, we’ll be Wits, and then Men must be Fools. [22]
Conclusion
Encouraged by the first Querelle des Femmes sparked by Christine de Pisan in the fifteenth century, feminist altercations began to appear in riposte to male injustice in England from the mid-sixteenth century and women’s voices went from non-existent to vitriolic in less than one century and a half, creating a new genre of vivacious literature in English language.
Gender wars in England were first triggered by misogynistic tracts, against which women fought back with virulence in defense of their dignity, then at the closing of the 17th century, the ripostes became more acerbic and English women began demanding equality in education and other social domains, paving the way for the birth of proto-feminist movements in the 18th century.
Critics believe that many of such misogynistic attacks and the subsequent retorts unfolding in the sixteenth and seventeenth-century England were partly a game of wit played by men for their own amusement, and partly an effort by publishers and booksellers to stimulate business.
Whatever the reality of gender wars writers in England, I argue that they unleashed the first feminist voices before feminism really existed and their pamphlets still fascinate and inspire scholars and feminists even in our time.
Nadine Saghir – Master 2 Etudes anglophones
Bibliography
- ANGER Jane, Her Protection for Women, to defend them against the Scandalous Report of a late Surfeiting Lover, and all other like Venerians that complaine so to bee overcloyed with womens kindnesse, London, Richard Jones and Thomas Orwin, 1589, accessible at: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/anger/protection/protection.html
- DUBOIS-NAYT Armel, « Animalizing Women and Men in an Episode of the Querelle des femmes : John Lyly vs Jane Anger », XVII-XVIII [En ligne], 76 | 2019.
- MUNDA Constantia, The Worming of a mad Dog or a Sop for Cerebus the Jailor of Hell: No Consultation but a Sharp Redargution [Reproof] of the bayter’, London, printed by George Purslow, 1617.
- COWAN Henry, John Knox, the Hero of the Scottish Reformation, New York, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1905
- SMITH, ELDER & CO. (eds), Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900.
- EGERTON Sarah Fyge, Poems on Several Occasions (1703), Delmar, Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1987
- EGERTON Sarah Fyge, The Female advocate, London, John Taylor, 1686. Accessible at: http://name.umdl.umich.edu/A40992.0001.0
- GOSYNHYLL Edward, Schole House of Women, printed in London by Thomas Petit, 1541
- KNOX John, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558), published by the Ex-classics Project, 2020. Accessible at:https://www.exclassics.com/blasts/reg
- SWETNAM Joseph, The Arraignment of Lewd, idle, froward, and unconstant women or the vanity of them, choose you whether, With a Commendation of wise, virtuous, and honest Women, Pleasant for married Men, profitable for young Men, and hurtful to none, London, 1615
- TAYLOR John, A iuniper lecture With the description of all sorts of women, good, and bad: from the modest to the maddest, from the most civil, to the scold rampant, their praise and dispraise compendiously related. Also the authors advice how to tame a shrew, or vexe her, printed by Iohn Okes for William Ley, London, 1639
Tattle-well, Mary and Hit-him-home, Ioane. The Womens Sharpe Revenge Or an answer to Sir Seldome Sober that writ those railing Pamphelets called the Iuniper and Crabtree Lectures, &c. Imprinted at London, 1640
[1] Gosynhyll Edward, Schole House of Women, London, 1541
[2] Dictionary of National Biography, Volume 22, pp. 266
[3] Dictionary of National Biography, pp. 267
[4] Knox John, First Blast of the Trumpet, pp. 6
[5] Knox John, Ibid, pp. 23
[6] Cowan Henry. John Knox, the Hero of the Scottish Reformation, pp. 271-74
[7] Anger Jane, Her Protection for Women, London, 1589
[8] John Lyly (1554-1606), a playwright who contributed to the development of prose dialogue in English comedy. He gained fame with the publication of two prose romances: Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Euphues and His England (1580), which together made him the most fashionable English writer of the 1580s (Source: Britannica).
[9] Dubois-Nayt Armel, Animalizing Women and Men
[10] Anger Jane. Her Protection for Women, London, 1589.
[11] Anger Jane, Her Protection for Women, Idem
[12] Anger Jane, Her Protection for Women, Idem
[13] Anger Jane, Her Protection for Women, Idem
[14] Swetnam Joseph, The Arraignment of Lewd, idle, London, 1615
[15] Constantia Munda, The Worming of a mad Dog, 1617, pp. 15-16
[16] Taylor John, A iuniper lecture, 1639
[17] Tattle-well Mary and Hit-him-home Ioane, The womens sharpe revenge, 1640
[18] Tattle-well, Ibid, pp. 10
[19] Tattle-well, Ibid, pp. 11-12
[20] Egerton Sarah Fyge, The Female advocate, lines 20-21
[21] Egerton Sarah Fyge, The Female advocate, London, 1686
[22] Egerton Sarah Fyge, Poems on Several Occasions (1703), Delmar, Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1987, pp. 108-09.
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
mastersfdl (15 juillet 2022). “Gender wars in England of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” – Nadine Saghir. Investigatio. Consulté le 20 avril 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/ra88


