In Honor of Women’s History Month, a Look at Margaret Cavendish’s Commitment to a Feminist Agenda
The MIT Press is proud to present From the Archive Friday (FTAF). Each Friday, we select an article from the depths of our online Journals archive and make it freely available for one week.
We have celebrated Women’s History Month through our FTAF program since 2014. This year is no exception. For the fifth year in a row, we will bring you a stellar lineup of journal articles about women and feminism, covering everything from 19th-century women inventors to the legacy of Margaret Cavendish, and from the history of feminist biography to the “China Girl” in film.
We’re excited to relaunch our FTAF program here on Medium. We hope this move will encourage more reading and sharing! Check back here each Friday for a new current events-related gem from our journals.
Without further ado, here is the second of five selections from our journal archives for Women’s History Month.
(Did you miss the first selection on women inventors? Check it out.)
The Legacy of Margaret Cavendish
Perspectives on Science
Volume 9 | Issue 3 |
Fall 2001
Author: Eric Lewis
“…Cavendish occupies a unique but difficult to define position as a critic of early modern experimental philosophy.”
Excerpt:
“Lately, historical interest in Margaret Cavendish has begun to focus on her unique role as a woman critic of the new mechanistic philosophies and emerging Royal Society. By linking her rationalist methodology, vitalistic metaphysics and lamentations about women’s plight in society, a portrait of an early pioneer in feminism and critic of modern science emerges. Hilda Smith, for instance, considers Cavendish one of the first feminists and a member of a very small group of late seventeenth-century women who ‘shifted the arena of the debate from qualities of individual women to the natures of men and women’ (1982, p. xiii). Smith, however, writes cautiously about the ties between Cavendish’s interest in science and her feminist political aspirations. ‘The duchess was fascinated by science because it promised both new ways of looking at things and new answers. She was actually frustrated with it because both methods and answers varied so widely from the things that concerned her’ (p. 61). Smith does not try to make sense of Cavendish’s specific doctrines, including atomism, and later vitalistic matter theory, royalism, or rationalism. Nor does she attempt to link these doctrines except vaguely to Cavendish’s feminism. Rather, she says that though the seventeenth-century produced rich variation in political thought, none was specifically appealing to feminist thinking. Smith addresses Cavendish’s rationalism noting: ‘Feminists linked their faith in reason to a distrust of custom, which perpetuated both ignorance and women’s domestic status’ (1982, p. 63). Given the Duchess’s vehement criticisms of Robert Hooke’s microscopic works, telescopic research and general methods employed by the Royal Society, the lack of specific connections between her metaphysical and epistemic claims, and her social/political commitments remains wanting in Smith’s account.
Others interested in Cavendish’s unconventional role as philosopher and critic of the emerging science and its institutionalization draw direct ties with her feminism. Sylvia Brown (1991), Lisa Sarasohn (1984) and Eve Keller (1997) view her taking a position against a male dominated science. Brown describes her acting defensively through her adoption of skepticism. Sarasohn and Keller argue that the Duchess takes an offensive role. Sarasohn claims Cavendish was forced to use a ‘full-scale’ skepticism in her attack: ‘on the authority of a male-dominated science, and, by implication, an attack on male authoritarianism’ (p. 294). Keller says that Cavendish’s natural philosophy ‘suggests tentative moves toward a feminist science being sketched by Evelyn Fox Keller.’ Eve Keller claims further: ‘Cavendish’s work relentlessly deconstructs the supposedly stable epistemological categories that service the masculinist science she derides’ (p. 466). John Rogers (1996) joins this choir of voices linking Lady Cavendish’s philosophy — in this case her early brand of vitalism — to her feminism. ‘Her architect atoms are forever engaged in the process of building a secularized and feminized version of the radical Puritans’ holy community, an ideal community that was, at least for Milton, grounded on the subordination of physical force to the force of reason’ (p. 203). These attempts to describe Cavendish’s anti-institutional and anti-empirical commitments in terms of her pioneering feminist motivations, however, conflates her anti-empiricism with her more unconventional literary ‘fancy’, isolating her from the more conservative social and scientific goals” (344–345).
“The Legacy of Margaret Cavendish” will be freely available from March 9th to March 15th on the MIT Press website.
