Women Writing Race in the Seventeenth-Century English Atlantic - Civil Agents

Women Writing Race in the Seventeenth-Century English Atlantic: Civil Agents highlights early modern women writers’ invocations of civility to reach for the privileges of whiteness. The women studied were writing in various textual modes and span boundaries of ideology, class, and race: Royalist writer and natural philosopher Margaret Cavendish; Restoration wit and notorious con woman Mary Carleton; early Quaker missionaries to Barbados Lydia Fell, Alice Curwen, and Elizabeth Hooton; and Patience Boston, a Native woman from Monomoy on Cape Cod. As this book explores, women writing in the English Atlantic engaged and leveraged civility as a concept and an idiom whose racialist implications were becoming codified. Some of the women analyzed embraced and leveraged that practice as a form of agency, while others resisted and were marginalized by it.