A Democratic Culture? Women, Citizenship and Subscriptional Texts in Early Modern England

Abstract

1 Accepted manuscript version of E. Vallance, ‘A Democratic Culture? Women, Citizenship and Subscriptional Texts in Early Modern England’, in Democracy and Anti-democracy in Early Modern England, 1603-1689, ed. C. Cuttica and M. Peltonen (Brill, Leiden, 2019), ch. 12 A Democratic Culture? Women, Citizenship and Subscriptional Texts in Early Modern England The social reformer and women’s suffrage campaigner Susan B. Anthony wrote that as women in nineteenth-century America could ‘neither take the ballot or the bullet’ to settle political questions, the ‘right to petition is one sacred right which we ought not to neglect’. Women’s petitioning activity has often been linked to the suffrage movement: Ellen McArthur, who undertook the first serious scholarly work on women’s petitioning in the seventeenth century was a suffragist. Both Susan Zaeske for the United States and Clare Midgley for Britain have argued that nineteenth-century petitioning campaigns for the abolition of slavery provided women with opportunities to advance broader claims about their rights as citizens. As Zaeske puts it