Women Enter the Stage of History as Political Actors
In spring 1649, during the peak of the English Revolution,
thousands of women in London actively engaged in national politics. Their
petitions to Parliament, signed by around 10,000 women, mark one of the
earliest examples of mass political activism by women in modern history. These
women explicitly and boldly claimed that they shared an equal stake with men in
the liberties gained through their struggles. This moment was not merely an
isolated instance of “proto-feminism” or a timeless voice of “women’s agency.”
It resulted from a major social upheaval that shattered traditional hierarchies
and brought new segments of society into political participation.
The English Revolution was fundamentally a class conflict,
with the monarchy and traditional aristocracy opposing a coalition of
merchants, rising gentry, yeomen, and the urban middle class. London’s artisans,
apprentices, and journeymen also supported them, and their activism repeatedly
pressured Parliament beyond its cautious approach. The formation of the New
Model Army in 1645—made up of paid volunteers influenced by radical Protestant
ideas—significantly altered politics. When Parliament tried to disband the army
unpaid in 1647, the soldiers elected Agitators and openly defied their supposed
authorities.
The Levellers emerged in this intense environment as a
political movement with defined policies, a press, subscriptions, regional
networks, and a large petitioning system. Their impact extended deeply into the
New Model Army and was highlighted during the October 1647 Putney Debates. At
these debates, Colonel Thomas Rainsborough stated that “the poorest he that is
in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he.” Women, involved in
gatherings, printing activities, and street protests, also adopted this perspective—“the
poorest she.”
The women’s petitions of 1649 directly challenged the new
Commonwealth government led by Cromwell and the Grandees. After prominent
Leveller leaders—John Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn, and Thomas
Prince—were arrested and imprisoned, groups of women marched to Westminster
demanding their release. Parliament responded dismissively, telling them to
return home and “meddle with their housewifery.” In response, the women
returned days later with a more pointed petition, asking whether their lives,
liberties, and property were any less vulnerable to arbitrary power than men's.
Their actions marked a political awakening among London’s artisan and trading
women—individuals whose daily lives had been significantly affected by the
upheavals of the 1640s.
Figures like Katherine Chidley, Elizabeth Lilburne, and Mary
Overton rose as leaders of this movement. Chidley, a long-standing separatist who
opposed clerical authority, helped organise the churches that formed much of
the Levellers' support base. Elizabeth Lilburne faced repeated imprisonment and
poverty as she petitioned tirelessly for her husband’s release. Mary Overton
was taken to Bridewell with her infant due to her involvement in the
underground press. Their actions contributed to a widespread plebeian mobilisation:
when Leveller soldier Robert Lockyer was executed in April 1649, women marched
at his funeral, wearing sea-green ribbons and transforming it into a political
protest.
For centuries, Whig historians concealed this history by
framing it within constitutional myths. Later, postmodernist identity politics
disconnected the women’s petitions from the class struggle that created them,
portraying them as mere acts of “gender performance.” In truth, the Leveller
women were not merely defining an identity; they were fighting with men of
their class for a democratic settlement against the Commonwealth's wealthy
rulers.
Their story demonstrates a fundamental truth: the struggle
against gender oppression advances only when bound up with the wider struggle
of the exploited and oppressed against class rule. The Leveller women stand at
the beginning of a long line of revolutionary women—from Versailles in 1789 to
Petrograd in 1917—whose political interventions were inseparable from mass
movements of the working and oppressed.
The English Revolution as a Social and Class Struggle
The English Civil Wars (1642–51) were not simply a “war of
three kingdoms” caused by administrative failure or religious conflicts, as
some revisionist historians suggest. Instead, they represented a social
revolution, pitting the monarchy and traditional aristocracy against a
coalition of merchants, rising gentry, yeomen, and the urban “middling"
classes.
This alliance drew support from artisans, apprentices, and
journeymen in London—groups whose protests often compelled Parliament to exceed
its leaders' cautious preferences. The creation of the New Model Army in 1645,
an army composed of paid volunteers driven by radical Protestant beliefs,
markedly transformed the political landscape. When Parliament attempted to
disband the army without paying the soldiers in 1647, the ordinary troops
elected Agitators and openly challenged their supposed authority. During this
tumult, the Levellers emerged—a political movement with a program, a press,
subscriptions, regional networks, and a large-scale petitioning system. Their
influence extended deeply into the New Model Army, culminating in the Putney
Debates of October 1647.
The Women’s Petitions of 1649
In late April 1649, shortly after Charles I's execution,
London saw a significant political act during the English Revolution. Groups of
women—representing artisans, traders, and common citizens—marched to
Westminster with a petition calling for the release of Leveller leaders John
Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn, and Thomas Prince. These leaders had
been taken from their beds and imprisoned in the Tower by the Council of State,
in an effort to silence a strong democratic opposition to the new Commonwealth.
The Parliament's reaction was not just dismissive but openly
hostile. The Serjeant-at-Arms told the women that the issue was too complex for
them and ordered them to “go home, look to their own business and meddle with
their housewifery.” With this disdainful remark, the ruling elite reaffirmed
class and gender hierarchy: political power was reserved for property-owning
men, while women—particularly common women—were to stay within domestic roles.
This rebuke highlighted the limits Cromwell and the Grandees aimed to enforce
as they built a republic focused on property rights rather than expanding
democracy.
Nevertheless, the women refused to accept the traditional
roles assigned to them. Their resistance was not just an isolated act of
“proto-feminism" or a timeless display of “women’s agency.” Instead, it
resulted from a significant social revolution that dismantled old structures
and brought new segments of the population into political participation. The
upheavals of the 1640s—characterised by mass mobilisation, religious
radicalism, the rise of the New Model Army, and the emergence of the
Levellers—created opportunities for those previously shut out. Women, involved
in congregations, print shops, and neighbourhood networks, began acting based
on the same principle expressed by Colonel Thomas Rainsborough at Putney: “the
poorest he”—and more and more “the poorest she”—deserve to live as fully as the
wealthiest.
On May 5, the women came back to Westminster with a more
pointed petition. This time, they directly challenged Parliament by boldly
asserting gender equality. They questioned whether women shared the same
interest as men in the rights protected by the Petition of Right and common
law. They asked if their lives, limbs, liberties, and property were any more
protected from arbitrary authority. Furthermore, they wondered if Parliament
wanted women to stay at home while soldiers took away their husbands and neighbours.
These questions hit at the core of the Commonwealth’s class
structure. The Levellers stood for small producers—artisans, shopkeepers, and
yeomen—whose push for democracy challenged the new regime's property-centred
values. Women's petitions intensified this challenge by arguing that political
rights should not be limited to male householders. Their involvement revealed a
contradiction: the Grandees’ claims of liberty versus their desire to restrict
political participation to those with a “fixed interest” in property.
The women who participated in the march—many of whom were
connected to figures like Katherine Chidley, Elizabeth Lilburne, and Mary
Overton—did not act as a separate gendered group. Instead, they were part of a
wider plebeian movement, advocating for demands that challenged the boundaries
of bourgeois republicanism. Their petitions collectively asserted that
democratic rights should belong to all freeborn individuals, regardless of
gender or property ownership. This episode powerfully illustrates how fights
against gender oppression are more likely to succeed when integrated with
broader movements of the exploited and oppressed. The Leveller women’s
resistance in 1649 is a notable early example of political awareness emerging
from grassroots efforts, questioning both patriarchal authority and the new
Commonwealth's class dominance.
Women Leaders of a Plebeian Democratic Movement
Katherine Chidley stands out as a significant figure of the
English Revolution, with her political and religious resistance rooted in the
upheavals of the 1640s that dismantled the old social order. A separatist from
Shrewsbury, she had previously challenged clerical authority in the 1620s by
refusing the churching ceremony after childbirth, a ritual aimed at reinforcing
female subjugation within the church hierarchy. Her refusal was more than a
private act of dissent; it was an early demonstration of the revolutionary
ideals that would later shape the Leveller movement: asserting that conscience,
liberty, and political agency belong to the “poorest he,” and increasingly, the
“poorest she".
In 1641, Chidley wrote The Justification of the Independent
Churches of Christ, defending congregations self-governed by their members
rather than controlled by the state or established clergy. This book presented
a bold idea for its era: that an unbelieving husband lacked authority over a
believing wife's conscience. During a time when women’s legal and political
identities were subsumed under their husbands—meaning their status was entirely
defined through male householders—Chidley’s position challenged the core of
patriarchal and church authority. Her argument directly contested the
interconnected systems of class and gender domination that supported the early
modern state.
Chidley’s importance extended beyond her writings to her organisational
contributions. She helped establish independent congregations and played a key
role in the network of gathered churches that supported the Levellers’ social
base. These congregations served not only as religious communities but also as
political arenas where artisans, apprentices, small traders, and their families
discussed scripture, authority, and the meaning of liberty. They provided the
infrastructure for circulating Leveller pamphlets, organising petitions, and
fostering political awareness among London's lower classes.
Alongside Elizabeth Lilburne and Mary Overton, Chidley was
widely recognised for leading the women’s petitioning efforts of 1649. These
efforts went beyond mere symbolic acts; they represented large-scale political
actions. When Leveller leaders John Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn,
and Thomas Prince were arrested and imprisoned, it was Chidley and her
colleagues who organised thousands of women to march on Westminster. Their
petitions claimed that women shared “an equal interest with the men of this
nation” in the liberties won through struggle. They questioned whether their
lives, limbs, and property were any less vulnerable to tyranny than men's.
Such questions were inseparable from the class struggle
driving the revolution. The Levellers represented the interests of small
producers—independent artisans, shopkeepers and yeomen—whose democratic
aspirations threatened the property‑based logic of the new Commonwealth. The
women who petitioned were drawn from the same social layers. Their political
intervention was not an early form of liberal feminism but a plebeian challenge
to the ruling elite’s attempt to restrict political participation to propertied
men.
Chidley’s activism continued into the 1650s, including
renewed agitation for John Lilburne’s release in 1653. Her persistence
reflected the broader trajectory of Leveller women, who refused to retreat even
as Cromwell’s regime moved decisively to crush the movement. Their actions showed
that women's political consciousness did not arise in isolation, but through
participation. Katherine Chidley’s legacy rests on her combination of religious
independence, political activism, and resistance to class oppression. She reminds
us that the fight against gender oppression is linked to the broader struggle
of the oppressed against class dominance—an important lesson that remains as
relevant today as it was in 1649.
Elizabeth Lilburne’s life offers one of the most striking
examples of how the English Revolution’s political storms fell with
disproportionate force upon women who stood beside its most radical figures.
Her story is not simply an adjunct to John Lilburne’s biography; it is a
narrative of endurance, political agency, and suffering in its own right.
Across the 1640s and 1650s, she lived under a level of state harassment that
would have broken many of her contemporaries. Instead, she became one of the
most persistent petitioners of the revolutionary decades, navigating the
shifting centres of power—Parliament, the Council of State, the Army
Council—with a tenacity that matched her husband’s polemical fire.
Persecution defined the rhythm of her domestic life. The
Lilburne household was raided repeatedly, often violently, as agents searched
for “dangerous books” and seditious pamphlets. These invasions were not merely
political acts; they were intimate assaults on the space where she raised her
children. The emotional toll was compounded by devastating personal loss. Most
of her children died in infancy, a tragedy common in the seventeenth century
but sharpened in her case by the instability created by her husband’s
imprisonments and exiles. The home was never secure, never free from the threat
of disruption, confiscation, or surveillance.
Her political labour was relentless. For a decade she
petitioned on John’s behalf, drafting, presenting, and circulating appeals that
demanded justice, due process, and humane treatment. Petitioning was one of the
few formal political tools available to women, yet Elizabeth wielded it with
unusual persistence and sophistication. She understood the mechanics of
influence: when to approach MPs, when to appeal to Army officers, when to
mobilise public sympathy. Her petitions were not passive pleas but interventions
that kept John’s case alive in the public sphere, forcing authorities to
confront the consequences of their repression.
During John’s exile in the Netherlands, poverty pressed
hard. She managed the household alone, relying on irregular support from
sympathisers while continuing to lobby for his return. This period reveals her
resilience most clearly: she sustained her family, maintained correspondence,
and preserved her husband’s papers despite material hardship and political
hostility.
Elizabeth Lilburne’s life illuminates the gendered
dimensions of radical politics. She endured the state’s coercive power up close,
yet transformed her suffering into political action. Her perseverance kept the
Leveller struggle visible even when its leading male figures were silenced. In
this sense, she stands not merely as John Lilburne’s wife but as one of the
Revolution’s most steadfast—and most overlooked—actors.
Mary Overton’s life stands as one of the clearest
demonstrations of how the English Revolution’s radical print culture depended
on the courage of women who operated in its most dangerous spaces. As the wife
of Richard Overton—printer, polemicist, and one of the most hunted Leveller
figures—she lived at the centre of the underground press that sustained the
movement’s agitation. But Mary was not merely an adjunct to her husband’s work.
She was an active participant in the production and circulation of illicit
pamphlets, and she paid for that commitment with a level of brutality that
exposes the Commonwealth regime’s deep hostility to plebeian women who entered
political life.
Her arrest in 1647 marked the state’s determination to crush
the Leveller press. Seized with her infant in her arms, she was dragged through
the streets to Bridewell—a punishment deliberately designed to humiliate and
terrorise. Bridewell was not simply a prison; it was a house of correction
associated with the disciplining of the poor, the disorderly, and the sexually
transgressive. To consign a political dissenter there was to mark her as
socially deviant, a woman who had stepped outside the boundaries of obedience
and domesticity. The spectacle of her arrest, carried out in full public view,
was intended to send a message: women who entered the political arena would be
treated with the same violence as men, but with an added layer of gendered
degradation.
From her cell, Mary Overton responded with a petition that
remains one of the most powerful documents produced by a Leveller woman. She
denounced her treatment not as a private grievance but as a violation of the
liberties of the freeborn—rights supposedly guaranteed by common law and
celebrated by Parliament in its struggle against the monarchy. Her argument was
radical in its simplicity: if liberty belonged to the people of England, then
women were part of that people. The state’s assault on her body, her child, and
her household was therefore an assault on the very principles the revolution
claimed to defend.
Her petition also revealed the political consciousness
forged among London's artisan and plebeian women. These women understood that
the repression of the Leveller press was not merely an attack on individual
printers but an attempt to silence a wider movement demanding accountability,
legal reform, and democratic participation. Mary’s imprisonment was part of a
broader campaign against the networks of wives, sisters, and neighbours who
carried manuscripts, hid type, and kept presses running when their husbands
were jailed.
Mary Overton’s experience illuminates the gendered violence
of the Commonwealth and the indispensable role women played in sustaining
radical politics. Her courage ensured that the Leveller voice continued to
circulate even under the harshest repression. In doing so, she asserted a
political truth the authorities feared: that the struggle for liberty could not
be confined to men, nor contained within the narrow boundaries of property and
obedience.
A Mass Movement of Plebeian Women
These three were the most prominent, but the petitions
represented thousands. When Leveller soldier Robert Lockyer was executed in
April 1649, his funeral became a mass demonstration in which women marched
wearing the sea‑green ribbons of the movement. This was politics conducted by
the plebeian layers of the capital—women included—on a scale never before seen
in England. For two centuries, Whig historians treated the English Revolution
as a constitutional quarrel among gentlemen. The Levellers were dismissed as an
embarrassing excess; their women doubly invisible.
Recovery began in the early twentieth century with Ellen
McArthur’s study of women petitioners. Keith Thomas’s 1958 essay showed how
gathered churches opened space for women to preach and argue. Patricia
Higgins’s 1973 study placed the Leveller petitions within a broader wave of
female political intervention.
The key perspective originated with Marxist historians from
the Communist Party Historians’ Group, especially Christopher Hill. In The
World Turned Upside Down, Hill argued that the revolution sparked a “revolt
within the revolution” among plebeian radicals whose ideas surpassed those of
the victorious bourgeoisie. H. N. Brailsford’s The Levellers and the English
Revolution, edited by Hill, extensively explores Leveller women and remains a
vital resource.
From the 1970s, revisionists such as Conrad Russell and John
Morrill attacked the social interpretation, reducing the Levellers to a
marginal sect and the women petitioners to a curiosity. More recent
scholarship—Ann Hughes, John Rees—has partly restored the picture. However,
much academic literature remains mired in postmodernist concerns with
“discourse” and “identity,” severing the petitions from the class struggle that
produced them.
The Leveller women were not “negotiating gender norms.” They
were fighting, alongside men of their class, for a democratic settlement
against the propertied rulers of the Commonwealth.
The Limits of the Leveller Programme
The Levellers did not propose votes for women. Their Agreements
of the People excluded servants and those receiving alms, because dependent
men lacked political independence. Women, legally subsumed under husbands and
fathers, fell under the same logic.
The women’s petitions pressed against this boundary without
breaking it. They demanded equal protection under law and equal rights to
petition, but not the franchise. They framed their arguments partly through
their roles as wives and mothers of persecuted men.
This was not timidity. It reflected the social relations of
a society of small producers, where the household remained the basic unit of
production and political representation. The Levellers spoke for independent artisans,
small traders, and yeomen—a petty‑bourgeois layer, not a modern working class. Their
class's property relations bounded their democratic programme, and they
recoiled from Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers' communism.
A consistent programme of social and sexual equality
required material conditions that did not yet exist: above all, the emergence
of the industrial proletariat and the socialisation of production.
The Crushing of the Levellers and the Restoration of
Class Rule
The Grandees understood the danger the Levellers
represented. In May 1649, days after the second women’s petition, Cromwell
surprised Leveller‑led mutineers at Burford and had three shot in the
churchyard. The movement never recovered.
The bourgeoisie, having used the plebeian masses to defeat
the king, turned its guns on them. Eleven years later it restored the monarchy
rather than risk renewed revolutionary upsurge from below.
The fate of the Leveller women—rebuffed by a Parliament of
property‑owners and crushed along with their movement—demonstrates that
democratic rights granted or withheld by the ruling class remain at its mercy.
A Heritage for the International Working Class
The Leveller women stand at the beginning of a long line:
the market women who marched on Versailles in 1789; the women of the Paris
Commune; the Chartist women’s associations; the textile workers of Petrograd
whose International Women’s Day strike in 1917 opened the Russian Revolution.
In each case, women entered political life not as a separate interest group but
as part of a mass movement of the oppressed.
The lesson is not that gender oppression is secondary. It is
that its roots lie in class society, and that the struggle against it has
advanced only when bound up with the broader struggle against exploitation.
Today, as democratic rights are under attack across the
world and ruling elites promote identity politics to divide working people, the
history of the English Revolution remains urgent. The Leveller women deserve study
not as icons of gender‑based politics, but as participants in the first great
revolutionary upheaval of the modern era—an upheaval whose unfinished tasks
passed to the international working class.
Bibliography
Primary and Secondary Sources Referenced in the Article
- Brailsford,
H. N. The Levellers and the English Revolution. 1961.
- Hill,
Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the
English Revolution. 1972.
- Hughes,
Ann. Gender and the English Revolution. 2012.
- Rees,
John. The Leveller Revolution: Radical Political Organisation in
England, 1640–1650. Verso, 2016.
- Rees,
John (ed.). John Lilburne and the Levellers: Reappraising the Roots of
English Radicalism 400 Years On. Routledge, 2017.
- Higgins,
Patricia. “The Petitioners and the Levellers.” 1973.
- Thomas,
Keith. “Women and the Civil War Sects.” Past & Present, 1958.
- McArthur,
Ellen. Women Petitioners to the Long Parliament. Early 20th
century.
- Winstanley,
Gerrard. The Law of Freedom.
