Stevie Davies’s Unbridled Spirits: Women of the English
Revolution, 1640–1660 demonstrates strong literary craftsmanship and genuine
empathy for its subjects. It aims to reintroduce the voices of women involved
in the English Revolution, such as prophets, petitioners, pamphleteers, and
Quaker evangelists whose roles conservative histories have marginalised or
dismissed over the past three centuries. Davies’s characterisations are lively,
sympathetic, and often poignant. However, the interpretive framework she
employs reflects the ideological shift that affected academic history in the
late 20th century: replacing class analysis with feminist and identity-based
perspectives. Consequently, the book illuminates many aspects but leaves others
in shadow.
The book clearly illustrates this contradiction,
highlighting one of the Revolution's most thrilling moments: the mass petition
in April 1649, where hundreds of women from London confronted Parliament
demanding the release of imprisoned Leveller leaders. The MPs dismissed them,
saying “it was not for women to petition and that they should go home and see
to their housework.” In response, the women strongly asserted their equal stake
in the liberties the Revolution aimed to secure. This act, an extraordinary
declaration of political agency by artisans’ wives, widows, servants, and
tradeswomen, serves as a focal point in Davies’s narrative. However,
understanding this event requires exploring the social forces behind it, the
political message it conveyed, and the reasons for its failure. A Marxist
analysis must address these questions, which the feminist framework alone
cannot fully explain.
The English Revolution as a Social and Class Struggle
The English Revolution was, contrary to traditional
conservative views, fundamentally a social upheaval rather than merely a
constitutional conflict between the King and Parliament or a debate on church
governance. It involved overthrowing the monarchy, executing a king, abolishing
the House of Lords, and dismantling existing ecclesiastical structures. This
revolution paved the way for the development of capitalist property relations
in England and marked Europe's first significant bourgeois revolution.
Within this upheaval, the collapse of censorship and the
disintegration of episcopal authority opened unprecedented space for political
and religious expression among the “middling” and “lower sort.” Ideas previously
unthinkable, or at least unprintable, circulated freely. Radical sects
proliferated: Independents, Baptists, Fifth Monarchists, Ranters, Seekers, and
later the Quakers. These congregations became arenas in which the most advanced
sections of the plebeian classes thought through, in the only idiom available
to them, the question of who should rule.
Women participated actively in this movement. The gathered
churches permitted women to speak, prophesy, and sometimes preach, which
shocked conventional societal norms. Thomas Edwards’s Gangraena (1646), a
compilation of heresies, included women preachers among the era's other
alarming practices, suggesting the world had indeed lost its mind. However,
women's involvement in these sects was not unusual; it originated from the
social upheaval caused by the Revolution.
Davies’s book vividly portrays this world, offering detailed
portraits of Katherine Chidley, Anna Trapnel, Mary Cary, Lady Eleanor Davies,
Elizabeth Hooton, Margaret Fell, and Martha Simmonds. Her sharp ear for the
period's unique language, the biblical cadences, and blunt, straightforward
rage enables these women to speak at length. This is especially valuable for
general readers. Yet, literary sensitivity alone does not suffice; the real
challenge is in interpreting these voices.
Gender and Class: Which Women?
Davies employs a feminist interpretive framework, depicting
women mainly as women. Their battle is seen as against patriarchy, fighting
male ministers, prophets, MPs, and husbands. This was a genuine struggle, given
the severe legal and economic subjugation of women under coverture, where
married women lacked independent legal status, and their petitions were
dismissed in gendered terms. However, this feminist perspective raises a key
question: which women are being referred to?
The petitioners of 1649 were mainly common London artisans
and small traders, not aristocratic women like Lady Fairfax or wives of
Presbyterian leaders. These individuals represented the same social class that
supported the Levellers, advocating for an end to arbitrary detention, relief
from tithes and taxes, and political power for the people. Their demands
aligned with Leveller principles and reflected the broader class struggle
within the Revolution, serving as a direct expression of it.
The same applies to the prophets. Trapnel’s eleven-day
trance at Whitehall in 1654 was more than a woman claiming a voice; it was a
millenarian expression of the Revolution's disappointed lower class. These were
individuals who fought for the rule of saints but ended up with the rule of the
Major-Generals and a Lord Protector embodying monarchical traits. Engels noted
that religious language, whether in the German Peasant War or the English
Revolution, was a necessary way for the masses to articulate their social
hopes. While Davies emphasises gender as the main factor, the social context is
less prominent. These women's destiny was shaped not by gender dynamics but by
class struggles.
The Defeat of the Plebeian Revolution
The decisive moments of the Revolution were class moments:
the suppression of the Leveller mutiny at Burford (May 1649), the dissolution
of Barebone’s Parliament (December 1653), and the consolidation of Cromwell’s
Protectorate as a regime committed to protecting gentry and merchant property.
When the radical movement was defeated, the women’s voices
were silenced. The Restoration completed the process. Margaret Fell’s Women's
Speaking Justified appeared in 1666, when the Quakers had already turned
toward pacifism and withdrawal from politics. It is a defence of women’s
spiritual equality mounted from a position of political retreat.
Nor were the gentlemen of the House hostile to women’s
political activity only as men. They were hostile to it as a form of plebeian activity,
one more manifestation of the “many‑headed monster” that Cromwell and Ireton
confronted at the Putney Debates in 1647. There Ireton insisted that the
franchise must rest on “a permanent fixed interest” in the kingdom, that is, on
property. The same logic that excluded the petitioning women excluded the
soldiers, servants, and apprentices who had fought Parliament’s war. The
feminist framework cannot explain this. Only a class analysis can.
Historiographical Context: From Marxism to Identity
Politics
Davies’s book must be situated within the historiographical
trajectory of the last half‑century. The radical sects were first rescued from
condescension by historians writing from a broadly socialist or Marxist
standpoint. Keith Thomas’s “Women and the Civil War Sects” (1958) opened the
subject. H.N. Brailsford’s The Levellers and the English Revolution (1961)
gave the Leveller women a substantial place in a history written from a
standpoint sympathetic to socialism. Above all, Christopher Hill’s The World
Turned Upside Down (1972) situated the sectaries, prophets, Ranters, and
Diggers within the social crisis of mid‑17th‑century England and treated their
ideas as the product of real class forces.
Hill’s work had limitations. His later drift toward cultural
and mentalité approaches weakened the class analysis that had grounded his
earlier work. But his starting point was Marxist: the English Revolution was a
bourgeois revolution, and within it there was a revolt of the plebeian masses
that went beyond what the bourgeoisie was willing to concede.
Davies draws on this tradition, but the explanatory
framework has shifted. The question is no longer why the revolution from below
failed, but how women found their voices within, and against, a male‑dominated
radicalism. This shift reflects the broader retreat of academic history in the
last two decades of the 20th century from Marxism toward identity‑based and
“linguistic” approaches.
These frameworks often produce valuable research on
neglected subjects. But they tend to dissolve the objective social relations
that give historical events their meaning. A figure like Trapnel risks becoming
an object of literary admiration- a woman who “found a voice” rather than a
representative of a social movement with definite aims and a definite fate. The
result is a depoliticised history, one that celebrates “agency” while obscuring
the structural forces that determine its limits.
The Limits of Feminist Historiography
The feminist orientation of Unbridled Spirits is not
simply a matter of emphasis. It reflects a theoretical position: that gender is
the primary axis of oppression, and that women’s struggles must be understood
primarily as struggles against patriarchy. This position is inadequate for
understanding the English Revolution.
The oppression of women in 17th‑century England was real and
severe. But it was inseparable from early modern society's class structure. The
legal doctrine of coverture, women's economic dependence, and restrictions on
their political activity were all rooted in the property relations of the
emerging bourgeois order.
The petitioners of 1649 understood this intuitively. Their
demands were not framed in terms of gender equality. They were framed in terms
of political and economic justice: an end to arbitrary imprisonment, relief
from tithes and excise, freedom from monopolies, and a political settlement
that would give “the people” sovereign authority. Their struggle was not a
separate “women’s movement.” It was part of the plebeian revolt from below. To
isolate their struggle as a chapter in “women’s history” misrepresents it.
The Women of the Revolution as Part of Working‑Class
Prehistory
The women of the English Revolution belong to the prehistory
of the modern working class. Their struggle was not for abstract “voice” or
“agency.” It was for political equality, economic relief, and democratic
control over the institutions of power. They glimpsed, however imperfectly,
that equality before God implied equality in political life.
But the bourgeois revolution that briefly gave them space to
articulate this insight also established the property relations that would
restrict political equality for centuries. The emancipation these women sought
could not be realised within the social order that emerged from the Revolution
and has not been realised since. Their struggle is best honoured not by
isolating it as a chapter in the history of women, but by understanding it as
an episode in the long struggle of the oppressed for a society free of
exploitation.
The Meaning of the Unbridled Spirits
Stevie Davies’s Unbridled Spirits is an engaging,
well‑researched, and often moving book. Its portraits of Chidley, Trapnel,
Elizabeth Lilburne, and the anonymous petitioners will send many readers to the
pamphlets themselves. Davies’s insistence that these women were serious
thinkers and political actors, not cranks or appendages to their husbands, is a
necessary corrective to centuries of dismissive historiography.
But readers should approach it with an awareness of its
limitations. The feminist framework within which Davies writes obscures the
class dynamics that gave these women their historical significance. Their
struggle was not primarily a struggle against patriarchy. It was a struggle
within a bourgeois revolution whose contradictions could not be resolved in
favour of the plebeian masses.
The history of the English Revolution belongs to the working
class. The unbridled spirits of 1640–1660 form its prehistory. Their voices,
briefly heard, then silenced, are reminders of the revolutionary possibilities
that emerge when the oppressed enter the stage of history, and of the
structural limits imposed by a social order founded on private property. To
understand them is to understand the Revolution itself. And to understand the
Revolution is to recognise that the struggle for political and economic
equality remains unfinished.
