The Role of Women in Early English Nonconformity

• Published in: Church history 1983-09, Vol.52 (3), p.299-311
• Main Author: Greaves, Richard L.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Baptists; Church congregations; Civil wars; Clergy; Men; Nonconformity; Parliaments; Pastors; Separatism; Womens studies
• ISSN: 0009-6407; 1755-2613
• DOI: 10.2307/3166711

The involvement of English women in the radical Protestant movements of the 1640s and 1650s has attracted the attention of a number of modern historians. The hub of such studies is Keith Thomas's provocative 1958 essay, “Women and the Civil War Sects,” which focuses on the expanded role of women in these groups and on the way in which sectarian views indirectly undermined the patriarchal family. More recently, Dorothy Ludlow has studied female preachers in this period, insisting that they were not fanatics but sober women with a distinctive sense of Christian calling who claimed full membership in the Christian community. The more well-known women, such as Anne Hutchinson and Mary Cary, have been the subject of recent studies in their own right. For the period after 1660, Pamela Volkman has examined the contrasting ways in which male and female converts to the sects were depicted, noting that women were more likely to be accused of emotional volatility, immorality, or even insanity than were men. These studies have progressed to the point that we are in no danger of overlooking the role of women in English Nonconformity in the mid-seventeenth century.