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.
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.
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
2 I keep up the Right of my place: Margaret Cavendish Protects White
Womanhood
3 What harme have I done in pretending to great Titles?: Civility as White
Innocence and White Property in Mary Carletons Narratives
4 Civilizing Quakers: Race, Gender, and Religion in Anglo-Caribbean Quaker
Family Discourse
5 Civilitys Antithesis: Patience Boston, an Indigenous Woman, Tells Her
Story
Afterword: Women Writing Whiteness
Bibliography
Index
Kristina Lucenko is Assistant Professor in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stony Brook University.
