I.Introduction

How did women experience the English Civil War?^[2]Women's involvement in the Civil War is a complex issue which historians and literary scholars have debated for many years.^[3]One question which is sometimes asked is whether the Civil War was,in any sense,beneficial for women.It goes without saying that the Civil War was a period of great suffering for the English population as a whole,and that many women's experience of the war was predominantly or exclusively one of grief and distress.But did the war,traumatic as it was,open up new opportunities in the lives of significant numbers of English women?Did the war conditions of the 1640s and the political uncertainties of the 1650s in some ways empower women to undertake activities which had previously been unavailable to them,and which may then again have been barred to them after the Restoration?Another question,no less fundamental for being obvious,is simply that of what women actually did during the Civil War.Women were in this period excluded from many of the public occupations open to men:they did not,for instance,serve in any of the Civil War armies or sit in any of the Civil War parliaments.Given the restricted opportunities open to them in this as in other periods,we may legitimately wonder what they did during the war years,and whether it was really very different from what they were doing at other times during the seventeenth century.In short,to what extent was women's experience of the Civil War distinctive for them—in comparison either with men's experience of the same period or with women in earlier or later years?

Recent research suggests that questions such as these may be too broad to admit of easy answers.Numerous methodological problems beset any attempt to reach firm conclusions about women's experience of this turbulent period.One key problem which affects research into women's history in most historical periods,not merely this one,is the relative lack of surviving evidence.Women typically left less trace in the historical record than men in past centuries.They were often omitted from family trees or disregarded in wills;they did not feature in army lists,parliamentary records or university registers;since they were less likely to receive formal education than men,they were consequently less likely to leave written testimonies such as letters,diaries or autobiographies.Some evidence does of course survive to tell us what some women were doing during this period,but the comparative sparseness of this evidence means that scholars need to exercise great care when attempting to extrapolate conclusions from it.The evidence of one woman's actions at one historical moment may not be equally applicable to women from different social classes,from different parts of England,of different political allegiances,or at different points during the period 1642-60.There is a danger that such evidence as does survive may over-represent certain groups:women from the elite classes,women from the radical sects,London women.There is also a danger that focusing too closely on the category of gender may obscure the many other factors which differentiated women during this period,and which women themselves may have regarded as of more importance than their status as the supposedly weaker sex.Gender,such an important concept for modern scholars,may have been of little concern to mid seventeenth-century women,who in many cases would have been more likely to identify with the interests of the men of their own family,or of their own religious denomination,rather than with other women.While this does not,of course,mean that we should ignore the issue of sexual difference in examining women's experience of the Civil Wars,it does suggest that if we concentrate on gender to the exclusion of all other factors,we will misrepresent a complex situation.Any survey of women which seeks in any way to do justice to their experience must take these other factors—class,geography,family or employment networks—into account as well.

No single essay can hope to provide a comprehensive account of women's experience during the Civil War period.What is possible,however,is to examine the individual experiences of some women and—mindful of the methodological difficulties I have acknowledged—attempt to draw some cautious conclusions from them.In this essay,consequently,I will analyse the examples presented by a range of different women,from a wide range of social groups and occupations.These will include women from the traditional social elites as well as from non-elite groups,women of both moderate and radical political and religious views,and women who both suffered and prospered during the Civil War period.They will also include women who acted in accordance with well-established conventions for correct female behaviour,as well as others who took advantage of the unprecedented events of their era to act in unprecedented ways.Furthermore,they will include some women whose first-hand accounts of their own and their families’lives have passed into mainstream Civil War historiography and have helped to shape the way we understand this period today.

In the rest of this essay,I will consider five aspects of women's experience during and immediately after the English Civil War.In the first section,‘Women in Traditional Roles’,I will discuss the examples of two women,Elizabeth Mordaunt and Jane Whorwood,who both intervened in public events during the interregnum,but whose interventions would have seemed wholly consistent with traditional expectations of feminine roles and behaviour.In the second section,‘Traditional Roles in Novel Circumstances’,I expand the notion of traditional female roles,considering several examples of women who,while still more or less conforming with existing cultural expectations of women,were nonetheless obliged by circumstances to engage—sometimes in very active ways—with the unprecedented events and demands of the period.In the third and fourth sections,‘New Roles in Uncertain Times’(1)and(2),I turn to two categories of women—publishers and prophets—whose behaviour cannot so easily be classified under the traditional categories.These women may be said to have taken advantage—whether wittingly or unwittingly—of the instabilities and uncertainties of the age and to have acted in ways largely unavailable to women of earlier generations.Finally,in‘Recording the Civil War’,I consider women who wrote about the Civil War:both those who commented on it while it was happening and also those who remembered it after the Restoration with the(sometimes doubtful)benefit of hindsight.In surveying such a variety of women and female activities,moreover,I will also touch on several further questions which scholars often ask of women's experience during the English Civil War.Did the war mean different things to women of different social classes?Did royalism or radicalism offer more opportunities for women?And what did women think about the war afterwards?Did they remember only the suffering,or did they look back on it as a period of excitement and comparative independence?Indeed,did the Civil War bring any significant measure of independence for women,or did the apparent freedom enjoyed by many women during this period merely mask an underlying reality in which their actions were manipulated by men and served a male agenda?