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Author: Sarah Connell

What if the Door Was Never the Point? Astell, Cavendish, and the Making of Women’s Intellectual Worlds

What if the Door Was Never the Point? Astell, Cavendish, and the Making of Women’s Intellectual Worlds

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By Rena Ryu, WWP Research Fellow When the architecture of knowledge is gendered, gaining access to knowledge is not necessarily considered the same as gaining intellectual authority. Many historical examples show that a woman can enter a space of learning and still be expected to bow her head to its rules, hierarchies, and definitions of “legitimate” knowledge. Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666) and Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694) dually confront this problem, but they imagine…

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Why Does Mary Astell Begin with a Room? 

Why Does Mary Astell Begin with a Room? 

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By Rena Ryu, WWP Research Fellow Looking back at Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694), it seems I carried the wrong impression right up until the end about her final proposal for education. Given the historical period she was writing in, I felt that she would attempt to persuade skeptical readers that women were capable of reason before proposing any sort of educational reform. So, when she opted to pace her story with much time describing specific…

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What Does It Take to Build a Space for Women’s Minds?

What Does It Take to Build a Space for Women’s Minds?

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By Rena Ryu, WWP Research Fellow When I first encountered Margaret Cavendish’s The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World (1666), I expected what many modern readers may expect from early science fiction: fantastical creatures, imaginative worlds, and much speculation. Certainly, I found those generic elements underneath the plot of a woman being transported and crowned as Empress in an unfamiliar universe surrounded by philosophers. But what fascinated me was the fact that Cavendish had to invent an…

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What’s a 21st Century Feminist To Do?

What’s a 21st Century Feminist To Do?

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By Emily Sullivan, English PhD student and DITI Assistant Director Introduction I began reading Hannah Webster Foster’s (1798) The Boarding School; Lessons of a Preceptress to Her Pupils with every intention of analytically chopping it for parts. During my first weekly encoding meeting with the Women Writers Project (WWP), newcomers were tasked with claiming an unencoded text, and Foster’s The Boarding School was perpetually pitched down the line, as the group shared a sentiment of distaste for the inevitable eye rolls and frustrated sighs that would…

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Symposium on the Marginalization of Women in the Sciences

Symposium on the Marginalization of Women in the Sciences

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By Catherine Trusky, English MA student On October 27, 2025, The Philosopher hosted a webinar on the historical marginalization of women in philosophy and science. The event gave participants the opportunity to learn from experts across several disciplines about women’s historical roles in science and philosophy, the ways in which these fields uphold gender binaries, and avenues for resistance. Over 133 people signed up to attend from across 19 countries. This event was organized as part of a TIER 1…

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Analyzing Scientific Discourse in the Works of Margaret Cavendish and Her Contemporaries

Analyzing Scientific Discourse in the Works of Margaret Cavendish and Her Contemporaries

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By Mel Williams, English Ph.D. Student Overview Currently, the Women Writers Online collection contains 32 texts by Margaret Cavendish, spanning philosophy, poetry, plays, and scientific reflection, making her the most extensively represented early modern woman writer in the collection. Cavendish distinguishes herself as an author through her diverse genres and her insightful and often critical engagement with contemporary scientific and philosophical discourses. In 1667, she became the first woman invited to a meeting of the Royal Society, one of the…

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New Visualizations Highlight the Impact of Gender on Early Modern Scientific Networks

New Visualizations Highlight the Impact of Gender on Early Modern Scientific Networks

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The “New Digital Methods for Understanding The Impacts of Early Women Writers on the Development of Science and Philosophy” project has released the first set of visualizations exploring the roles that women played, and could have played, in early modern scientific discourse. This project is a London-Boston, collaborative project between Northeastern University London, the PolyGraphs project, the NULab, and the Women Writers Project (the project PIs are Sarah Connell, Julia Flanders, Brian Ball, and Peter West). The project examines and highlights the impacts of…

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Celebrating More Than Thirty Years of the Women Writers Project

Celebrating More Than Thirty Years of the Women Writers Project

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The WWP is delighted to announce the release of Always in Progress: Three Decades of the Women Writers Project, a documentary by John Melson. Work on this documentary began in 2018 as part of the WWP’s celebrations of the project’s thirtieth anniversary. This milestone marked an opportunity to reflect on the WWP’s decades of work bringing texts by pre-Victorian women writers out of the archive to make them accessible to a wide audience of teachers, students, and scholars. The documentary shares…

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Reading Between the Lines Part II: A Mini Blog Series Investigating A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison

Reading Between the Lines Part II: A Mini Blog Series Investigating A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison

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By Claire Lavarreda, NULab/DITI Research Fellow and World History Ph.D. student I. Introduction In the first entry of the “Reading Between the Lines” series, we investigated how Mary Jemison (a white woman captured and adopted by a Seneca family) portrayed women and gender in her work, A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison. Jemison was strongly influenced by her biological and adoptive mothers, as well as her adoptive sisters, and these bonds reveal the complex way Jemison viewed fellow women. Brave, tender, intelligent—in…

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Reading Between the Lines: A Mini Blog Series Investigating A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison

Reading Between the Lines: A Mini Blog Series Investigating A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison

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By Claire Lavarreda, NULab/DITI Research Fellow and World History Ph.D. student   I. Introduction “Mother, from the time we were taken, had manifested a great degree of fortitude, and encouraged us to support our troubles without complaining; and by her conversation seemed to make the distance and time shorter, and the way more smooth. But father lost all his ambition in the beginning of our trouble, and continued apparently lost to every care—absorbed in melancholy. Here, as before, she insisted on the…

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