Women Writers Project

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More

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…

Read More Read More