Women Writing Race in the Seventeenth-Century English Atlantic: Civil Agents [Hardcover]

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.

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.

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 in this book were writing in various textual modes and span boundaries of ideology, class, religion and race: Royalist writer Margaret Cavendish; notorious German princess 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 early English Atlantic engaged civility as a concept and an idiom whose racialist implications were becoming codified. Some of the women analyzed embraced and leveraged the practice of civility as a form of agency, while others resisted and were marginalized by it.