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323
Women, Feminism, and Religion in Early Enlightenment England. Sarah
Apetrei. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 325 pp.
$95.00. ISBN 978-0-51396-8.
Feminism began as a form of Christianity. This statement encapsulates
Sarah Apetrei’s most expansive claim in this rewarding piece of intellectual
history. More specifically, this Christian feminism emerged in the period of
1680–1710 in both philosophical circles and prophetic groups, especially
among the Quakers and Philadelphians (6–9, 17). Yet, Apetrei argues,
these two movements, usually studied separately, came to their religious
feminism through shared influences, historical contexts, and direct interactions. Apetrei marks these links in the two halves of the book, which focus,
respectively, on Mary Astell and the prophetic groups. In making her case,
Apetrei engages in and expands the conversation about religion found
in such studies as the edited volume Women, Gender, and Enlightenment
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Indeed, Apetrei concludes that the religious
feminism thus forged plays a crucial role in creating the diachronic context
necessary for fully understanding Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminism (285).
While Apetrei’s work promises to offer insights for those interested
in Wollstonecraft studies, she also insists that scholars of seventeenthcentury women, historians and literary critics alike can learn something
from recent work on the period of the Enlightenment and that of such
early modernists as Brad Gregory. The specific lesson these studies teach
their early modernist peers is to take religion seriously as a generative
phenomenon instead of viewing it primarily as something that “[w]omen
transcend, negotiate, manipulate and exploit” (27, see also 28–30, 43).
Apetrei’s point, however, goes beyond this generative claim; she positions
her work as a contribution to the ongoing “religious turn” in some literary
and historical circles. Apetrei embraces ideas of the Shakespearean scholar,
Julia Reinhard Lupton, who summarizes this movement’s critical position on religion as a distinct phenomenon that searches for the universal
(42). In desiring to contribute to intellectual history from this perspective,
Apetrei argues that particular religious positions and experiences enabled
some early Enlightenment religious thinkers and visionaries to conceive
of women’s dignity as “something like an ‘innate idea’” that has universal
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implications (46). From this epistemological base, a Christian feminism
took shape.
A key concept enabling this “innate idea” among Apetrei’s eighteenthcentury visionaries and philosophers is reason. For Mary Astell and other
second-generation English Platonists, the type of reason in question is
not exactly the basic human faculty of reason, although human reason
does play a role. Instead, it is her Christological position; Christ is the
immanent presence of universal reason in people and serves as a route to
divine knowledge and wisdom (127–28). It is divinely infused reason that
allows Apetrei to connect Astell and the mystical authors. She argues that
these women and a few men collectively embraced what might be called a
passive experimentalism of inner revelation that stood against and above
the reason tied to “sensual nature” (258, see also 128, 257–60). The exact
way in which spirit and reason relate to each other varies depending on
who is speaking and, in this period, resists any easy gendered binary. In
making this point, Apetrei explicitly challenges gender models proposed
by Anita Guerrini and Phyllis Mack (18–19). Finally, this inspirational
reason, which makes access to innate ideas possible, serves to refute the
understanding of early modern visionaries as anti-rationalists.
Apetrei’s major subjects share another element in their anthropological thinking: a more positive stance on human nature than other contemporary strands of English Protestantism offered. Importantly, this optimistic
anthropology fosters notions of sexual equality and is linked with a shift
“emphasiz[ing] God’s attributes of mercy and justice over his wrath and
inscrutability” (211). Of course, a God who is primarily moved by love
and mercy is not likely to foreordain a rather arbitrary elect, leaving the
rest to be damned. Instead, these early Enlightenment feminists developed
a universalist soteriology. The salvation they spoke of relates to the incarnation and its effects. In comparable ways, Astell and the prophets argue
that the incarnation and crucifixion began an ontological transformation
of humanity, bringing persons closer to their pre-lapsarian selves. There
are two important corollaries to this point. The first is sexual equality, and
the second establishes women, not men, as better representations of God
because they share his maternally associated qualities of mercy and love.
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As the preceding sentence indicates, there exists a certain degree of
tension in these Christian feminists’ religious worldviews between equality
and female superiority. I draw attention to this tension because it impacts
Apetrei’s rationale for reclaiming the term feminism as a useful descriptor for her subjects. Apetrei argues for the existence of a trans-historical
“theoretical feminism” composed of three core characteristics: an insistence
on the sexes’ basic equality in “moral, intellectual and spiritual status,”
critiques of strategies that promote male domination, and, finally, claims
that societies’ gendered hierarchies occur because of cultural, not natural,
causes (32, emphasis in original). While overall Apetrei makes a strong
case for the women and men of her study articulating versions of these
claims, she leaves unaddressed the moments where her Christian feminists
assert female superiority, not equality, in moral, intellectual, or spiritual
status (51–52, 56, 60, 64–65, 115, 183). Although these tensions may not
be enough to scuttle Apetrei’s reclamation project, they are something that
probably should have been addressed. As it is, the reader must decide how
to square the superiority claims with those of equality in light of Apetrei’s
definition of feminism.
I have only a few other quibbles with this engaging study. For example, Apetrei uses with some frequency terms such as “heretic” and “papist”
even though more neutral descriptors, such as Quakers, Unitarians, and
Catholics, are readily available (10, 13, 79, 146, 209). Also I wonder if
Apetrei would make exactly the same claim about gender equality and
liberalism if she had engaged with Katherine Gillespie’s Domesticity and
Dissent in the Seventeenth Century: English Women Writers and the Public
Sphere (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004) (11). Nonetheless, these small
weaknesses are offset by a compelling and well developed thesis and a
thorough introduction, which could serve upper-level undergraduates and
graduate students well as a status quaestionis on several issues. The study
would also interest scholars working on the history of feminism, women
and the Enlightenment, and students of religion in early modern England
more generally.
William E. Smith III
Independent Scholar
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