Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle

Abstract

Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673) was one of the few women in seventeenth-century England to write about natural philosophy.2 How was it possible for a woman to do philosophy at a time when women were excluded from university and academy? Had Margaret Cavendish not been of elevated rank, it is unlikely that she would have been a philosopher. The privileges of rank gave her access to a world of philosophy. Cavendish was born Margaret Lucas, daughter of Thomas Lucas of the lesser gentry of Colchester. As she recorded in her autobiography, she had little formal education, and what education she had was that suited to a lady — singing, dancing, “playing on music,” reading, writing, and the like.3 Though women were not “suffer’d to be instructed in Schools and Universities,” as she never tired of reminding her readers, this did not dampen her appetite for ideas, for (as she wrote some years later) “thoughts are free, [and we women] may as well read in our Closets, as Men in their Colleges.”4