“That tyrant custom”: the politics of custom in the poetry and prose of Augustan women writers

Abstract

The Augustan Age saw a rise in the number of women who published polemical texts in defence of their sex. Natural Philosophy and Cartesian rationalism greatly influenced these writers in their arguments againstthe nature- and scripture-based beliefs in women's inherent inferiority, but so too did seventeenth-century political debates between patriarchalists (Tories) and contractarians (Whigs). Whilst claiming their rights as free men, male Whig authors would often denounce Custom's arbitrary influence over political powerstructures and succession within the state, but they did not usually extend their arguments about Custom's tyranny to include its negative effects on women. Exasperated by double standards, Augustan women writers adapted the rhetoric of Whig partisan politics in their polemical, protofeminist texts in order to highlight both the shortcomings of Whig logic and the inequalities between men and women in the state and in the family. By decrying Custom's adverse effects on women, protofeminist writers carried liberal logic through to their genderdebates where Whig authors had faltered in partisan politics.