“The women of the property-owning class will always fanatically defend the exploitation and enslavement of the working people, by which they indirectly receive the means for their socially useless existence.”
Rosa Luxemburg
Naomi Baker’s new book is to be commended as she has rescued a significant number of radical Women of the seventeenth century from what E.P. Thompson once called the “enormous condescension of posterity”.[1] History and Historians in general have not been kind to women who were radicalised during the English Revolution. There is a dearth of material on women’s struggle. No major biography exists of two of the most important Leveller women, Katherine Chidley and Elizabeth Lilburne.
Baker is a senior lecturer in English Literature at the University of Manchester. Her new book is well written and is a meticulous examination of women who not only had to battle against their male counterparts but also had to struggle against the violent attacks of the English aristocracy and sections of the bourgeoisie who refused to accept their democratic right to protest against social inequality and tyranny.
Radical Religious Women of the Seventeenth Century is set within the context of the long political crisis of the 17th century, which saw commercial expansion, the rise of towns and manufacturers, a crisis of monarchy and landed privilege, and produced an explosive alignment of forces. As Frederick Engels shows,
“When Europe emerged from the Middle Ages, the rising middle-class of the towns constituted its revolutionary element. It had conquered a recognised position within medieval feudal organisation, but this position, too, had become too narrow for its expansive power. The development of the middle-class, the bourgeoisie, became incompatible with the maintenance of the feudal system; the feudal system, therefore, had to fall.”[2]
As Engel correctly states, the seventeenth century was a period of social and economic upheaval in which religious dissent fused with emerging political and social currents. The decomposition of feudalism led to the emergence of new classes and struggles. The rapid growth of sects like the Quakers and Ranters, which fueled peasant and urban uprisings, was bound up with transformations in production and class alignments.
Women such as Anne Hutchinson, Margaret Fell, Lady Anne Conway, Katherine Chidley, and the many unnamed women who participated in sects (Quakers, Ranters, Levellers’ sympathisers, and radical Baptists) played vital roles in contesting clerical and state authority, defending popular religious autonomy, and advancing early arguments for conscience, equality and popular rights. Their struggles are best understood as part of the bourgeois revolutions and the awakening of radical thought, which began with the Reformation and culminated in the 1640 English bourgeois revolution.
Religious sects took full advantage of the world turned upside down, undertaking radical pamphleteering and mass mobilisation. This created political spaces where women, both poor and rich, could express themselves as radicals, preachers, writers, and organisers. Baker believes there was no single “school”; women appeared across all economic, political, and social tendencies, but upon reading the book, it seems a significant number were protesting against social inequality. As Christopher Hill observed, the English Revolution helped many women both to establish their own independence and to visualise a total escape for the poorer classes. It was the poorer classes that suffered the greatest degradation regularly through jail, torture, war and disease.
Margaret Fell was a Quaker who combined religious dissent with organisational work within meetings and through pamphlets, arguing for spiritual equality in ways that had political consequences. The Levellers included women like Katherine Chidley, who wrote, “Have we not an equal interest with the men of this Nation, in those liberties and securities contained in the Petition of Right, and the other good laws of the land? Are any of our lives, limbs, liberties or goods to be taken from us more than from men, but by due process of law and conviction of twelve sworn men of the neighbourhood”?[3]
Leveller women like Chidley supported petitions, military grievances, and political club activity; they pressed for legal changes and denounced arbitrary power. Ranters and some Diggers, though numerically smaller, pushed the limits of acceptable discourse, challenging sexual, familial, and proprietary norms. Large numbers of women-led relief networks, parochial committees and protests against price rises and conscription-like abuses, linking economic suffering to political demands.
These activities were expressions of class interests formed by material necessity: survival, defence of household livelihoods, resistance to arbitrary levies and enclosures. For many women, the fight for social and political equality would be their first involvement in politics. It can be said without contradiction that women like Katherine Chidley and Elizabeth Lilburne laid the basis for future struggles of working-class women, such as the suffragettes.
The phenomenon of radical religious women in the seventeenth century — sectarians, prophetic preachers, petitioners and organisers among Quakers, Ranters, Baptists and other sects should be grasped scientifically by placing it in the framework of historical materialism. These women did not act in a vacuum: their ideas, forms of organisation and modes of struggle were rooted in shifting modes of production, class relations and state power.
Marxism begins from the premise that the economic base shapes the ideological superstructure. Religious movements did not float free of material life; they arose from and reflect concrete social relations. As Karl Marx maintained, there is a dialectical relationship between the economic base and the ideological superstructure writing in the book A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy he makes the following point “In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life.”[4]
Acts carried out by female radicals should be analysed dialectically: the religious idiom contained egalitarian content (an attack on hierarchical priesthood, the struggle for spiritual equality developed into political militancy, but it also carried conservative potential that confined it to moral appeals without linking it to collective economic struggle.
Naomi Baker’s” interest in seventeenth-century radical religious women is commendable, but the struggle of these women should be treated as a social phenomenon rooted in material conditions. Individual biographies and religious language matter, but only within a historical‑materialist account that connects ideas to class relations, production, and the state.
Radical women who expressed religious language or organised through faith-based networks must be analysed in relation to the continuity of such traditions. Are the struggles of these women grounded just in the defence of household subsistence, wages, or communal relief, or do they articulate wider class demands? Seventeenth-century women were moved from religious protest to political action; their modern counterparts must be evaluated by whether their struggles advance class action or merely moral protest.
There is a Contemporary relevance to this book. For a Marxist, the emancipation of women is inseparable from the socialist revolution. Historically, religious radicalism only played a progressive role when it politicised oppressed layers and helped forge independent class organisations. But it becomes reactionary when it replaced class struggle with appeals to conscience, charity, or bourgeois courts. Thus, comparing Naomi Baker’s seventeenth-century radical women with today’s radicals is useful only to the extent that it helps activists draw lessons for the upcoming socialist revolution.
[1] E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), 12.
[2] Socialism: Utopian and Scientific- Friedrich Engels, 1880
[3] Women’s Petition (1649)-From J. O’Faolain and L Martines, Not in God’s Image (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), pp. 266-267.
[4] A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
A Trumpet of Sedition 