The Tory roots of feminism and radicalism: English literature and politics, 1660--1740

The Tory Roots of Feminism and Radicalism: English Literature and Politics, 1660--1740 explores the contradictory nexus of Tory-royalist politics and proto-feminism and radicalism in Restoration and early eighteenth-century literature, Analyzing poems, plays, political writings, and philosophical treatises by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Aphra Behn, Mary Astell, Jonathan Swift, and others, I argue that what critics have called "Tory radicalism" and "Tory feminism" need to be understood as parallel and intertwined. The point of intersection, my dissertation demonstrates, is the experience of political and social disenfranchisement at a historical moment when sex and status were not clearly differentiated. Because Tory patriarchalism perceived sex as a form of social status, "Toryism" encouraged an unexpected alliance among an increasingly disempowered male gentry and aristocracy, commoners, and women.;Radicalism between the Restoration and the French Revolution remains a neglected area of study. Feminist scholars of the period have become increasingly interested in feminism's strange birth out of royalist patriarchalism, but they have largely understood this incongruity as particular to women's unique history and concerns. My dissertation extends the studies of Tory feminism by Ruth Perry, Catherine Gallagher, and Joan Kinnaird by putting them in dialogue with work on Tory radicalism by Christopher Hill, Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, and Isaac Kramnick. My project both situates early feminist writers in the broader political context of the Tory denunciation of Whig corruption, and argues that Tory radical writers also express a contingent alliance with women. The central writers my project examines distrust the emergent market society's promise of "equal opportunity." In its rejection of the modern leveling impulse that would replace the hierarchies of status, the Tory radical, Tory feminist protest relies on an ideology of "difference," a version of the aristocratic equation of birth and worth, which both recalls the hierarchies of feudalism and anticipates the economic and corporeal materialisms central to modern radicalism and feminism alike.