An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex: In a Letter to a Lady

The full name under which the Essay was first published is An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex, In Which are Inserted the Characters of a Pendant, a Squire, a Beau, a Vertuoso, a Poetaster, a City-Critick, &C., in a letter to a lady. Published in L ... Read more

The full name under which the Essay was first published is An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex, In Which are Inserted the Characters of a Pendant, a Squire, a Beau, a Vertuoso, a Poetaster, a City-Critick, &C., in a letter to a lady. Published in London by Roper and E[lizabeth] Wilkinson in 1696, the author was listed only as "a Lady." For many years, the work was attributed to Mary Astell, a contemporary of Drake and author of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies and other works. However, authorship is now decidedly attributed to Drake. Her name is listed in a Curll catalogue issued after 1741 as the author, and the second edition of the Essay included a poem dedicated to the author by James Drake. The Essay is written in the form of a letter to a female friend. It purports to be inspired by a conversation between several gentlemen and ladies. Drake first constructed the rationalist framework used at that time to explain women's intellectual inferiority, especially using John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. She then proceeded to show that this rationale was outdated, and in this modern time, women would benefit from a greater knowledge. Only two works using this kind of rationalist argument had been used for a feminist argument before, and only one of those was written in English. Besides her rational arguments, Drake also wrote sketches of various stereotypes among men: the Pedant, the Country Squire, the News-monger, the Bully, the City-Critick, and the Beau. She uses these pictures to remind her readers that men, also, had follies. Less