2   M.

VAN ELK

Women writers were profoundly affected by these changes. On the one

hand, the questioning of the social order that accompanied the decline of
absolutism opened up opportunities for literary and non-literary expres-
sion. The inception of the public sphere, whether we regard it as a sin-
gle arena or as made up of temporary, small-scale gatherings in publics
and counterpublics, potentially offered women venues within which to
make themselves heard. But at the same time, the new idea that domes-
ticity and privacy were contrasted to the public realm strengthened the
long-­standing prohibition on female public speech. McKeon’s approach,
in other words, opens up productive avenues of investigation into the
impact of the separation of public and private on women writers in par-
ticular. Moreover, he describes broad developments that were not unique
to England. Just across the channel was the Dutch Republic, a place where
absolutism had also been subjected to “explicitation,” where a burgeoning
pamphlet literature allowed for the formation of something akin to public
opinion, and where the ideology of domesticity was articulated in espe-
cially forceful ways, both in prescriptive literature and in art.
This study asks how English and Dutch women writers were affected by
and responded to the vast cultural and political shifts of the seventeenth
century. How did women writers in these countries come to understand
public roles for women, and how did they position their own work in
relation to the public/private divide? I propose that there is much to be
gained from comparing the writings by women from different countries
in light of the far-reaching changes sketched by McKeon. A focus on con-
ceptions of public and private in women’s texts helps us assess the cultural
climates within which they wrote and to which they responded. My explo-
ration of the various kinds of female “publicities” in texts by women shows
that regardless of their social, cultural, and religious background, women
writers frequently represented themselves and other women writers along
the lines of a traditional model of absolutist power and publicity. Although
there is a good deal of variety in their formulations, this model continued
to authorize women’s writing, even in the face of the decline of absolut-
ism, and allowed them to counter the new emphases on the household,
which were beginning to compromise female agency in the public realm.
Early Modern Women’s Writing offers in-depth readings of texts pro-
duced by Dutch women, in many cases for the first time, along with a
fresh perspective on English women writers, particularly on their royalist
­self-­presentation in response to the Civil Wars. If English women writ-
ers articulated their public authority on the basis of royalist principles,