Of Home and Bondage

Abstract If women of the seventeenth century were looking for ways to participate in the progress of the enlightenment, whether in philosophy, religion, or science, from a home or a convent, sometimes using the tools of domesticity, in the eighteenth century, their ambition took on a more political turn. Women began to ask more pointedly how they could be free, if they were confined to a home. Toward the end of the century, in the context of the French Revolution, they asked how their domestic status could be reconciled with citizenship. This will be the topic of Chapter 6. The present chapter looks at what women who wrote in English and had ties with England thought about domestic power structures, and particularly about the compatibility of freedom and domesticity. I begin with Mary Astell’s Reflections Upon Marriage, and progressively make my way to the end of the century through Phillis Wheatley Peters’ letters and poems, Mary Wollstonecraft’s works, and finally, Mary Prince’s Narrative.