English Protestant poet, best-known for her feminist polemical tract, A Mouzell for Melastomus (1617) Born in London, Rachel Speght was the daughter of the Calvinist minister and author James Speght. Speght’s father oversaw her humanist education, which included biblical and religious studies, Latin grammar, logic, and the classical authors, and he promoted her writing and publication. A member of the English middle class, she dedicated her texts to women, among whom was her godmother, Mary Moundford, the wife of Thomas Moundford, a physician and also a writer.
Speght became a public figure when she entered the querelle des femmes, the debate on women’s rights that was already raging on the continent, with her publication of the feminist tract, A Mouzell for Melastomus, The cynicall Bayter of, and foule mouthed Barker against Evahs Sex (1617), a work in prose. The first Englishwoman to publish a feminist tract under her own name, Speght wrote her work in response to Joseph Swetnam’s The Arignment of Lewde, idle, froward and unconstant women (1615). It is unclear whether she first presented the Mouzell to publisher and bookseller Thomas Archer (who had also published Swetnam’s text), or if Archer approached Speght and solicited her manuscript to increase his sales. Speght’s learned references to the classics and the Bible in her response to Swetnam’s misogynist work betray both her Protestant learning and her humanist education in rhetoric. Speght dismisses King Solomon’s inability to find one virtuous woman among one thousand, for example, claiming it points more to Solomon’s unfortunate choices regarding women than it does the nature of the female sex. Her sense of humor is also apparent in an addendum to the Mouzell, in which, labeling Swetnam an “Asse,” she mocks the flaws in grammar and logic that appear in his tract.
Inspired by the death of her mother, Speght’s second and final poem, Mortalities Memorandum with a Dreame Prefixed (1621), stands as a meditation on death and the transience of human life. “No less feminist because couched in metaphors and rhetorical flouishes,” Marion Wynne Davies writes of the Mortalities, Speght’s dream vision “is re-sexed to display a woman’s point of view, while her account of death commences with a vigorous defence of Eve” (1996, 360—361). Reasserting her authorship of the Mouzell, which apparently had been contested, Speght writes in her preface to the Mortalities that a motive for this publication is to “divulge this spring of my endeavor, to [those] . . . who have formerly deprived me of my due” (Speght 1996, 45).
Little is known of the remainder of Speght’s life. She married William Procter, a cleric who became a Calvinist minister like her father, on 6 August 1621. Baptism records of two children, Rachel (26 February 1627) and William (15 December 1630), identify Minister William Procter as their father. There is no reference to the children’s mother, but their Christian names point to the Speght-Procter union. William Procter published the sermon, The Watchman Warning, in 1624 and died in 1653; there is no record of Rachel Speght’s death.
Michele Osherow
See also Education, Humanism, and Women; Feminism; Querelle des Femmes.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
O’Malley, Susan Gushee, ed. The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works, Part 1, Printed Writings, 1500—1640, Volume 4, Defences of Women, Jane Anger, Rachel Speght, Ester Sowernam, and Constantia Munda.
Hants, NS, and Brookfield, UK: Scolar Press Series, 1996.
Speght, Rachel. The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Speght. Edited by Barbara Kiefer Lewalski. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Secondary Sources
Walker, Kim. Women Writers of the English Renaissance. New York:Twayne Publishers, 1996. Wynne-Davies, Marion, ed. Women Poets of the Renaissance. New York: Routledge, 1999.
World History
