Revolting Women · Part 4
The Long Silence After Revolution — and Why It Never Really Was
After the political upheavals of the seventeenth century, women appear less often in the most familiar political narratives. The surviving record suggests something more complicated than simple withdrawal.
This article was first published in August 2025. It is reproduced here in revised form as part of the permanent Samuel Stephen Chronicles research archive.
After 1649
The original article began with the Leveller women who petitioned Parliament in 1649. Their visibility mattered because petitioning had become one of the ways ordinary people could press political claims directly upon government.
After the Restoration, the Act against Tumultuous Petitioning of 1661 restricted large-scale petitioning. The Act was not written specifically as a measure against women, but it narrowed a political form in which women had participated prominently during the revolutionary decades.
That distinction matters. The legislation did not make women politically silent. It changed the channels through which collective political pressure could be expressed.
The record becomes harder to see
The apparent quiet of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can be misleading if political activity is sought only in parliamentary debates and formal office-holding. Women continued to appear in other kinds of evidence: petitions, food disturbances, enclosure disputes, correspondence, printed argument and local protest.
In that sense, the ‘silence’ is partly a problem of where historians look. An absence from the central institutional record is not the same thing as an absence from political life.
Markets, food and the ‘moral economy’
The original article pointed to food disturbances as one important arena. When prices rose sharply, women could be highly visible in crowds that attempted to enforce what contemporaries regarded as a fair or customary price for grain and bread.
Later historians, most famously E. P. Thompson, described this wider culture of popular expectation as a moral economy. The term should not be used to imply that every crowd acted for identical reasons, but it helps explain why market intervention could be understood by participants as legitimate defence of customary rights rather than simple criminal disorder.
Enclosure and customary rights
Women also appear in disputes over enclosure and access to common resources. Gleaning, grazing and fuel-gathering could be central to household survival. When those rights were challenged, resistance could take forms that rarely enter conventional political histories: removing fences, defending customary access and participating in village protest.
Such episodes are especially important to this series because they demonstrate how political conflict can survive outside formal institutions.
Jacobite networks and political communication
The original piece also drew attention to women in Jacobite networks during the risings of 1715 and 1745. Women could carry messages, conceal fugitives, move money and sustain political loyalties within households and kinship networks.
The surviving material is uneven and should not be turned into a claim that women formed a single coherent political bloc. What it does show is that political participation did not disappear simply because formal institutions remained overwhelmingly male.
Arguments in print
Women were also present in the intellectual record. Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies appeared in 1694. Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman followed in 1792. Their arguments differed in context and purpose, but both demonstrate that questions of women’s education, reason and social position remained politically alive long before the nineteenth-century suffrage campaigns.
Chartism and the nineteenth century
Industrialisation and mass politics created new arenas of participation. Female Chartist associations organised meetings, circulated material and supported petitioning even though the formal Charter itself demanded political rights for men.
Again, the evidential point is narrower than a simple story of continuous feminist progress. Women’s political participation could expand, contract and change form according to the opportunities and restrictions of a particular moment.
What the series is really showing
Across the four articles, a recurring pattern emerges:
- in 1381, women appear in legal records of revolt even when narrative chronicles minimise them;
- in the Pilgrimage of Grace, women appear as supporters, couriers, advisers and, in Margaret Bulmer’s case, as a person executed for treason;
- during the Civil War and revolutionary decades, women petitioned, published, gathered intelligence, financed causes and defended strongholds;
- after the Restoration, political participation continued through different and often less institutionally visible forms.
The strongest conclusion is therefore not that women were systematically absent and later ‘rediscovered’. It is that different kinds of records preserve different kinds of political activity. If historians look only at official office-holding, legislation and elite narrative, much of that activity becomes difficult to see.
The long silence?
The original title called the period a ‘long silence’. The evidence assembled in the article points in the opposite direction. What changed was visibility, access and record type.
Women did not disappear from political life. They continued to act through markets, households, local communities, print culture, religious networks and later mass political movements. The archive becomes more fragmented, but it does not become empty.
That is the wider argument of Revolting Women: not that every rebellion was secretly led by women, but that political history becomes distorted when only the most institutionally visible actors are counted.
