When did feminism start in England? If you’re in the mood, you could start with Boudicca–warrior queen who took a hefty bite out of the Roman army and turned Roman towns to cinders–but let’s start with Anne Wentworth instead. She was fiery but not in as literal a way. 

Admittedly, Wentworth’s a random place to start, but so’s Boudicca. The real answer is that feminism doesn’t have any single starting point, so I’m almost playing fair here.

Anne Wentworth was born in 1629. Or 1630. Close enough since we’re too late to send a birthday card. The Romans were long gone by then and she was no warrior, but she fought the good fight. 

Even more irrelevant photo than usual: Madron Holy Well, Cornwall. The strips of cloth (and hair scrunchies, and dog bags) represent– Well, they represent whatever the people who left them there wanted them to represent: prayers, wishes, respect, anything else you can think of. I found them oddly moving.

Anne Wentworth steps out of line

Her story starts off conventionally enough: She married William Wentworth–probably a glove dealer–in her early twenties and they had a daughter. They lived in London and were (this gets less conventional) Anabaptists, a small and persecuted religious group that was a forerunner of (improbable list warning here) the Baptists, Mennonites, and Quakers. 

For eighteen years, the Wentworths lived together unhappily. Or at least Anne was unhappy. She later described herself as suffering “great oppression and sorrow of heart.” I don’t know the details, and I’d be surprised if she published them. They weren’t the point, but she did write about being “grossly abused” mentally and physically and she described William as a “scourge and lash,” so that she “lived in misery.”

That’s not the misery memoir we expect today but it was shocking at a time when women were expected to put up with whatever situation their marriages had landed them in and shut up about it.

In 1670, when their daughter was about ten, Anne had what she considered a visit from god.

As she later described it, she came down with a “hectic fever,” nearly died, and came out of the experience believing god had spared her for a reason. It was time to stop living a lie and to start–yes, folks–prophesying. And prophesy she did, which neither her church nor her husband welcomed.   

The sequence of events may be clear to the experts but they’re not to me, so let’s throw any attempt at a timeline out the window. What I can piece together is this:

• She and the church parted ways, although it’s not clear whether she walked out or was pushed.  
• Her husband locked her out of the house and destroyed her writings,
• in spite of which, she published four accounts of her experience, including: A True Account of Anne Wentworth’s Being Cruelly, Unjustly, and Unchristianly Dealt With by Some of Those People Called Anabaptists (1676; no one went in for understatement back then) and A Vindication of Anne Wentworth (1677).
• Anne and her daughter hid from William for a while. 
• A year after he pitched her out, with the help of her supporters she got back into the house and changed the locks.

Giving the church a right of rebuttal

I’m not sure what document we’re quoting here–that’s a problem when you work with secondary sources–but her church considered her a “proud, passionate, revengeful, discontented, and mad woman,” (you may have figured out by now that proud wasn’t a compliment, especially for a woman). She had “unduly published things to the prejudice and scandal of [her] husband” and had “wickedly left him.” They charged her with “rejecting and neglecting their church” and with “dissatisfying” her husband.

Gender and timing

If that doesn’t convince you that gender was an issue, I’m not sure what will, but gender doesn’t entirely account for why Wentworth’s prophecies weren’t a smash hit. Her timing was off. The high tide of prophecy had passed. After the execution of Charles I, Cromwell’s Protectorate, and the religious upheaval associated with all of that, a lot of people were nervous about inventive religions. They figured the world had received all the prophesies it needed, thanks, and everybody could just make do with what they had.

Still, if you have a visit from god–or if you’re convinced you do, anyway–you’re probably not going to say, “Couldn’t you have told me this twenty years ago?” Wentworth was sure she was living in the end times and god had chosen her as his “battleaxe,” so she did battle with her pen.

Her timing was also bad in that she predicted the would happen apocalypse before New Year’s Day 1678, even thoughtfully warning Charles II and London’s lord mayor about it. 

Then it didn’t happen, which will lose any prophet a bit of credibility, not to mention popularity, but she kept on writing and continued to have supporters–see above about the people who helped her get back into her house. 

She wouldn’t be the last prophet to get the timing wrong on the apocalypse, and probably not the first either. Let’s not hold it against her.

So what makes her a feminist?

The word didn’t exist, so she wouldn’t have considered herself one. The first recorded use is from the 19th century and it was used to mean nothing more than the state of being feminine.  

How the world has changed.

But in the face of opposition from husband and church, she claimed the right to speak and publish the truth as she saw it, and at a time when the idea that a woman shouldn’t be dominated by a man was almost unthinkable, she thought it. And went public with the thought. 

It must’ve scared the hell out of her. She wrote, “Here is a case that cannot possible be brought to an end without coming into the publick view of the World, though it is so contrary unto my nature, that I would rather suffer unto death than be in any publick way; but am constrained now, & thrust out by the mighty power of God, who overpowers me, that I must no longer confer with flesh and blood, and yield to my own reason of my weakness, foolishness, and fearful slavish nature, that am daunted with a look of any terrible, fierce, angry man.”

After that, the passage gets so religious, not to mention so 17th century, that I wandered off to feed the cats, but even if Wentworth and I pour our passion into different molds, I have to respect hers.