She points out that Saint Paul had been taught by his mother and grandmother; she decries ‘Mans Scholastick Learning’, which, she says, has too frequently been set up to contradict the Scriptures; she notes that the words ‘she’ and ‘he’ are identical in the original text. She blames the Roman Catholic Church for equating God with ‘an old Man with a corporeal Substance,’ and rebukes those who will not recognise the truth when God ‘brings the knowledge of it to light by a Woman.’ Both sexes, she says, are required to search the scripture, which will tell them that ‘God has often imployed Women in declaring his truth.’ Furthermore, Sophia or the spirit of wisdom is an aspect of Christ, who therefore partakes of both genders: ‘Christ is sometimes spoken of as a he, and sometimes as a she.
Sounds pretty contemporary, doesn’t it, give or take an odd spelling or two? In fact it is what Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present (Cambridge University Press, online by subscription) has to say about A Full and Clear Account the Scripture gives of the Deity, which was published by M. Marsin in 1700. We don’t know much about M. Marsin: not her Christian name, not where or when she was born or where or when she died. We only know that she was running some little business before she gave this up to walk the more than 100 miles from her own place to London in order to get her theological ideas into print. And her theological ideas include a lively strain of ‘feminism’.
She seems to have begun publishing in 1696 with three tracts or pamphlets (though it’s hard to be sure, since not all the pamphlets of this time are definitively ascribed or securely dated). She sold her own works at prices ranging from tenpence to one shilling and sixpence. Next year she took up the cudgels for women with The Womans Advocate, which points out that it is not women but learned men who have historically misread the Bible, that nowadays women are allowed to read and interpret for themselves, and that women were the first people to see Christ after he rose from the dead.
In 1700 she published, as well as A Full and Clear Account, another “feminist” tract, Good News to the Good Women (which, she explains, is also addressed “to the Bad Women too that will grow better”). This relates the part played by both kinds of women in history (in the Old and New Testament) and also looks forward to the future. Christ’s Second Coming, she says, will put an end to the inequality of women. Then “the Husband will not be above the Wife, nor the Wife above the Husband; but as they were in the first Creation, before Sin entred into the World.” Women will then “be deliver’d from that Bondage, which some has [sic] found intollerable.”
M. Marsin’s last known work was long for her at forty pages: Two Remarkable Females of Womankind, advertised for sale on 10 July 1701. Here she calls for a college or institution to be founded for the “Instruction of young Women in Piety and Knowledge . . . how to read the Scriptures, so as to understand what they read.” Had she been reading Mary Astell? If only we knew! Some of their religious opinions could hardly have been more different, yet on matters of gender they shared important common ground.
The last sentence of Orlando‘s section on Marsin’s writing says: “She remained probably the most ‘feminist’ voice in English theology until the even more obscure Lucy Hutton a century after her.”
So click on Lucy Hutton. This time, though we have no birth date, we have a death date – 9 January 1788 – because somebody wrote it into the British Library’s copy of her Six Sermonicles; or, Discourses on the Punishment of Eve. The same person recorded Hutton’s name – only because one can’t be quite certain about the handwriting she (or, of course, her husband) may have been called Hulton, not Hutton at all.
Hutton, or Hulton, published one text which seems not to survive: Letters on the Antediluvian Females, that is on women who lived before Noah’s flood, in the age of the patriarchs. This must have been an imaginative work, because the Bible says almost nothing about those women (just a few names: Adah, Zillah, and Naamah, and of course who their husbands were).
Hutton’s Sermonicles, published at Kendal in the Lake District, might easily have met the same fate as her first book: only two copies are known to survive, one in London and one at Urbana, Illinois. And why Sermonicles, not Sermons? Why, “to keep in view the pre-eminence of men,” of course. Hutton seems to have been an ironist as well as a radically original thinker. “I have tried in my obscure retreat to think for my self,” she writes: a fine and fighting credo for any woman in a patriarchal world.
This Lake District author takes a more familiar and personal line than Marsin: she reacts with personal hurt and indignation to misogynist sentiments, whether from St Paul or Milton. Any attempt to suggest that women are inferior “contradicts my whole habit of thinking from infancy.” But she finds it easy to explain how these writers came to be so mistaken, and is confident that her “sisters” can instruct their children to avoid their mistakes and therefore to be wiser than the saint or the epic poet. She is full of unusual ideas. Adam cannot have named everything before Eve was created, so Eve did some naming too. There was sex in Paradise, and Eve may have been pregnant at the time of the Fall, but if so she would have miscarried. Eve, she says, was created equal, but women since then have lived in subjection: she wishes she could help her sex by “unravel[ling] the twisted line of love, duty, and pleasure,” and she calls on men to meet women half-way in becoming more like unfallen Eve.
She died before this book was published, so someone at Kendal must have published it for her. Marsin, on the other hand, was still expecting when her final work appeared that she would publish more. What happened? How can these two extraordinary women have been so forgotten? They remind us that anyone struggling to shape a feminist theology today had foremothers who are worth getting to know, as well as, probably, other foremothers who are gone beyond retrieval.
Along with colleagues, Dr Isobel Grundy, University of Alberta, established the ground-breaking Orlando project– a scholarly history of women’s writing in the British Isles. She is author of the biography, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment.