Political Passions: Gender, the Family and Political Argument in England, 1680-1714

Ideas about marriage, gender and the family were central to political debate in late Stuart England. Rejecting both the Whig narrative that ties Lockeian contract theory to “affective individualism,” and the recently fashionable claim that liberalism expelled women from the “public sphere,” Rachel Weil shows how political argument became an arena in which the proper relations between men and women, parents and children, public and private were defined and contested. Using sources that range from high political theory to scurrilous lampoons, she considers public debates about succession, resistance and divorce.