A ‘Proportionable Share’: Levelling Politics of Emergency in Women’s Petitions

• In Event: The Politics of Levelling: History and Theory

Abstract

The Leveller women justified their standing as petitioners demanding that the Commons release the movement’s four leaders from the Tower as follows: ‘That we are assured of our Creation in the Image of God, and an interest in Christ, equal unto men, as also a proportionable share in the freedoms of this Commonwealth’. Their assertion of a right as Englishwomen to petition the Commons for the redress of grievances and their sense of entitlement to a timely reply marked the development of a levelling politics of emergency. The Leveller women had organised two mass-petitioning campaigns, collecting tens of thousands of signatures from across London and its suburbs, in the hopes of pressuring MPs to give in to their demands. Newsbooks offered detailed reporting on their demonstrations in Westminster Square as of late April 1649. However, MPs ignored the Leveller women for a month before admitting and then summarily dismissing them from Westminster Hall.

A formal analysis of the rhetorical strategies and tactics deployed by the Leveller women petitioners from 1646 to 1653 illuminates the porous lines between radical ideas and action. The Leveller women developed a rich repertoire of arguments, references, and tropes in their petitions to subvert the conventional patterns and gendered language of humble address. I draw on J. L. Austin and Quentin Skinner’s speech-act theories by asking: What were the Leveller women doing rhetorically in their petitions? A major contention throughout this paper is that the Leveller women developed a levelling politics of emergency as a justification for their interventions in matters of state, as well as a radical sense of entitlement to both petition the Commons as Englishwomen and to a timely reply. An examination of what the Leveller women intended to do by petitioning reveals the highly complex relationship between notions of equality and hierarchy during the mid-seventeenth century.

Author

• Justin Kyle Schwartz, King's College London