By Genevieve Duska (Fall 2022)
A Muzzle for Melastomus by Rachel Speght is a text that opened doors for early feminists. Speght was the first English woman to write something of this nature under her own name. She wrote two known works in her lifetime, both which explore feminism. Her father was a Calvinist minister who supported her writing and was able to educate her. The education she received shows through her excellent writing at her young age of only nineteen. Speght was raised in a very religious household because of her father, and even married a Calvinist minister later in her life. This gave her writing a lot of religious undertones and caused her to reference the Bible constantly in her work.
Speght’s A Muzzle for Melastomus was written in response to Joseph Swetnam’s very misogynistic pamphlet with a very lengthy title: The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Forward and Unconstant Women. Swetnam’s text was the first that set off a series of pamphlet wars. The pamphlet wars were an argument or discussion taken place over a series of printed pamphlets intending to either defend or attack an idea. Pamphlet wars because especially more common when the printing press was invented and became more widely used. Pamphlet wars were a very public argument over which many people had the chance to read and review, deciding on who they could side with.
The form in which A Muzzle for Melastomus was written as a pamphlet in straight prose made the argument that Speght was making very digestible and persuasive for the audience it was intended for: the general public reading these pamphlets. She is able to show off her elevated writing style in her work: “for you, being greedy to botch up your mingle mangle invective against Women; have not therein observed, in many places, so much as a grammar sense.” Speght’s other work, Mortalities Memorandum is similar in the content which it holds which is that women have the same rights as men, specifically in education. However, Speght’s second and only other work is written in poetry, which is harder for a reader to digest and leaves more up to interpretation. The two different forms of her writing are able to contrast each other and get her one argument which is the need for women’s rights and put it into two different contexts. This lets her ideas become accessible to multiple different audiences.
Joseph Swetnam’s writing, The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Forward and Unconstant Women holds the ideal that women are worthless. He writes that women should keep quiet and stick to the house to be servants to their husbands. He continues on to say that women are becoming too outspoken and loud and that angry women are scary beasts. He uses his protestant ideals to bring this issue back to the bible, saying that women are created from the rib which has a crooked shape and are therefore crooked in nature. He misquotes the Bible several times in his writing using his own examples of how men are superior to women. Swetnam writes the entire text in a joking manner, giving men advice throughout, explaining how they can govern and own their wives but also how marriage should be avoided because women are whores. Swetnam explains how the more beautiful a woman is, the more untrustworthy she is, and she will more likely cheat on the husband. He warns women from reading this text because he knows they would criticize him, showing that he knew what he was doing in his writing and that it would cause an uproar.
Speght comes back to rebuttal Swetnam and says that women should stand up for themselves, which is exactly what she does. She mentions Swetnam by name calling him ignorant and saying she is restraining herself from calling him worse because of her age. She brutally attacks Swetnam saying that he cannot write either a grammatical sentence or a rational one and says how he is just spewing out nonsense by claiming “the empty barrel makes the loudest sound”. She even includes a crossword poem of Joseph Swetnam’s name, calling him a multitude of ugly things. Being a minister’s daughter and having a religious upbringing, Speght was very familiar with the Bible and what it says. She calls Swetnam out for misquoting the Bible and emphasized how he offended God by misquoting his word. She counters Swetnam by quoting the Bible correctly to beat him at his own game. She explains how in the story of Adam and Eve, Eve was the first one to eat the fruit that committed the sin which Swetnam claimed in his writing, but the sin was only truly completed after Adam ate the fruit as well. Eve also meant well in giving Adam the fruit and was acting out of the kindness of her own heart. Speght says: “woman first sinned, yet find wee no mention of spiritual nakedness till man had sinned; then it is said, Their eyes were opened, the eyes of their mind and conscience; and then perceived they themselves naked, that is, not only bereft of that integrity, which they originally had, but felt the rebellion & disobedience of their members in the disordered motions of their now corrupt nature, which made them for shame to cover their nakedness.” Adam and Eve’s eyes were not “opened” until both of them had consumed the fruit. Just because Eve was created out of Adam’s rib, she is not crooked. Being taken from the man’s rib leaves the woman to be close to his heart and his equal. Speght explains this in her work: “she not produced from Adams foot, to be his too low inferior; nor from his head to be his superior, but from his side, near his heart, to be his equal; that where he is Lord, she may be Lady: and therefore saith God concerning man and woman jointly, Let them rule over the fish of the Sea, and over the fowls of the Heaven, and over every beast that moves upon the earth: By which words, he makes their authority equal, and all creatures to be in subjection unto them both…” Speght continues throughout her lengthy writing to convey her message that God has pronounced that men and women should be equal, and that Joseph Swetnam’s take on the bible is inherently wrong. How can a woman be so cruel and such a monstrosity when she has come from a man? Does this not also make man a monster?
Obviously, the themes of gender and feminism are extremely prevalent in Rachel Speght’s work. She stands up for herself and every other woman by belittling Swetnam and invalidating his work, all in a very professional and educated way. The way she presents her writing makes it very hard to argue back or see any more reason to continue to support Swetnam’s views. She is able to take both her academic and religious educations to create one cohesive argument that women and men are equal and should be treated as such. The Bible explicitly says that men should be considerate with their wives and treat them with respect. Although men and women are not physically equal because men are usually the bigger and stronger of the two sexes, they are spiritually equal and have both been created in the image and the likeness of God. Rachel Speght is able to take all of this from the bible and more and put it into eloquent words in order to convey her message that men and women are equal.
In today’s world, feminism is equally as important as it was in Speght’s day. The human population has advanced a lot in terms of men and women being equal, but we are nowhere close to being there. Speght was able to set off a branch of a movement that is so important to women spanning the centuries. Women today may not have to stay at home and do the dishes all day like women back then did, but there are still so many everyday things that they have to suffer through. Women make less money than their male counterparts do, making only 77% of what a man doing the exact same job earns. As well as making less money, they have to spend more money on products. The “pink tax” makes many household items that can be made for both genders cost much more when it is marketed towards women instead of men. These items can range from razors to shampoo to clothes, whatever it is, if it has the word woman on the packaging, the cost is going to be upped. Women are also vastly discriminated against in the workplace. There are very few women in positions of power in corporate jobs and even branching out into the government. Men have had the upper hand for so long and it is hard for women to be able to break down those walls and prove themselves to get to a position of power even if they are just as qualified if not more qualified than the men running against them.
Although the women being banished to the household does not happen anymore, women are still expected to do most of the household chores and take care of the children. They have to accomplish all of these tasks at home now with the added job on top of that. Women are doing so much more work on average than men do every day between their workplaces and the home. They are proving themselves every day that they are stronger than men, but they still get discriminated against and are not acknowledged. Women are still widely treated like objects. Many men see women as sex-objects who can do what they want them to do and clean up after them. Even in 2022, women do not have full bodily autonomy and cannot get abortions if they are wanted or needed in 13 states. Women are continuing to fight for their right to have reproductive rights as well as fighting for sexual assault awareness and equal pay.
Rachel Speght’s message that men and women are inherently equal and should be treated as such has been able to withstand the test of time and still be relevant today. Women have been fighting this fight for hundreds of years and although progress has been made in some ways, they continue to fight and struggle for what they deserve. Women’s rights and equality is a battle that might never go away, but hopefully we are able to get close to something that is equal if not get all the way there in time. Women deserve to be treated with just as much respect and humility as men are in every aspect of life and though it is a difficult journey we are slowly getting there.
Even hundreds of years ago, Speght was able to so very eloquently get the point across that women deserve to be treated as equally as men, because that is what God intended and why He put both sexes on this Earth. She is able to express how people who think differently are misinformed and ignorant and do not deserve to get to have freedom of speech and spew nonsense for all the world to read. Her education gave her a beautiful background for her to be able to convey all that she needed to convey and hopefully convince audiences who read her work that Swetnam and all those who think like him were wrong at the time and are still wrong today.
Works Cited
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Marg. “Rachel Speght Replies to a Misogynist in 1617.” Marg Mowczko, 18 Mar. 2022, https://margmowczko.com/rachel-speght-and-misogynism/.
A Mouzell for Melastomus – Wiley Online Library. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1475-6757.2009.01063.x.
“A Mouzell for Melastomus.” A Mouzell for Melastomus, https://pages.uoregon.edu/dluebke/WesternCiv102/SpeghtMouzell1617.htm.
“Rachel Speght.” Enotes.com, Enotes.com, https://www.enotes.com/topics/rachel-speght.
Speght, Rachel, and Rachel Speght. A Mouzell for Melastomus, the Cynicall Bayter of, and Foule Mouthed Barker against EUAHS Sex, or an Apologeticall Answere to That Irreligious and Illiterate Pamphlet Made by Io. Sw. and by Him Intituled, the Arraignement of Women by Rachel Speght. Printed by Nicholas Okes for Thomas Archer, and Are to Be Sold at His Shop …, 1617.
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