Early Modern Dutch Women’s Engagement in Political Disputes

This paper will examine Protestant women who published political pamphlets and poetry in Dutch between roughly 1650 and 1710. Early in the seventeenth century a few women asserted their views through emblems and symbols; however, by the end of the century and continuing into the next, more women praised or condemned powerful, well-respected men’s policies and actions using more explicit religious language. Contrary to previous scholarship, which argued that women’s frequent references to God and his plans for the Dutch people signaled a failure to express strong political beliefs, this paper will reveal that religious imagery was in fact the primary way women expressed their political goals. This claim raises some interesting questions, such as what cultural beliefs allowed women to employ religious imagery as a means to denounce or commend particular public figures, how did women justify their written accounts of political events, and what did women have to say about their potential for public action. For the purpose of this paper, I will focus on three women whose political works have survived in impressive quantities: Cornelia van der Veer (1639-1702), Katharina Lescailje (1649-1711), and Anna Maria Paauw (? – 1710).