SOURCE: Bowen, Barbara. “Aemilia Lanyer and the Invention of White Womanhood.” In Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women's Alliances in Early Modern England, edited by Susan Frye and Karen Robertson, pp. 274-303. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Bowen examines issues of race and womanhood in Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum.

“Woman,” in the late-capitalist United States at least, is a racial term. Some of the most powerful work of modern feminism has been devoted to revealing the correlation between race and womanhood that white supremacy must suppress; “all the women are white,” the title of a black feminist collection observed in 1982 (Hull et al.). Eve Sedgwick identifies as one of the two great “heuristic leaps” of feminism the recognition that all forms of oppression, though they are structured differently, “must intersect in complex embodiments” (Sedgwick, 1990, p. 33). Where patriarchy coexists and collaborates with white supremacy...