SOURCE: Jones, Ann Rosalind. “Counterattacks on ‘The Bayter of Women’: Three Pamphleteers of the Early Seventeenth Century.” In The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, edited by Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty M. Travitsky, pp. 45-62. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1990.

In the following excerpt, Jones examines Speght's scripturally based arguments for women's rights in A Muzzle for Melastomus, the first of several works written to refute Joseph Swetnam's popular anti-female pamphlet, The Araignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women.

In 1615 Joseph Swetnam published The Araignment of Lewde, idle, froward and unconstant women, a pamphlet in which he gathered together misogynist commonplaces from the debate over women throughout the preceding century in England. What was new about Swetnam's tract was its success (by 1634 it had been republished ten times) and its capacity to stir up counterresponses. Five of Swetnam's contemporaries wrote against him, including three...