Graduation Year
2021
Document Type
Thesis
Degree
M.A.
Degree Name
Master of Arts (M.A.)
Degree Granting Department
History
Major Professor
Giovanna Benadusi, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Jennifer Knight, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Brian Connolly, Ph.D.
Keywords
authorial choices, gender, women's writing
Abstract
This thesis explores how women authors responded to masculine discourses of dominance in late sixteenth-century England. Directly, it concentrates on the pamphlet Jane Anger her Protection for Women, written in 1589 and published under the pseudonym Jane Anger. I argue Anger’s pamphlet was a radical voice within Elizabethan print culture which lends a view into gender politics of the time in which this piece was produced. I also argue that though Anger’s target audience was the gentlewomen of England, she crafted her pamphlet for a broad audience that included any literate man or woman across social station. The importance and radical nature of this pamphlet is found in the author’s use of a female voice to speak out against what she perceived to be an unjust social hierarchy between men and women. She located anti-woman discourses within the male-dominant genre of rhetoric and then critiqued the discourses she found issue with. Anger questioned the validity of male dominance, responded with evidence of what she saw as women’s superior features, and then generated her own evidence to support her claims. Further, Anger issued a call to action for the gentlewomen of Elizabethan England to pen their own responses to these anti-woman discourses.
Scholar Commons Citation
Wessel, Ashley M., "Jane Anger Her Protection for Women and the Emergence of a Radical Female Voice in Late Sixteenth Century England" (2021). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/9258
