Acknowledging Sexual Equality

Abstract This paper reads Margaret Cavendish’s play Bell in Campo (1662) as an implicit critique of Hobbes’s own depiction of the Amazons. In the play, Cavendish adopts a Hobbesian conception of equality and, like Hobbes, uses the Amazons as evidence of this natural equality. She departs from Hobbes, however, in setting her Amazon tale in a modern civil war. For Cavendish, Hobbes’s Amazons are insufficiently threatening, as he neglects to show their origins in a rebellion of wives against their husbands. By retelling the Amazon tale in the context of civil war, she reminds Hobbes of the importance of extending the ninth law of nature – that we acknowledge each other’s equality – to both sexes.