Dealing with the ‘ Fair Sex ’ : Women and the Periodical

In the aftermath of the 1688 ‘Glorious Revolution’, pamphlets debating revolution, novelty and change were numerous. Many of them raised dangerous questions which potentially challenged and threatened the existing patriarchal and religious order. Among the mooted issues were the sovereignty of the people, the right to rebel against authority and to choose the sovereign, and the sinful nature of resistance or obedience. There was therefore a need to reconcile changes and tradition and to present the new era as a period of positive and limited changes. The Revolution therefore also opened an era of moral reflection that rejected the loose and rakish morals of the Restoration regime along with the theory of the Divine Right of Monarchs. It was this conservative agenda that mostly the Whigs supported in the late seventeenth century and in the early decades of the eighteenth century, in particular by launching a new form of journal: the periodical. These periodicals, a large number of which are included in the Nichols collection, emerged in the 1690s and reflected the new mood of the nation, blending the desire for novelty and freedom and the wish to contain it at the same time.