Joseph Swetnam's Analysis

In 1615 the publishing of Joseph Swetnam’s The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women, sparked a written war tha spanned centuries. The warriors in this written battle where polemicists, people who attacked others using spoken or written words. The Publishing of Swetnam’s work brought to life many female polemicists who wrote against the misogynistic work. Among these people was author Rachel Speght “the first self-proclaimed and positively identified female polemicist in England,” (Lewalski) as well as the first female author not to use a pseudonym during the Jacobean era