The FNSA Forum.

The FNSA Forum is intended to provide space for reader contributions of a maximum length of 350 words. Letters may comment on material previously published in this journal, or may address issues that would not otherwise merit space for an essay. Opinions expressed are solely those of the correspondent, and do not necessarily reflect those of the Editorial Board of Studies in Prolife Feminism or the Board of Directors of the Feminism and Nonviolence Studies Association, Inc.

As this is the charter issue, no correspondence is yet available for publication. However, to avoid leaving readers bereft of commentary, we offer the following example of the deep historical roots of feminist thought.

Anne Dudley Bradstreet (1612-1672) was the Puritan daughter of one New England settlement governor and the wife of another (Massachusetts Bay Colony). She authored several collections of verse including the popular The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America (1650), the introduction of which contains poems written by several, men who express amazement that a woman could write such good poetry. Bradstreet writes:

From the Prologue

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue
Who says my hand a needle better fits,
A poet's pen all scom I should thus wrong.
For such despite they cast on female wits:
If what I do prove well, it won't advance,
They'll say it's stol'n, or else it was by change.

In a poem on Elizabeth I (In Honour of That High and Mighty Princess Queen Elizabeth of Happy Memory) who, in Bradstreet's time had reigned relatively recently, is the following stanza:

Now say, have women worth? Or have they none?
Or had they some, but with our Queen is't gone?
Nay masculines, you have thus taxed us long,
But she, though dead, will vindicate our wrong.
Let such as say our sex is void of reason,
Know 'tis a slander now but once was treason.