It is perhaps an understatement to say that liberalism and contract theory have become anathematic terms within postmodern academic feminism. As Carole Pateman most famously argues, because “republican” critiques by Locke (as well as Hobbes and Rousseau) liberated men from kingly rule in the political sphere by situating them as rulers over the domestic realm, then liberal political theory in general represents a “masculinist” tradition that contains little of value – and much of harm – for modern women. Although writings by such seventeenth-century sectarian women as Katherine Chidley, Anna Trapnel, Elizabeth Poole, Sarah Wight, Anne Wentworth, and Mary Cary are but “dews and drops” in a much larger river of political thought, I will argue that they nonetheless represent an alternative source of liberal ideas that have the potential to complicate this powerful and still highly influential thesis.

As Rachel Weil puts it, Pateman's 1987 study, The Sexual Contract: Aspects of Patriarchal Liberalism, “provides a starting point for the anti-liberal feminist cause” by grounding its antipathy within what she sees as its genealogical origin in contract theory's critique of patriarchalism. As it was reinvigorated in seventeenth-century England into a fully-fledged justification for divine right absolutism, patriarchal political theory was predicated upon the authority of the father.