In a small group of sectarian women writers, liberalism finds its “mothers.” Their formulation of such core liberal ideas as property-in-self, the separation of church from state, and a free marketplace devolved heteronomously from their expressed desire for liberty of conscience. Their private spheres of public performance were the kitchen, the birthing room, and the bedchamber, and the public stages upon which they performed their private selves included the prison cell, Whitehall, and Parliament, since, after all, their “suums” accompanied them wherever they went. Their ideological criticism of political domination took the “exclamatory” forms of visions of contractual relations between the subject and the body politic, pleas for freedom of religious conscience, vindications of the possessive individual, and words in season favoring a free market in preaching. Their rhetoric of reason was infused with the ostensibly competing, more literary languages of marriage, motherhood, midwifery, domestic and agricultural servitude, and religious devotion. Their protoliberal influences included the mythical – theWelsh goddess Sabrina – the biblical – Hannah, Jael, Christ, and Amos – and even the crypto-Catholic – the Virgin Mary, a penetrable self who was immaculately impregnated by the spirit alone.