I have another person to add to my list of imaginary attendees in my hypothetical dinner party. Might I introduce to you one Margaret Lucas Cavendish (d.1673)?.
Margaret’s life shows just how much human potential has been wasted by limiting women’s access to education. She gleaned hers through conversations of the men around her — her brother and her husband were well read and travelled in elite philosophical circles among the likes of Thomas Hobbes and Rene Descartes. Many of these men refused to engage in her ideas in writing — so Cavendish had to take matters into her own hands.
Cavendish had an unending craving for intellectual ideas — particularly scientific and philosophical subjects. And she wanted to be a writer. Despite the fact that her peers made fun of her spelling and grammar, she persevered. If the elite men wouldn’t discourse with her, then she would invent a fictional third person and create a hypothetical conversation.
She went far — for instance, Cavendish rivals Johannes Kepler as the first science-fiction author. In 1666, Margaret published _The Blazing World_, which tells the story of a woman who gets whisked away to another world with talking animals who make her their empress. There, she successfully creates a utopian society with no disharmony between sex, class, or religion and returns to Earth to stop an attack with submarines driven by fish-men from the Blazing World.
Her philosophical ideas were numerous, but among the most significant was that everything in the universe (including humans and our minds) is completely material: “Nature is material,” she wrote, “or corporeal, and so are all her Creatures, and whatever is not material is no part of Nature . . . .”. This was a Very Big Deal at the time. Cavendish insisted she was not an atheist, but also argued that the natural world operates completely through physical causation.
Margaret Cavendish was the first woman granted an invitation to the British Royal Society — but even as she achieved recognition, her male peers considered her eccentric enough to call her “Mad Madge.” I wish she could have been alive to see the scientific knowledge advanced since her lifetime.
Source(s): Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, May 29, 2017. _The Folger Shakespeare Library_, Esther French, March 20, 2018, “‘The Blazing World’ by Margaret Cavendish: the first science fiction novel written by a woman. _Chasing Castles_ “The ‘Blazing World’ of Margaret Cavendish.
