In this survey of some 200 women's writing between 1649-88 the author draws on the range of genres in which women expressed themselves: in petitions, prophecies and religious writings, autobiography and biography, fiction, plays, poetry and books on housewifery, medicine, midwifery and education. Living under the necessity of their subjection, their writings show us how they were able to make a virtue of this - to turn constraints into permissions, into little pockets of liberty or autonomy, thus constantly defining and redefining existing concepts of femininity. In the upheavals of civil war and regicide, many women travelled the country and even the world, campaigning for social change and explaining their beliefs. In 1649, for example, Joanna Cartwright appealed for Jews to be readmitted to England and many petitions sought parliamentary reforms for women. After the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, women such as these were driven back into quiescence. Others turned to love poetry and plays, often ridiculing male conventions of panting lovers and coy mistresses: Aphra Behn, reviled for her success as a woman playwright, nevertheless wove together, music and spectable, the dilemmas that she and her sisters faced in the debauchery of the Restoration.