With Domesticity and Dissent, Katharine Gillespie adds to the growing body of research on seventeenth-century sectarian women. Gillespie focuses on six women—Katherine Chidley, Anna Trapnel, Elizabeth Poole, Sarah Wight, Anne Wentworth, and Mary Cary—all of whom (except Wentworth) produced their works during the turbulent years of the Civil War and Interregnum. Gillespie's primary interests are establishing how these women argued for religious freedom and investigating the relationship between these arguments, political theory, and issues of gender. Although she is not the first to explore such questions, she carves out new territory by arguing that these women articulated themes of possessive individualism and liberalism before such later, better-known figures as John Locke.

Domesticity and Dissent begins with a discussion of John Milton's 1637 masque Comus, which, Gillespie says, “narrates the `birth’ of the possessive individual” (1). She refers throughout her book to images and characters from the masque—a technique that unfortunately tends to obscure more than it illuminates, since she never clearly explains the relationship of Comus to the other texts. Indeed, the introduction is the weakest section of the book for similar reasons: rather than articulating the relationship between her argument and the existing scholarship, it strings together quotations from a variety of scholars. Gillespie's argument becomes much more evident in the rest of the book, particularly in chapter 1. Here she sets out the views of various feminist political theorists, especially Carole Pateman, who have claimed that liberalism is inherently antifeminist because its idea of the autonomous political subject by definition implies male dominance. Gillespie is especially suspicious of suggestions that feminist political theory must emphasize the collective over the individual and that liberalism's distinction between public and private spheres is antithetical to a feminist project.

Gillespie focuses on sectarian women because she believes that their specific circumstances—as female religious dissenters who sought to articulate their views publicly—fostered important political arguments. For them, Gillespie suggests, the “`private’ spaces of the home were the site of production for the `public’ body of the church,” since many of them used these private spaces for preaching; at the same time, as dissenters who had to defend their unconventional practices, they wrote defenses “that translated their religious understanding of privacy, self-determination, and property-in-self into a set of political prerogatives” (44). She thus sees them as in many ways the real creators of the original Habermasian public sphere.

Each of chapters 2–5 addresses one or two of these sectarian women, using a close analysis of their publications (and, in some cases, publications about them) to illuminate a particular theme of liberalism. First, she discusses Chidley and Trapnel, arguing that they both sought a separation between church and state in order to define a private realm of free religious practice. She suggests that far from being a site of patriarchal oppression, the private sphere represented, for these women, freedom from the dictates of a state-sponsored church. Moreover, by printing their works, and by using their homes as the locale for preaching, even to small groups, they helped to construct an alternative public sphere. In the next chapter, Gillespie analyzes Poole's addresses to the General Council of Officers in December 1648 and January 1649. Poole, Gillespie argues, took the language of matrimony that was commonly applied to politics (the king as husband of his people) and turned it on its head by suggesting that a violent, tyrannical king could be “divorced” (but not executed) by his subjects because he had violated his contract with them. Gillespie also claims that in response to sexual slanders against her, Poole articulated a notion of “radical individualism” (160), and this notion of the “sovereign individual” forms the key theme in chapter 4, on Wight and Wentworth. It is in this chapter that Gillespie most directly takes on antiliberal feminists like Pateman. According to Gillespie, it was precisely the view of early modern women as unstable subjects, in thrall to their own bodies and easily swayed by evil influences, which necessitated their emphasis on the abstract, autonomous self: “the self that is formed in relation to God alone is freed from all ‘relations’ with others” (195). Finally, in chapter 5 Gillespie uses Mary Cary to trace the appeal of a free market in religion.

Domesticity and Dissent has many strengths. Gillespie is at her best when she engages in close analysis of individual texts, frequently presenting unusual perspectives on these works. The section that reads Henry Jessey's pamphlet about Wight as a form of masque is one impressive example (185–90). Such close readings also help tie the various authors together, for instance, by drawing the reader's attention to the significance of the common metaphors of virginity and rape. The book does have some weaknesses, however. Gillespie is less successful when she seeks to relate the texts more directly to material circumstances, either the authors’ lives—when she must often rely on conjecture in the absence of evidence—or changes in social and economic conditions—as in her discussion of tithes and enclosures in chapter 5, where the discussion tends to elide metaphorical and literal “labor.” Anne Wentworth, who published in the 1670s, fits awkwardly into a book that is otherwise focused squarely on the middle of the century. The intended audience is also somewhat unclear. Why define the Levellers, for example (76), when taking for granted the reader's knowledge of the key events and religious movements of the seventeenth century? Historians are likely to find the book's subjects familiar after several decades of research on sectarian women, and Gillespie at times overstates the originality of her work. Such problems do not detract from the broad argument, however, which will be a useful contribution to ongoing debates about the place of women in the development of modern political theory.