In this brisk, engaging, and accessible study, Ann Hughes argues that an exploration of early modern gender is necessary for an understanding of England's upheavals during the 1640s and 1650s. She organizes her book around three central points of investigation: the implications of gendered cultural frameworks in political crisis, the application of gendered terms to define and sharpen political divisions, and the power of political instability to reinforce, challenge, and transform the theory and practice of gender. Two additional, related themes emerge during the course of the book: the place of gender in competing seventeenth-century notions of public and private, and the justification of the label “revolution” to describe the civil war and interregnum. Hughes's analysis moves deftly among diverse sources, from early modern pamphlets, poetry, and political treatises to recent studies by Mary Fissell, Diane Purkiss, Susan Wiseman, and other noted scholars, and her treatment of each of the book's main topics is both thoughtful and thought provoking. These strengths make Gender and the English Revolution an important contribution to scholarship on early modern England, women's history, and gender.

The book opens with a consideration of how regicide unsettled England's association of state and household, and provides a useful introduction to the early modern contexts that shaped performances of masculinity and femininity prior to the 1640s. Hughes then moves to “Women and War,” a chapter comprising one-third of the book's length. Her approach blends synthesis and anecdote to illuminate the diversity of women's experiences, and many of those whose words and actions Hughes features—Lady Brilliana Harley, Anne Trapnel, Lucy Hutchinson, and Henrietta Maria, among them—will be familiar to students and scholars of the period. Hughes draws on the experiences of both the famous and the unfamiliar in describing women's economic dislocation, opportunities for activism as spies and intermediaries, attempts to secure pensions, property rights, the lives of their husbands, and petitions to Parliament on public matters. Of particular value is Hughes's convincing demonstration that royalists and parliamentarians employed similar gendered strategies in valorizing women, supporting their own cause and vilifying those who favored the opposition; parliamentarians criticized royalist women as wanton whores, for example, while royalists caricatured radicals such as Lady Anne Waller as domineering, subversive shrews. The chapter then considers women and religion, highlighting prophets and Quakers. In closing, Hughes stresses that while “it is not easy to discern a clear line from women's activism in the rival religious groupings of the seventeenth century to modern claims for emancipation or liberation,” women's faith imperatives nonetheless served as “a crucial foundation for female agency and creativity” (89).

The next two chapters, “Manhood and Civil War” and “Bodies, Families, Sex: Using Gender, Imagining Politics,” employ distinct methodologies that help account for their relative brevity. Presenting “case-studies or snapshots that highlight problems, anxieties and contested stereotypes and identities” (90), Hughes emphasizes the ways in which civil war initiated reconsideration of what it meant to be male. Chapter 3's coverage of the rival masculinities that emerged from clashing political agendas is thus designed to be neither a comprehensive nor a conventional narrative of men and war. Instead, Hughes uses sources ranging from Cavalier pamphlets and the Putney debates to the writings of the Digger Gerrard Winstanley to uncover competing understandings of what it meant to be a “political man.” Her analysis demonstrates that martyrdom, authority, household, and the dependent/independent dichotomy all possessed gendered contexts and consequences. Chapter 4, in contrast, shifts attention from the concrete to the theoretical, examining such “political imaginaries” as the body politic and the familial metaphors employed in political discourse. In her assessment of the impact of crisis on gendered understandings of politics, Hughes argues persuasively that parliamentarians tended to distinguish between family and state and between public and private in ways that royalists did not.

There is much to admire in this study, and it is a testament to Hughes's skill that there are several topics a reader may wish she had given slightly expanded consideration. At the end of the introduction, she notes, she has included “neither women nor men form a homogeneous category, and in this book their experiences during the English revolution are structured by age, social and marital status, religious and political allegiance, and sometimes by national or ethnic identity, as well as by gender” (29). The book is at its most effective when probing the interplay of religious and political loyalties with gender; it addresses age and status somewhat less distinctly. Little attention, however, is given to issues of regional diversity. Hughes explicitly excludes Ireland and Scotland as a focus (4), but greater acknowledgment of the ability of local practices and customs to shape individual and communal identities would have given her argument about the multiplicity of English masculinities and femininities added nuance. In addition, while admirably dividing her attention between royalists and parliamentarians, and among radical religious sects, Hughes provides little commentary on men who adopted a neutral or antiwar stance. In what ways did the activities and petitions of the Clubmen, for example, complicate contemporary notions of manhood?

Gender and the English Revolution deserves a wide readership, among specialists and nonspecialists alike. Its brevity (the text concludes on page 149; a 25-page notes section and an index follow), paperback format, and cost make it an attractive selection for an advanced undergraduate or graduate course, although the absence of a bibliography or timeline impedes an easy survey of sources, scholarly literature, and chronological development. Still, Hughes excels at providing lucid, tightly focused explanations of both concepts (gender and patriarchy) and contexts (prewar ideologies and realities) that would inform students without feeling burdensome or redundant to a more expert audience. This accomplished volume is thus a welcome addition to the complex historiography of the seventeenth-century English crises. Hughes has crafted here a valuable reminder, following Joan Scott, of the importance of considering gender as a category of analysis.