Uncivil Conflict(s): Mary Rich and Margaret Cavendish on Domestic Unrest.

Civil war and domestic conflict are two sides of the same coin, each a source of shame for how they tear families apart. Although the English Civil War looms large as a troubling event in political history, the other form of domestic unrest barely registers in historical accounts of this period. And while civil wars have a beginning, middle, and end, domestic violence in the household forms a continuous but unacknowledged backdrop to civil violence and its aftermath. We must look to early modern women's civil war writings to uncover the hidden history of this violence and include it on the continuum of violence in the seventeenth century. This article considers the diary of Mary Rich and Margaret Cavendish's Orations of Divers Sorts (1662) for their reflections and analyses of domestic violence and as powerful examples of how historical women writers made sense of this societal injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]