Gendering "Just Cause" in the English Civil War: A Prayer for Procreative Peace.

Focusing on Mid-Wives just Petition , a 1643 anti-war tract often dismissed as a political satire of women's sexual appetites, Megan Matchinske imagines the possibility instead put forward by its narrator of a post-Lockean propertied self that genders female and has inalienable rights. When we pay attention to the tract's parodic midwives as powerful provocateurs, we discover something key. In both A) foregrounding midwifery as a marketable vocation in which practitioners attained through expert knowledge economic independence, mobility, and prestige and B) focusing our attention on the consequences of midwives' multi-pronged labors—labors they undertake in the community and those they oversee to fulfill those obligations—this mock petition advocates a rights platform that demonstrates how early designers of individual political rights could have adapted and modified their ideas, outlining a propertied and embodied right to bear that genders female, justifies domestic labor, and offers its subjects and, even more pertinently, the workers that deliver them, protection from unprovoked and unjust civil war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]