When 500 "lusty lasses" besieged Parliament, demanding their right to present a petition, the Speaker of the Commons sent a message to tell them that the matters concerned were too complicated for them to understand, and that they should therefore "goe home, and looke after your owne businesse, and meddle with your huswifery."
Oooooooh, mate - that's not going to go down at all well ...
The leaders of the Levellers (a revolutionary political party of egalitarians, arising from the Civil Wars) had been taken as political prisoners, and the hundreds of women demonstrating around Parliament were their wives and other supporters.
They wanted to remind MPs that the recent wars had been fought for the cause of liberty: what sort of liberty had they won, if men could still be arrested for disagreeing with the government?
The refusal of the elected members to speak to what a Leveller news-sheet called "the bonny Besses in the sea-green dresses" (that being the Leveller's party colour), on the grounds that they were not only left-wing extremists but also girlies, led to three days of protests, pickets, and intermittent violence ("Now the storme began, and their Tongues pelted hail-shot against the Members as they passed to and fro".)
When one MP instructed the women to go home and wash their dishes, he was told "Sir, we have scarce any dishes left to wash." As well as being a smart comeback, that's also a reminder that the "Lusty lasses of the Levelling party" (to quote a royalist periodical) saw their political, constitutional and economic complaints as being intertwined.
While the right-wing press mocked the women for calling "a generall Rendevous at Westminster, to present a Petition with one hand, and cock their Petticoats with the other," the women themselves said that the campaigning of their men had been ignored "while we in silence have sate at home." But now the time had passed when they were willing to "be bounded in the custom of our Sex," because at a moment when the people's victory over tyranny hung in the balance, "we have an equal share and interest with men in the Common-wealth."
(Before anyone asks, no I have no idea how one cocks one's petticoat. It's an art no longer taught in schools, probably due to political correctness.)
One of the leaders of the lusty lasses was told by an MP that it was "strange" to see women petitioning. She replied "Sir, that which is strange is not therefore unlawfull; it was strange that you cut off the king's head."
In fact, it must have been a lot less "strange" (presumably meaning without precedent) than it would have been a decade earlier. By necessity, many women played an active part, on all sides, in the British civil wars of the 1640s and 50s, not just as preachers and petitioners, printers and pamphleteers, but as grass roots political organisers and even as defence administrators.
Eventually, the parliamentary authorities were left no choice but to accept the 10,000-strong Humble Petition of Divers wel-affected Women. In the autumn, the Leveller leaders were acquitted at trial.
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Sources:
The Leveller revolution by John Rees (Verso, 2016)
www.historytoday.com/archive/civil-war-women-not-behaving-they-should
https://fotw.info/flags/xf-prot.html
Separated by their sex by Mary Beth Norton (Cornell University Press, 2011)
www.historytoday.com/archive/women-militants-english-civil-war
https://earlofmanchesters.co.uk/ecw-qa-women-know-your-place-did-anyone-fight-for-votes-for-women-during-the-english-civil-wars/
https://frontline.thehindu.com/books/revolutionaries-with-ribbons-of-seagreen/article9796775.ece