这篇文章理解起来难度较大，我们来梳理一下文章结构和逻辑的转换：

It isan oddbut indisputable factthat the seventeenth-centuryEnglish women who are generallyregarded as amongthe forerunners of modernfeminism are almost all identified with the Royalistside in the conflict between Royalist andParliamentarians known as the English CivilWars.

现象：被普遍认为是现代女权主义先驱的17世纪英国女性，在英国内战保皇派和议会派的争斗中，被划到了保皇派的阵营中。

要注意作者这里对这个现象的定性：odd butindisputable虽然奇怪但是不可辩驳的，意思就是这的确是一个事实，这些女性的确是保皇派。但odd的存在表明这是一个矛盾，文章开头出现矛盾，后面基本都会解释。



Since Royalist ideologyis often associated with the radical patriarchalism ofseventeenth-century political theoristRobertFilmer—a patriarchalism that equates family and kingdom andasserts the divinely ordained absolute power of the king and, byanalogy, of the male headof the household—historians have beenunderstandably puzzled by the fact thatRoyalist women wrote the earliest extended criticism of theabsolute subordination of women in marriage and the earliestsystematic assertions of women’s rational and moral equality withmen.

进一步强化矛盾：保皇派的想法通常都和父权主义相关，但这些保皇派的女性却是第一批公开批评女性在婚姻中从属地位和系统性地主张男女平等的人。



Some historians havequestioned the facile equation of Royalistideology with Filmerian patriarchalism; and indeed, there may havebeen no consistent differences between Royalist andParliamentarianson issues of family organization and women’spolitical rights, but inthat case one would expect earlyfeminists to be equally divided between the twosides.

作者对一种解释的评判：一些历史学家认为把保皇派理念和父权主义等同起来太轻率了，保皇派和议会派对家庭结构和女性政治权利的观念可能并不存在一贯的分歧。注意indeed是让步，更重要的是but后的内容，作者对这种解释的态度是否定的，因为如果的确是这样的话，这些女性也应该平均分布于两个阵营，但一开头讲过了，这些女性就是保皇派的，这是一个indisputablefact，所以这个解释并不成立。



CatherineGallagher arguesthat Royalism engendered feminismbecause the ideology of absolute monarchy provided a transition toan ideology of the absolute self.

CG对这个看似矛盾现象的解释：之所以女权主义产生于保皇派是因为君主专制思想提供了向绝对自我思想的过渡。

engender这个词在这句话中非常关键，不认识或理解错误会使得对整篇文章的理解产生偏差。



She citesthe example of the notoriously eccentricauthor Margaret Cavendish (1626-1673), duchess of Newcastle.举例论证，这一部分初读时可以快速浏览。Cavendish claimed to be as ambitious as anywoman could be, but knowing that as a woman she was excluded fromthe pursuit of power in the real world, she resolved to be mistressof her own world, the “immaterial world” that any person can createwithin her own mind—and, as a writer, on **. In proclaiming whatshe called her “singularity,” Cavendish insisted that she was aself-sufficient being within her mental empire, the center of herown subjective universe rather than a satellite orbiting a dominantmale planet. Injustifying this absolute singularity, Cavendish repeatedly invokedthe model of the absolute monarch,a figure that became a metaphorfor the self-enclose, autonomous nature of the individualperson. 君主专制和女权主义相关的具体表现 Cavendish’s successorsamong early feminists retained her notion of woman’s sovereignself, but they also sought to break free isolation that herabsolute singularity entailed.

CG论点的例证

整篇文章主要介绍了CG对一个看似矛盾但实际存在的现象的解释。第一段是陈述现象，进行铺垫，第二段是解释本身。

------来自chasedream