Editing and Introduction by Ashley Ortega, Camryn Ford, Carrington Bobbitt, and Karis Miller
Ashley Ortega, Camryn Ford, Carrington Bobbitt and Karis Miller are undergraduate students at the University of Central Arkansas.
This piece is a spirited, defiant poem by the English writer Sarah Fyge Egerton. This poem is a key text in the “battle of the sexes” literary tradition and an early example of feminist argument in English literature. It was written as a direct and immediate response to the misogynistic work Love Given O’re : Or, A Satyr Against the Pride, Lust, and Inconstancy of Women (1682) by Robert Gould. Gould’s satire was one of many anti-female pieces popular in the late seventeenth century that sought to “Discover all their [women] various sorts of vice.” This work emerged in an era where women were generally excluded from public intellectual spaces and satire was considered a “men’s genre.” Egerton’s public intervention was a bold move, challenging contemporary norms about women’s roles in society and literature. Sarah Fyge was an English poet from a middle class background. She published her first and most famous work, The Female Advocate, while still in her teens, suggesting a precocious engagement with contemporary debates. Her later works, including her second major publication Poems on Several Occasions, Together with a Pastoral (1703), continued to explore topics such as gender roles, marriage, friendship, religion, and education, often reflecting her own grievances regarding her two “less than ideal” marriages. Egerton is remembered as one of the significant female voices of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries who used her writing to challenge the prevailing patriarchal attitudes of her time. The central critical orientation of The Female Advocate is its early, measured, and militant feminist argument. Egerton used logic, theological arguments, and natural evidence to argue against Gould’s misogyny. She not only challenged the merit of Gould’s claims but went further to suggest that men and women were equal in many ways and that women might even be considered superior. She argued that man alone was a “barren Sex and insignificant,” and that “Heaven made Woman to supply the want, And to make perfect what before was scant.” The poem is written in heroic couplets, a common form for satire and argument at the time. By employing the same elevated style as her male counterparts, Egerton asserted women’s capability to participate in traditionally male literary genres and intellectual debates. She applied generally accepted theological points to counter Gould’s arguments, effectively using the dominant cultural framework to defend her sex.
Editorial Note
During this editing process, we focused mainly on making the text easier for college students like us, to be able to better understand the text. We focused on making the language more comprehensible, like any words that were written too differently to understand, were put in the modern version. We also focused on making sure any words that were too difficult for us to understand, we made sure to put definitions for those words. We also focused on the footnotes to give descriptions of certain people, places, or phrases that would need to be explained to someone who maybe wouldn’t know what it was or what it meant. There were some words that weren’t written how we normally would, but we thought they would sound like how our spelling is, so we left those the same. Also in the footnotes, we talked about different words the author used and how it would allude to something else.
Works Cited
Egerton, Sarah Fyge. “The Female Advocate, or an Answer to a Late Satyr against the Pride, Lust and Inconstancy, &C. Of Woman.” Goodreads, 2024, www.goodreads.com/book/show/25604018-the-female-advocate-or-an-answer-to-a-late-satyr-against-the-pride-lus. Accessed 20 Nov. 2025.
“Item Information | Love given O’re, Or, a Satyr against the Pride, Lust, and Inconstancy &C. Of Woman | Early English Books Online | University of Michigan Library Digital Collections.” Umich.edu, 2025, name.umdl.umich.edu/A41691.0001.001. Accessed 20 Nov. 2025.
Wikipedia Contributors. “Sarah Fyge Egerton.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 11 Nov. 2024, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Fyge_Egerton#:~:text=advocating%20women’s%20rights.-,The%20Female%20Advocate,points%20to%20counter%20Gould’s%20argument. Accessed 19 Nov. 2025.