Geertje Bol
Wissenschaftliche_r Mitarbeiter_in SNF
Departement für Geschichte
Forschung und Publikationen
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Publications
15 Publikationen
From Courtiers to Courtship: Tory Feminism and the Political Dangers of Flattery
Geertje Jeanne Bol, Mary Jo MacDonald, Perspectives on Politics (2026) | ArtikelCitations and Abbreviations
Geertje J Bol (2026) | BuchkapitelDedication
Geertje J Bol (2026) | BuchkapitelThe Virtue of Scripture Moderation
Geertje J Bol (2026) | BuchkapitelIntroduction
Geertje J Bol (2026) | BuchkapitelAstell’s Machiavellian Streak
Geertje J Bol (2026) | BuchkapitelMacaulay’s History
Geertje J Bol (2026) | BuchkapitelReflections on Revolutions
Geertje J Bol (2026) | BuchkapitelPartisan Virtue: The Politics of Inclusion in Eighteenth-Century Women’s Political Thought
Geertje J Bol (2026) | BuchConclusion
Geertje J Bol (2026) | Buchkapitel -
Forschungsprojekte
The Politics of Female Ambition: Gender and Agency in Seventeenth-Century England and France
Status: LaufendBeginn 01.09.2026 Ende 31.08.2030 Finanzierung SNF Projektblatt öffnen This project investigates the early modern origins of the enduring double standard that celebrates ambition in men but condemns it in women. It offers the first systematic and comparative study of ambition as a gendered political concept in seventeenth-century England and France, showing how ambition became both a marker of civic virtue and a moral boundary for exclusion. The project traces how ambition was used to justify women’s subordination—portraying their aspirations as unnatural, vain, or corrupt—and exclusion from politics, learning, and public life, while at the same time exploring how early feminist thinkers such as Marie de Gournay, Madeleine de Scudéry, Margaret Cavendish, and Mary Astell subversively drew on it as a resource for emancipation. By integrating digital text analysis with close reading, The Politics of Female Ambition reconstructs how ambition functioned as a contested vocabulary of power—at once enforcing exclusion and offering tools for its critique. Using a bilingual corpus of seventeenth-century texts, it maps how ambition was defined, moralised, and gendered across languages, genres, and confessions. The project thus combines large-scale digital mapping with fine-grained interpretation to uncover how ambition circulated between France and England, and how women transformed a term of reproach into a claim for agency, dignity, and inclusion. By uncovering how early feminist thinkers recognised and resisted the moral double standard of ambition, the project illuminates the historical roots of tensions that continue to shape contemporary debates about women’s aspiration, leadership, and equality. Combining historical recovery with methodological innovation, the project reframes ambition as a moral and political concept with emancipatory potential. In doing so, it contributes to feminist theory, the history of political thought, and digital intellectual history, offering new insight into how ambition shapes debates on gender and equality, and how it might be reimagined as a more inclusive ideal.