Other things that women could be in The Past....
Sometimes we come across people in the past who really, really, anticipated some of the wilder parts of the internet (and who would have run wild over Comment is Free etc): see today's ODNB Life of the Day:
James [née Banckes], Elinor [Eleanor] (1644/5-1719), printer and polemicist:
Between 1681 and 1716 Elinor James wrote, printed, and distributed more than ninety broadsides and pamphlets addressing political, religious, and commercial concerns. The fact that she either printed or oversaw the printing of her own works had consequences for their material form; she typically entitled her papers Mrs. James's Advice, Mrs. James's Vindication, and the like, and printed her name in huge letters at the top of her texts. (In fact James may never have ‘written’ her broadsides at all, but rather composed them directly at the printing press with type.) The papers are addressed to six monarchs, the houses of Lords and Commons, the lord mayor and aldermen of the City of London, and others, and they comment on national events such as the exclusion crisis, the revolution of 1688, the Act of Union, and the Jacobite risings of 1715. James petitioned Charles II against ‘sins of the flesh’, James II against promoting Catholicism, and William III against taking James II's crown, and her publications describe her apparent interviews with these kings. She also advised City of London leaders on issues ranging from mayoral elections to the enforcement of City by-laws and commented on trade issues such as the management of the East India and South Sea companies and the economic disadvantages of a free press.
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James combined print petitioning with oral activism. Her papers allude to her public political activities at sites such as Guildhall, Whitehall, and Westminster, and her claims are often supported by external evidence. In November 1687 she disrupted a meeting at Grocers' Hall where a nonconformist minister was preaching before the lord mayor, and caused such a disturbance that Robert Spencer, earl of Sunderland, recorded the incident in a newsletter to a fellow peer. In December 1689 she was arrested, tried, and fined for ‘distributing scandalous and reflecting papers’ condemning William III (Luttrell, 1.617). James wrote more than a dozen works addressing the revolution of 1688, and any one of these might have alarmed the authorities.
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James was among the most prolific and politically active women writers of the later Stuart period. A middle-class tradeswoman with a printing press in her own home, her works chronicling the national events of a tumultuous period are a unique resource for the recovery of popular female involvement in early modern political culture.
Query: supposing someone created a figure like this in a historical novel or a Restoration-era fantasy world - what are the odds that she would be decried as unrealistic, anachronistic, and probably a nod to plitakel-krektnis?
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