Teresa Bejan
speaker
149 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 18 Jun
Teresa Bejan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Indeed, towards the end of the transcript we have of the debates, Maximilian Petty, one of the
civilian levelers present at the Putney debate seems to say, well, look, we can agree that servants and alms takers should be excluded from the franchise as well because they're not sufficiently independent.
And so I think historians are really focused on these exclusions and making the argument that they revealed the levelers to be hypocrites in some sense, you know, violating their own egalitarian principles.
But I think that what Claire and Ted have been emphasizing is right, is that we care about the franchise because we think about political equality primarily in terms of the right to vote.
But for a very long time, and indeed until quite recently, hardly anyone had the right to vote.
So if you want to look at the sort of the radical egalitarian implications of the Leveller arguments, you've got to look to petitioning.
And there precisely we find two groups that seem to be excluded from the franchise at Putney, so women and servants.
not only sort of asserting themselves as equals, but demanding to be acknowledged as equals.
And so again, to give you a wonderful quote in which we hear this echo of Lilburn's proposition, this comes from one of the several women's petitions of spring 1649.
The women petitioners opened by saying, quote,
as also of a proportionable share in the freedoms of the Commonwealth, we cannot but wonder and grieve that we should appear so despicable in your eyes as to be thought unworthy to petition this honourable house.
And there, of course, that's the House of Commons, right?
So here we have women demanding a political voice as women on the basis of this levelling argument.
Well, quite.
So Claire has sort of alluded to the modern historical reception of this amazing discovery of the Putney transcripts in the late 19th century.
And it sort of was not lost on historians at the time that there seemed to be obvious parallels between the demand for equal voice at Putney to the
and sort of modern campaigns for voting rights in this country and also then in the United States.
And so there was a well-developed kind of historiographical debate in the 20th century about just how radical the Levellers really were.
And in particular, kind of in the middle of the 20th century, Marxist historians, so Christopher Hill and others,
began to make the case that, well, you know what, I mean, sure, the Levellers look radical from the perspective of many of the other sort of possible positions in the mid-1640s.
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