SOURCE: Lockridge, Kenneth A. “‘The Female Creed’: Misogyny Enlightened?” In On the Sources of Patriarchal Rage: The Commonplace Books of William Byrd and Thomas Jefferson and the Gendering of Power in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 29-45. New York: New York University Press, 1992.

In the following excerpt, Lockridge analyzes the reasons for Byrd's tempered yet intense disdain for women as set out in the satirical essay “The Female Creed” that appears in one of his secret diaries.

At the very moment when he was recording his private fears about himself and about women in his commonplace book, William Byrd was aiming a public dart of misogyny at women in the form of an essay called “The Female Creed,” dated to the year 1725. Here, many of the same constructions of women would be offered and if anything deepened into an implied portrait of what Susan Gubar has called “The Female...