Margaret Cavendish truly believed in the feminine spirit and felt that women had never received the credit they deserved. Cavendish believed wholeheartedly that women could understand philosophy and politics as well as men and that they should be allowed to study these subjects freely. Furthermore, she called for women's independence from male restrictions. For this reason, feminism abounded in her thoughts and works. In The Blazing World, Margaret Cavendish shows that women are capable of effectively ruling a world when given power. It also shows that women are capable of excelling in a world created in their minds, free from the limitations imposed by men. To better understand Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World, we must examine her journey. When Cavendish was only two years old, his father died, leaving his mother to raise the family alone. As a result, her mother became a model of “feminine independence and administrative competence” (Lilley ix). This proved to young Margaret that a woman could manage various affairs very well on her own, and it instilled in her strong feminist values. She firmly believed that "woman had been given to man not only for pleasure, but also to help and assist him" and that "women would work as much with fire and furnace as men" (quoted in Harris 210). His shining example must have been his widowed mother. Later, when Cavendish began publishing her written works, she boldly used her real name instead of a pseudonym. This was very unusual for a woman in the 17th century (Lilley x). Cavendish was fully aware that women writing philosophy went completely against all norms; she compared him to "men in petticoats" (q...... middle of article ......politics.BibliographyBattigelli, Anna. Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Spirit. Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1998. Cavendish, Margaret. The Blazing World and Other Writings. Kate Lilley, ed. Harris, Frances. Hunter 198-217. Seventeenth-Century Scientific Thought." Iliffe, Rob and Frances Willmoth. "Astronomy and the Domestic Sphere." Hunter, Susan. "Women, Writing, History: 1640. -1740, Isobel and Susan Wiseman, eds., 1992. 156-77.