active 1696-1707 Judith Drake

Judith Drake was an English writer active around the late 1690s and early 1700s. She is most often associated with An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (1696), a lively and influential work that argues women are not naturally inferior to men and that unequal education helps explain the differences people claimed to see.

Very little about her life can be confirmed. Sources describe her as probably the wife of the physician and pamphleteer James Drake, and place her within a circle of learned English women that included figures such as Mary Astell and Lady Mary Chudleigh. Some scholarship notes that even basic details such as her birth and death dates remain uncertain.

What has kept her name alive is the force of her writing. An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex mixes social criticism with satire, taking aim at pedants, critics, and fashionable male types while making a serious case for women’s reason and ability. No suitable verified portrait image could be confirmed from the sources reviewed.