Controversy
The play was one item, and apparently the final one, in a controversy that erupted in 1615 with the publication of Joseph Swetnam's crude anti-feminist tract The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women. Swetnam's work attracted abundant attention, and provoked three responses in defense of women: Rachel Speght's A Muzzle for Melastomus (1617), and two works published under pseudonyms — Esther Hath Hang'd Haman by "Esther Sowernam" and The Worming of a Mad Dog by "Constantia Munda" (both also 1617). The pseudonyms are thought to represent other female authors, making this polemical response to Swetnam a rare cluster of early 17th-century works written by women. The play Swetnam the Woman-Hater shows internal signs of being the final response to Swetnam in the relevant period.
More generally, Swetnam the Woman-Hater is one of a long-running series of English Renaissance plays on what can be called, very broadly, the gender question. Earlier plays in this sub-genre would include Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and Beaumont and Fletcher's The Woman Hater and The Woman's Prize. Beyond the confines of the drama, there was an abundant literature on the subject. Swetnam's tract was only one in a long series of similar attacks on women; countervailing defenses of women were less common though not unknown — as in Protection for Women (1589), by "Jane Anger," and The Worth of Women: Wherein is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men (1600), by "Moderata Fonte" (both pseudonyms).
Read more about this topic: Swetnam The Woman-Hater
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