Although the conclusion of the second part of The Fair Maid saw Bess Bridges ushered into the home during its performances in the 1630s, the next decade would see numerous women not only leaving their houses to participate in politics, but also actively defending their households from encroaching Parliamentary and Royalist forces. During the English Civil Wars, N.H. Keeble notes that ‘the incidence of female petitioners of parliament during the years 1642-1653 and in 1659 is a clear and specific example of the Civil War enabling women to forgo their customary womanly silence for an “Amazonian” or “masculine” spirit; the activities of prophetesses is another’. Keeble's assessment assumes that women before this time were customarily silent, and the character trajectories of Heywood's Elizabeth and Bess seem to bear this assertion out. Of course, although much critical work has demonstrated the presence of very vocal fictional and historical women in the early modern period, there is no doubt that, in the upheaval of the Civil Wars and the uncertainty of the Interregnum, actual English women's more vocal presence and visible work outside of the household exerted a marked influence on other women. Margaret Cavendish benefitted not just from those women's example but also that of real and fictional women using geographical rhetoric. As a woman writing and publishing during the Interregnum and Restoration, Cavendish not only can claim the female petitioners and prophetesses as forebears, but she also within her work reveals the imprint of geographic texts.