Though European scholars before the early modern era had written about the nature of women (notably Christine de Pizan, Bocaccio, and Chaucer in the fourteenth century), the controversy (often called the querelle des femmes or "debate about women") heated up in England in the late sixteenth century, partly as a result of the religious debates of the era (the Reformation) about human nature in general.
Many of the debaters grounded their arguments
in a their particular readings of the first two creation stories of the
book of Genesis, especially the Eden narrative (the story of Adam and
Eve).
You may want to read the biblical
accounts in Genesis 1 (the first creation story) and Genesis 2-3 (the
second) before continuing. You can read these verses in any Bible you
might have, but you might like to read the passages in their early
modern versions. The Geneva Bible was the standard Protestant Bible in
England at the time of the Woman Controversy, while Catholics in
England would have read Genesis from the English translation of the
Rheims Douai Bible produced in France. You can find these and other
Bible translations through the database The
Bible in English.
The process that gets you to the verses you wish to read is rather tedious and confusing. When you've pulled up the Bible in English site, begin by entering Genesis under Book (leave Keyword blank), and choose the Version (particular translation) you wish to consult from the drop-down list. Then click on Submit Search at the top of the page. On the next screen, click on the link to Geneva Bible or Rheims Douai Bible (or whichever version you've chosen), then on the link to Genesis, then on the link to THE FIRST BOOKE OF MOSES . . . in Geneave, or THE BOOKE OF GENESIS in Rheims Douai, and finally on Table of Contents. From that page, you can choose the chapter you wish to read. You'll notice that both the Geneva and Rheims Douai Bibles are filled with commentary on individual verses and introductory material that take either a Protestant or Catholic position on the meaning and significance of individual words or whole sections of the Bible. Those were contentious times for the various post-Reformation denominations of Christianity, particularly around issues of biblical translation and the meaning of the Bible.
Now back to the Woman Controversy: Many translations of an early sixteenth-century treatise on women, De nobilitate et praecellentia foeminei sexus (On the nobility and preeminence of women, 1529), by Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, circulated in England throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Agrippa's treatise was probably meant to be a jest, but nonetheless his arguments in defense of women' influenced many later polemicists.
One of the first to enter the debate in print went by the name Jane Anger, probably a pseudonym. That tract, Jane Anger, her Protection for Women To defend them against the Scandalous Reports of a Late Surfeiting Lover . . . (1589) was written in response to an anti-woman pamphlet now lost, probably the 1588 Boke his Surfeit in Love.
The early 17th-century poet Aemilia Lanyer took up the cause of women in her book Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum ("Hail God King of the Jews," 1611), a retelling of the Passion (the betrayal and crucifixion of Jesus) Though the book is not written in the polemical or debate mode, it defends women's goodness throughout. Particularly notable in its proto-feminism is "Eues Apology" [a defence of Eve] and Lanyer's prefatory poem "To the Vertuous Reader".
Probably the most well-known of the English polemical works about women was Joseph Swetnam, whose pamphlet, The Arraignment of Lewd, idle, froward, and unconstant women or the vanity of them . . . (1615), was reprinted in 1615, 1619, 1628, 1634, 1645, 1690, and several times in the eighteenth century. Swetnam's pamphlet sparked a number of replies, none of which enjoyed the popularity of Swetnam's Arraignment. Scholars have recently discovered Swetnam's copy of one of his responder's pamphlets, Rachel Speght's A Mouzell for Melastomus. Swetnam had written lewd comments in the margins, attacking the writer's virtue rather than her argument.
Many of of Swetnam's rebutters took pseudonyms. One, Esther Sowernam, both played on Swetnam's name (Sweet-nam vs. Sour-nam) and recalled the biblical story of Queen Esther's confounding of her husband's second-in-command, Haman, in her pamphlet entitled Esther hath hanged Haman; or, An Answer to a lewd Pamphlet . . . .
Another of Swetnam's responders took the name Constantia Munda ("pure or elegant constancy") in the pamphlet The Worming of a mad Dog . . . . The argument shows familiarity with legal terminology and theory and plays on Swetnam's image of a legal "arraignment."
Two unusual pamphlets of 1620 engaged the issues of the querelle by focusing on the current fashion for women to adopt men's clothing styles. The first, Hic Mulier: or, The Man-Woman, condemns manly women's "unnaturalness," to which Haec Vir; or, The Womanish-Man responds. It is difficult to provide an exact translation of the Latin titles as English nouns do not carry gendered articles, but the equivalent of Hic Mulier in Spanish would be "El Mujer," while Haec-Vir would be "La Hombre."