Prospectus, Here I Come!

I've been puzzling over my dissertation topic lately, and I've been trying to write through possibilities and ideas I've got rumbling around in my head. I think I finally got to something close to what I want to do (even though it needs a clearer focus and the wording needs to be much, much more precise). Here's an excerpt from my freewriting today:

In thinking about a ‘so what?’ I need to remember my audience. I’m primarily writing for Renaissance scholars, and maybe for others with literary interests and training. My ‘so what’ doesn’t have to make the work totally relevant to today’s youth, for instance. I don’t have to make those kinds of stretches. I think my ‘so what’ will actually show up in response to other works.  For instance, “I’m considering the topic of women’s authority because I want to show that women had special authorities that worked synergistically to enable the category of women rulers so that people can understand that female autonomy was not fully limited nor defined by men, but exceeded the social definitions.” That actually sounds pretty good (even though it's not what I'm really trying to say). I think I’m at my best in responding to others or situating my work in a context (once I find what that context is). I do think I’ll have a section called “The Christian Woman,” “The Political Woman,” “The Domestic Woman.”  I’ll look at how social networks, and controlling those social networks enabled women to have a particularized power/authority/autonomy that took her out of the prescribed role as functioning only in the non-public sphere. And how the power granted in each particular case could translate through metaphors into the other spheres, culminating in the image of Elizabeth as “Mother of England, Christian Prince.”