This entry historicizes and summarizes discussions of whiteness–understood as a variable somatic marker and a social term indicating privilege or power–in cultural production by and about early modern women. It begins by summarizing the Black feminist framework offered by Kim F. Hall (Things of darkness: economies of race and gender in early modern England. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1995) that identifies the terms fair/dark as racially coded in early modern England. It then recounts historical treatments of whiteness within scholarship on early modern women’s writing, from crude comparisons of slavery and the absence of suffrage in the first wave (Woolf [1929] 1935) to the oblivious assumption of Black identity by white women in the second (Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa [Le Rire de la Méduse].” Trans. Paula Cohen and Keith Cohen. Signs 1(4):875–893, 1976) to the corrective offered by Black feminism in the third (Hendricks and Parker, Women, “Race,” and Writing in the Early Modern Period. Routledge, New York, 1994) and the “activist” (Coles, ‘Undisciplined’: early modern women’s writing and the urgency of scholarly activism. In: Goodrich J, McQuade P (eds) Criticism, vol 63(1–2), pp 55–61, 2021) scholarship of today.