gender Flashcards
underdown
crisis in gender relations
esp 1560-1640
anxieties about boundaries and new attempts reassert them
ingram critci
sexuality and reputation
gowing
gender mattered more to women than to men as an organising feature of their lives
legal system and women- hist
- Shepard: defamation cases, most male cases are about their economic and social credibility; women’s cases are usually sexual reputation.
civil war and women
Opportunities for female agency: defending estates, participation in sects, petitioning parliament, crowd politics. Evokes anxiety about inversion of the gender order?
hist civil war and gender
- Ann Hughes: gender central in CW polemic, both sides try to undermine the other’s masculinity. C1 pilloried as an unmanly man, in thrall to his powerful Catholic wife. For the Royalists, the political subversion of the parliamentarians was analogous to a potential gender one.
masculinity
- advice lit for young men how to align themselves w classical ideas and chivalrous codes of masc
- male reputation nd credit
p honour econ - adultery and control of sex
- puritans issue men playing women in theatre
- marriage reciprocal
advice lit masculinity
chivalrous codes of mas- braithwaite- the eng gentlemen- what to wear etc - esp purotans 1630
- gouge domestically duties 1622
- ealrier ones dod and cleaer- godlie forme of householde gov 1598
marital relations masuclinity
dod and cleaver- a godlie form of househode gov
marriage reciprocal in a sense
man has responsibility for outside the home, but the woman does have the responsibility for things within it, and also painting honour fo family
policing sex -
- public magirstrates and ifnormal action of community
- importance of kirk sessions in scot policing morals- shaming of cuckolds, whores, scolds nd shrews
- sucking stool, scolds bridle for ageing women
precept gender= sources
bible
shakespeare
law \authoirty
precept gender- bible- positive gender relations
- Galatians 3:28 ‘in Christ there is neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, man nor woman’ – spiritual equality, temporal hierarchy.
- Homily of the State of Matrimony (1563) ‘It is instituted of God, to ye intent that man and woman should live lawfully in a perpetual friendly fellowship,
- to bring forth fruit, and to avoid fornication.’ - same
precept- shakespear
- Taming of the Shrew: “Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper… / Such duty as the subject owes the prince / Even such a woman oweth to her husband…” (husband owes protection, wife obedience).
law precept gender
- English common law particularly restrictive to women. Single woman’s identity as feme sole – same legal identity as a man.
- Married woman feme couvert – husband bears full legal responsibility other than in cases of treason, murder, brothel-keeping. BUT couverture pertains to English common law, not civil/canon.
- Opportunities for women through Chancery
legal precept diff scot- gender
- Couverture less enforced in Scotland. See higher proportion of wills.
inequality in law- gender
different crimes for spousal murder – petty treason for woman. Major anxiety about infanticide; it was considered a solely female crime (See A Pittilesse Mother 1616) Laws against illegitimacy – ‘bastard getters’ – overwhelmingly enforced against mothers.
stats illegit children
Records for Hertfordshire, Lancashire, Somerset and Warwickshire for 203 women punished in the late Elizabethan and early Stuart period for having an illegitimate child: 65 imprisoned, 35% whipped. Of 135 men prosecuted, 4 % imprisoned, and 25 % whipped.
authority precept - gender
Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum (pub. 1583), of the ‘parts and persons of the commonwealth’, ‘we do reject women, as those whom nature hath made to keep home and to nourish their family and children… except it be in such cases as the authority is annexed to the blood and progeny, as the crown.’
practice- gender
marrital customs vary thorughout british isles
household
womens work
sexual freedoms
marital customs vary regionally
highlands- custom trial arriages- see how go for year inc sexual relations tghen decide married properly
thought barbaric in eng
wales often live with kin
the household- gender stats
- Late age of marriage, between 27 and 29 for men, c. 26 for women –
- Many men and women never marry – c. 1/5 population in England.
why late age marriage
reflects the assumption that marry when can form a secure socioeconomic unit. High number of remarriages, especially for men, complicates ideas of virginity and femininity?
why many men and women not marry
Demographic expansion – high numbers of journeymen, wage labourers etc. who don’t achieve economic independence; possibilities for unmarried women to support themselves through paid labour.
womens work pratcially
-can make textiles; married women can trade through specific feme sole customs in London and boroughs.
-As much as 60% of married women in London supported themselves through their own labour to some extent.
-In periods of economic contraction, it was women’s opportunities which declined first.
- Guilds- silk trade for example, men formed and forced women out of the trade which they had previously constituted the majority in c1600.
sexual freedoms
trail marriages in highlands
restoration court
libertinism
sexual freedoms- restoration court
sexually free and depraved; women like Countess Castlemaine (one f C2) mistresses was labelled a whore by everyone from the King to Samuel Pepys, but she still had major power and influence
libertinism - sexual freedoms
sexual license and hedonism – actually becomes fashionable for young male courtiers.
gender for elizabeth
wooding
a powerful tool in political relationships: flirtation, rebukes etc.
women at work
- Women, from 1650, go into apprentices with milliners and textile workers, with a female master; though registered under the master’s husband.
- 10% of the shops at Robert Cecil’s New Exchange (1609) are leased by women.
women and spaces
women go to the auctions at the coffee house. However, they were not safe spaces for women: reports of robberies there frequent and the picture of orderly rows of men talking earnestly is a fiction created by the 18th century essayists Addison and Steele.
- Women go to the theatre and are actors.
- JK Tippon: women do go into guild halls; but they only work there in cleaning jobs, not allowed in rooms associated with civil governance; eat at separate tables and separate rooms
changing fahsions women
: low cut, low waisted bodice instead of gowns.
poverty
Gregory King estimated that 2/3 of the country comprised of vagrants, labourers, cottagers and small artisans. Certainly, half of all women were in poverty at any one time.
somerville women
reality did not improve but the groundwork of changes were made in theory: a rise in belief in social determinism and the weakening of natural law authorities.
crawford and mendelson
paradox of the fact that non-elite men improved their position while that of women deteriorated.
renaissance good for women?
women did not have a Renaissance in the same way that men did: the recovery of a patriarchal and misogynist Classical culture was not a benefit.
hist argue womens lives worseoned
crawford and medelson
kelley
laurence
jordan
amussen
ep thompson
prior
womens workload
Prior: labour divide was “efficient and inequitable” as while men’s was limited and task based, women’s was infinite and constant.
womoen and rebvellions
- EP Thomson: women active in food riots because they feel them hardest as both consumers and small producers. These riots were not ‘political.’
good life for women
alice clark - domestic production good, women valued production unit
16thc eng women engaged industry agri
home central unit production- run farms trades landed estates
usefulness eocn roels equality w husbnads
alice clark onn 17thc
as capitalism expanded in the 17th century, there was increasingly more division of labour with the husband taking paid labour jobs outside the home, leaving the wife reduced to unpaid household work. Middle-class women were confined to an idle domestic existence, supervising servants; lower-class women were forced to take poorly paid jobs. Clark therefore contended that capitalism had a negative effect on powerful women
hist sexual rev
Dabhoiwala: sexual revolution a result of the religious pluralism of the Glorious Revolution.
why women in opverty hist
- Erickson: informed and legally knowledgable widows who improved their economic position.
- Staves: widows ignorant of their legal rights and they undergo a slide to poverty.
women as cultural figures
patrons lit
piblic sphere
oral and music trad
lit and women
patron- elizabeth stanely -first woman known to have written and published an original play in English: The Tragedy of Mariam.
: translators were respected; for example Lady Anne Bacon’s translation of Jewel’s Apologie becomes the standard version.
women in public sphere
Women in the public sphere: outing husbands’ bad behaviour an effective form of behaviour control.
women and musical trad
labouring women, especially in the textile industry, have songs they sing to pass the time.
areas women authority over men
- elizabeth in her own right
maternal authority
mistresses of the households- authority over servants
medical
women medicne
were surgeons at St Bartholomew’s, London, at least as early as 1598.- alice gordon
- 1691 mary neale praised by clergymen and laity for skills esp when pulling teeth
maternal authority example
Sir John Hales letters – ‘follow the diet as your mother tells you’ – are revealling. Is it a coincidence that all of Henrietta Maria’s surviving adult children die in the Catholic faith?
women and wills
- Women have wills: Leeds and Hull 1520-1650, women’s wills acount for 20% of total.
slight improbement in legal property
Chancery sympathetic to women seeking their inheritance; use of ‘trust’ common for women.
- ‘Paraphernalia’ an established idea; husband’s attempts to sell wife’s goods without her consent are thwarted;
- -equitable device of ‘jointure’ established to maintain wife’s control.
worsen womens state legally
Childless widow’s right to husband’s goods halfed; brought down to a third of previous level by the courts’ overzealous enforcement.
women better in law
- birth rates fall, less sons, more female inheriting
- perception women untouchable by the law- remains even after star chamber clarifies matter 1605
- frequently executors of wills and admin of estates and businesses- success debated erickson and staves
female experience violence positi ve
- somerville poisitive-
beating wives was limited to “lawful and reasonable correction” and the students at the Inns were taught to observe strict limits. Any violence against wives wwas banned in New England. - : Even Elizabeth Carey, a woman beaten by her husband for her conversion to Catholicism at a time when the religion was illegal, was given her freedom and an allowance of £500 per year.
bad female experience violence
- Remember wives had to be wealthy enough to bring cases against their husband, and they had to have the authorities and community on side.
- Crawford and Mendelson are less positive: popular proverbs trivialised and actively encouraged beating women as a source of obedience; a law in London in the 16th Century barred wife beating after 9pm with the justification that it was too loud and disturbed the peace.
- The violence in society was inescapable and not restricted to the private sphere: with thin wood and plaster walls you could hear what was going on and women often used their neighbours as oral ‘witnesses.’
female experience- sexuality- fluidity
May Day and festivities suggest probably more sexually free than we notice. Indeed, the sexual escapades are generally the ones which don’t reach us as historians.
- Couples were technically ‘reciprocally obliged’, but as The Merchant’s Tale reveals, this was not always the case in reality.
- lesbians and gayness
- gender fluidity
homosexuality embraced
Foucault’s argument that sexuality as a characteristic of identity and not practice is a modern invention. Older men penetrating younger men was treated quite permissively.
- Equally, in the London Court Records for 1680, there is an account of a marriage breakdown between two women who referred to each other as spouses and exchanged love letters. Suggests remarkable fluidity.
homeoseuclailty condemend
women perceived as lesbians were labelled ‘tribades’ or hermaphrodites.
gender fluidity
: boys play both genders, As You Like It, women cross dressing to participate in the Civil War.
sexual rev hist
dabhoiwala post 1688
female expeirnce marriage- positivity
- Crawford and Mendelson argue for essential similitudes in the experience of marriage everywhere on the social spectrum.
- Marriage, in theory, was to be by the freely given consent of both parties. If physical coercion was enacted or threatened, if threats of disinheritance or of marriage to a less appealling party were made, all would result in a void marriage.
- customliving first w husbands parents
status married owmen
higer status than single. They intentionally war the characteristic dress – a scarf and hood – and moved forward in their seating in the church.
work in the home- female experience
- burdonsome
- Thomas Tusser’s Five-Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (1580): up at 4 bed at 10 in the summer; up at 5 bed at 9 in the winter.
- Alice Clarke omits childbearing and rearing from her discussion of female work and labour in a fashion we would criticise today.
- Mary Prior: “efficient and inequitable…”
- Even a Countess was expected to personally supevise the laundry: Second Earl of Clare’s tirades survive about his wife sending out the laundry to be done.
female expeirence female spaces
-Childbirth - except for Mary of Modena – an all female environment.
- women freely visit each other houses
- women carers and deathbed
- household itself- pop culture space over which mistress had domiion
shift female spaces
shifting of the more communal religion of the late-medieval period to the more individualied climate in the post-Reformation years saw the patriarchy become closer and more immediate. [c.f. Wooding].
household guarded as women space
word for husbands who over-meddled in domestic affairs: ‘cotquean.’ The Women to the Plow and the Man to the Roost (1629) satirised the chaos which ensued when a man tried to carry out womens’ duties in the home (though today we might see the weaponised incompetence in this).
lower class womens spaces
more likely to be found in men’s spaces – often because they weren’t in a position to choose. Consider the 12 year old girl working in her father’s alehouse at midnight.
curfew and women
Curfew, doesn’t apply to men, if broken by a woman it means the Bridewell.
gednered community lfie
- subevrsion sexual mores seen threat to parish - bastard morelikely to be a drain on poor rate
- patteren of litigation- women on women increases, women on men falls 17thc- separation of spheres
hierarchical community church
apprenticeships and women
2% of apprenticeships in London in 1500 were for girls; 6% by 1700. Most of these were parish apprenticeships anyway in which only half of participants completed it. Consider that, given apprenticeships cost money, a bad socioeconomic climate discouraged this.
typical jobs for women
Thirsk) Stocking knitting was very important: perhaps 13% of all labouring women
- Nursing especially during the Civil War: Judith Massey received £10 for looking after 150 NMA soldiers after Naseby.
- Cleaning, weeding, etc.
- Wet nursing, fostery parenting, midwifery (licensed or unlicensed), ‘Searchers.’
work for middling sort women
-business owning
gilds
medical
school teachers
retail
merhcant
prohibition from some trades
business women
5-10% of businesses owned by women by 1700. (Laurence)
women merchants
London: wife of a merchant can trade as a feme sole merchant
gilds and women
Gild merchant in Preston, Lancashire, 16 female members in 1397, 6 in 1415, one in 1542, none in 1592 despite a reaffirmiation of rights.
teaching women
up to £25 per year for a schoolmaster; though men get £40.
limitations on womens jobs
- Increasing regulation on alehouses precludes this though it was never considered high class employment. Equally, socioeconomic factors had an effect: bakers and London Weavers Company prohibited women 1547-50.
cw jobs women
take up production
singel women
Some recognised the greater freedoms of being a single woman (can trade and hold property in own name, can sue and be sued, also risks, especially of unintentional pregnancy); but in Mary Astell’s phrase, more pervasive was a fear of the “old maid.”
- Amy Froide’s work on Southampton: single women traded, often with the held of benefactions from mothers and aunts. – suggests it is something for the established middling sort, not a source of social mobility in itself.
unmarried stats
- 1666 birth cohort: average 9.2% non-marriage rate; this is at 20-28% for gentry and peerage women: see their greater independence.
widows
: if she was old, pious and self-effacing, she was recognised as an ideal recipient for charity. However, this led some women to victimise themselves because of the expected and necessary image to gain charity.
female solidarity
Temma Kaplan called this “female consciousness”, the notion among women that they had their own identity distinct from that of men.
- Crawford and Mendelson argue for the “revolutionary potential” of this because “it politicised everyday life.”
- Shared bodily experiences and fears, especially of death in childbirth. While Schofield puts the figure between 6 and 7%, it certainly did not feel this way for women at the time.
Transmitted letters and stories: everything from breastfeeding to needlework and husbandry.
- Helene Cixous notes the subversive quality of female laughter: transgresses male control and the notion that women should be silent and obedient.
female communities
-1630s, Viscountess Falkland proposed Great Tew where older women might retire and younger women might be educated.
-1694 Mary Astell’s proposal for a college for unmarried women.
wealthy upper classes- women
- Aristocratic women, for example, were more likely to employn a wet nurse, to conceive again quickly and to bear more children.
- Brodsky: daughters of wealthy London merchants often married wealthy and established men in the city and this gave them less power.
diff classes women experience in marriage
Similarly, the anonymous author of In Defence of the Female Sex (1696), it was argued that marriage was more equal, respectful and thus more holy and enjoyable further down the social scale because it was more collaborative and there wasn’t such a power imbalance. This is essentially Alice Clark’s thesis.
- - Margaret Hunt: women who own their property are not better off due to this stake in their marriage, in fact it is more often a cause of tension as husband’s felt it a slight that it wasn’t theirs.
lower class women better
Plebeian women could rely on friends and neighbours for emergency aid in which isolated women in big manors couldn’t.
lower class worse
- Poor women more likely to give birth to illegitimate children and thus was a scary risk: 1599 Essex justices ordered that a woman be whipped until she bled for bearing a bastard.
widows and class
Certainly, for widows, wealth was more important than their gender; but this was because in many ways they had shed what were perceived as the essentials of their gender: no longer subordinate to and dependent on a man, no longer menstruating etc.
female frienship- examples
Maids often trusted with incriminating letters: Lady Throckmorton sent her servant Joane Morley to warn a priest that his religious views were known.
- Alice Thornton, a gentlewoman, described her mother’s maid as “my good friend” and her autobiography bears this out.
bible authoirty on inheritance
Number 27.6-8: “say to the Israelites, ‘If a man dies and leaves no son, give his inheritance to his daughter.’” – of used justification for everything from property to the crown.
women subservient men
St Peter: ”be in subjection to your own husbands.”
Eve created from rib and not foot used to place women as helpmates not slaves.
women can be powerful- bible
- Deborah: “though a married woman and subject to a husband, she reigned over the lord’s people notwithstanding.”
women limited in churhc- bible
- Pauline injunctions prohibit women from places of authority in the church.
knox on women
Queenship was unnatural, arguing God’s wrath at Eve extended to the whole of her sex.
aristotle on women
- women imperfect men- ‘mutiliated male’- humoural tehory women body less efficient
- for housekeeping and childbirth
-aritstole riicules notion feamle officeholding plato republic
judge ruling linked to gender
- Judge deciding a case at the King’s Bench in 1566: argued women were rational but men were superior. Husband’s should rule wives because they’re “for the greatest part more reasonable than women.” – he clealry thought this an uncontroversial maxim on which to rest the case.
1688 and women
- marys claim favoured over jakes upposedly illegit son
- william shared trhoen with mary- even tohugh danby prepared justfy mary sole claim- she wanted to
- anne took over- 1702- deafenng slence vaout gender and husband
importance of gender hist 1688
schowoerer and beddard emphasise
analogies betwene state and family
- Jean Bodin, Six Books of the Commonwealth, “impossible that a commonwealth should prosper when the families which are its foundation are ill-regulated.”
- Heads of household of families with recusants of Catholics are suspected.
- Mary Astelll: “if absolute sovereignty be not necessary in a state, how come it be so in a family.”
crime- state and family
Men (head of the households) fined for indiscretions of members of their households like not observing the Sabbath.
- Wife killing husband petit treason.
women in rebellious groups
- not allowed to join as could not vote- excluded sevrants and smei feudal retainers by levellers
female exclusion fro mpolitics justified
- Henry Bullinger: exhortations on female obedience should not be used to justify female exclusion from politics.
somerville- 2 important theoretical developments occurred
- reformation- clerical celibacy only imporant while chritsians persecuted thus dangeorus preists have fmaily- saumaise
- humanism- more aristotle studied -elssauthoirty had as anatomy stueis more humour model abandoned
body and coneption- womens power
Aristotle had a ‘one seed’ model which gave women no agency in conception: she was the body on which the male seed acted.
- Lacquer: the 16th and 17th century ‘one sex’ model was less congenial to pernicious hierarchies. The ‘two-sex’ model of differentation was brought in to justify women’s continued exclusion from the political arena in the late 17th century.
women rebelling
- ## weber agrued women rebeled no property and nothing to lose - yet unconvincing suggests women no positive aims
women rebelling examples
thorughout period
- Giggleswich, Yorkshire, 1537, 400 people, mainly women and children protest the Earl of Cumberland’s enclosures.
- 1606 Rotheram and 1619 Dorset, myth of female unaccountability in law behind much of women’s assertiveness.
- Fen drainage protests high proportion of women.
- Weavers Riots 1675, of the 201 taken to court, 11 weavers’ wives.
women not political
- Peter Laslett: argues for almost complete female impotence in politics.
- EP Thompson, women’s food riots not ‘political.’
women wwere. political
Crawford and Mendelson: women of “central significance” to politics.
- e1 politcial sucess- proved women could rule didnt prove shold
mary ii
anne
mary ii and feminity
- submissive feminities
- letters indicate deeply deferential attitudes to william
- in william absence defefred everything to pc- deemingherself ‘wholly a strnagwer to business’
anne and power
- gave husband no independent royal power
head of army and navy but not title of king - utilised maternal imagery, her coronation verse being from Isiah 49:23: “kings shall be thy nursing fathers, queens shall by thy nursing mothers.”
women playing lady macbeth
-fears charles ii led by mistress- french lousise de kerouaille often blamed for his policies
- anne boleyn- protestant convicne henry become supreme head of cofe, leave pope, promote cranmer and latmer to bishops
- henrietta maria- naseby correspondence, warning c1 making deal w paliaments
recognision power of women
- Anne Clifford control of elections in borough of Appleby (esp 1688).
-Lady Rachel Russell: instrumental in strategy and arrangements for 1688 settlement (Schwoerer) –
major influence on weak minded husband in whom “she created the politician she could not be.” He was, despite his cautious and originally completely pro-monarchy position, arrested for complicity in Rye House Plot.
women and voting
1678, Richmond, women denied the right to vote but can get a man to deputise and then they can exercise their vote.
women during civil war
- Spies for both sides; Aphra Benn to Antwerp 1666
- Important: the rhetoric of a ‘law of necessity’ which allowed extreme action politically also carried through to gender. Restoration is a strict ‘return to normalcy.’ – no more female heroics wanted.
mary gender not problematic
russel
richards
redworth
russel- mary gender
- mary created her own reputation for weakness and lack of skill to serve her own political ends
- by emphasise domestic diff get best possibel deal in her negotiationsw. pope and hapsburgs
richards- mary
- mary marriage did not dilute her authority
- mary in charge of marriage
- mary not elizabeth who nroamlised queenship
redworth- mary
mary not prime mover in her marriage
attempts constitutionally cuckold philip failed- however this was a benefit
mary gender problematic
betteridge
heywood
betteridge- mary gender
- depictions female weakness
- counter-productive marian propaganda served to feminise and domesticate mary
- emphasis feminine as antidote to masculien arrogance of heresy and heretics and celebrating vriginity
heywood
spider and the fly
problematic imagery of ‘maid ‘
poor gender relations- bible
- Genesis: Eve subordination etc justified.
- Corinthians 14.34-35 ‘Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak but must be in submission, as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home. For it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.’ – vs reality
