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.
- Poorest: Norwich Census 1570, women often HOH – husband’s died or left. In periods of economic contraction, it was women’s opportunities which declined first.
- Guilds for example sporadically reasserted male culture: silk trade for example, men formed a silk guild 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?