Gender Flashcards
Key sources
Knox, Monstrous Regiment (1558); Aylmer (1559 reply)
Edmund Spenser, Faerie Queene (1590/6)
Dodd and Cleaver (1598)
William Gouge (1622)
Richard Brathwaite (1631)
John Donne, The Autumnal, The Sun Rising (1630’s)
Pepys Diary (1660)
Lady Margaret Hoby’s dairy; Lady Grace Mildmay’s medicine and recipe books/prayers.
Key ideas: gender
Masculinity as tightly controlled as femininity throughout the period, subject to hierarchy in status terms
Differences in expectations according to status/rural/urban?
Key monarchs:
Mary I (1553-58) Elizabeth I (1558-1603)
Women and reputation/honour
Dabhoiwala: reputation “a compound of social and moral status”; chastity “a prerequisite, rather than a measure, of reputation”
Gowing: “sexual insult belonged to a culture that perceived women’s virtue, honour, and reputation through sexuality”. no equivalent to “whore” for men
Men and reputation/honour
Shepard: patriarchy increasingly dependent on “distinctions of social position”; honour dependent on “virtue/honour/character” (morals) for women but this “of subsidiary importance to men” - instead = worldly values of ‘rank’ and ‘quality’
in 1604-28 1/5 of population never married (positive culture of excess bravado)
Women’s work
Gowing: “women had duties, work, and social lives both outside and inside the house”
Women and power
Gowing: 16% of Southwark households headed by women in 1631.
1570-1640 = 1800 suits of sexual slander/marriage and 85% were by single female litigants.
1570: women suing 1/2 total sex/marriage cases; 80% by 1620.
Capp: 20% women heading households, and “female sociability” “provided ritual practical advice and support”
Female rule - issues
Gender - inner sanctum, question of marriage and control
Elizabeth I and faction
Hanmer - “no dispute that faction did dominate high politics in the later 1590’s”
Neale - “endemic” vs. Adams: “occasional”
Williams: Leicester/burghley: “loosely constructed and volatile groupings”. Eg’s of success: Ralegh 40,000 acres in Ireland, vs. Spenser: £50p.a. Burghley’s son Robert Cecil gaining secretaryship rather than Essex.
Adams: privy chamber: “feminine inner sanctum”. 1590’s “battleground for factional struggle”
Elizabeth I and court management
GUY - 2nd reign after 1585 and Dudley’s death. E didn’t refill positions - 13 LL left open, court vacancies unfilled: privy C = 10 in 1598, half the no. of 1559. Corruption: Shirley accused of embezzling 30,000 from treasury in 1593 and Burghley took £3000+ for wardships within two years.
Adams: court expenditure: 10,000-90,000 p.a. over rule, mainly on food.
Body politic and mixed monarchy:
McLaren: wisdom of many “imparted grace to a female prince, and thereby preserved both protestantism and national autonomy”
Cult of Virgin Queen
Consciously chosen because a virgin = someone who could be worshipped.
Used in 1590’s in opposition to the Anjou match
Sieve portraits from 1597-83. 135 surviving paintings and 25 book images.
Doran - alternative meanings of symbols in portraits - Rose, phoenix and Pelican = Tudor, hereditary rule, and charity, as well as virginity…
KING - bible and sword = similar emblems inherited from HVIII (used to signify his authority coming directly from God) to be a prot. monarch.
“bookends”
START: pre-reformation women as abbesses (positions of unique power) - eg. Syon Abbey, richest one pre-reformation, last leader: Abbess Jordan.
END: Restoration libertinism, eg. Barbara Palmer, Countess of Castlemaine
Dodd and Cleaver - Quotes
1598 - “A household is as it were a little commonwealth”, “the duty of the husband is to travell abroad to seeke living: and the wives dutie is to keepe the house”
William Gouge - quotes
“Of Domesticall Duties”, 1622
Ephesians 5:22 “wives submit unto your husbands, as unto the lord”
“a bad husband, wife, parent… is no good christian”
“of all the inferiours in a family, wives are far the most excellent”
Husband - “his place is expressed in the metaphor of an head”