Women in Early Modern England, 1550-1720 (review)

Fifteen years in the making and a fully collaborative venture of the co-authors, Women in Early Modern England is a splendid new survey of the lives of early modern English women. Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford describe how their “shared search for the legacy of women’s lives” began in the early 1980s at a time when medieval and nineteenth century women were beginning to be recovered, but when the early modern era remained “the Dark Ages” of women’s history. While immense strides have been made since that time, this study is nonetheless a genuine landmark. The authors have not only systematically surveyed the relevant primary and secondary sources, they have confronted major interpretive issues about women’s agency and status in this period. Theirs is a lively, well organized account with much new material that advances both our factual and theoretical understanding of women’s experience in the years from 1500 to 1750.

Following a “stage-setting” introduction that defines terms and concepts and presents the themes to be addressed, the authors provide a lengthy first chapter that explores the multiple discourses—medical, religious, legal, political, and social—through which women were defined in early modern England. The authors focus on popular as well as elite discourse about the category “woman,” and their full discussion amply justifies their point that difference between the sexes was a deeply held article of faith that cut across all social groups, with men as the primary authors of that discourse. While Mendelson and Crawford expressly avoid any claim to uncover the origins of the accompanying gender hierarchy favoring men, their account provides vivid documentation of strong and pervasive beliefs in female inferiority. It also shows that in the face of the dominant discourse, women reacted by constructing a counter-discourse of their own upholding women’s value, dignity and contributions to family and community. The next two chapters trace the female life cycle across different social groups from childhood and adolescence through adulthood. Aware that far more material on the well-to-do groups is available in both primary and secondary sources, the authors concentrate on recovering the lives of the more typical majority and on exploring the variety of female experience over time. Here their archival labors as well as their imaginative use of the sources pay off handsomely, as they are able to show both the immense variety in the lives of more ordinary women as well as compelling evidence, despite the clear disadvantages of poverty and low status, that these women experienced more scope for independent activity than their sisters in the privileged classes.

Participation along with men in the institution of household service, for example, ensured considerable mobility for women and men alike as well as women’s greater say in their own matrimonial decisions. While it is true that such independence also made most women more vulnerable to rape and seduction than the more protected daughters of the upper classes, it also encouraged the development of women’s own sense of individual responsibility, in financial as well as sexual matters. Typically, women as well as men were required to amass their own savings in preparation for marriage and the establishment of a separate household. They therefore had particular motivation to prevent a pregnancy that might entail impossible burdens of support and compromise their marriageablity. When a suitor attempted to persuade Alice Wheeler, for example, that she should have sexual relations with him on the grounds that they were already contracted to marry, Wheeler responded tartly, “I know ...that I am your wife and you my husband, yet until such time as we are married [in church] you shall not have the use of my body (p.121).”

The authors argue convincingly, too, that outside the ranks of the elite, there was less disparity between the lives of girls and boys, especially in the earlier stages of the life cycle. Whereas upper-class boys left the maternal orbit as early as seven...