Gender Relations
1. The Subordinate Position of Women in a Patriarchal Society
a) Society hierarchical; gender one of its basic principles. Women’s subordinate role
evident in law and custom: patriarch = a social and political system in which authority
was vested in males as husbands and fathers.
b) Government (local & central): women excluded from office. Law: judges, lawmakers
all male. Women’s evidence in courts counted less than men’s.
c) Property rights: men had control over women’s moveable property (money & goods).
Inheritance law usually favoured sons. Widows had limited rights, often only a life
interest in a share (portion or jointure).
d) Within the family: husbands had authority over all members of the household. Could
beat a disobedient wife ‘within reason’.
e) Education: girls barred from schools in most countries and from universities
everywhere (until late 19th c). Basic literacy therefore much lower among women.
f) Professions: excluded from law, church, medicine.
g) Business: excluded from most urban trades and crafts. Guild regulations barred
women from trading independently.
h) Earnings: female labouring jobs, e.g. helping with harvest, spinning, charring,
brought low wages. When women and men did the same job, the woman’s wage was
only 2/3 of the male wage.
i) ‘Double standard’ of morality: sexual lapses far more serious for women.
2. Why did Women Apparently Accept This Subordinate Position Without Protest?
a) Physical strength: cf. Mary Astell (‘men have all the strongest argument, such as
guns, pikes, blunderbusses’. Strength a factor in work; and in physical protection:
man more likely to protect rest of family members than woman. No police force…
b) Biological facts and theories. Nature of female body and constitution made woman
different from men and ‘inferior’. Aristotle, Galen and the theory of four humours:
women were cold/moist therefore weaker (physically, mentally, morally) and more
passionate, emotional (cf. Eve in Milton’s Paradise Lost).
c) Religion and the church. Laid down in Bible that God intended men to be superior;
God created Adam in own image; Fall of Mankind (Eve’s responsibility). A message
repeated in sermons, books right across Europe, both Catholic & Protestant.
d) Custom and tradition: gender inequality not new (similar throughout Europe and
Middle East, back to ancient times; and Asian & African societies too). So patriarchy
seems to be universal, perhaps even timeless.
e) A few intelligent women broke out of the mental straitjacket: Christine de Pisan
(c.1400), Mary Astell (c.1700): shrewd, incisive, apparently ‘modern’. But neither
could suggest any way to change gendered order of society.
3. Negotiating Patriarchy: ‘Making the Best of It.’
a) Social realities less extreme than the law would suggest. Social pressures that
moderated position: practical, pragmatic, rather than ideological. Restrictive ideology
cf. permissive reality.
2
b) Family life: parenting as a joint responsibility, required willing co-operation and
consideration. Many poor families also depended on the wife’s earnings to get by.
Family farms run jointly: ‘joint-role relationship’.
c) Business: many towns in Germany, England & France allowed a legal fiction: wife
could register as femme sole (single woman) for business purposes, and was then
allowed to practice a trade independently.
d) Other women found opportunities in the margins: in medicine (as midwives, bonesetters, nurses, searchers of the dead); in textiles (spinning, lace-making); in moneylending (e.g. Gluckel of Hameln, the rich Jewish widow, of late 17th century; also
offering credit, sometimes as pawnbrokers: and in de-regulated occupations not
controlled by guilds (e.g. food and drink outlets—alehouses, inns, later coffeehouses— lodging houses)
e) Politics: informal roles at the royal court. Women as petitioners. Women often
involved in riots (over bread, custom, tax) partly because magistrates looked on them
more leniently.
4. Did Women’s Position Improve or Worsen, 1500-1700? Evidence both ways.
a) Worsening? Religion: protestantism marginalised women (convents closed, female
saints swept away). Witchcraft: most ‘witches’ women (often 80-90% of those
prosecuted; thousands burnt in late 16th/early 17th centuries. Law: roman law
replaced customary law, and therefore favoured men. Regulation of sexual offences
(e.g. infanticide: single mothers deemed guilty unless could prove innocence, France
1556, England 1624). Harsher laws on adultery (carries death penalty in Germany,
Scotland, Sweden, and England 1650-60; and weighted against women). Harsher
punishment of unmarried mothers. Economy: more restrictions over work (fewer
occupations open to women; reinforced by greater commercialization, e.g. brewing
industry, and by cultural shifts: the genteel, leisured lifestyle of merchant’s wife as a
new ideal).
b) Improving?: Marriage: A higher valuation of marriage (now the ideal, rather than the
celibate religious life);.preachers urged companionship, condemned wife-beating as
barbaric. Education: Girls’ schools in some Protestant countries, esp. Germany (e.g.
Augsburg, 1623: 1500 children at school, 800 boys, 700 girls). Mid-17th c schools for
girls in England. Women venturing into print & numerous publications now aimed at
women: proto-magazines (Ladies Diary by John Tipper, Coventry schoolteacher,
c1700).More Generally: end of witchcraft persecution by 1700; a new culture of
‘civility and politeness’ among elites, esp. in N.W. Europe.
c) No simple verdict. Fluctuations—gains and losses--and regional variations, esp.
North/Southern Europe and rural/urban. But most of all distinctions of age, of social
status (class?); of marital status
Professor Steve Hindle: 17.x.2007