Caroline Dunn

“When women are classified merely by life-cycle position, marital status, or occupation, it disguises how a woman fulfilled different roles for different people -- a woman might be concomitantly a wife and a servant, or a daughter and a ward. We should also be wary of generalising about women of the same status; thus although historians often depict widowhood as the pinnacle of female empowerment in the Middle Ages, especially for wealth widows, it was these same high-status widows who remain susceptible to abduction throughout the medieval era even after lawmakers had, to an extent, successfully curbed the abduction of maidens and wives in earlier centuries.”
― Caroline Dunn, Stolen Women in Medieval England: Rape, Abduction, and Adultery, 1100–1500