Status Updates From Women In England, 1500–1760...

I find it difficult to escape the conclusion that individualism is ... a process which freed men from ancient constraints, but which was of much less advantage to women. It liberated man from the restraints of the community & have them the whole market place in which to operate, it deprives women of the support of the community while not substantially increasing their opportunities for personal choice & action.

Better off women were increasingly confined to the home...urban work became less varied for women, as they came to be excluded from trades outside vitualling & clothing; & the proletarianisation of rural labour, by the increased specialisation of agricultural work, meant that the lot of the rural poor was increasingly deprived & dreary.

In contrast to a history of men over the same period (1500-1760), we see areduction in the opportunities for women to work in different trades & a diminution of their rights to hold office...as we have seen, what benefited man ( Reformation, civil war, industrialisation) did not universally improve women's circumstances.

The prominence of women (in riots) owed something to the continued & widespread belief that women could not be held responsible forvtheir actions, despite the court of Star Chamber's judgement of 1605 to the contrary.

-all the same their husbands' were legally liable for any fines they had to.pay.

Women as indicators of food riots, the suggestion is as consumers and small scale retailers they were particularly aware of price increases.

Medical uncertainty about the duration of pregnancy caused many problems. Generally the court's favoured the supposition that a child born to a woman whose husband had died within about 10 or 11 months of the child's birth was his child.

- Rabelais jokes about that

16th century East Sussex women were 50% of all murder victims
16th century Essex very few rape cases ended in a conviction; 10 out of 26, most accusations were of masters raping servants, clergymen made up a large group of those masters.

Violence between women was relatively common: there are numerous accounts of brawls in churches about pews...many cases of violence between women involved incidents where one felt that her status had been impugned in some way...preservation of reputation was an extremely important motive in women's actions...it is also possible that violence between women was singled out for particular attention at law

Evidence for Essex, Sussex & Hertfordshire suggests that the cast majority of homicides in the late 16th & early 17th centuries were committed as acts of unpremeditated aggression. They draw attention to the prevalence of domestic violence in this period. Wives accounted for 3/4 of the victims of domestic murders.

historians begun to consider the ways in which the boundaries between sin, crime & madness have moved over time. In early modern England everyone sinned, but not everyone committed crimes in so doing. These boundaries have a gender component: women's supposed sexual voraciousness explained men's being seduced to sin; madness accounted for women who spoke up outside the conventional bounds of their sex.

Some women did influence their male relations& used their position to invilve themselves in political affairs... women were also blamed for getting men into difficulties & it is often impossible to know how much they were actually responsible for unpopular or ill-advised decisions.

One of the most interesting of these relationships, is that between Charles I & Henrietta Maria, sister of Louis XIII of France. She gives the impression of having been bossy, & was probably as poor a judge of character as her husband. Both were intensely sensitive to flights to their position; indeed, it could be argued that there may the root of the problem of Charles's relations with parliament.

Witches & witchcraft accusations, almost more than any other phenomenon in early modern England, perplex us. We can comprehend persecution, scapegoating, community tensions & feuds. It requires a real act of imagination to try to understand a society in which beliefs in magic, sorcery & the supernatural coexisted with orthodox Christian brlief, with no sense of inconsistency.

The majority of (witchcraft) accusations were against women (80-90%) &women were often linked in accusations against men. The majority of accusers were women & of a slightly higher socio-economic status than the accused. Most accusations of witchcraft amounted to disputes within the local community.

It isas difficult to explain the ending of prosecutions for witchcraft as their start...the deepest division is between those who are withcraft accusations as a form of elite control ( by men over women,by one class over another, by a ' rational' Christian culture over an irrational pre-Christian culture) & those who see them as the expression of local antagonists & aggressions.

It is characteristic of New religious movements that women play an important part at the outset but that, as the movementa become institutionalised, their role diminishes. The history of the Quakers shows this clearly, as does that of the early Methodists.

1650s
most women going naked or barefoot for a sign were Quakers, & a 1/3 of the Quakers arrested for disrupting church services were women. In 1659 7000 Quaker women presented a petition to parliament. This activity was treated with mixed reactions by the male Quaker leadership, who were sometimes actively hostileto these women.

The church of England was, in the end, the only major European Protestant church not to allow divorce.
- which is quite funny considering

Convents often disappeared because many of them were no more than small private houses or farma to begin with. There were fewer nuns than monks, they lived in smaller communities & this communities were poorer. ..often the only evidence of the former existence of a number is in place names ( Nunburnholme & Nunkeeling in Yorkshire, Canonsleigh in Devon, Minories in Aldgate London)

In the early middle ages it was more usual for women to be able to read & write than men, except for clergy, but by the 16th century fewer than 10% of women were literate. During the 17th century, the proportion rose above 10% &reached about 25% by the 1720s.

Alehouse-keepers were often recent arrivals in the vicinity, poor & female. The nature of the work made it particularly suitable for women, since it required little capital & might be done part time...at Bideford in 1660 about 1/4 of the licensed alehouse-keepers were women & this was a characteristic figure...unlicensed alehouse-keeping was one of the commonest legal charges against women.

In the early Stuart court the amounts of money spent on clothing, personal adornment & feasting far exceeded those spent upon more durable works of art. Charles I bought Henrietta Maria a pair of earrings which cost more than the ceiling of the banqueting house at Whitehall which Rubens painted.

There was a considerable market in stolen clothes - 27% of urban larceny cases in the 18th century involved clothing. Dishonest servants made off with their employers'wardrobes, & entire washing lines full of clothes disappeared as well as consignments of dirty laundry on their way to be washed.

Probate inventories:
' the only household article which men were more likely to have them women was a clock. Women had more pictures, prints, looking glasses, table linen, curtains & silver than men. There were regional variations...earthenware was more common in areas where there was a local pottery industry & pictures & prints tended to be found in the areas around London, closer to the printing industry.

Gleaning was a customary right & was always done by women & children...even in better off households it might contribute up to 1/8th of the households annual income. Until the later 18th century gleaning was far from a marginal economic activity, though it was of greatest benefit to those who were marginal in the rural economy.

Spectacles were a considerable novelty, and they were expensive and difficult to obtain. Last Bridgeman living in Warwickshire, ordered some scetacles from London in 1698, but was not satisfactorily fitted until 1701 after a good deal of correspondence.
- young woman did domestic work, 30-40 year olds did sewing, older women did washing, nursing or hawking.

Wages work was for most women, associated with a particular period of their live, between childhood & marriage. It was the opportunities for such work which contributed to the independence of young women & their relatively late age at marriage during the 16th & 17th centuries.

A study of accidental deaths recorded in the coroners' inquests for the later middle ages gives a fascinating insight into the way in which feel women spent their days...
...the evidence of inquests held in the 16th century suggests several changes in women's daily routines. The greater use of chimneys had improved domestic safety
drowning was the commonest cause of death
outdoor accidents were the main killers

Women's work in early modern England was arranged informally & rarely involved contact with official bodies.women rarely exercised authority over anyone outside the home, or appeared in public places; &their work packed formal standing. Women were not identified by their trade, as men were, but by their marital status. These characteristics were the result of much women's work taking place in the household

Pica (eating inedible substances) and anorexia nervosa were not unudal complaints in early modern England, & they generated a considerable medical literature.