Jan-Maat’s Reviews > Women In England, 1500-1760: A Social History > Status Update

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.

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.