PROLOGUE

How Weak?

It was a fact generally acknowledged by all but the most contumacious spirits at the beginning of the seventeenth century that woman was the weaker vessel; weaker than man, that is.

The phrase had originated with Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament into English in 1526 and was given further prominence by the King James Bible. St Peter, having advised wives in some detail to ‘be in subjection to your own husbands’, urged these same husbands to give ‘honour unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life’, founding his remarks on those of St Paul, in his Epistle to the Ephesians.

By 1600 the phrase was freely employed – by Shakespeare amongst others – to denote either a particular female or the female sex as a whole. Throughout the century following, the words of St Peter, founded on those of St Paul, might form part of the Protestant marriage service as an alternative to a sermon: so that there was a fair chance that most women would listen to them at least once – on the most important day of their life, their wedding-day.

Man then was the stronger, woman the weaker vessel. That was the way God had arranged Creation, sanctified in the words of the Apostle. About the precise nature of this female ‘weakness’ there was however a good deal less agreement.

Was woman morally weaker than man? And if she was accepted as such – for Eve’s audacious behaviour in the Garden of Eden certainly seemed to hint at some innate tendency to depravity in the female sex – what followed? Many of those of both sexes who accepted woman’s innate moral inferiority deduced from this that man had a particular duty to protect the weaker sex. Furthermore, it could be argued that for man, the stronger vessel, to sin was a good deal worse than for woman, the weaker – her own frail nature, while inevitably leading her towards temptation in that fatal way she had inherited from her ‘Grandmother Eve’, also to a certain extent excused her.¹

It was a point made by the Rev. Robert Wilkinson in a wedding sermon of 1607, ‘The Merchant-Royal or Woman a Ship’, which provided a classic exposition of the duties of the married state: where sin was concerned ‘he that imposeth so much upon the Weaker Vessel, importeth much more to the stronger’. Equally if a husband was exacerbated by a particular fault of his wife’s: ‘Yet you must remember she is the Weaker Vessel: God therein exerciseth your wisdom in reforming, and your Patience in bearing it …’²

Few however would have gone as far as the sultry and intelligent Emilia Lanier, who at the beginning of the century dared to pursue the question of ‘my Grandmother Eve’s’ feminine frailty to its logical conclusion:

The majority of those who accepted the notion of woman’s moral inferiority simply concentrated on the eternal vigilance necessary to keep the devil from tempting the woman and causing her to fall – yet again. As William Perkins wrote in 1608, on the vexed subject of witchcraft: ‘the woman being the weaker sex, is sooner entangled by the devil’s illusions with this damnable art than the man’.⁴ Witchcraft and sorcery represented perhaps the extreme forms of the devil’s attentions to womankind: Elizabeth Josceline, laying down precepts for her unborn child in 1622, expressed the more conventional view that a girl would inevitably be in greater danger from the sin of pride than a boy; to her hypothetical daughter she wrote: ‘thou art weaker and thy temptations to this vice greater’.⁵

If morally weaker, was woman necessarily spiritually inferior? From the notion of woman’s susceptibility to temptation, certain propagandists did slide casually towards the notion of woman as inherently evil – tempted as it were in advance of her birth, born already beguiled. Joseph Swetnam provided a notorious example of this in The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women, first printed in 1615. ‘Then who can but say, that Women spring from the Devil,’ he inquired, ‘whose heads, hands, hearts, minds, and souls are evil?’⁶ This type of fulmination, however, tended to elicit a fierce barrage of objections, and although Swetnam’s book had gone through six editions by 1702, his views were violently attacked.

These interesting discussions concerning woman’s possible spiritual inferiority were rooted in uncertainty rather than bigotry. The question of the female soul was crucial. Once again, the notion that women were actually born without souls represented the extreme view, generally denounced whenever it was stated.⁷ For example, in 1646 George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends, met some people in Nottingham ‘that held women have no souls, adding in a light manner, no more than a goose’. He reproved them by adducing the text of the Magnificat: how could the Virgin Mary’s soul magnify the Lord if she did not possess one?⁸

The equality of the male and female soul was another matter. At the beginning of the seventeenth century it was by no means taken for granted that the respective souls which dwelt in the bodies of men and women were identical. It was for this reason that William Austin, in a book of 1637 praising the female sex, took so much trouble to stress the point: ‘in that the soul there is neither hees nor shees’.⁹ It was significant that throughout the seventeenth century educators and other friends of the female cause felt the need to state and restate the principle: God ‘gave the feeblest woman as large and capacious a soul as that of the greatest hero’, declared Richard Allestree in 1673 in The Ladies Calling, a best-selling guide to conduct.¹⁰ Despite St Peter’s statement that the strong and weak vessels were ‘heirs together of the grace of life’, not everyone agreed with Allestree even then. In 1600 there would have been a good many who instinctively flinched from such a proposition.

Perhaps the idea of the woman as merely physically weaker was the simplest notion to entertain, as Rosalind, in man’s apparel in the Forest of Arden, knew it was her duty to check her tears and ‘comfort the weaker vessel [her Cousin Celia] as doublet and hose should show itself courageous to petticoat’. It is true that women were regarded as more susceptible to ailments than men; the midwife Jane Sharp, in a popular book of 1671 based on forty years’ experience in her profession, pleaded for greater medical care for women for that very reason.¹¹ Obviously the general sufferings of women in childbirth, although not strictly speaking produced by disease, and the high rate of maternal mortality encouraged this view.

Yet there was an unexpected corollary to the notion of woman’s physical weakness, her ‘fairness’, her ‘softness’ – for as the century wore on, phrases like ‘the softer sex’ – used by John Locke for example – and ‘the fair sex’ hung delicately like perfume in the air. By the 1690s in the popular Ladies Dictionary, females were referred to unhesitatingly as ‘being made of the softest mould’.¹² The identification during this period of outward beauty with inward beauty, reaching its extreme form in the doctrines of the ‘Platoniques’, took the argument further. If women were indeed softer, physically ‘smoother’ as William Austin had it, might they not also be softer and smoother in spirit? Better than men?

In a very different context, to present woman as physically inferior to the male was to ignore one potentially menacing aspect of her strength well known at the beginning of the seventeenth century. This was woman’s carnality. ‘Though they be weaker vessels, yet they will overcome 2, 3 or 4 men in satisfying of their carnal appetites’ – thus the Elizabethan musician Thomas Wythorne.¹³ Female sexual voracity was a subject of frequent comment. It was axiomatic that a woman who had once experienced sex would wish to renew the pleasure as soon as possible and as often as possible – hence the popular concept of the ‘lusty widow’. The relative facts concerning the male and female orgasm being well understood, women were regarded in an uneasy light for being undeniably weaker – yet in certain circumstances insatiably stronger.

Where intelligence was concerned, there was a great deal more unanimity. At the time of the death of Queen Elizabeth I, almost everyone of both sexes agreed that the female intelligence was less than that of the man: women themselves were wont to refer as a matter of form to the strength of their passions, apt to rule over their weaker reason. The intellectual – and childless – Duchess of Newcastle was described in an elegy on her death as being the exception to the rest of ‘her frail sex … who have Fruitful Wombs but Barren Brains’. The Duchess herself subscribed to one contemporary supposition that the female brain was somehow biologically different: ‘mix’d by Nature with the coldest and softest elements’.¹⁴

And yet … there was something troubling here too, which could not be altogether overcome by referring automatically to clever women as having a masculine intelligence. The great Queen who died in 1603 had played that game herself with consummate skill, describing herself in a famous passage as having the body of a weak and feeble woman but the heart and stomach of a king – that is her masculine counterpart. As the century progressed, obstinate voices would point out that women were not actually intellectually inferior to men – merely worse educated. Other voices would be raised to the effect that if woman’s intelligence was really inferior, she might logically need more, not less education than a man.

For those who pondered on such subjects, it must have been a relief to come to the absolute certainty of the English common law, or as a cynical assessment of women’s position, The Lawes Resolutions, put it, ‘The common law here shaketh hand with divinity.’¹⁵ Under the common law of England at the accession of King James I, no female had any rights at all (if some were allowed by custom). As an unmarried woman her rights were swallowed up in her father’s, and she was his to dispose of in marriage at will. Once she was married her property became absolutely that of her husband. What of those who did not marry? Common law met that problem blandly by not recognizing it. In the words of The Lawes Resolutions: ‘All of them are understood either married or to be married.’¹⁶ In 1603 England, in short, still lived in a world governed by feudal law, where a wife passed from the guardianship of her father to her husband; her husband also stood in relation to her as a feudal lord. This had serious consequences for those wives foolish enough to be detected plotting to kill their husbands: for the act thus counted as treason. Like servants who plotted the death of their master, the wife was subject to the death penalty in its severest form – being burnt alive.

Here was the weak vessel with a vengeance – weak at law. Yet even here there was a respite. The wealthy widow might or might not be racked with lust as the popular imagination believed (one of those ‘young brisk widows who cannot be satisfied without that Due Benevolence which they were wont to receive from their Husbands’).¹⁷ Her position was none the less, as we shall see, in many ways enviable. City wives were particularly well treated: by the Custom of London a wife had the right to one third of her husband’s property at death, and if there were no children, their one third share also. The potential strength in the position of the wealthy widow, if her settlement was unencumbered, her children free from restricting guardianship, may stand as one example of those possibilities which did exist for womankind in the real world, outside the dream or nightmare of her theoretical weakness …

For it is at this point that we notice history holding the door ajar; through this door we glimpse prophetesses, businesswomen, nuns, blue-stockings, radicals, female labourers, prostitutes and courtesans, good women, holy women, the immoral and the amoral, criminals, wayward heiresses, unhappy wives, purposeful mothers, heroines – great ladies who defended besieged houses and castles in the Civil War and others, no less brave, who fought as soldiers themselves – nurses, midwives, adventuresses, educators, and that new breed, the actress.

The contemplation of these faces, in their variety and vitality, whether suffering or triumphant, summons questions to the lips. Now the sound of the female voice too is heard: the writers including poets and playwrights, the diarists – the first diary by a British woman was written at the turn of the sixteenth century by Lady Margaret Hoby¹⁸ – the memorialists, the letter-writers from the sublime and literary to the humble, the latter all the more fiercely poignant for being so often without name or number; Dante’s la gente perduta,¹⁹ a phrase which can cover too easily 90 per cent of English womanhood in the first half of the seventeenth century.

Were these vessels all really so weak as society ostensibly supposed? What kind of lives did women really lead in England between the death of one Queen Regnant and the accession of another?

1Prayers for women’s use, composed by either sex, often referred apologetically to ‘my Grandmother Eve’. Men in the seventeenth century were not, it seemed, descended from Eve.¹