Women, Resistance and Revolution (3 page)

Judging by the tone of the popular literature of the bourgeoisie in the towns, their wives were by no means passive and docile creatures. There are continual complaints about the shamelessness and insubordination of women. The two were almost synonymous. Much of this can be dismissed no doubt as the product of a new market with a public that enjoyed a salacious tale with a smack of moralism. But it was also an unmistakable indication that the old mechanisms of social control were beginning to confront conditions with which they could no longer cope. It was not so much that men in the sixteenth
century encountered new problems, but they encountered them on a scale and at a velocity which made them appear completely out of control. When commentators denounced unmarried mothers who were ‘so little ashamed’,
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it was the lack of shame they really minded. The complaints about the companions of incorrigible rogues, ‘doxies’, and women pedlars or ‘bawdy baskets’ selling themselves along with their wares were not so much that they’d never been seen before but that the authorities didn’t know what to do with them. Greater mobility and the changes in both countryside and towns presented the Tudors with a new degree of wandering poverty. Their frantic Poor Law documents express that bewilderment. As towns got bigger too it became increasingly difficult to know what everyone was doing in them. An anxious proclamation of 1547 forbade the women of London to ‘meet together to babble and talk’, and ordered husbands to ‘keep their wives in their houses’.
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Enforcement was another problem.

Simultaneous with the breakdown of the traditional social structures which had contained the aspirations of women, the forces which promised a new potentiality grew stronger. When in the seventeenth century the puritan revolution unleashed so many heretics, babblers and talkers upon the world, it would have been indeed surprising if some impudent lasses, like Mildred, who had been forced to keep their place, sit in silence, obey with humility, and bide their time, had not decided to join in. While impatient and radical thinkers challenged so many authorities, judged their betters, expected to be able to consent before being governed and even taught that all were equal, women tentatively started to take some of these ideas to themselves. Within the self-governing religious communities of the puritan sect they found a certain limited equality and a larger scope for self-expression. Here the Lord could pour out his spirit to all alike. The poor lace-maker could become God’s handmaiden. Having got rid of the priest and proclaimed the priesthood of all believers, why confine divine inspiration to men? Anna Trapnel fasted, prophesied, and in ‘The Cry of a Stone’ declared that ‘Whom the Son makes free, they are free indeed’.
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If the only criterion was individual conscience why couldn’t women challenge their husbands’ and fathers’ right to instruct them in what to believe and their power to control how they behaved. To the horror of Anglicans and Presbyterians, for whom it was anathema that those
‘who lie in the same bed … should yet be of two churches’,
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puritan women not only chose their own beliefs but actually divorced their husbands for spiritual deviation. The notion that the authority of fathers and husbands should rest on agreement like the authority of the state, that the husband had no more right to control the wife’s conscience than the magistrate had to coerce the man’s, persisted. Though by no means popular with many supporters of the Protectorate it was to outlast the Commonwealth of the seventeenth century and in many legal guises find itself chased through the courts in subsequent centuries. Like the Quaker George Fox’s idea that male domination belongs to sin and that in the new life men and women will be equals, it has still to be fully realized.

The implications of these notions went beyond the sects even at the time. A pamphlet called ‘The Women’s sharpe revenge’ appeared in 1640 criticizing anti-feminist writings. Its full title was ‘The Women’s sharpe revenge: Or an answer to Sir Seldome Sober that writ those railing pamphlets called the Juniper and Crab-tree, lectures, etc. Being a sound Reply and full citation of those Bookes: with an Apology in this case for the defence of us women. Performed by Mary Tattle-well and Joan Hit-him-home, Spinsters. 1640.’ Tattle-well and Hit-him-home protested both against the double standard of sexual morality and the restricted and confined nature of the education permitted to women. They were emphatic that all critics of women were men who had either had no success in love-making, or had been unfortunate enough to marry shrews. They quoted scripture in their defence, an old trick, pointing out that women weren’t created to be slaves or vassals. After all, they didn’t come out of men’s heads ‘thereby to command him’, but neither did they come ‘out of his foote to be trod upon’. With irrefutable logic they showed how women had come ‘out of his side to be fellow-feeler; equal and companion’.
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Though they undeniably demolished contemporary anti-feminists who used dubious arguments to prove that women were more prone to evil than goodness because they had been ‘made of a knobby crooked rib’, even such militants as Tattle-well and Hit-him-home didn’t demand a say in government. The women of the puritan revolution were still incapable of expressing their claims in political terms. There was as yet no political feminist justification, though a moral one was beginning to develop. The women petitioners to the Long Parliament in 1642 apologized for
petitioning against popery. ‘We doe it not out of any self-conceit or pride of heart, as seeking to equall ourselves with men, either in Authority or Wisdome.’
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Puritanism effected a species of moral improvement in the position of women. Within a very confined sense it allowed women a certain restricted dignity. It provided an impetus for a more humane concept of relationships between the sexes, protesting against wife-beating and opposing rituals like churching which had emphasized the uncleanness and animal baseness of women. By regarding morality as an affair of the inner spirit rather than the opinion of the world or the apparatus of government, it provided a means of challenging the double standard of sexual morality. Essential to radical-puritan democracy was the idea of the individual as the independent owner of his own person and capacities, with the right to resist invasion and violation. This had obvious implications for women. Within puritan democratic thinking too was the assumption that women, as human beings, had certain inalienable rights to civil and religious liberty.

However, politically in the puritan attitude to authority there was an important ambiguity. Apart from extreme radicals and millenarians the majority would not have considered that the idea of government by consent implied any threat to the authority of the father. Ideas of liberty were soon hedged about. Popular consent was conceived as meaning the consent of heads of households. Just as the communism of the early settlers in America included only those heads of households in the covenant of the commonwealth and provoked a movement of the young men in revolt, liberty was interpreted as the liberty of fathers. It was argued that the franchise must depend on independence from the will of others. Those who were bound either by a wage contract or the wife’s terms in a marriage contract had handed over part of their rights and forfeited the privilege of the franchise. Thus the idea of participation in government was restricted to those who owned property and to men. Puritan democracy spoke not for all peasants, not for apprentices, or the inferior sort of people, but for the yeomen farmers, the small master craftsmen in the towns. It certainly didn’t include women, not even the more privileged women. Instead they were ‘included’ in the franchise of their masters.

Indeed, a combination of factors served actually to reinforce the authority of heads of households in the seventeenth century.
Politically they were now the crucial link through to the state, acting as intermediaries between the central government and their own dependants and servants. The chain of authority was not removed; it was changed and secularized. The father reading the Bible, instructing his family, became responsible not only for their material but for their spiritual welfare. The worship of the Virgin, the reverence for female saints were replaced by a stern assertion of God’s fatherhood. The economic tension of the medieval community breaking its integument focused on the household, still an independent unit of production but subject to the penetration of the new market relations of early capitalism. Puritanism assumed and took for granted the small independent concern, either farm or family business, in which the family worked side by side and the wife could well be a partner though still an inferior partner. But this ideal of self-sufficient independence was rapidly ceasing to represent the new reality. The richer yeomen’s wives were already withdrawing from agricultural labour, and in the towns, as crafts became more intensively capitalized, the wives of the larger tradesmen no longer worked in the business. The roles of husband and wife were more specifically differentiated. The external world of work became the sphere of the man exclusively, the internal world of the family and the household was the proper business of the woman. This was rather different from the situation earlier amongst these middling people, when it was customary for the young girls to do the housework while the ‘housewife’ attended to the family business.

At the same time changes in industrial organization affected women’s position in the structure of work. In the guilds their situation was being progressively weakened. The old protections and privileges of widows disappeared, and as apprenticeship became more formal the entrance of women to trades was closed. A sustained struggle developed from the sixteenth century over the definition of ‘women’s work’. Some trades which had been reserved for women were encroached upon and eventually take over by men. Brewing was probably originally a women’s trade but by the seventeenth century brewsters (female brewers) were prohibited. In York, despite women’s resistance, men replaced them in candlemaking. As new unprotected industries arose these became the province of women excluded from the guilds. The textile industry was especially suited to become ‘women’s work’, not only by tradition but because
some of its several processes could be done at home. Though there were attempts to restrict women weavers, spinning especially was easily done by women. It had been a home industry since ancient times. The pay for this type of work was lower than the rates in regulated trades, but domestic industry was to proliferate in the eighteenth century. With every new refinement in the division of labour women found themselves allocated either a place in which they were powerless or a place in which they were more severely exploited. While their richer sisters passed out of production into leisure and domestic isolation to ape the habits of the upper classes, the women of the poor encountered merely new forms of drudgery.

Not to work, for the women of the middling people, became the mark of class superiority at the very moment when their men were establishing work as the criterion of dignity and worth. Not only was industry closed to them but their limited education made entrance into the professions impossible. The process of intellectual specialization, one of the effects of the scientific revolution, emphasized this exclusion. Here again women were confined to the lowlier, less highly paid areas of professions. This is well illustrated in medicine. As it evolved from magical art to science, requiring a more specific and theoretical learning, male doctors assumed control of the higher branches. Women surgeons finally disappear in the seventeenth century. Similarly midwifery, which had been a respected profession and for which the women who looked after the upper classes were well paid, was downgraded. The original disapproval of having a man at a birth was conveniently discarded by the rich and fashionable. Women midwives were confined to the poor. There was some resistance. Jane Sharp in
The Midwives Book
(1671) retaliated with a rejection of scientific methodology and book-learning in favour of the traditional craft lore. ‘It is not hard words that perform the work, as if none understood the Art that can’t understand Greek. Words are but the Shell that we oftimes break our Teeth with them to the kernel, I mean our brains to know what is the meaning of them; to have the same in our Mother-tongue would save us a great deal of needless labour.’
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Though in 1687 Mrs Elizabeth Collier worked out a scheme for a training course for midwives it was never put into effect. In France, where similar developments had the same result, the midwives did not merely complain; they organized and formed a school of midwifery raising the status of their occupation.

This was significant of a wider difference. The persistence of Catholicism meant that the aspirations of women tended to take a secular rather than a religious form. Instead of a suspicious reaction to science, theory and the new intellectual world of emerging capitalism, feminism in France tried rather to apply reason to the advantage of women. Enlightenment has many facets. As the assumption spread that it was unwise to accept anything as true unless it could be demonstrated, and that it was possible after breaking information into several parts to proceed step by step in an orderly and rational manner to deductive knowledge of even the most complex aspect of reality, no matter how traditional and well established, new grounds for questioning the subordination of women appeared. If it could be argued that given a suitable environment and education human beings could ultimately be capable of grasping the universe, why not extend this to women. A disciple of Descartes, Mlle de Gournay, in
L’Egalité des Hommes et des Femmes
believed that the restricted education of girls accounted for their inferiority. Though this ‘reasonable’ feminism continuing the renaissance tradition spoke only for the more privileged women, putting their claims to compete in the opening world of the bourgeois man, politically it was to prove more effective than the religious millenarian glimpses of liberation. The demand for the access and accommodation of an upper-class intellectual elite was to meet with bitter resistance. But it had in the short term more prospect of realization than the vision of a transformed relationship between human beings and the natural environment. The demand for accommodation did not look so far ahead as the vision of liberation.