Love and Marriage in Seventeenth-Century England
Church and State stood foursquare behind the superiority of man in seventeenth century England. It was only when a lady became a widow, writes Maurice Ashley, that a glorious opportunity for authority and freedom suddenly flooded in upon her.
During the seventeenth century, women were in theory, and in practice so far as the law went, inferior to men. That had been their situation ever since Anglo-Saxon times. The teaching of Pauline Christianity and the network of feudal laws and customs had made it so. Women did not serve on juries or hold any public positions.
A lady of wealth passed directly from the rule of her father to that of her husband, under whose “rod” or “power” she remained until she died or was widowed. It is true that, among the poorer classes, women were so essential to the family welfare that they could assert their authority from time to time; but patriarchy was the climate of the society in which they lived, and the circumstances of the age prevented them from asserting themselves successfully or for very long.
For most women life was seldom agreeable. When the wives and daughters of farm labourers were not toiling in the fields or in their insanitary cottages, they were giving birth to children or recovering, in rough conditions, from the effects of child-birth.
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