Name:

Women’s Roles and Context Reading

The following excerpts are drawn from modern academic readings on the roles of women in
the seventeenth century. Although the ​The Crucible​ and ​Year of Wonders​ are products of
the time in which they are produced, they comment and critique on this period in which their
action takes place.

Marriage in Seventeenth-Century England: The Woman’s Story

Alice Brabcová

“In seventeenth-century England, marriage and sexual morals played a far more important
social role than nowadays. A family centred around a married couple represented the basic
social, economic and political unit. In the Stuart period, a husband’s “rule” over his wife,
children and servants was seen as an analogy to the king’s reign over his people—a
manifestation of a hierarchy constituted by God. A woman was regarded as the ‘weaker
vessel’ (a phrase taken from the New Testament)—a creature physically, intellectually,
morally and even spiritually inferior to a man; therefore, the man had a right to dominate her
(Fraser 1981: 1).”

“In a society strongly influenced by Puritan values, sexual integrity and the status of a
married person gave a woman respectability and social prestige. This, together with the fact
that it was very difficult for women to find ways of making an independent living, meant that
securing a husband was a matter of great importance.”

Summarise your understanding of this in two dot points.

●

Identify any connections between this and your understanding of the novel and play.
Women’s Bodies and the Making of Sex in Seventeenth-
Century England
Laura Gowing

“The regulation of the body was a priority for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
governments. Both the Protestant and Catholic reformations meant to impose a model “holy
household” on the unruly desires of men and women alike. That project was not simply an
elite one; it demanded and encouraged the active participation of ordinary neighbors, women
as well as men. In addition, the creation of the early modern state brought with it a concern
for poverty that prioritized preventing and punishing illegitimacy. In an era of frequent
dynastic crisis, where monarchies were perpetually troubled by the possibility of a line dying
out with no heir, the legitimacy of children, the potency of men, and the fidelity and fertility of
women were all political concerns (Roper 1989; Weil 1999; Crawford 2010).”

“In many ways the early modern legal system offered advantages to women, but not where
their bodies were concerned. Rape, becoming in the seventeenth century a crime more of
sex than of property, began to involve questions of consent and resistance; prosecution
remained unlikely. From 1623, infanticide could be presumed from a secret illegitimate
pregnancy. The opacity of the sexual and reproductive body put women in an awkward
relationship to the legal culture of fact and the new world of proof and evidence.”

“Pregnancy was a corporeal experience brutally determined by economics. The poor,

according to midwives’ books, gave birth more easily, and needed plainer food in pregnancy;
prostitutes conceived with difficulty. Even more starkly, the difficulty of single motherhood for
poor women in the seventeenth century made infanticide all too imaginable as a solution for
illegitimate pregnancy. The history of illegitimate births tells a quite different tale from that of
the prescribed rituals for childbirth: one that is equally rehearsed, but to a different effect.
Oaths like this one—“if William Ridley be not the father of the child I now labour of, I pray
god that it and I may never part”—haunted women with the possibility of death in childbirth.
In communities troubled by the specter of single mothers and unsupported children,
parenthood began to seem contingent on economic stability.”

Complete a PMI (Plus-Minus-Interesting) of this reading in relation to your understanding of

the novel and play.
P

I
Women, Property, and the Law in the Anglo-American World,
1630–1700
Lindsay R. Moore

“Colonial women in North America did not enjoy more advantages and legal freedoms than
their counterparts in England. The approximately 60,000 women who emigrated from
England to the colonies between 1630 and 1700 left behind the benefits of a complex but
comprehensive system of English law that protected and served their needs with a level of
sophistication that the American courts lacked. Though Anglo-American culture remained
fundamentally patriarchal throughout the early modern period, in the seventeenth century the
English legal system provided women with more varied and robust methods of circumventing
the law of coverture than did the colonial legal system.”

“The dominant trend of the scholarship on women, property, and the law in early modern
England has shown that women in England inherited, owned, and managed property and
also went to law to defend it. While acknowledging very real restrictions women faced under
the common law, these scholars have noted that other legal jurisdictions gave women the
ability to exercise some independent control over property and the flexibility to pursue
litigation if that property was threatened.”

“The restrictions women faced under common law were remarkably enduring and persistent
across the Anglo-American world. Under English and colonial common law, married women,
or femes covert, were legally “covered” by their husbands. This meant that according to the
letter of the common law, married women could not draw up their own wills without the
consent of their husbands, enter into binding contracts, or initiate or defend a legal suit
without their husbands’ assistance. A husband legally controlled and reaped the profits of his
wife’s wages or property during their marriage. The colonial formulation of coverture was
much like its English counterpart: though inheritance practices varied between colonies,
under colonial common law married women could still not own or manage property, nor
could they initiate or defend a suit in a common law court without their husbands’
assistance.”

What does this reading suggest about the lives of married and unmarried women?
Married
Women

Unmarried
Women
Witch Hunting in Seventeenth-Century England: a
Historiographical Review
Rachael Maclean

“One model popularly used to explain witch hunting in seventeenth-century England is the
Thomas/Macfarlane socioeconomic model. These historians have argued that witch hunting
was a wealthy vs. poor process of prosecution caused by neighborly tensions. They argue
that when wealthier neighbors breeched common standards of neighborly charity (such as
refusing to loan poorer neighbor money or goods) they would become consumed by guilt.
Common tragedies such as sickness, cattle death, and fruitless labor then seemed to
become punishments for their breech of charity and they turned on their poorer neighbors,
accusing them of using witchcraft as revenge.”

“A second common model used to explain the rise in witchcraft persecutions is a religious
model concerned with elite and popular views of witchcraft. This model explains that popular
and elite views of witchcraft in the middle ages were largely concerned with ​maleficium,​ the
ability of a witch to do harm, and did not think magic was, itself, worthy of punishment. Then,
during the Protestant Reformation, elites began to accept continental views of witchcraft.
This continental view argued that all witchcraft, not just ​maleficium,​ was evil because all
magic was the result of a contract with the devil. Thus, all witches were engaged in false
religion, Satan worship, and the denial of Christ.”

“Some historians argue that the spread of the demonic view over the ​maleficium v​ iew among
the upper class during the early modern period created a religious zeal to purge the land of
witches rather than a quest for social order. The strength of this argument is its attention to
religious motivation. Protestants, especially puritans, who were mostly of the rising middle
class, were deeply concerned with Satan and his influence on earth. Indeed, the topic was
so often preached upon that the devil’s power began to seem as great as God’s. This
helped forge a puritan view that cast the world in a series of binary conflicts where every
interaction was a struggle between good and evil. It is no wonder, then, that deeply religious
puritans were more likely to perceive threat in witchcraft than their English Catholic
predecessors.”

“Finally, a psychological model is often used to explain witch prosecutions and witch
confessions. The model argues that witches were the ultimate social “other:” evil, irreligious,
animalistic, female, and cruel to the innocent. Other women, then, especially ‘godly’ women
anxious about their own salvation, could prove themselves to be godly housewives and
mothers by posing themselves against a witch. This led to the increasing prosecution of
witches by other women. Anxieties about masculinity, threatened by female power, could
also be played out and assuaged during witch prosecutions, meaning men also had a
psychological reason to prosecute witches. Confessions were caused, in this model, by the
psychological trauma of poor women’s lives. Financially crippled by patriarchal and
economic systems, women were forced to make incredibly difficult, socially taboo decisions.”
Summarise the different motivations behind accusations of witches and evaluate their
relevance to the novel and play.

Godly Women in Early Modern England: Puritanism and

Gender
Diane Willen

“If intense spirituality dominated the Puritan's existence, it ought also to provide the
framework for an examination of the interaction between Puritanism and gender. The Puritan
practised experiential religion, sought the assurance of salvation, and practised godly
behaviour - activities accessible to women, especially literate women. Moreover, Puritanism
had a particular appeal for women. Functioning in a society that both prized and expected
female piety, and denied the status of the Puritan divine, women might seek the greater
status of Puritan saint. With but a few notable exceptions, however, historians have shown
little interest in exploring individual spirituality as a means of understanding gender (that is,
the socially constructed roles for men and women and the exercise of authority between
men and women). Instead they have been more concerned to examine the family as the key
to understanding gender relations.”

“We know that Puritan divines entirely agreed with their fellow Protestants as well as their
Catholic predecessors in describing the family in patriarchal language and endowing the
good wife with conventional female virtues. The husband was 'head' to the wife and head of
the spiritualised household, which practised and taught religious piety.”

Pick a word, a phrase and a sentence that encapsulates your understanding of Puritanism
and gender.
Word

Phrase

Sentence
Vocabulary

Stuart Period: ​1603-1714

Illegitimacy:​ the state of being born to parents not lawfully married to each other

Infanticide:​ the crime of a parent killing their child within a year of birth

Corporeal:​ relating to a person's body, especially as opposed to their spirit

Patriarchal:​ denoting a system of society or government controlled by men

Coverture:​ the legal status of a married woman, considered to be under her husband's
protection and authority

Piety:​ the quality of being religious or reverent

Divine:​ a cleric or theologian