Early-Modern Attitudes to Gender

 

Sexual Difference

Man has the most perfect nature of all animals? Woman is more compassionate than man, and has a greater propensity to tears. She is also more envious, more querulous, more slanderous, and more contentious. Further still, the female is more dispirited, more despondent, more impudent, and more given to falsehood, than the male. She is likewise, more easily deceived, and more apt to remember; and again the female is more vigilant, less active, and, in short, less disposed to motion, and receptive of less nutrient than the male. But the male, as we have observed, is more disposed to give assistance in danger, and is more courageous than the female.

Aristotle, The Generation of Animals (C3rd BCE)

 

The male provides the ?form? and the ?principle of movement?, the female provides the body, in other words, the material. Compare the coagulation of milk. Here the milk is the body, and the fig-juice or the rennet contains the principle which causes it to set. The semen of the male acts in the same way as it gets divided up into portions within the female.

~ Aristotle, The Generation of Animals (C3rd BCE)

 

Women's Education

Though the girls seem commonly to have a quicker ripening in wit than boys have, for all that seeming, yet it is not so? their brains be not so much charged, neither with weight nor with multitude of matters, as boys? heads be: and therefore like empty cask they make the greater noise? As for bodies, the maidens be more weak, most commonly even by nature, as of a moonish influence, and all our whole kind is weak of the mother side, which when she was first made even then weakened the man?s side? The dearest comfort that man can have if they incline to good: the nearest corrosive if they tread awry. And therefore charily to be cared for, bearing a jewel of such worth in a vessel of such weakness.

          Massacio, Expulsion from the Garden of Eden                        ~ Richard Mulcaster, Positions (1581)

 

As for eloquence, I have no great care, nor a woman needeth it not, but she needeth goodness and wisdom. Nor is it no shame for a woman to hold her peace, but it is a shame for her and abominable to lack discretion and live ill?. When she shall be taught to read, let those books be taken in hand that may teach good manners. And when she shall learn to write, let not her example be void verses, nor wanton or trifling songs, but some sad sentence, prudent and chaste, taken out of holy scripture, or the sayings of philosophers? And finally let her learn for herself alone and her young children, or her sisters in our Lord. For it neither becometh a woman to rule a school, nor to live among men, or speak abroad, and shake off her demureness and honesty, either all together or a great part: which if she be good it were better to be at home within and unknown to other folks. And in company to hold her tongue demurely. And let few see her none at all hear her.

            ~ Juan Luis Vives, The Instruction of a Christian Woman (1540)

 

Marriage

Wives submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject to Christ, so let wives be subject to their husbands in everything?

            ~ Ephesians (5:22-24)

 

What the duty of a wife is towards her husband

The duty is comprehended in these points; First that she reverence her husband. Secondly, that she submit herself and be obedient unto him. And lastly that she do not wear gorgeous apparel, beyond her degree and place, but that her attire be comely and sober, according to her calling? As the church should depend upon the wisdom and discretion and will of Christ and not follow what itself listeth: so must the wife also submit and apply herself to the discretion and will of her husband, even as the government and conduct of everything resteth in the head, not in the body.

~ Robert Dod and John Cleaver, A Goodly Form of Household Government (1598)

 

 

 

A 'skimmington', the ritual shaming of a cuckolded man

 

 

Women at Plays

?theatres are snares unto fair women. And as I told you long ago?our theatres and playhouses in London are as full of secret adultery as [if] they were in Rome. In Rome it was the fashion of wanton young men to place themselves as nigh as they could to the courtesans, to present them pomegranates, to play with their garments, and wait on them home when the sport was done. In the playhouses at London it is the fashion of youths to go first into the yard, and to carry their eye trhough every gallery, then like unto ravens where they spy the carrion thither they fly, and press as near to ye fairest as they can. Instead of pomegranates they give them pippins, they dally with their garments to pass the time, they minister upon all occasions, and either bring them home to their houses on small acquaintance, or slip into houses when plays are done?

            ~ Stephen Gosson, Plays Confuted in Five Actions (1590)

 

?If you will learn how to be false, and deceive your husbands, or husbands their wives, how to play the harlots, to obtain one?s love, how to ravish, how to beguile, how to betray, to flatter, lie, swear, forswear, how to allure to whoredom, how to murder, how to poison, how to disobey and rebel against princes, to consume treasures prodigally, to move to lusts, to ransack and spoil cities and towns, to be idle, to blaspheme, to sing filthy songs of love, to speak filthy, to be proud, how to mock, scoff, and deride any nation?shall you not learn then as such enterludes how to practice them?

~ John Northbrooke, A Treatise wherein Dicing, Dauncing, vain Plays, or Enterluds, with other Idle Pastimes, etc., commonly used on the Sabbath Day, are reproved by the Authoritie of the Word of God? (1577)

 

 

 

Mary Frith, or Long Meg of Westminster, immortalized in Middleton and Dekker's The Roaring Girl (1619) was a well known frequenter of plays and even performed on stage at the Swan theatre with her viola. Frith wore men's apparel, carried a rapier, smoked a pipe, and swore and fought. She was a scandal.