Normal Women, page 16
The Elizabethan state sermon followed Tyndale in urging men and wives to live lovingly together as help-meets and partners, but (you will be amazed) most of the instruction was aimed at women, telling them to be obedient to their husbands and that they should endure domestic violence without complaint. The Homily tried to persuade men not to beat their wives, however badly behaved. This is the royal government, declaring from the pulpit, to a congregation whose attendance was compulsory, that women were inferior to men and should be gently taught rather than beaten: ‘honest natures will sooner bee reteined to doe their dueties, rather by gentle words, then by stripes’.52 ‘Stripes’ meaning the weals made by a whip.
Women were ordered to subject themselves to their husbands and told how to apologise for defiance: ‘Let them acknowledge their follies, and say, My husband, so it is, that by my anger I was compelled to doe this or that; forgiue it me, and hereafter I will take better heede.’53
Tyndale argued that if a husband was violent to his wife, she must patiently bear it, both for the improvement of her marriage and for the order of society:
Euen so think you, if thou canst suffer an extreme husband, thou shalt haue a great reward therefore: . . . if wee be bound to hold out our left cheeke to strangers which will smite vs on the right cheeke: how much more ought wee to suffer an extreme and vnkind husband?
But if by such fortune thou chancest vpon such an husband, take it not too heauily, but suppose thou, that thereby is laid vp no small reward hereafter, & in this life time no small commendation to thee, if thou canst be quiet. But yet to you that be men, thus I speake, Let there bee none so grieuous fault to compell you to beat your wiues.54
The imaginary difference between the sexes had to be learned by everyone and the imaginary features of woman’s nature had to be coached into people, who had not observed that women were weak, uncertain, indecisive and volatile in real life.
Sexist training had to begin. But traditional child-rearing was an obstacle. The sex of a newborn baby was only rarely recorded; medieval babies were swaddled, without any identifying signs as to boy or girl, wrapped up tightly and carried around on a board, sometimes hung up out of danger. When babies started to walk, they came off the swaddling board, and boys and girls would be dressed in similar gowns and put in the care of older children or their mother – or, in aristocratic families, sent away to a wet nurse until they were about four years old. The ‘blank slate’ theory of child psychology proposed by John Locke in the middle of the seventeenth century argued that children had no innate tendencies – they must be trained for their future role in the world and appropriate behaviour for their sex from the age of about six years old. In castles and cottages this was done: girls were coached in ‘girlish’ behaviour, put into small versions of their mother’s dress and expected to help with her work; sometimes they were sent away from home to be mentored by an admired woman friend. Around the age of ten years old, an elite boy would be ‘breeched’ – taken out of petticoats and dressed in breeches – and removed from the care of his mother, sent to a tutor or school or to another family, and expected to learn ‘manly’ behaviour. The young people would live in mostly same-sex groups, learning appropriate behaviours and mixing for courtship and friendships.
This was not easy for all boys: in 1639, grandmother Anne North wrote that the breeched boy is to ‘act his part’:
You cannot believe the great concern that was in the whole family here last Wednesday, it’s being the day that tailor was to help dress little Frank in his breeches . . . Never had any bride that was to be dressed upon her wedding night more hands about her . . . when he was quite dressed he acted his part as well as any of them.55
In labouring families the girls learned to spin, sew, keep house and grow food, do agricultural work or whatever work their mothers and female kinswomen did, including perhaps skilled craft work, from a very early age. They might be apprenticed to a craft. Boys worked with their fathers and, if in a trade, might take an apprenticeship with a neighbour, kinsman or in the family business when they were twelve years old or older. Ballads and chapbooks – the only literature for working people – focused on the apparently complex task of becoming that superior being: a man. There were no advice books for lower-class girls56 – they copied their mother, naturally inferior to men, bound for marriage, when they would promise obedience to their husband.
In the traditional wedding rite, the Sarum Manual, used from about 1540, the bride promised obedience but also to be ‘Bonoure and buxom in bed and at borde’.57 The church confirmed that women could be sexually aroused, indeed they must climax during marital sex if children were to be conceived. The danger lay in the delicate balance between the virginal appropriate modesty before marriage and appropriate arousal (with their husband only) thereafter. Widespread fears that women were insatiable continued: ‘Of women’s unnatural insatiable lust what country, what village does not complain?’58 Robert Burton fretted in 1621.
Courtly love was still highly fashionable, and the most popular theme of all entertainments and arts. It had been sexualised; the story was no longer about reaching unity with God, but about sexual satisfaction. Heroines must appear sexually cool at first; but this was a stage in the love story not a permanent inviolable state. The heroines either melted or were overwhelmed by male force in the stories. Their oaths of chastity were an obstacle for the hero to overcome. But – though frail – it was a core virtue. In some readings of women’s nature, it was their only virtue. Whether women were bonny and buxom in bed or unawakened, virtue in women meant chastity or modesty. All the other virtues belonged naturally only to men.
Pressure on women to enact modesty increased. A female commentator – Jane Anger – pointed out the perennial contradiction for women who want to be sexually attractive and encourage courtship but know that to encourage flirting is unattractive: ‘If our honest natures cannot away with that uncivil kind of jesting, then we are coy. Yet if we bear with their rudeness and be somewhat modestly familiar with them, they will straight make matter of nothing, blazing abroad that they have surfeited with love, and . . . telling the manner how.’59
Anger lost the debate about the nature of women, which grew more toxic from the 1600s. It saw an entirely new genre of literature develop: ‘women-hater’ writings.60 Against Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women, first published in 1616, went through ten editions and was still selling well in 1634. The genre complained generally of women, not only of those who did not conform to the impossible requirements of courtly love virtues, but also any independent women who were outside male control: single women, widows and disobedient wives. In 1632, a clergyman, Daniel Rogers, wrote balefully to his women readers: ‘Remember thy sex is crazy ever since Eve sinned.’61
Then – just as things were going moderately badly for women – there was a national emergency: after nearly five centuries of male rule, three queens came along one after another.
It was a disaster. The theologian John Knox wrote:
For who can denie but it repugneth to nature, that the blind shal be appointed to leade and conduct such as do see? That the weake, the sicke, and impotent persones shall norishe and kepe the hole and strong, and finallie, that the foolishe, madde and phrenetike shal gouerne the discrete, and giue counsel to such as be sober of mind? And such be al women, compared vnto man in bearing of authoritie. For their sight in ciuile regiment, is but blindnes: their strength, weaknes: their counsel, foolishenes: and judgement, phrenesie, if it be rightlie considered.62
Young King Edward, son of Henry VIII, crowned at nine and dead by 15, named his cousin and fellow Protestant Jane Grey as his heir – queen of England. Bullied by her in-laws and her own ambitious parents, the 15-year-old girl claimed the crown for nine days in July 1553, before her cousin, the rightful heir, Mary I, was acclaimed queen and marched at the head of her troops into London. Jane would have been spared execution but for her own determined refusal to convert to Roman Catholicism. She wrote to her sister, Katherine Grey: ‘Laborre alway to lerne to dey, deney the world, defey the devell, and disspyse the flesh, delite yourselfe onely in the lord’ – ‘Always work at learning to die, deny the world, defy the devil and despise the flesh – delight only in the lord.’63
Victorian historians (who love nothing better than a doomed young woman) celebrated Jane Grey’s martyrdom, and her story was told as that of an innocent pawn trapped by ambitious men.
This 1833 portrait, by Paul Delaroche, woefully inaccurate on many counts, shows Jane in the virginal colour of white, slumping into silence while a sensible man supports and advises her (mansplaining death), and the executioner displays yards of leg and codpiece in skin-tight red stockings. Delaroche specialised in the melancholic: he also painted the famous pictures The Princes in the Tower, Young Christian Martyr and Strafford on his way to Execution. Jane Grey’s own words show she was no helpless victim nor anyone’s pawn. She was a young woman determined on death rather than life as a Roman Catholic, who chose death as a religious and political act of great power, enforcing the image of women’s nature as spiritual, even martyred.
Her nine days named as queen were succeeded by two successive reigning queens with only female heirs – a crisis for patriarchy. How could a man be subject to a woman? How could men submit to the rule of a woman since women were incapable of even governing themselves? The line of Mary I, Elizabeth I and their heir, Mary, Queen of Scots, threatened the monarchy itself. Coincidentally, women regents also ruled Scotland and France, and these five women were enough to frighten John Knox into declaring that the world faced a ‘monstrous regiment of women’ – an unnatural government by the blind, weak, sick, impotent, foolish, mad and frantic.
A woefully inaccurate depiction of Lady Jane Grey, painted in 1833 as a doomed young woman
The Execution of Lady Jane Grey by Paul Delaroche, 1833, National Gallery (IanDagnall Computing/Alamy)
Mary I (1516–58) took the throne in July 1553, surviving a siege and marching on London. Her decision to marry Philip of Spain provided a husband to rule her, but challenged her primacy as queen. The English lords tried to square the circle, saying she was superior to her foreign husband in England only, but he ruled her everywhere else. All official documents were to be signed first by him, but they would summon Parliament and reign jointly. He could not take her out of the kingdom, nor have custody of their children and he could not inherit the throne and reign alone. English advisors and lawyers tied themselves in knots trying to maintain a husband’s authority who ‘owned’ his wife, his children and all her possessions, while keeping her country and an heir independent of Spain.
Luckily for them, Philip showed little interest in Mary, nor even in ruling her in England, and she died childless, succeeded in 1558 by her half-sister Elizabeth (1533–1603) who – having lived through the murder of her mother, her stepmother, the divorce of two stepmothers and the desertion of her half-sister’s husband – was understandably sceptical about marriage.
Manly Qualities
Elizabeth started her reign denying feminine weakness: ‘Though I be a woman, yet I have as good a courage, answerable to my place, as ever my father had.’64
Her speech at Tilbury, on the eve of the Armada, reassured her followers that she had the courage of a king: ‘the body but of a weak and feeble woman but the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too’. And later in life she referred to herself as a king, the ‘husband’ to England as well as a virgin queen.65
Elizabeth’s own male supporters believed that the task of reigning over a country was too much for a woman. Her advisor and secretary Sir William Cecil hesitated to put a report before her because it was ‘a matter of such weight, being too much . . . for a woman’s knowledge’, and the hostile Spanish ambassador to England remarked in 1559 that she was ‘troublesome . . . naturally changeable . . . a spirited and obstinate woman’.66
Mary Cleere of Ingatestone, Essex, was burned at the stake in 1576 for daring to say that a woman had not the power to bestow knighthood, like a king.67 Only in triumph did Elizabeth celebrate her womanhood. The Armada medal, struck to celebrate the English victory against the Spanish in 1588, had the motto ‘Dux femina facti’: ‘Under a woman’s command’.68
The idea that everyone was one flesh and a blend of different characteristics – the ancient Greek belief – meant that a woman of power could be thought of as ‘manly’. The previous Plantagenet queen Margaret of Anjou was described by diplomat Polydore Vergil as ‘A woman of sufficient forecast, very desirous of renown, full of policy, council, comely behaviour, and all manly qualities’.69 The interrogator who failed to break Margaret Pole in 1539 said, ‘We may call her rather a strong constant man, than a woman.’70
Lady Anne Berkeley ruled Gloucestershire for two decades from the 1530s and was described as ‘a Lady of a masculine spirit, over-powerful with her Husband’. When Lady Berkeley’s rights as a widow were attacked by her brother-in-law, who had expected to inherit instead of her, she sat as judge, empanelled a jury, called witnesses, ruled in her own favour and fined him for bringing the case against her. She was notorious for her litigious aggression: ‘seldom at rest with herself, never wanting matter of suit or discontent to work upon’.71
Elizabeth I’s tutor, Roger Ascham, confirmed that the clever girl had a male mind: ‘Her mind has no womanly weakness, her perseverance is equal to that of a man.’72 Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, complained that his daughter Mary was ‘too wise for a woman’, telling Henry VIII’s advisor Thomas Cromwell that he had not plotted with her: ‘In all my life I never commoned with her in any serious cause . . . and would not have thought she had been such as I find her, which as I think, is but too wise for a woman.’73
The Countess of Westmorland (c.1533–93), who raised armies against Elizabeth I, was said by Sir Thomas Tempest to ‘rather playeth the part of a knight than a lady’. Writer Aphra Behn explained her talent by saying that it was her masculine side: ‘All I ask is the Priviledge for my Masculine Part the Poet in me.’74
Some women went even further than thinking like men – they chose to look like men, borrowing men’s clothes and offending against the sumptuary laws that ruled what class might wear what clothes. Queen Elizabeth might wear a man’s jacket to symbolise her power, but when non-royal women started to do so, it frightened men who feared a woman taking on the mantle of male authority. Concern about women’s vanity and extravagance, an ancient complaint, took on a new urgency when fashionable women started to adopt men’s clothing. Elizabethan women wore Spanish or French ruffs – decadent foreign fashions – and a long doublet like a man. They adopted high crowned hats with a proud waving feather instead of the modest coif-type headscarf that hid their hair.75 The gorgeous fabrics, rich colours and billowy tailoring of men’s clothes topped with great wigs of lustrous ringlets of the late Tudor and Stuart courts caused no concern to anyone but the few Puritan commentators when it was men peacocking about; but when women gloried in them, there was a clampdown by the crown, which triggered arrests in the 1470s, 1490s, 1550s and 1570s.76
The city fathers of Chester were disturbed that women were wearing a variety of caps that did not show their marital state, ‘which disordering and abusing of apparrell, is not oncly contrary to the good use and honest facion used in other good cities and places of the realme . . . but also is verrey costly, more than necessary charges conveynyently requireth, and ageynst the common welthe of this city’.77
King James I – notorious for his favours to men – was hugely offended by ladies at the court wearing men’s clothes. He ordered sermons be preached ‘against the insolencie of our women, and theyre wearing of brode brimd hats, pointed dublets, theyre haire cut short or shorne, and some of them stilettoes or poniards, and such other trinckets of like moment’.78
The clergy obligingly hammered the point that women cutting their hair and wearing hats like men were immodest, unwomanly and an offence against God. The campaign against ‘Men’s Shee Apes’ spread to plays, ballads and pamphlets.
The Puritan preachers agreed. William Prynne, the influential Puritan writer, was as offended as the Bishop of London. The offence was only partly of appearance: women in men’s clothing were behaving in ways that breached the standards of conduct imposed upon them: they were noisy, public, playful and carrying weapons. It was also an offence against national pride: the women were wearing foreign fashions and behaving in an un-English manner. And it was an offence against class: fabrics and colours were reserved for different classes of society, and the women were wearing whatever they chose. The worst offence was that by dressing like men, the commentators claimed that they had made themselves into a ‘hermaphrodite’ or ‘monster’:
I have met with some of these trulls in London so disguised that it hath passed my skill to discern whether they be men or women. Thus it has now come to pass that women became men and men transformed into monsters.79
Commentators in 1583 agreed that women who dressed as men were making themselves into ‘monsters of both kinds’, Puritan pamphleteer Philip Stubbes said: ‘Our apparel was given us as a sign distinctive to discern betwixt sex and sex and therefore one to wear the apparel of another sex is to participate with the same and to adulterate the verity of his own kind. Wherefore these women may not improperly be called hermaphrodites, that is monsters of both kinds, half women, half men.’80
Disguising for entertainment, wearing costumes for plays and performances, dressing as another gender or class had been a tradition of public play, part of ‘misrule’ undertaken on high days and holy days. Hocktide (the Monday after Easter Monday) was celebrated in Hexton, Hertfordshire, by women dressing as men and challenging a men’s team to a tug of war. The defeated team would be pushed in a ditch and smeared with mud.81
