Identity and agency in England, 1500-1800 by Henry French & Jonathan Barry

Author:Henry French & Jonathan Barry [French, Henry & Barry, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Psychology, History, Europe, Sociology, Social Science, England, Great Britain, England - Social conditions - 17th century, Social status, Social History, Marginality; Social, Philosophy, Social role - England - History, Social role, Marginality; Social - England - History, Social status - England - History, England - Social conditions - 16th century, Group identity - England - History, Group identity, Congresses, England - Social conditions - 18th century
ISBN: 9781403917645
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2004-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

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Judith Spicksley

And for to live single it is my delight

And so, honest young-man, I wish you good-night.116

However, the consequences of attempts to refashion the identity and status of single women laid bare the limitations of self-fashioning in the early modern period. Economic changes may have provided the means by which some women could consider the possibility of a single life in the long term, but allowing women to believe that celibacy and marriage enjoyed equitable abstract status threatened to herald an unprecedented level of social change.117 Though with hindsight, it is clear that marriage, as an institution, was never seriously under pressure, the spirit of the age was clearly one of concern.118 Moreover, the proto-feminist literature constituted only one part of the assault on marriage visible in the literature of the later seventeenth century. Some of the more extreme Protestant sects, for example, had toyed with alternative relationship options in the form of polygamy or free love.119 A declining interest in marriage amongst the gentlemen of the realm was a feature of men’s writings, and there was also a revival of the discussion of celibacy for priests.120 But a more pressing concern from an assessment of a broader range of the published literature reveals itself to be one of female autonomy. The use of money lending as a means of support was linked in popular literature to immorality in women, while favourite images of single independent women for male satirists, the ‘embodiments of threatening and castrating female autonomy, were the Amazon, the whore and the witch’.121

Indeed the major theme of published material across a range of genres appears to have been the predatory nature of early modern women, an idea that drew heavily on pre-existing notions of female sexuality, and justified their continued subordination within marriage. For marriage provided the cornerstone of religious and social policies, it legitimised gender relations and secured the legal transfer of property. Participation in the world of work was governed by the expectation that all individuals would enter marriage, and the economic and political power of the nation was understood to have been dependent upon it: the true source of national wealth was revealed in the ability of married women to reproduce society, both in a literal and figurative sense. The fact that universal marriage had never been achieved was of little consequence –it was the belief that marriage was the ultimate aim and choice of all women that had to be maintained.

Janet Todd has argued that the praise of spinsterhood and celibacy in women’s writings, which is peculiar to the Restoration and early Celibacy, Credit and ‘Spinster’ Identity

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eighteenth century, may in part be a response to ‘the extra-ordinary nastiness of male sexual satire’, during this period.122 Satirists certainly set out to undermine the notion of choice by lampooning the idea that women would ordinarily choose to remain single: the failure of women to obtain sexual satisfaction was held up as the only reason they were likely to have done so. Thus women were reduced to consider a preference for celibacy, in opposition to their natural desire for marriage.

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