Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The clearest embodiment of the secondary status of early modern English women can be found in their restricted legal rights and limited access to property. Travellers to England regularly commented on English women's paucity of rights compared to their European neighbours, particularly if they were married. According to Dutchman Emanuel van Meteren, ‘Wives in England are entirely in the power of their husbands, their lives only excepted’. However, these same travellers puzzled over the apparent freedoms English women enjoyed in practice. Van Meteren went on to note that despite the overwhelming power of husbands, English wives ‘are not kept so strictly as they are in Spain and elsewhere’. A German observer agreed that English women ‘have much more liberty than perhaps in any other place’. National stereotypes of this kind make dubious historical sources. However, the discrepancy these writers detected, between theoretical subjection and apparent liberty, provides a neat encapsulation of the complex and contradictory nature of women's rights in early modern England. For despite possessing fewer legal rights and opportunities than men, early modern English women went to law in their thousands, and while a myriad of different pressures acted to limit their access to property, examples can be found of women possessing or controlling large estates, borrowing and lending money and operating ... log in or subscribe to read full text