Weaker Vessel (Paperback)

Drawing from a wondrously deep well of diaries, letters, and papers from 17th-century England, the gifted historian Antonia Fraser gives the image of the "softer sex" a drubbing, plunging readers into the lives of "heiresses and dairy maids, holy women and prostitutes, criminals and educators, widows and witches, midwives and mothers, heroines, courtesans, prophetesses, businesswomen, ladies of the court, and that new breed, the actress." Prophetess Jane Hawkins, called "a witty crafty baggage" by one angry bishop, got around the ironclad law forbidding women to preach by claiming inspiration from God, while Catholic Mary Ward risked her neck repeatedly to found a string of convents and schools for girls on the European continent. Although several good wives of London beat the Lord Mayor in 1649 for his part in trying to arrest five members of Parliament, it's certainly true that most Englishwomen of the time were hemmed in by the whims and fears of men. Wealthy girls were routinely used as chips to bolster family fortunes through marriage, and any old, poor woman unfortunate enough to have "a furred brow, a hairy lip, a squint eye, a squeaking voice or a scolding tongue" lived under suspicion of witchcraft, wrote one contemporary observer. In Fraser's sure hands and supple prose, memorable and execrable historic moments spring to life. --Francesca Coltrera

Entertaining and revealing account of the lot of women in England from the death of one Queen Regent (Elizabeth I) to the accession of another (Queen Anne). A mass of deftly handled material and winner of the 1984 Wolfson Award for History. (Kirkus UK)

A panorama of 17th-century English womanhood, presented with Fraser's usual taste for passion and pageantry, and a degree of balance between the higher and lower orders. Centrally, she succeeds in showing how the ideology of woman as the weaker vessel was belied by women rising to the personal challenges created by the English Civil War, the Great Plague, and the fire of London, quite apart from the risks of repeated pregnancies, then believed to be women's normal state. While Elizabeth I reigned, it was not good form to emphasize woman's weakness; but once she was dead (1603), women were valued chiefly for the wealth they could bring to a marriage. "In an age before the English had properly discovered the rumbustious sport of fox-hunting, heiresses were hunted as though they were animals of prey." Affection was suspect, though even the well-born sometimes succumbed. The lower classes may have been freer to choose, Fraser suggests, if simply because less was at stake. During the Civil War, however, women became defenders of castles, disguised comrades-in-arms ("she-soldiers"), and solicitors on behalf of husband and family. They made demands, subsequently, on Cromwell's Commonwealth; but only the small sect of Diggers proposed such radical changes as giving women equal right to choose whom to marry ("for we are all of one blood, mankind, and for portion, the Common Storehouses are every man and maid portion, as free to one as to another"). With the Restoration, many of women's opportunities for independent action vanished; life became "a continual labor"; and it was harder to find a husband. From displays of bravery, women were reduced to displays of accomplishment. "So the girls tripped in dainty slippers down the ornamental paths of their education; so very different from the demanding courses of classics and grammar set for their brothers." Some became gentlewomen, some "petticoat authors," and some courtesans - "wanton and free." In sum, Fraser believes that women's status rose during the middle decades of upheaval, only to fall as the Restoration took hold. "Women in the seventeenth century were as they had always been, strong vessels where they had the opportunity. . . where a particular combination of character and circumstance enabled them to be so." Vivid personalities, powerful circumstances, told with drama and bite. (Kirkus Reviews)