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Women in European Society

This research explores the fluctuating condition of women in European society from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The research examines changes in attitudes toward women, notably in the ways that ideals of female behavior and the consequences of such ideals for real-world women shifted based on changing intellectual currents in the Renaissance (ca. 1350-1550), the Reformation (ca. 1520-1600), and the Enlightenment (ca. 1680-1780).

Ideals of female behavior and essence have long preoccupied Western commentators--most of whom were and are male. But feminist critique of the commentators' texts has resulted in the identification of dramatic and wholesale transitions of attitudes toward women that decisively influenced women's experience of the world, in particular in the generations of transition out of the medieval worldview and into the worldview of the early modern period, encompassing the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment.

Women's experience of Europe's transition from the medieval to Renaissance culture did not carry with it a Renaissance for women. Whatever rebirth women's culture achieved came later. This was not because women's experience remained planted in medieval sensibility and praxis but because Renaissance culture, which privileged male social and political experience, had the effect of obliterating women's standing in society: "events that further the historical development of men, liberating them from natural, social, or ideological constraints have quite different, even opposite, effects upon women" (Kelly-Gadol 176). It was during the Renaissance that social roles became increasingly engendered, with males increasingly dominant and females both dependent on and subservient to them. The whole effect was to accomplish "domestic imprisonment of citizen wives" (Kelly-Gadol 177).

Patriarchy in its Renaissance configuration should be contrasted with the medieval configuration of relations between...

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Women in European Society. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 09:11, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1683115.html