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 constr

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utors shaped her outlook, male educators who, as humanists, suppressed romance and chivalry to further classical culture, with all its patriarchal and misogynous bias (Kelly-Gadol 188). According to Wiesner, women were not entirely passive as their world changed around them. She cites evidence that they attempted to "defend[] their public role" (1). Boxer and Quataert cite Christine de Pizan's 1404 City of Women, a critique of misogynistic literature, continuing into the 18th century for opening "to women the fruits of their culture . . . as it was conceived at the time" (23). This initiated the 400-year-long Argument About Women, aka querelle des femmes, which debated the Renaissance presumption of female inferiority through the Reformation and Enlightenment. In the Renaissance, what was public was redefined and expanded, even as women were increasingly confined to the constraints of the private sphere. Women who deliberately sought public recognition (of, for example, poetry) were considered scandalous and immoral (Wiesner 12). Women's work, education, and inheritance options were restricted. For every widow of a craft guild member who petitioned to maintain title to the workshop and staff, there were systematic exclusions of

Category: History - W