location of virtually all meaningful discourse around Elizabeth, and the increased social mobility in England during the Renaissance, Elizabethan women as a group appear to have been marginalized in relation to men in ways familiar to patriarchal societies. In this regard, Neely cites the Elizabethan emphasis on power, politics, ideology, and culture as specifically masculine in temperament, criticizing as well certain modern interpretations of Elizabethan society and culture that have tended to emphasize such features at the expense of exploring meanings for women's status and social participation as an attribute of Elizabethan society (Neely 6-17). In any event, the ordered state of Elizabethan society can be inferred from evidence pointing to widely shared notions of the role and importance of the family unit as a social good, and of the emerging sense of nationhood and cultural identity. Implicit in the details of domestic life and of the particular area of sexual mores are subsidiary issues such as the conflict between the conventional morality espoused by religion and the "robust" circumstances of the English Renaissance.
Writing in 1952, Camden says that the "lot of the Elizabethan woman may justly be compared in many respects to that of her modern American sister" (17), by which he seeks to make a case for the view that Elizabethan women had a significant measure of social freedom. Camden cites evidence of the education of Elizabethan women and the high regard in the culture for female beauty, although he also says that contemporaneous observations of the nature of woman contain no "objective realization that woman is being seen through the eyes of men" (20). Additionally, distinctions between the virtues of men and women are made in ways that leave no doubt about where in the hierarchy of society and culture and in relation to each other males and females stand. Thus men are "endowed with wit, judgment, and a mind almost di...