All Men and Both Sexes: Gender, Politics, and the False Universal in England, 1640-1832

All Men and Both Sexes: Gender, Politics, and the False Universal in England, 1640-1832

by Hilda L. Smith
ISBN-10:
0271021829
ISBN-13:
9780271021829
Pub. Date:
04/15/2003
Publisher:
Penn State University Press
ISBN-10:
0271021829
ISBN-13:
9780271021829
Pub. Date:
04/15/2003
Publisher:
Penn State University Press
All Men and Both Sexes: Gender, Politics, and the False Universal in England, 1640-1832

All Men and Both Sexes: Gender, Politics, and the False Universal in England, 1640-1832

by Hilda L. Smith

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Overview

All Men and Both Sexes explores the use of such universal terms as "people," "man," or "human" in early modern England, from the civil war through the Enlightenment. Such language falsely implies inclusion of both men and women when actually it excludes women. Recent scholarship has focused on the Rights of Man doctrine from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution as explanation for women’s exclusion from citizenship. According to Hilda Smith we need to go back further, to the English Revolution and the more grounded (but equally restricted) values tied to the "free born Englishman." Citing educational treatises, advice literature to young people, guild records, popular periodicals, and parliamentary debates, she demonstrates how the "male maturation process" came to define the qualities attached to citizenship and responsible adulthood, which in turn became the basis for modern individualism and liberalism. By the eighteenth century a new discourse of sensibility was describing women as dependent beings outside the state, in a separate sphere and in need of protection. This excluded women from reform debates, forcing them to seek not an extension of a democratic franchise but a specific women’s suffrage focused on gender difference.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780271021829
Publisher: Penn State University Press
Publication date: 04/15/2003
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 248
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.72(d)

About the Author

Hilda L. Smith is Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati. She is the author of Reason’s Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists (1982) and two edited volumes, Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition (1998) and Women's Social and Political Thought: An Anthology (2000), coedited with Berenice Carroll.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One


"Only of free Persons"

Male Maturation and the False Universal

An assumption central to the early modern false universal was that a process of male maturation lay at the heart of learning, social relationships, economic standing, and membership in the political realm. Men were portrayed as both individuals and as exemplars of the qualities that broadly characterized human existence. Women were discussed in much more specialized ways: normally in terms of sexual functions and relationships, in domestic roles, or as exceptions in public economic or political roles. A queen, although the most powerful political figure in the nation, did not symbolize women's political power (or generic political authority), while members of Parliament or magistrates were used to illustrate men's general political standing. A king did not merely symbolize male political authority but mutually reinforced the standing of the father as head of the family, while the father in turn embodied patriarchal authority on which the king's, as well as his own, leadership was grounded. And while women were responsible for a range of skilled and unskilled tasks, they did not inhabit an occupation in ways their male counterparts did, inscribe their sex with the abilities attached to that occupation, or define the standards of the trade through their skills. No matter how many carried out the trade, or what skill they displayed, women who held a post were still considered individual exceptions. Such was the case for those who held public office as well. Traditional accounts stressed that a woman held a publicposition because something out of the norm (usually a mishap) occurred in the nature of the trade or the state, or in the woman's own life, which led to her economic or political independence.

    Much has been written on the differences between the sexes articulated during the seventeenth century on religious, political, and economic principles, but less attention has been given to a gender-distinct aging process. While many scholars take for granted women's omission from the public and political world, few would deny that the female sex aged along with their male counterparts. Yet works on aging excluded women as surely from the stages of life as did those written about public offices. This chapter will explore that topic and will postulate the way in which Englishmen (and to a lesser extent women) visualized the distinct training and ultimate maturation of their sons and daughters, their students, apprentices and servants, and young people generally. While discussions of citizenship, appropriate religious roles for men and women, occupations suitable for each sex, or proper marital roles are crucial to an understanding of gender values in the mid-seventeenth century, they are more apt to feature application and outcome rather than basic nature. Thus, through a discussion of the aging and maturing of young males and females into adult men and women, we can grasp most thoroughly how the adults around them envisioned their essential natures, appropriate training, and adult lives.

    To understand this seventeenth-century discussion we must grapple with its asymmetry. It was never a discussion of the nature, training and adult goals of two distinct sexes; rather, it was consistently grounded in a conflation of man and human in a large range of works directed to sons, apprentices, students, and so on. This was combined with a smaller body of works supporting specialized training for daughters, female servants, and girls. These realities become clear first quantitatively from an assessment of the number and types of works that appear under the heading "son" or "daughter" (and, alternatively, "young man" or "maid") in the electronic listing of works produced by the Library of Congress for the period 1625-1700. Among these, 624 works appear with the word "son" in the title, while only 187 appear with "daughter." Most significant, however, is not the number, but rather the distinct goals for each sex and the related distinctions in the type of works: those directed to sons are much more apt to be broad-based works preparing individuals to be responsible adults and citizens in English society generally, while official documents or private works referring to girls and women are more restricted.

    As noted earlier, William Shakespeare in As You Like It illustrates this process of maturation when he shifts his well-known portrayal of the world as a stage to the "Seven Ages of Man" in a manner conflating the identity of both sexes with the qualities of just one. Shakespeare does not merely use terms such as "schoolboy" and "soldier" to designate stages relevant only to men's lives, but he modifies gender neutral terms to ensure that they refer only to males. Terms such as "infant," "lover," and "old age" carry no gender-restricted qualities with them, but Shakespeare incorporates such qualities in his description of the aging process. The full text identifies the lover as directing his attention to his "mistress" and the pantaloon losing his "big manly voice." The seven ages of man was a common medieval trope, and after Shakespeare's comedy, it continued in use. The recent commentary on the comedy is instructive because scholars have given considerable attention to the class limitations of Shakespeare's stages of life without commenting on its gender exclusion.

    A mid-seventeenth-century work by Henry Cuffe, The Differences of the Ages of Mans Life, perpetuates the view that the aging process occurs only in men and argues that heat defines men's intellectual capacity and physical prowess. In making this argument, based on principles derived from Greek medicine, he links such heat to the stages of life and explicitly contrasts that progression with women and children, defining their natures as outside such a process of male maturation. Cuffe introduces the topic in a broad discussion of human nature and its place within the universe: "so the heart of man, the fountayne of life and heat, hath assigned to it by Nature, the middle part of our body for his habitation, from whence proceedeth life and heat, unto all the parts of the body, (as it were unto Rivers) whereby they be preserved and enabled to perform their naturall and proper functions." While heat may be the central characteristic of mankind, it is lacking in some people. Children who are "too ripe witted" when young either die young "or else toward their old age [become] most sottish" because "from the beginning they had but little moysture." In turning to Plato for an authoritative source, he concludes: "Plato doubted not to say, that looke how much moysture there is in us, so much also is our folly; and therefore it is as the same Plato observeth, that children and women are for the most part most foolish." Thus this discussion of the ages of man concludes with a familiar misogynist slur about women's moist nature making them foolish and confirming that they constitute a category along with children that removes them from an evolving rational nature.

    Historians have written on the nature of youth and the training and education of both males and females, but they have given less attention to the linking of male education with human development and women's restricted education beyond such development. Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos's study of the nature of adolescence in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England, builds upon her earlier work on male and female apprentices in Bristol. A number of historians have discussed the subject of "masterless men" who are often associated with young men of the lower orders. The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England devotes considerable attention to the socialization of young people, with a chapter treating women separately. The chapter most relevant to this work is Paul Griffiths's study of "masterless young people" in Norwich from 1560 to 1645. He concludes that women were treated differently from men and that independence, or being "at their own hand," was punishable only for women up to 1632, while 80 percent of those punished for being "out of service" were also women. While he expands the more common term from "masterless men" to "masterless young people," still the language of the relevant statute reinforces the broad status-based terminology for males and the more gender-specific language for females: "Whereas gret unconveye ys in this town in that senglewomen being unmarried be at ther owne hands and doe bake and brewe and use other trades to the great hurte of the poore inhabitants havinge wieffe and children."

    Even though Bernard Capp in the same collection points out that women constituted twenty percent of English householders in the early modern period, in the statute women are contrasted with inhabitants who are assumed to have wives and children. Capp points out that women often had authority that early modern authors believed they lacked, and certainly this was the case. But it remains both true and crucial that the language of statutes and a massive range of social commentary continually conflated human and man, while categorizing women separately, no matter their actual status.

    A statute issued under Charles I offers a good example of the use of falsely inclusive language in one portion of an act, only to be clarified in another to exclude women. A law from 1630 is directed both to aiding the elderly poor and forcing the idle young and able-bodied adult to gainful labor: "For the training up of Youth in honest and profitable Trades and Mysteries, by putting them forth to be Apprentices, as also for the setting to worke of idle persons, who being of abilitie to worke, in some kinde or other, doe neverthelesse, refuse to labour, and either wander up and down the Citie and Countrey begging, or which is worse maintaine themselves by filching and stealing." Directions for implementing the act followed and made clear that the term "persons" as used above meant only males, for in this section such persons were accompanied by women and children: "That no man harbour Rogues in their Barnes, or Outhouseings. And the Wandring persons with women and children, to give account to the Constable or Justice of Peace, where they were marryed, and where their Children were Christened; for these people live like Savages, neither marry nor bury nor Christen, which licentious libertie makes so many delight to be Rogues and Wanderers." Such language obscures the fact that women were part of the broad-based status and occupational categories to which the legislation was addressed, and encouraged policies in which parish training and apprenticeship programs were reserved for men.

    Ben-Amos's work is devoted throughout to males, except for chapter 6, "Women's Youth: The Autonomous Phase." While she offers a range of useful examples on the preparation for adulthood, and claims in her introduction that "this book is about young people, men and women in a broad spectrum of middling and lower groups of society, who, in the period between 1500 and 1700, spent at least part of their adolescence and youth away from their homes as farm servants, domestic servants, or apprentices," she does not adequately differentiate the generalized instruction for boys and young men from the specialized teachings for girls and young women. Her work makes clear, as well, the economic determination of childhood and adolescence, where employment and occupational training constituted the transition from childhood to adulthood for most children, in contrast to the classical education for upper-class boys and the emphasis on culture and social graces for elite girls educated at home or in finishing schools.

    Ben-Amos begins her work with the seven ages, but fails to note their gender significance. Her materials, whether from prescriptive literature or the experiences of apprentices and servants, are drawn overwhelmingly from men. In chapter 6, she notes the special and more restricted directives for girls, but does not contrast them with males elsewhere standing for humans. In many ways, her treatment reflects the problem identified most prominently by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, and noted by innumerable later feminist theorists, that there are not two sexes but only one, with the second representing the "other" beyond the male norm. Here, Ben-Amos emphasizes the more limited training and expectations parents held for daughters, but she also demonstrates that such expectations and prescriptions often did not conform to reality.

    Rather than adulthood, adolescence, Ben-Amos claims, offered women "a measure of autonomy and independence," when they both "learnt and performed a host of agricultural tasks and skills" in the countryside and "a range of skills and competencies acquired through formal and informal apprenticeships" in towns. She points to the difficulty of assessing women's acquiring skills on the same terms as men. They were more apt to undergo informal apprenticeships or to gain skills as domestic servants. When women assumed management of shops as widows, "it was clear that they had gained the skill to manage the craft," but unclear how and when they obtained such skills. Their place was recognized more as a partnership: "Married women in Bristol were normally considered formal parties to apprenticeship contracts, and in the Register of Apprentices their names appeared almost as a rule alongside those of their husbands, indicating that the apprentice was subject to their discipline and supervision as well." But because we have so few institutional and legal documents tracing women's lives from childhood onward, we tend to find them in records only as secondary figures or as participants in transitional moments of male maturation. As Ben-Amos notes, "the informal nature of such learning makes it difficult to gauge its precise dimensions," and thus makes it virtually impossible to contrast the specialized (and often obscured) direction women pursued to adulthood in opposition to the general, recorded, and public route taken by men.

    As is clear in Ben-Amos's discussion of adolescence during the early modern period, training for adulthood was determined by rank, especially for males. While women from the upper and lower ranks were given distinct training based on whether they were being prepared to serve in another's home or to supervise their own servants, the domestic skills taught differed less than did the preparation of gentlemen from those lower on the social scale. The former learned to manage the family estate, prepare for public office or for a profession while the sons of yeomen, artisans, and cottagers, whose highest sights were normally an apprenticeship, more likely received little training and ended up as agricultural laborers or performing service in a local household.

    These realities make it more difficult, therefore, to identify stages of development for women than for men. Lawes Resolutions was one of the few works to include a chapter on divisions in women's lives beyond the much used, but seldom commented on, "maid, wife and widow." Here the stages vary greatly from Shakespeare's seven ages. The stages of a woman's life are: at age seven a father can seek money contributions to the costs of a wedding agreement from his tenants to marry a daughter, at age nine she qualifies for dower, at twelve she can consent to marriage, at sixteen she is past the age the lord can select a husband for her, and at twenty-one she is able to "make a feoffement." With the exception of feoffement, this was a passive progression tied wholly to decisions concerning marriage. While it was common to reduce the category "woman" to the legal and domestic standing of "wife," the author made clear the problems inherent in having "wife" stand for all women. In the portion of Lawes Resolutions treating single women, the anonymous author asks the reader to focus on the standing of virgins, for here "the Law differeth little or not much from the common form apperteyning unto males." Finally, to determine women's legal and political disabilities, the author notes that one could turn to patrilineal naming (along with biblical and legal restrictions) for more evidence: "Let us speake of heires, and see a little in what cases a woman shall inherit. It is knowne to all, that because women lose the name of their ancestors, and by marriage usually they are transferred in alienam familiam, they participate seldome in heirship with males." There was little concern over confusion of cause and effect, or awareness of circular reasoning. Surely women taking their husbands' names must have been a result rather than an indicator of their lack of legal or political standing. Thus, a pastiche of biblical commentary, legal precedent, and linguistic explanations was offered to explain fundamental issues of women's failure to evolve into independent adulthood. As will be discussed in Chapter 5, this alters dramatically after 1700 when ideas associated with the values tied to sensibility and the "fair sex" influenced much that was written about women.

(Continues...)


Excerpted from All Men and Both Sexes by Hilda L. Smith. Copyright © 2002 by The Pennsylvania State University. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgmentsix
Introduction: The Concept of the False Universal1
1"Only of free Persons": Male Maturation and the False Universal39
2"Citizens of the same City ... Brethren and Sisters": Gender and Early Modern English Guilds73
3"Acting His Own Part": Gender, the Freeborn Englishman, and the Execution of Charles I109
4"Interests of the Softer Sex": Commercialism, Politics, and Gender in the Eighteenth Century135
Epilogue: "Masculine Gender ... Taken to Include Females": Gender, Radical Politics, and the Reform Bill of 1832173
Conclusion203
Bibliography211
Index223
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