English Aristocratic Women, 1450-1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers

Journal of Social History, Summer, 2004 by Martha C. Howell

These questions raise others concerning theory. While Harris is fully sensitive to the way women's opportunities in their rarified culture were constructed by class, her task was not to interrogate the category of class (in the sense of social status). Others may be prompted to ask what class then meant and want to analyze the way that the category was constructed precisely by the specific gender system Harris has analyzed. Her evidence also suggests that we need better ways to deconstruct the historical category of woman and the term patriarchy. Harris's women were, after all, not only uniquely empowered by class, they were defined as women by class. For example, while they were--as women--incorporated within the cultural narratives that labeled women frivolous and vain, cautioned them to be chaste, prudent and silent, or praised them for submissiveness and humility, they were--as aristocratic women--uniquely positioned to be invulnerable to some of these admonitions, especially closely supervised to assure compliance with others, and punished with unusual severity when they violated certain others. As a result they not only behaved differently from women in lower social ranks, they imagined and experienced their femininity differently. It is surely on these differences that we must concentrate to satisfactorily explain what Harris so convincingly demonstrates: women of the Tudor aristocracy were subjects in a double sense, they were by and large content with their lot, and they certainly did not imagine a way out of it.

Martha C. Howell

Columbia University