Gender, Sex and Subordination in England: 1500-1800. - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Spring, 1998 by Barbara J. Harris

Gender, Sex & Subordination in England 1500-1800 is a general survey of the construction and meaning of gender in early modern England. This ambitious work claims to map "a new historical country," the realm of gender and patriarchy, for the first time and to provide "an initial argument" (p. x) for thinking about the subject in the crucial centuries when "modem patriarchy, a new system of gender relations, began to be created." (p. 296) Despite Fletcher's claim, many early modern historians have written about the "big picture" in the history of women, gender, and patriarchy before him - Alice Clark, Joan Kelly, Lawrence Stone, Judith Bennett, and Martha Howell, to name only a few - and he is unduly dismissive of their work. Furthermore, since his interpretative model is based on well-known primary and secondary material (p. x), the chapters in his book (6-13) describing women and men's actual experience have little to say to scholars already familiar with the subject, although they will serve as an introduction for those new to it.

Gender, Sex & Subordination maps the construction of gender on two different levels. On the more general, Fletcher asserts that gender relations are created by an ideological framework centered on scientific and medical views of the female and male body that is translated into prescriptive codes for behavior and then embodied in experience at the individual and collective levels. (p. 98) As a way of thinking about gender, this schema is remarkably static and abstract. Most fundamentally, it assumes that there is a construction of gender at any particular historical moment rather than a continual contest between women and men - even more, between different groups of women and different groups of men - about what femininity and masculinity mean, how women and men ought to behave, and how they actually do behave. Furthermore, like Thomas Laqueur on whom he heavily depends, Fletcher assumes that the survival and use of a small group of key scientific texts during the long centuries we conventionally label medieval meant that little worth noting about the meaning of gender or the operation of patriarchal institutions occurred for nearly two millennia. This ahistorical reification of gender and patriarchy is surely related to another characteristic of his model - its inattention to the causal or interactive relationships between the ideological and prescriptive frameworks of gender in any period and the economic, political, or social structures of the society in which they operate.

Even on its own terms, the schema has flaws, since there are serious gaps among its three elements. Fletcher does not demonstrate how medical and scientific views were translated into broadly held ideas about how women and men ought to behave. Indeed, he presents no evidence that popular authors of prescriptive literature during the period 1500-1800 knew the medical and scientific literature at all. As one might expect, his discussion often falls back on the writings of well known protestant clergymen and conventional religious tropes. He has equal difficulty explaining how this prescriptive material, which focused on the patriarchal family, affected the experience of individual women and men and of particular social groups. In fact his chapters on husbands and wives (pp. 8-9) suggest that material factors and personality were far more important than prescriptive ideas about conduct in constructing individual relationships. Untangling the connection between prescription and experience and between the lives of individual people and larger social groups is one of the knottiest problems facing social historians, not just those working on gender. A causal connection cannot be unproblematically assumed.

Unlike his general conceptual framework, Fletcher's second map of gender is concerned with change. He believes that a crisis in male-female relations and loss of confidence in the ideological foundations of the gender hierarchy developed in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Persisting in his inattention to material factors, he locates the crisis in the inadequacy of traditional medical and scientific doctrines - specifically, pace Laqueur, the one body model of sexuality and humoral theory - that had explained and justified patriarchal institutions and practices since ancient times. (pp. 401-2) Men resolved the crisis by drawing on the methods and assumptions of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century to construct a "new secular ideology of gender" and "modem secular patriarchy." (pp. 283, 295) The crucial change was the shift from "a theory of hierarchy to one of opposites." (p. 291) The end product, the ideology that Barbara Welter called the cult of true womanhood over twenty years ago, also supported the subordination of women. (p. 395) Nonetheless, Fletcher considers it an improvement on the earlier gender regime because "for the first time"(p. 360) it replaced an "overwhelmingly negative construction" of women with a "constructive view of femininity."(pp. 377,412) Here, his whiggish judgment differs markedly from that of other historians who have studied the impact of the scientific revolution on women (e.g. Londa Scheibinger) and the transformation of gender relations and ideology in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (e.g. Catherine Hall and Leonore Davidoff).