"The women of the property-owning class will always
fanatically defend the exploitation and enslavement of the working people, by
which they indirectly receive the means for their socially useless existence."
Rosa Luxemburg
"The English Civil War broke out over issues; both
political and religious Gender was not among them."
Bernard Capp
Ann Hughes is Professor of Early Modern History at Keele
University; she has published widely on mid-seventeenth Century English history.
Her specialities are the study of Gender, print culture and religion. She is undoubtedly
one of the foremost authorities on the English Revolution.
In this slim volume, Hughes attempts "to discuss all
the ways in which the political upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century
interacted with, were affected by and had an impact on gendered roles and
relationships."
After a dearth of studies of women and the English
revolution, the recent spate of publications examining women and the English
revolution, including Hughes's book is to be welcomed up to a point. There is
still no of the biography of two of the most famous Leveller women Katherine
Chidley and Elizabeth Lilburne.
While one book cannot make up for a few centuries of neglect
Hughes's book is an important contribution to our understanding of the role women
played in the English revolution.
Hughes's book is part of a proliferation of Gender orientated
books that have been published over the last few decades. This relatively new type
of historiography has been promoted heavily by universities and publishers
alike. The recent proliferation of books, articles, etc. has many reasons. One
major factor being the growth of women historians who have started to explore
this previously under-researched subjects. Another reason is that women, in
general, have a much-increased degree of political freedom and economic
independence than previous generations of women.
One of the major problems with this type of politically
motivated historical study is the evisceration of class. There cannot be a
genuine struggle for women's emancipation without an examination of the class
nature of female exploitation. As this article points out "There is more talk of gender in the
American and global media than perhaps at any previous moment in history. The
#MeToo campaign in the US has supposedly brought the conditions of women to the
fore like never before. The US media and Hollywood are animated by hardly
anything else.
"But this is a fraud. The women are getting nearly all
the coverage belonging to the upper echelons of society, the richest five or
ten per cent. Working-class women are nowhere to be seen in all this, except
for a few token exceptions that prove the rule. This skewed class lineup in the
media coverage reflects a greater social reality: the gap between affluent
women and working-class women has widened dramatically in the past several
decades. On International Women's Day in 2018, what are the conditions of the
great majority of women in the world, those who are ignored by the media, those
who do not get their faces and their complaints on the evening news? Today, of
the 1.3 billion of the planet's 7.6 billion inhabitants living in extreme
poverty, 70 per cent are women or girls, according to Project Concern
International."[1]
The striking feature about the subject matter of Hughes's
book is that many of the problems faced by 17th Century women are
unfortunately still with us in the 21st Century. As I said earlier,
there is a dearth of material written on the plight of women in the 17th
Century.It is over eighty years since Alice Clark wrote a major work analysing
the working life of women in the 17th Century. Sharon Howard, in an article about Clark wrote,
"I have a soft spot for Alice Clark (not least for her maxim that "those
who do not make mistakes do not make anything"). This was her only book.
She was not a well-known academic historian; rather, a feminist and
businesswoman whose life encompassed many other activities and who only began
historical research at the age of 38. She was a member of the Clark family, who
were Quakers, of shoemaking fame (you know, those horrible sensible shoes you
wore as a kid because your mum made you, except they recently got all trendy
and cute).Born in 1874, she was firmly influenced by the 'first wave' of
feminism, particularly by debates about female economic dependence and 'parasitism'
on men and its adverse effects on women and society as a whole. She also needs
to be understood in the context of early 20th-century concerns about the social
consequences of industrialisation and pioneering sociological investigations
into contemporary conditions of the poor, and increasing interest in what was
then called 'economic history' (it would now be termed social history). The
contribution made to that historiography by women was subsequently ignored by
many historians; feminist historians have in more recent decades worked to
reconsider their significance ".[2]
Gender historiography is a relatively new concept in which
to study women's role in history. The systematic study of women in history is
largely a by-product of the genre "History from below" instigated by
the Communist Party History Group. While producing some important research and
publications, the replacing of gender over class in the study of historical
events is a move away from a classical or orthodox Marxist approach.
Gender studies were heavily promoted by journals such as History
Workshop. The growth in gender studies was also facilitated by books like The
Making of the English Working Class by Edward P Thompson. Independent women
historians and writers started to insist that "women's experience no
longer is 'hidden from history.[3]
Books that started to examine women's role in history were
not always met with support. When the outstanding historian Keith Thomas who
taught history at Oxford in the 1950s decided to set up a series of lectures on
Women and the 17th Century his attempt was met with at best indifference and
worse outright hostility.
The period that Hughes writes about was truly a world turned
upside down, where traditional family roles were coming under high
pressure. As Alison Jones points out "The
Civil War of 1642-1646 and its aftermath constituted a time of great turmoil,
turning people's everyday lives upside down. It not only affected the men in
the armies, but it also touched the lives of countless ordinary individuals. It
is well known that women played a significant role in the Civil War, for
example, defending their communities from attack and nursing wounded soldiers.
What is often forgotten, however, is that some women took advantage of the
havoc wrought by the conflict to dissent from conventional positions in society.The
slightest deviation by women from their traditional roles as wives and mothers
was condemned by this patriarchal society. Therefore dissent could take many
forms that today do not appear particularly extreme – for example, choosing to
participate in emerging radical religious sects, having greater sexual freedom,
fighting as soldiers and practising witchcraft".[4]
It took much courage to take part in the struggles of the
day. The punishment for doing was swift and brutal. Heavy punishment was meted
out to those women who rebelled against the prevailing orthodoxy. One such 'rebel'
was Margaret Cavendish who wrote in a tract
We become like worms that only live in the dull earth of ignorance,
winding ourselves sometimes out by the help of some refreshing rain of good
educations, which seldom is given us; for we are kept like birds in cages to
hop up and down in our houses, not suffered from flying abroad to see the
several changes of fortune, and the various humour, ordained and created by
nature; thus wanting the experiences of nature, we must need to want the
understanding and knowledge so consequently prudence, and invention of men:
thus by an opinion, which I hope is but an erroneous one in men, we are shut
out of all power and authority, despised, and laughed at, the best of our
actions are trodden down with scorn, by the overweening conceit men have of
themselves and through despisement of us".[5]
According to Hughes, society's problem was not the result of
a class struggle but was because England was a patriarchal society. While Hughes acknowledges the fact that
political and economic differences did occur among men and women, these are
mostly ignored. She contends that the primary motivating factor for pursuing
civil war was the struggle of women versus men.
Hughes states that "neither women nor men form a
homogeneous category, and in this book, their experiences during the English
revolution are structured by age, social and marital status, religion, and
political allegiance, and sometimes by national or ethnic identity, as well as
by Gender. One category missing from this list is class.
I must admit I have problem historians who advocate the
theory of patriarchy. Under the guise of investigating all women's history,
there has developed a tendency to reduce all women's struggle to a fight
against repression regardless of what class they belonged.
The promotion of women's studies came at the same time
number of revisionist started to attack previous whig and Marxist
historiography.Hughes promotion of Gender studies is in direct opposition to a
class-based study of history.
To conclude Hughes book is not without merit as Gaby
Mahlberg says
"The power of
Hughes's book, and what makes it so valuable to both specialist scholars in the
field and their students, is the great wealth of primary source material on
which it is based and the ease with which the author moves between the
micro-stories of early modern men and women, their wider context, and ongoing
historiographical debates. Gender and the English Revolution are likely to join
The Causes of the English Civil War (London, 1991) as staple reading for
students of the mid-seventeenth century".[6]
Despite the criticisms and caveats, which include Hughes abandonment of any
class-based analysis of the English revolution the book is worth reading.
[1]
The condition of working-class women on International Women’s Day-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/03/09/pers-m09.html
[2]
Early Modern Notes by Sharon Howard entitled Alice Clark, working women's
historian.
[3]
Reviewed Works: Hidden from History. Rediscovering Women in History from the
17th Century to the Present by Sheila Rowbotham; Woman's Work. The Housewife,
Past and Present by Ann Oakley-Review by: Susan J. Kleinberg-Journal of Social
History
Vol. 10, No. 1 (Autumn, 1976), pp. 99-103
[4]
Dissent and Debauchery: Women and the English Civil War- Alison Jones
[5]
Philosophical and Physical Opinions (1655)
[6]
Gaby Mahlberg's Review 12th July 2012 -www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09612025.2012.706066
