The Weaker Vessel

This volume offers a panorama of 17th-century English womanhood, presented with Fraser's usual taste for passion and pageantry, and a degree of balance between the higher and lower orders. Centrally, she succeeds in showing how the ideology of woman as the weaker vessel was belied by women rising to the personal challenges created by the English Civil War, the Great Plague, and the fire of London, quite apart from the risks of repeated pregnancies, then believed to be women's normal state. While Elizabeth I reigned, it was not good form to emphasize woman's weakness; but once she was dead (1603), women were valued chiefly for the wealth they could bring to a marriage. During the Civil War, however, women became defenders of castles, disguised comrades-in-arms, and solicitors on behalf of husband and family. With the Restoration, many of women's opportunities for independent action vanished; life became "a continual labor." In sum, Fraser believes that women's status rose during the middle decades of upheaval, only to fall as the Restoration took hold. "Women in the seventeenth century were as they had always been, strong vessels where they had the opportunity. . . where a particular combination of character and circumstance enabled them to be so." Vivid personalities, powerful circumstances, told with drama and bite.