The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England by Antonia Fraser

Author’s Note

    ‘ Were there any women in seventeenth-century England?’ This question was put to me by a distinguished person (male) when I told him the proposed subject of my new book; like another jesting interlocutor, he did not stay for an answer, but vanished up the steps of his club. This book is in part at least an attempt to answer that question.
    Wherever possible I have quoted the voices of women themselves, in letters, in the few but poignant diaries, and in the reports of others. Obviously there are enormous difficulties with the written record where women of this period are concerned, in view of the fact that the vast majority below the gentry class were, through no fault of their own, illiterate. Nevertheless I have battled to breach the walls of this artificial silence. Indeed, if I have had a bias, it has been towards the unknown rather than the known; believing strongly in what we owe to ‘the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs’, in the words of George Eliot’s moving conclusion to Middlemarch .
    The idea of writing such a book first came to me in 1970 when I was working on a biography of Oliver Cromwell; it occurred to me that a study of women in the English Civil War would produce some interesting results, in view of the spirited nature ofthe women in question, whether petitioning, defending castles or fighting alongside their husbands – a variety of activities, none of them particularly passive. Working on a life of Charles II, following these women through to the next generation, did nothing to diminish my ardour, but did show me how much more complicated the subject was than I had supposed.
    After ten years of working on the seventeenth century I felt more enthusiasm than ever. But I did come to the conclusion that I must confine my study to England alone; although I had at an early stage wistfully contemplated including Scottish women, until the many differences in the laws as well as the society of the two nations convinced me that this was a separate subject. I also realized how important it was to take the hundred odd years from the death of Queen Elizabeth I to the accession of Queen Anne as a whole, if only to explore to what extent woman’s position in society did or did not improve with the passage of time.
    This, then, is a study of woman’s lot: it is not intended as a dictionary of female biography in the seventeenth century, nor for that matter as an encyclopedia of women’s topics. I have selected those characters who interested me; omissions were not only inevitable, if the book was not to be of mammoth size, but also deliberate.
    Obviously, no one writes in a vacuum, and to boast of being unswayed by the currents of opinion swirling about in one’s own time would be, like most boasts, foolish. During the twelve years in which I have been taking notes towards this book, the growth of feminism both as a force and an influence has been a spectacular phenomenon. But this book is, I hope, a historical work, not a tract. After all, to write about women it is not necessary to be a woman, merely to have a sense of justice and sympathy; these qualities are not, or should not be, the prerogative of one sex.
    I have taken the usual liberties in correcting spelling and punctuation where it seemed necessary to make sense to the reader today. For the same reason I have ignored the fact that the calendar year was held to start on 25 March during this period, and have used the modern style of dates starting on 1 January throughout. This is an age which presents considerable problemsto the writer, where the nomenclature of women is concerned. On the one hand, many of the them bore the same Christian name: in a host of Marys, Elizabeths and Annes, one learns to be grateful for the odd Jemima. On the other hand, equally confusingly, women at this period changed their surnames with frequency, due to marriage and remarriage. Sometimes, therefore, it has proved