Word: 17th
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...much valued in our age," Cary Verney, a lady of the Restoration court, lamented. The playwright Aphra Behn concurred. The 17th century's female model, she said, was "that dull slave call'd a Wife." Among her fellow rebels, Fraser reports, were she-authors, she-preachers, even she-soldiers, as well as stubborn widows, unruly prostitutes and acid-tongued ladies of the court...
While examining the period for her earlier books, Cromwell: The Lord Protector and Royal Charles: Charles II and the Restoration, Lady Antonia must have amassed an exhaustive file under some such heading as "17th century women: the great exceptions." She sets it all out stylishly here in a sprawling documentary. The index lists the names of more than 550 women, most of whom, in one way or another, refused to play the game...
...formidable warrior for Scotland, riding at the head of a troop of horses with a case of pistols attached to her saddle and daggers at her girdle. It was the "learned woman" that terrified both the learned and unlearned men around her. The prevailing opinion, according to the 17th century writer Hannah Woolley, found that a woman was "learned ... enough if she can distinguish her Husband's bed from another...
...education was a prized experience. For a woman, it was frowned upon as "the drug called learning." How could a woman be "modest" if she knew too much? Above all, education increased a woman's vocabulary, and one thing a 17th century man could not abide was a talking woman, whether the speech came salty and profane from the fishwives of Billingsgate or gentle and saintly from Quaker women testifiers, "prattlers" for Christ...
...marjoram, "thyme, parsley, the juice of the herb savin−that did little good. A study of aristocratic women suggests that 45% died before 50, one-quarter of those in childbirth. If perpetual pregnancy did not do a woman in, smallpox well might. Life expectancy was 35. If a 17th century woman should survive to old age, she was in danger of being taken for a witch. In a 1648 treatise, John Stearne explained witchcraft as a woman's game on the ground that females are more "revengeful" than men because of Satan's "prevailing with Eve." Such...