Word: vessel
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WERE THERE any women in 17th century England?" asks a man as he disappears into his men's club. With this anecdote, Antonia Fraser explains the purpose of her latest book. In The Weaker Vessel, Fraser uses diaries, letters and popular ballads to recreate the condition of women in British society from the reign of Queen Elizabeth to that of Queen Anne...
...title, an ironic reference to a phrase in the King James Bible, is based on remarks made by St. Paul; he advised wives to subjugate themselves to their husbands and for husbands to protect "the weaker vessel." In this case and many others, Fraser indicates how the established church reinforced the image of women as morally and physically inferior. For example, women's prayers often included "Grandmother Eve," from whom all women were said to have inherited the original sin. Yet much of Fraser's book reveals how the 17th century was a time of change, even for women...
...were written for wives advising them to be modest and industrious. Above all, procreation was a prime function of marriage. Most married women were in "virtually perpetual pregnancy," because effective contraception had not yet been adopted. In childbirth, women faced tremendous constraints that did indeed make them a weaker vessel. A high infant mortality rate resulted from the lack of disinfectant, the limited use of forceps and mishandling by midwives. The midwives lacked medical knowledge because they were not taught Latin, and only a few English-language medical textbooks existed. Many women died in childbirth, and those who survived faced...
FRASER'S ENGAGING style succeeds where a conventional historian's might be tedious. She is a troubadour who effortlessly recounts a story she has exhaustively researched, and documented. The Weaker Vessel is a welcome addition to the slowly growing field of women's studies. It is also a warning that, as in the England of Elizabeth I, "it is easy to suppose in a time of freedom that the darker days of repression can never come again." This statement is made parenthetically, but it stands as the central motif of the book. As in 17th-century England, there are more...
Antonia Fraser, 52, author of the newly published The Weaker Vessel, on her efforts to be an objective feminist historian: "Of course there's no such thing as a totally objective person, except Almighty God if she exists...