The Role of Women in Early English Nonconformity

1983 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-311 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard L. Greaves

The involvement of English women in the radical Protestant movements of the 1640s and 1650s has attracted the attention of a number of modern historians. The hub of such studies is Keith Thomas's provocative 1958 essay, “Women and the Civil War Sects,” which focuses on the expanded role of women in these groups and on the way in which sectarian views indirectly undermined the patriarchal family. More recently, Dorothy Ludlow has studied female preachers in this period, insisting that they were not fanatics but sober women with a distinctive sense of Christian calling who claimed full membership in the Christian community. The more well-known women, such as Anne Hutchinson and Mary Cary, have been the subject of recent studies in their own right. For the period after 1660, Pamela Volkman has examined the contrasting ways in which male and female converts to the sects were depicted, noting that women were more likely to be accused of emotional volatility, immorality, or even insanity than were men. These studies have progressed to the point that we are in no danger of overlooking the role of women in English Nonconformity in the mid-seventeenth century.

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 853-874 ◽  
Author(s):  
MISHA EWEN

AbstractThis article explores the role of women investors in the Virginia Company during the early seventeenth century, arguing that women determined the success of English overseas expansion by ‘adventuring’ not just their person, but their purse. Trading companies relied on the capital of women, and yet in seminal work on Virginia Company investors women have received no attention at all. This is a significant oversight, as studying the women who invested in trading companies illuminates broader issues regarding the role of women in the early English empire. This article explores why and how two women from merchant backgrounds, Rebecca Romney (d. 1644) and Katherine Hueriblock (d. 1639), managed diverse, global investment portfolios in the period before the Financial Revolution. Through company records, wills, letters, court depositions, and a surviving church memorial tablet, it reconstructs Romney's and Hueriblock's interconnected interests in ‘New World’ ventures, including in Newfoundland, the North-West Passage Company, Virginia colony, and sugar trade. Studying women investors reveals how trade and colonization shaped economic activity and investment practices in the domestic sphere and also elucidates how women, in their role as investors, helped give birth to an English empire.


Author(s):  
Cassandra L. Yacovazzi

Just five weeks after its publication in January 1836, Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery sold over 20,000 copies. By “escaped nun,” Maria Monk, the book provided a shocking exposé of convent life, from licentious priests to tortured nuns to infanticide. Despite Maria Monk’s unveiling as an imposter, her book went on to become the second bestseller before the Civil War, after Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Far from representing a curious aberration, Monk’s book was part of a larger phenomenon, involving riots, propaganda, and politics. The campaign against convents was intimately connected with cultural concerns regarding reform, religion, immigration, and in particular the role of women in the republic. At a time when concern for “female virtue” consumed many Americans, nuns were a barometer of attitudes toward women. The veiled nun stood as the inversion of the true woman, needed to sustain the purity of the nation. She was a captive for a foreign foe, a fallen woman, a “white slave,” and a “foolish virgin.” In the first half of the nineteenth century, ministers, vigilantes, politicians, and writers, both male and female, crafted this image of the nun, locking arms against convents. The result was a far-reaching antebellum movement that would shape perceptions of nuns and women more broadly in America.


Author(s):  
Clare Jackson

This chapter provides a picture of the uses to which judicial torture was put after 1660. It also reconsiders Hume's ‘vestige of barbarity’: the role of judicial torture in late seventeenth-century Scotland. It first explores the practice of judicial torture in its broader legal, political, and philosophical contexts before turning to consider three specific instances wherein torture was sanctioned. The first concerns the torture in 1676 of the Covenanting preacher, James Mitchell, following his alleged attempt to assassinate the head of the established church, Archbishop James Sharp of St Andrews. The second investigates the torture of William Spence and William Carstares in 1684 on suspicion of treasonable attempts to foment an Anglo-Scottish rebellion against Charles II's authority, and the final case addresses the torture in 1690 of an English political agitator, Henry Neville Payne, in connection with Anglo-Scottish Jacobite intrigues being concerted against the government of William and Mary. Moreover, it describes the role of judicial torture within a domestic Scottish context. It is noted that if judicial torture is regarded as ‘an engine of state, not of law’, primarily deployed to protect civil society, rather than to punish known crimes, then some chilling contemporary parallels emerge.


Author(s):  
Vijay Phulwani

In this essay, Vijay Phulwani posits that Du Bois uses the language of tragedy in 1935’s Black Reconstruction in America to emphasize the constraints and limitations created by white supremacy and subvert the tragic legend of Reconstruction. Informed by his changing understanding of the role of slaves and freedmen in the Civil War and Reconstruction, Du Bois’s ideas moved from an emphasis on internal racial uplift and external political agitation to a theory of economic separatism and a strategic embrace of segregation. Du Bois returned to the subject of Reconstruction many times throughout his career, using it to rethink and further develop his ideas about the form and content of black politics. Phulwani argues that by continuing to analyze Reconstruction, Du Bois was able to simultaneously narrate its history and model alternative strategies for building black political and economic power.


1976 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 947-968 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander De Grand

Perhaps because the subject seemed so obvious, there has been little work done on women under fascism. This omission is unfortunate not only because Fascist policy was more complicated than the general impression of it but also because it offered an interesting example of the interaction between propaganda and reality in an authoritarian society. Women played an important role in several major propaganda campaigns of fascism, such as the ruralization policy and the battle to increase the birth rate. Concern for the role of women was at the heart of the conservative and stabilizing nature of fascism and, in so far as it meant the subjugation of the private lives of citizens to the demands of the State, policy towards women reflected the totalitarian and imperialistic side of fascism as well.


2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 551-572 ◽  
Author(s):  
JONATHAN HEALEY

ABSTRACTThe development of the poor law has formed a key element of recent discussions of ‘state formation’ in early modern England. There are, however, still few local studies of how formal poor relief, stipulated in the great Tudor statutes, was implemented on the ground. This article offers such a study, focusing on Lancashire, an economically marginal county, far from Westminster. It argues that the poor law developed in Lancashire surprisingly quickly in the early seventeenth century, despite the fact that there is almost no evidence of implementation of statutory relief before 1598, and formal relief mechanisms were essentially in place before the Civil War even if the numbers on relief remained small. After a brief hiatus during the conflict, the poor law was quickly revived in the 1650s. The role of the magistracy is emphasized as a crucial driving force, not just in the enforcement of the statutes, but also in setting relief policy. The thousands of petitions to JPs by paupers, parishes, and townships that survive in the county archives suggests that magistrates were crucial players in the ‘politics of the parish’.


1984 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. Walcot

Students today demand that what they are taught or what they discuss is ‘socially relevant’. A topic appears to exhibit social relevance when it is related to some issue currently reckoned important and the subject of controversy. No topic at present is thought more socially relevant than the role of women in society. Extra-mural students can vote with their feet as undergraduates cannot, and it is significant how regularly the brochures of university extra-mural departments in Britain have come to feature courses with titles such as ‘Women's Studies’, ‘New Horizons for Women’, ‘Images of Women’, and ‘Women Speak’. Teachers of Classics have not been reluctant to devise their own courses on women in antiquity, and it is my impression that no university in North America is without a course of this type, while postgraduate seminars covering the same field of interest seem to have become firmly established throughout Western Europe. Books, articles, and notes on women and ancient society abound, and the resultant bibliography grows more and more daunting each year.


Adeptus ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justyna Marianna Zynek

Tradition and the practices of gender domination on the example of hutsul carollingThe Christmas custom of carolling occupies a very special place in the life of Hutsulshchyna inhabitants. Referred to as a religious rite, for a long time Hutsul carolling has been an object of numerous studies that shape ideas about it. In spite of the functioning of many forms of carolling in these areas, both researchers and the inhabitants of the Ukrainian Carpathians recognize as the most important the male form of carolling, which marginalized the role of women. However, on closer inspection it turns out that women also have an exceptional impact on the course of tradition, often taking the initiative in carolling. The article focuses on the, hitherto disregarded in the literature gender, relations within the Hutsul carolling. It also analyses the connection between discourse and social practices manifested in male and female forms of carolling. A look at the official and non-official character of tradition as well as relations between genders and any crises connected with them highlights the domination and symbolic power within the gender domain. Tradycja a praktyki dominacji w obrębie płci na przykładzie huculskiego kolędowaniaBożonarodzeniowy zwyczaj kolędowania zajmuje szczególne miejsce w życiu mieszkańców Huculszczyzny. Określane jako rytuał religijny huculskie kolędowanie od dawna stanowi obiekt wielu prac naukowych, które kształtują wyobrażenia na jego temat. Na tych terenach funkcjonuje wiele form kolędowania. Za najistotniejsze, zarówno badacze, jak i mieszkańcy Karpat ukraińskich, uznają kolędowanie mężczyzn, w którym marginalizowana jest rola kobiet. Przy bliższym przyjrzeniu okazuje się jednak, że również i one mają szczególny wpływ na przebieg tradycji, niejednokrotnie przejmując kolędniczą inicjatywę. Artykuł skupia się na nieuwzględnianych dotąd w literaturze przedmiotu relacjach płci w obrębie huculskiego kolędowania. Analizuje również związek dyskursu i praktyk społecznych przejawiających się w kolędzie kobiecej i męskiej. Przyjrzenie się kwestiom oficjalności i nieoficjalności oraz relacjom między płcią a wszelkiego rodzaju kryzysami pozwala zwrócić uwagę na uwidaczniającą się dominację oraz przemoc symboliczną w obrębie płci.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-44
Author(s):  
Helmi Setiawan ◽  
Anwar Efendi

This research is descriptive qualitative research using the feminist literary criticism approach. The subject of this research are three novels by Okky Madasari which are titled: 1) Maryam, 2) 86, and 3) Entrok. The technique of data collecting used in this research is to study the library read the note, conducted by reading carefully and repeated thoroughly and classifying the data obtained based on women’s image. Analyzing data in this research use the descriptive qualitative method. The research finding in the form of physical women’s image, the image of women’s psychic and the role of women consisting of domestic and public areas. Domestic roles include as a child, wife, and mother. The role of women in the public domain consists of the educator, economic, and social movement sectors.


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