Women of England

by Bartlett Burleigh James

The great evil of Puritanism was the tendency to hypocrisy which it produced among the people, by forcing upon them the simulation of a virtue greater than they in reality possessed. An affectation of piety which was carried to fanatical extremes, and which affected men and women alike and made them fall into stereotyped expressions and cant utterances having a savor of religiosity, while barren of the spirit of true devotion, was, to say the least, unwholesome for the nation. But the very fact that the pendulum had swung so far in the direction of primitive austerity in life and in worship showed that behind the hollow and insincere forms and words of Puritanism there was a magnificent earnestness of purpose, such as had been foreign to English life as a whole, although to be found among the followers of Wyckliffe and the Lollards.

As the spirit of Puritanism spread, its opponents, who were styled the Libertines, became more defiant in their attitude and less regardful of the strictures which the narrow-minded bigots, as they styled the Puritans, cast upon them. Thus, the women were divided by the extremes of position occupied by the men. Drunkenness among women of rank became very common. Intellectual fervor declined and learning became superficial, while the pet vices, inanities, and vain pomp of the reign of Elizabeth lost much of their glitter and became mere prosaic and gross immorality. While the women of the court indulged in revelry, to the scandal of their sisters of the middle classes, the latter, by their piety as well as by their pious affectations, brought upon themselves coarse witticisms, ribald mirth, and allegations of misconduct under the guise of sanctity. So it happened that just when the women of the middle classes were approaching in position their sisters of the higher circles, by the ascent of the class to which they belonged and by the recognition on the part of the superior ranks of their worth as individuals and their importance as a sound element of the nation, the tendency toward a uniform equality, however remote its realization, was rudely checked by an issue which sundered the respective classes to the nethermost poles. It then became but a question of which section of the nation should administer its affairs and direct its destiny. When the two opposing camps of aristocracy and democracy met in conflict, King Charles was led to the gibbet, not because the feeling of the people was so especially bitter against him personally, as that he was the impersonation of an aristocracy which had become so intrenched in power, that, regardless of its acts, it claimed divine right to rule.

The female sex, as a whole, was not held in high esteem by the Puritans, however dear to them may have been the women of their own households. By the gayety and licentiousness of the brilliant era of Elizabeth, women had forfeited the esteem of these stern censors of public virtue, and were held up as snares in the way of the righteous and as emissaries of Satan. It would be unjust to the sound judgment of those earnest men of powerful thought and tested standards even to suggest that they did not make a distinction between woman in disgrace—as they regarded the women in representative life about them—and woman in her normal and helpful relationship to society, as illustrated in the Biblical types of exalted womanhood. It was but natural that, at a time when the social sin was the canker of society, woman should have been looked upon in the light of the temptress in Eden. It is only with such qualification that the characterization of a writer on the period of the Commonwealth, whose description is generally accurate, can be accepted: "Under the Commonwealth, society assumed a new and stern aspect. Women were in disgrace; it was everywhere declared from the pulpit that woman caused man's expulsion from Paradise, and ought to be shunned by Christians as one of the greatest temptations of Satan. 'Man,' said they, 'is conceived in sin and brought forth in iniquity; it was his complacency to woman that caused his first debasement; let man not therefore glory in his shame; let him not worship the fountain of his corruption.' Learning and accomplishments were alike discouraged, and women confined to a knowledge of cooking, family medicines, and the unintelligible theological discussions of the day."

The high tension which had been maintained during the preceding reign was followed during those of James I. and Charles I. by a mental inertia; and the intellectual life of the people, which had resulted from the revival of learning in the sixteenth century, languished and almost died of inanition. Even among those men—the courtiers—who amused themselves chiefly by the foibles of the other sex, there was a morbid reaction against their associates in frivolity. It was no longer customary to praise women for their wit and repartee and to look upon them as brilliant, or to regard their coarse jests as delicate humor; instead of this, these men affected toward them great contempt, and scoffed at all other men who manifested respect for the sex. Whether among the nobility or among the Puritans, woman was wounded in the house of her friends.

Amid the premonitory rumblings of civil strife and the actual horrors of war, when the nation was rent asunder, the matters of belief and of conduct were the burning themes for thought and discussion; it was not possible to maintain interest in intellectual concerns, even if there had not been a reaction from the highly wrought state of mind of the preceding era. That behind the Puritans' apparent hatred of beauty and of the grace of intellect and of life there was no real abandonment of the true principles which underlie all permanent beauty and grace is sufficiently shown by the production of that poet who sounded deepest the reaches of philosophy and scaled highest the ascents of poetic thought—the great Milton. He it was who caught the deep significance of the movements of the age, and brought them into harmony with the parable of human history—a feat so mighty that it called forth the highest flights of poetic fancy and sought the embodiment of the best graces of language. It is not without interest to note the absence of woman in the lofty theme of Milton, saving only as she appears in the Puritanic conception of the temptress.

Another of the Puritans, who in his way was as great as Milton, Bunyan, the Bedford tinker, caught and set forth in magnificent allegory the meaning of the Puritan movement for the individual; but there is an absence of woman in the story of the pilgrimage of Christian to the Celestial City, excepting as she appears in the character of the temptress, as at Vanity Fair. The Christian Graces, who are represented as women, are not types of the sex of the day, but are used to point the contrast the more sharply between woman in ideal and woman as the product of the times of the Puritans. It remained, however, for the Puritans to refine the sex by the fires of relentless criticism and to produce the severer, but much nobler, Christian woman, who became the normal type, not only for the middle classes, but, to an extent, for the women of the higher circles as well.

The state of society was not favorable for intellectual expression on the part of woman, although it can hardly be said that it retarded intellectual progress. The character of the English woman was being affected in a way to save it from becoming merely superficial and volatile, like that of her French sister, and her intellect was being sobered for literary production that should have worthier qualities than mere brilliancy to recommend it. When the women of the middle classes stepped out into the arena of authorship, the value of the Puritan period as a corrective of the frivolity and false standards for women which had previously obtained becomes manifest in their writings.

The loss of opportunities of education for the women of the middle classes, which was a result of the dissolution of the religious houses, had never quite been made good, and even down to the second half of the seventeenth century there was no adequate system of popular education. In the case of the children of the nobility, suitable education and training for their station in life could be obtained only by sending them abroad to Italy, France, or Germany, or by bringing foreign teachers into the country. Girls were never sent abroad for their education; and in the case of the daughters of middle-class society, all that was regarded as needful was training in the practical affairs of housewifery—to which, in the case of the Puritans, was added inculcation of the Scriptures and the reading of other devout books. The current opinion is well expressed in the following citation from The Art of Thriving: "Let them learne plaine workes of all kind, so they take heed of too open seeming. Instead of song and musick, let them learne cookery and laundry, and instead of reading Sir Philip Sydney's Arcadia, let them read the grounds of huswifery. I like not a female poetesse at any hand: let greater personages glory their skill in musicke, the posture of their bodies, the greatnesse and freedome of their spirits, and their arts in arraigning of men's affections at their flattering faces: this is not the way to breed a private gentleman's daughter."

Even if higher education for women were not recognized as important in the seventeenth century—and the facilities were not at hand, even if the sentiment had existed—it would be captious criticism to construe this into a grievance against the sex. In all that pertained to dignity and real worth, the women of the Commonwealth, with all the narrowness of their training, were much in advance of womankind at the beginning of the modern era, and their moral differentiation from the women of the same class before the spread of Puritanism was most marked. Puritanism was a distinct gain for woman, for through that movement the process of raising women in the social scale received great impetus. A comparison with the girls of France of about the same period certainly shows that the low state of education among the sex in England was not in any wise peculiar to English conditions. Fénelon, in referring to the neglect of the education of the girls of his country, says: "It is shameful, but ordinary, to see women who have acuteness and politeness, not able to pronounce what they read; either they hesitate or they intone in reading, when, instead, they should pronounce with a simple and natural tone, but rounded and uniform. They are still more deficient in orthography, whether in the manner of composing their letters or in reading them when written."