Women in England 1500-1760

Women in England 1500-1760 charts the expectations and experiences from birth to death of women in England in the period between the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution, using the most recent statistical studies as well as the evidence of individual biographies and other writings. Bringing together the astonishing range of research over the last twenty years, this book looks at areas such as life-expectancy, likelihood and duration of marriage, choice of partners, numbers of children and experiences of pregnancy and childbirth, work inside and outside the household, education, religion, and participation in the community and the wider world. These are all subjects on which people make broad generalizations which often bear little resemblance to the most recent research. Early modern England was not a golden age for women, and women's opportunities for an independent existence outside the family probably diminished between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. But nevertheless there were many areas of life in which women, despite official prohibition, were able to exercise power and individual choice in matters both material and spiritual. As members of nuclear families, marrying usually in their mid-twenties, women lived in a recognisably modern society rather than a traditional society of extended families and child brides. Anne Laurence examines the material world of women - their possessions and what they created and commissioned - as well as their mental worlds: their beliefs, their writing and the popular culture in which they participated.