WAS THERE PROGRESS TOWARD EQUALITY BETWEEN THE SEXES

IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE?

• Literacy rates rose among women, but not as rapidly as they did among men.

• Lutherans placed new emphasis on the need for companionship between spouses.

• Women remained excluded from almost all skilled trades and professions.

(See Merry Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, 1993.)

Raphael,Madonna of Belvedere

(1506)

Hans Baldung Grien,

“Adam and Eve”

(1520s)

Lucas Cranach the Elder,

“Judith with the Head of Holofernes” (ca. 1530)

Caravaggio, “Judith Beheading Holofernes” (ca. 1598)

Bordone, “Venus and Mars with Cupid”(a Venetian courtesan, 1559/60)

Tintoretto, “The Origin of the Milky Way” (1570)

Lucas Cranach the Elder,

“Ill-Matched Couple”

(1520-22)

Rubens,“The Last Judgment”

(1617):removed from the

Jesuit church in Neuburg in 1653

for its “offensive nudities”

Geertruydt Roghman,“Woman Spinning”(1640s)

“The School Room” (1526):A Protestant vision of the ideal school for both

boys and girls; in fact, there were very few schools for girls….

A Midwife’s Manual from 1545:

The birthing cradle and illustrations of the most common

positions of the fetus

Frans Hals, “Married Couple in a Garden” (ca 1622)

Lutherans argued that the tale of Adam’s rib symbolized the need for companionship between spouses, and Catholic writers soon adopted a similar ideal.

“Recipe for Marital Bliss” (ca. 1680): The husband should beat the wife for laziness, talkativeness,

vanity, or chasing after other men; the wife should beat the husband for drunkenness, laziness, or failure

to support his family.

Sofonisba Angissola, “Portrait of the Artist’s Sisters

Playing Chess” (Cremona, 1555)

Judith Leyster,Self-Portrait,

ca. 1635

Judith Leyster,“Carousing

Couple”(1630)

Judith Leyster,“The

Proposition” (Amsterdam,

1631)

Anne Bonny (1725):

This famous Irish woman pirate

was based in the Bahamas. She retired to South

Carolina, married, and lived 80

years.

A French knitwear workshop, 18th century:Women prepare the yarn at the spinning wheels, and the family father weaves the yarn into cloth

Men and women work side by side in this metalworking shop.

Women managers run this fancy Parisian dress shop in the 18th century, when more and more

middle-class customers sought to emulate court fashion

“In the Salon of Madame Geoffrin in 1755”(the milieu in which the idea of women’s equality

arose)

FRENCH WOMEN’S LIFE CYCLES, 1750 and 1960

From Joan Scott and Louise Tilly, Women, Work, and Family (New York, 1978).

In Europe there was no mass movement for women’s equality before the 1880s….

Lucas Cranach the Elder,

“An Allegory of Melancholy”

(1528)

Entrance to Salpêtrière Hospital, founded in Paris in

1656

By 1780 it was the largest hospital in the world, with 10,000 patients, many of them suffering mental illness, plus 300 imprisoned prostitutes.

Inmates of Salpêtrière who typify “dementia, megalomania, acute mania, melancholia, idiocy, hallucination, erotomania and paralysis” (1857)

In the 19th century 80% of lunatics committed to asylums were women…