Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- 1 How Northwestern Europe Was Strange
- 2 Marrying Early and Marrying Late
- 3 The Riddle of the Western Family Pattern
- 4 The Women and Men of Montaillou and Salem Village
- 5 Communities in Crisis
- 6 What Men and Women Want
- 7 Interpreting the Western Past with the Women and the Households Left In, 1500–1800
- 8 The Late-Marriage Household, the Sexes, and the Modern World
- Epilogue
- Index
7 - Interpreting the Western Past with the Women and the Households Left In, 1500–1800
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- 1 How Northwestern Europe Was Strange
- 2 Marrying Early and Marrying Late
- 3 The Riddle of the Western Family Pattern
- 4 The Women and Men of Montaillou and Salem Village
- 5 Communities in Crisis
- 6 What Men and Women Want
- 7 Interpreting the Western Past with the Women and the Households Left In, 1500–1800
- 8 The Late-Marriage Household, the Sexes, and the Modern World
- Epilogue
- Index
Summary
In London in the 1570s, some women created a stir by adopting men's styles of clothing. Clergyman Phillip Stubbes pronounced the women's behavior nothing less than a deliberate challenge to the divinely ordained immutability of sex differences:
The Women … haue dublets & Jerkins as men haue …, buttoned vp the brest, and made with wings, welts and pinions on the shoulder points, as mans apparel is, for all the world, & though this be a kinde of attire appropriate onely to man, yet they blush not to wear it, and if they could as wel chaunge their sex & put on the kinde of man, as they can weare apparel assigned onely to man, I think they would as verely become men indeed as now they degenerat from godly sober women, in wearing this wanton lewd kinde of attire, proper onely to man.
It is writte in the 22 Deuteronomi, that what man so euer weareth womans apparel is accursed, and what woman weareth mans apparel is accursed also …. Our Apparell was giuen us as a signe distinctiue to discern betwixt sex and sex, & therfore one to weare the Apparel of another sex, is to participate with the same, and to adulterate the veritie of his own kinde. Wherefore the Women may not improperly be called Hermaphrodita, that is Monsters of bothe kindes, half women, half men.
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- Information
- The Household and the Making of HistoryA Subversive View of the Western Past, pp. 202 - 242Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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