What were women like during Shakespeare' time?

Answer 1

Better than you probably think. Of course this was long before suffragettes so women did not have political rights, but then neither did almost all men. And women mostly worked at home, because keeping house was a very difficult job and absolutely necessary, and could easily be combined with the equally difficult job of looking after babies. Women who had to earn an income to support themselves could do so, usually with cottage industries like cloth preparation or brewing, and sometimes with the oldest profession. Widows whose husbands had a business carried on with the business and nobody thought ill of them.

Europeans who visited England in those days marvelled at how free the English women were, how they were permitted to go freely about the streets and carry on their business. Women were treated with considerable respect for the most part, even when they acted crazy. Mary Frith, the notorious Elizabethan transvestite and rebel, actually appeared on the stage of the Fortune Theatre. She was charged, of course, but the penalty wasn't too severe (she promised not to do it again). Far from being treated badly, most people appear to have thought she was pretty cool. Dekker and Middleton, who wrote a play about her, certainly thought so.

Answer 2

Much better than you probably think. Although women, and especially married women, had fewer rights than men, they were not without rights altogether. And whatever the legal status, a strong-willed person of either sex will get his or her way. It is worth considering Shakespeare's comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor, the only play he wrote which is explicitly set in contemporary England, and the two strong-willed women there. This must have been a comment of some sort on the reality of contemporary society.

Answer 3

People often paint the life of Elizabethan women as a life of dark and dismal slavery. But that picture is misleading. They say that women had no education rights, but then neither did men. In fact, an education was a luxury for most people. Upper class women were generally well-educated (Consider Queen Elizabeth I or Mary Sidney, sister of Sir Philip Sydney). They say that women had no voting rights, but nobody did. It was a monarchy. They say that marriages were arranged without the bride's consent. This didn't happen. Shakespeare is an example: his marriage was certainly not arranged! Anne Hathaway, not her father, chose him.

The picture of the submissive woman who has no rights and defers in all things to the men around her is a wishful picture of women drawn by men, not the reality. Women did have rights and the courts upheld them. Of course, as has always been the case, there were dominating and submissive men and women both. There is a great variety of dynamics in relationships.

This is not to say that women of that time had a cushy life: they did not. The job of keeping a house, of feeding people and clothing them was a difficult and time-consuming one, and these jobs were done almost entirely by women, either housewives or house servants. Many women had to run a business at the same time as a house, because they were widows or because they had absentee husbands (as Anne Hathaway did) or useless husbands (as Judith Quiney nee Shakespeare did).

Answer 4

This question is very broad and it is not possible to give any kind of coherent answer in less than a very thick volume or two. "Shakespeare's time", i.e. the late 16th and early 17th century, was a time when there were women living on every continent in the world. Can we generalize about the lifestyle of women living in Mexico, and the Ottoman Empire, and Japan, and West Africa, and Hawaii and England at this time? At this time particularly, a remarkable number of European women held the highest possible status (consider Queen Elizabeth, Mary Queen of Scots, Juana la Loca, and Catherine des Médicis), whereas others were at the bottom rung of society.

The phrase "status of women" reeks of the 1960s and the feminism which developed during that time. It would be silly of us to expect to find twentieth-century feminism before 1900, and we don't. Women's roles have always centred on the main fact which makes them women: they are the child-bearing sex, and they are the ones who carry around baby food with them. The preservation of the species (this is not now an issue but it has been for millions of years) meant developing social structures to keep women safe, so they could keep the children safe and well and give them a place to grow up. But that does not mean that everyone before our century held a rigid view of women or that everyone's views were the same, or that women themselves held rigid or universal views about what women could or could not do. Looking just at Elizabethan and Jacobean England, I'd ask you to read two plays and a speech. One play is Heywood's Fair Maid of the West, about a tough but principled hostess of a tavern who becomes a pirate, and the other is Dekker and Middleton's The Roaring Girl, about a real-live woman called Mary Frith who was a transvestite and a tough girl. Mary herself allegedly appeared on the stage of the Fortune Theatre during one performance, for which she was naturally punished.

The speech is the speech given by Queen Elizabeth to her troops at Tilbury on August 9, 1588, one of the greatest speeches ever given by anyone anywhere. She said, "I know I have the body of a weak, feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field."

Answer 5

very outspoken, romantic kind of a person and also very superstitious.

Answer 6

Female. People are pretty much the same as they were then--that's why we can understand what's going on in Shakespeare's plays.

Answer 7

look harder