The many sweeping historical changes in England after 1100 - such changes as the ongoing incorporation of Norman traditions, the growth of a commercial economy and the demographic shock of 1348-9 - offer excellent opportunities for tracing how the status of women might or might not also have changed. This is a difficult topic, for ‘the status of women’ is a slippery concept, easily evoked but hard to measure, especially over time. In general, ‘the status of women’ involves relativity (comparing the life opportunities of women and men), complexity (assessing social, legal, political, economic, religious and ideological factors) and a level of generalization (emphasizing the commonalties of the category ‘women’) that is almost the antithesis of attention to differences among women. It is also a much debated topic, with some arguing that women’s status has improved over time, others arguing the opposite, and still others suggesting that women’s status over the centuries might have seen more continuity than transformation. Within these three broad interpretations there is, of course, room for common ground; for example, there might have been small and temporary improvements within an overall trend of continuity.
‘Change for the better’ is perhaps the most common interpretation, embraced almost automatically by many students and modern historians. Buttressed by popular myths about chastity belts and droit de seigneur, this notion of the middle ages as an oppressive time for women neatly complements Whiggish histories of ever-improving human circumstances. If one assumes that medieval England was necessarily a less developed civilization than industrial England, medieval women must have been oppressed in egregious ways. Most medievalists reject these assumptions, but some have traced ‘change for the better’ on a more modest and less Whiggish scale - that is, within the middle ages itself. Jeremy Goldberg and Caroline Barron have argued that the labour crisis of the late fourteenth century allowed women to gain better employment, earn higher wages and even, if they chose, avoid marriage. Based on evidence drawn particularly from the cities of York and London, their arguments have been accepted by some and greeted with scepticism by others. In any case, the changes they posit were short-lived, since both agree that when the labour market contracted later in the fifteenth century, economic opportunities for women waned and rates of marriage increased.17
An interpretation that stresses ‘change for the worse’ is perhaps the most favoured among medievalists, and it operates on two different timescales. The first traces change between the middle ages and the modern era. Ever since Eileen Power argued for the rough-and-ready equality of medieval women in 1926, some medievalists have invoked ideas of a medieval golden age for women and its necessary analogue: a decline in women’s status with the advent of modernity. Although no medievalist would argue that women’s lives were glorious in the middle ages, many assert that medieval women were nevertheless less subordinated to men than women have been since. This interpretation appeals to many medievalists, for whom it serves to valorize the middle ages as a superior civilization, as well as to many feminists, for whom women’s higher status in the past implies the possibility of higher status in the future.
The second scale of ‘change for the worse’ works within the middle ages itself. Negative trends have been found in almost every medieval century, but the eleventh and twelfth centuries have been especially highlighted as a time of gender crisis - when an old ideology of gender similarity was, it is argued, usurped by a new ideology of gender difference. In Jo Ann McNamara’s view, a male identity crisis emerged around 1100, born of the relative pacification of European society and the strict imposition of clerical celibacy. Susan Mosher Stuard roughly agrees, arguing that a new gender rigidity then emerged from such factors as the Gregorian reform, the development of new customs of marriage and the recovery of classical texts. Yet these arguments have difficulty linking ideology with practice (as in Stuard’s attempt to suggest that people ‘sought answers from authorities’), and although gender ideologies have certainly changed over time, they may not have changed as quickly and as thoroughly as McNamara and Stuard suggest.18 Within English history specifically, the Norman Conquest has been seen as imposing a yoke of male privilege when, as Doris Mary Stenton described it in 1957, the ‘rough equality’ of Anglo-Saxon times fell away with the ‘masculine world’ of Norman feudalism. Yet, as Pauline Stafford has recently shown so well, this understanding of the Norman Conquest has been built more on assumption than hard evidence. All told, it is not at all clear that ideas of gender separation and polarity were strikingly new in eleventh - and twelfth-century Europe (including England), nor is it clear that new practices then oppressed women in strikingly harsh ways.19
Yet a third interpretation stresses ‘change without transformation’, arguing that the changes traced by such scholars as Barron, Goldberg, McNamara, Stuard and Stenton altered the specific experiences of women without transforming their overall status vis-a-vis men. Hence, for example, female wage workers in late fourteenth-century England earned higher wages than before the Black Death (a change in experience), but they were still paid about 70 per cent of the wages paid to men (a continuity in status).20 Studies of working women in the later middle ages have traced considerable change in the specifics of women’s work. Women left some occupations and took up others; their wages rose slightly in some decades and fell in others; they worked more in the home at some times than others. Yet these studies have also traced impressive continuities in the basic structures of women’s work. In 1300, 1500 and 1700, women’s work varied in time-specific ways, but compared to men’s work, women’s work remained characteristically low-skilled, low-status and poorly remunerated (as it still is today).21
This interpretive emphasis on continuity also suggests that if shifts in status did occur, they were so restricted and short-lived as to pale beside overall continuities. Its proponents argue, for example, that if some women in the early fifteenth century were able to improve their status (as Goldberg and Barron have suggested), the overall trend was nevertheless one of continuity, since this shift in status affected only a minority of women in York and London, and since it lasted, even for this minority, only into the mid-fifteenth century. Moreover, positive changes in one sector (for example, wages) might often have been offset by negative changes in another sector (for example, ideology). As a result, the concept of a ‘patriarchal equilibrium’ - an ever-fluid but self-adjusting system of male dominance - might best describe the history of women in medieval England. If so, it might be most useful to understand medieval women’s history as simultaneously dynamic and static, with the many changes in women’s experiences seldom accompanied by transformations - either for better or worse - in women’s status vis-a-vis men.22
World History
