As someone who originally trained as a social historian of the Medieval Period, I have some things to add in support of the main point. Most people dramatically underestimate the economic importance of Medieval women and their level of agency. Part of the problem here is when modern people think of medieval people they are imagining the upper end of the nobility and not the rest of society.
Your average low end farming family could not survive without women’s labour. Yes, there was gender separation of labour. Yes, the men did the bulk of the grain farming, outside of peak times like planting and harvest, but unless you were very well off, you generally didn’t live on that. The women had primary responsibility for the chickens, ducks, or geese the family owned, and thus the eggs, feathers, and meat. (Egg money is nothing to sneeze at and was often the main source of protein unless you were very well off). They grew vegetables, and if she was lucky she might sell the excess. Her hands were always busy, and not just with the tasks you expect like cooking, mending, child care, etc.. As she walked, as she rested, as she went about her day, if her hands would have otherwise been free, she was spinning thread with a hand distaff. (You can see them tucked in the belts of peasant women in art of the era). Unless her husband was a weaver, most of that thread was for sale to the folks making clothe as men didn’t spin. Depending where she lived and the ages of her children, she might have primary responsibility for the families sheep and thus takes part in sheering and carding. (Sheep were important and there are plenty of court cases of women stealing loose wool or even shearing other people’s sheep.) She might gather firewood, nuts, fruit, or rushes, again depending on geography. She might own and harvest fruit trees and thus make things out of that fruit. She might keep bees and sell honey. She might make and sell cheese if they had cows, sheep, or goats. Just as her husband might have part time work as a carpenter or other skilled craft when the fields didn’t need him, she might do piece work for a craftsman or be a brewer of ale, cider, or perry (depending on geography). Ale doesn’t keep so women in a village took it in turn to brew batches, the water not being potable on it’s own, so everyone needed some form of alcohol they could water down to drink. The women’s labour and the money she bought in kept the family alive between the pay outs for the men as well as being utterly essential on a day to day survival level.
Something similar goes on in towns and cities. The husband might be a craftsman or merchant, but trust me, so is his wife and she has the right to carry on the trade after his death.
Also, unless there was a lot of money, goods, lands, and/or titles involved, people generally got a say in who they married. No really. Keep in mind that the average age of first marriage for a yeoman was late teens or early twenties (depending when and where), but the average age of first marriage for the working poor was more like 27-29. The average age of death for men in both those categories was 35. with women, if you survived your first few child births you might live to see grandchildren.
Do the math there. Odds are if your father was a small farmer, he’s been dead for some time before you gather enough goods to be marrying a man. For sure your mother (and grandmother and/or step father if you have them) likely has opinions, but you can have a valid marriage by having sex after saying yes to a proposal or exchanging vows in the present (I thee wed), unless you live in Italy, where you likely need a notary. You do not need clergy as church weddings don’t exist until the Reformation. For sure, it’s better if you publish banns three Sundays running in case someone remembers you are too closely related, but it’s not a legal requirement. Who exactly can stop you if you are both determined?
So the less money, goods, lands, and power your family has, the more likely you are to be choosing your partner. There is an exception in that unfree folk can be required to remarry, but they are give time and plenty of warning before a partner would be picked for them. It happened a lot less than you’d think. If you were born free and had enough money to hire help as needed whether for farm or shop or other business, there was no requirement of remarriage at all. You could pick a partner or choose to stay single. Do the math again on death rates. It’s pretty common to marry more than once. Maybe the first wife died in childbirth. The widower needs the work and income a wife brings in and that’s double if the baby survives. Maybe the second wife has wide hips, but he dies from a work related injury when she’s still young. She could sure use a man’s labour around the farm or shop. Let’s say he dies in a fight or drowns in a ditch. She’s been doing well. Her children are old enough to help with the farm or shop, she picks a pretty youth for his looks instead of his economic value. You get marriages for love and lust as well as economics just like you get now and May/December cuts both ways.
A lot of our ideas about how people lived in the past tends to get viewed through a Victorian or early Hollywood lens, but that tends to be particularly extreme as far was writing out women’s agency and contribution as well as white washing populations in our histories, films, and therefore our minds eyes.
Real life is more complicated than that.
BTW, there are plenty of women at the top end of the scale who showed plenty of agency and who wielded political and economic power. I’ve seen people argue that the were exceptions, but I think they were part of a whole society that had a tradition of strong women living on just as they always had sermons and homilies admonishing them to be otherwise to the contrary. There’s also a whole other thing going on with the Pope trying to centralized power from the thirteenth century on being vigorously resisted by powerful abbesses and other holy women. Yes, they eventually mostly lost, but it took so many centuries because there were such strong traditions of those women having political power.
Boss post! To add to that, many historians have theorised that modern gender roles evolved alongside industrialisation, when there was suddenly a conceptual division between work/public spaces, and home/private spaces. The factory became the place of work, where previously work happened at home. Gender became entangled in this division, with women becoming associated with the home, and men with public spaces. It might be assumable, therefore, that women had (have?) greater freedoms in agrarian societies; or, at least, had (have?) different demands placed on them with regard to their gender.
(Please note that the above historical reading is profoundly Eurocentric, and not universally applicable. At the same time, when I say that the factory became the place of work, I mean it in conceptual sense, not a literal sense. Not everyone worked in the factory, but there is a lot of literature about how the institution of the factory, as a symbol of industrialisation, reshaped the way people thought about labour.)
I am broadly of that opinion. You can see upper class women being encouraged to be less useful as the piecework system grows and spreads. You can see that spread to the middle class around when the early factory system gears up. By mid-19th century that domestic sphere vs, public sphere is full swing for everyone who can afford it and those who can’t are explicitly looked down on and treated as lesser. You can see the class system slowly calcify from the 17th century on.
Grain of salt that I get less accurate between 1605-French Revolution or thereabouts. I’ve periodically studied early modern stuff, but it’s more piecemeal.
I too was confining my remarks to Medieval Europe because 1. That was my specialty. 2. A lot of English language fantasy literature is based on Medieval Europe, often badly and more based on misapprehension than what real lives were like.
I am very grateful that progress is occurring and more traditions are influencing people’s writing. I hate that so much of the fantasy writing of my childhood was so narrow.
Wanna reblog this because for a long time I’ve had this vague knowledge in my head that society in the past wasn’t how people are always assuming it was (SERIOUSLY VICTORIANS, THANKS FOR DICKING WITH HOW WE VIEW EVERYTHING HISTORICAL). I get fed up with people who complain about fantasy stuff, claiming “historical accuracy” to whine about ethnic diversity and gender equality and other cool stuff that lets everyone join in the fun, and then I get sad because the first defence is always “it’s fantasy, so that doesn’t matter.”
I mean, that’s a good and valid defence, but here you have it; proof fucking positive that historical accuracy shows that equality and diversity are not new ideas and if anything BELONG in historical fiction. As far as I can tell, most people in the past were too bloody busy to get all ruffled up about that stuff; they had prejudices, but from what little I know the lines historically drawn in the sand were in slightly different places and for different reasons. (You can’t trust them furrigners. It’s all pixies and devil-worship over there).
So next time someone tells you that something isn’t “historically accurate” because it’s not racist/sexist/any other form of bigotry for that matter-ist enough for their liking, tell them to shut the hell up because they clearly know far less about history than they do about being an asshole.
I FINALLY FOUND OUT WHY THIS HAPPENS. You see this all the time when there’s a fight or a scrum and suddenly everyone pairs up with a member of the opposite team and they just sort of …hold each other.
Someone on reddit asked about it. And it turns out there’s a logical-ish reason:
all of the other players pair off with their man to prevent anyone else entering into the fight … so it’s a form of self policing.
[…] The players basically want to prevent 2 on 1, etc. fights and by finding a “hugging” partner so there’s no ganging up on one guy, even on accident. They do it because it’s fair. And it’s kind of cute sometimes.
Okay, as I’ve gotten older I’ve dug deeper into my defense of Lady Russell. Is she a perfect human being? God, no. Are her motives and actions reasonable, given their context? Absolutely.
Anne is still a teenager–a very sheltered one–when she meets Frederick Wentworth. For all her virtues, Lady Russell knows damn well that Anne hasn’t really been out in society enough to become widely appreciated and socially adept. And this is a whirlwind romance–a total of three months passes between their first meeting and their final (for eight years) parting. Lady Russell is a snob, yes, but every point she raises has a certain kind of validity–they know NOTHING about Wentworth or his people, apart from his brother being a curate who is almost equally new to the region. Wentworth’s own traits are as evident as they can be over a brief acquaintance. He has no money, his career is risky as hell and this is a very unstable period for peace between England and foreign powers. There was the American war, then war with France, and then MORE war with France, and–hint–there’s gonna be lots more war with France. Wentworth is said to be lucky, and he knows it, and he trusts it. Whatever his insane charisma levels might convince Anne of, Lady Russell is not a bad or wrong person for feeling that luck can and will run out and isn’t something to build hopes on. Lady Russell has no reason for repressing her opinions when they come from genuine worry for Anne’s future with this totally unknown quantity who has swooped into town and charmed her so thoroughly. Sir Walter is openly snobby about the lowering nature of the connection, but Lady Russell’s objections are far more practical.
Wentworth is that dude in leather on a Harley revving the engine and telling Anne to hop on.
Anne isn’t stupid, either. Whatever she feels for Wentworth, Lady Russell is not quite a mother-figure (though there’s overlap and complexity, I will allow,) but also a friend. And Anne doesn’t have many of those–certainly none with so deep and long a connection as Lady Russell. So when your best and oldest friend in the whole world is legitimately deeply concerned for you and a HUGE change you’re about to make? You listen. Marriage is for life. Marriage IS your life, when you’re a genteel woman who cannot respectably earn her own living.
Also, Lady Russell convinces Anne that to reject Wentworth is ultimately for Wentworth’s own good, too–we aren’t explicitly told why, but it’s indicated that this is the primary motivation which ultimately sways Anne to end the engagement. For herself, Anne is still somewhat willing to take on the risks laid out by Lady Russell–but she also doesn’t wish to be a burden on Wentworth when his career is at a precarious point. Prize-money being how a naval officer might make a steady fortune, the need to support a wife and any children (particularly after Sir Walter has refused to settle a dowry on Anne, if she marries Wentworth,) might drive a man of Wentworth’s nature to run deadly risks in order to take enemy ships. This, I’m guessing, is Anne’s reasoning for why marrying Wentworth now, when she knows she will bring no money to the union, seems increasingly like a poor idea.
Anne does desire to marry Wentworth–but not at any cost. Whatever she might later come to feel and realize about her judgement and Lady Russell’s judgement and the choices that were made, there were a LOT of Good Reasons™ against marrying Wentworth.
Like, IT COULD END SO, SO BADLY.
As to wrecking her hopes, I think Anne owned her decision, and that’s part of why she’s so faded and miserable–she only blames herself.
Which…and it pains me to say this because Anne Elliot is bae…she’s not…wrong? Lady Russell advised her, as a friend, and gave decent warnings about very real risks and concerns with this match. Lady Russell was not unreasonable, and Lady Russell had no power other than to give her advice. Sir Walter is holding the purse-strings and being a total dick for no reason other than snobbery. At least Lady Russell gives a fuck what happens to Anne.
Wentworth is, of course, pissed af, and our sympathies are sort of with him because we know the frustrations of being unable to make people see things your way, but logic is simply not on his side, here. It’s his persuasion of Anne against Lady Russell’s, and he loses. Maybe that’s part of why he later claims to want a woman who knows her own mind…but only when that mind aligns with what he wants. Also why he principally blames Anne, as well, though he of course knows Lady Russell was the primary influence pointing out all the vulnerabilities in the marriage to Anne and so he resents that she said anything at all. But as Anne owns the decision to break the engagement, he lets her.
And let’s not forget that they could have gotten back together a mere two years later, had it not been for Wentworth’s resentment. A little patience and some secure funding and a show of long-term fidelity, and Lady Russell’s objections and Anne’s fears could have been done away with, then, if Wentworth had been even a little yielding in his pride. He has only himself to blame for six of those years of miserable separation.
I think in the maturity of their later relationship, Wentworth would come to forgive and appreciate Lady Russell, and Anne doesn’t blame Lady Russell (and is right not to. LADY RUSSELL DID NOTHING WRONG.) If Wentworth was going to be the sort of man to pissily forbid Anne to remain in close contact with her oldest and dearest friend when it’s primarily their own choices which caused them grief, even after they have reconciled, he’s not a man who is worthy of her. He may be away from England for long periods of time, and Anne will likely then have great need of close friends and wise counsel. It might take him a little while to get the toxicity towards Lady Russell out of his system after holding on to it for so many years, but isn’t the point of the story kind of that having the grace to admit you were wrong and move on from past mistakes is the healthier way to live and love?
Cassandra: we need a leader Leliana, Lying through her teeth: Sorry, the hero of ferelden has vanished. Varric, lying through his teeth: sorry, I don’t know where Hawke is.
DA4
SB: We need a leader Cassandra, deadeye: I don’t know where the inquisitor is
i'll apple your turnover 