She-Soldiers and Acid Tongues

By Melvin Maddocks

THE WEAKER VESSEL by Antonia Fraser; Knopf; 544 pages; $19.95

"Women, like our Negroes in our western plantations, are born slaves, and live prisoners all their lives," declared the anonymous author of An Essay in Defense of the Female Sex. Lady Antonia Fraser confirms this low appraisal of the state of many 17th century Englishwomen. But not all. Her indefatigable and lively research shows that a number of spirited females refused to get along and go along with a loveless marriage, contracted with an eye on a dowry and followed by a dozen children.

"Our sex is not much valued in our age," Cary Verney, a lady of the Restoration court, lamented. The playwright Aphra Behn concurred. The 17th century's female model, she said, was "that dull slave call'd a Wife." Among her fellow rebels, Fraser reports, were she-authors, she-preachers, even she-soldiers, as well as stubborn widows, unruly prostitutes and acid-tongued ladies of the court.

While examining the period for her earlier books, Cromwell: The Lord Protector and Royal Charles: Charles II and the Restoration, Lady Antonia must have amassed an exhaustive file under some such heading as "17th century women: the great exceptions." She sets it all out stylishly here in a sprawling documentary. The index lists the names of more than 550 women, most of whom, in one way or another, refused to play the game.

Curiously, the she-soldiers seemed to have aroused the least disapproval in the male. The Calvinist Lady Ann Cunningham was a formidable warrior for Scotland, riding at the head of a troop of horses with a case of pistols attached to her saddle and daggers at her girdle. It was the "learned woman" that terrified both the learned and unlearned men around her. The prevailing opinion, according to the 17th century writer Hannah Woolley, found that a woman was "learned ... enough if she can distinguish her Husband's bed from another's."

For a man, education was a prized experience. For a woman, it was frowned upon as "the drug called learning." How could a woman be "modest" if she knew too much? Above all, education increased a woman's vocabulary, and one thing a 17th century man could not abide was a talking woman, whether the speech came salty and profane from the fishwives of Billingsgate or gentle and saintly from Quaker women testifiers, "prattlers" for Christ.

What a ruckus the women raised, despite the ideal of demure silence! In 1643, in the midst of civil war, as many as 6,000 women marched on Parliament "to cry for Peace, which was to the women a pleasing thing." Off and on throughout the century, dairymaids would form an "Amazonian" mob to protest against enclosure of the land where their cattle grazed. The militants armed themselves with scythes and pitchforks, and on one occasion threatened to burn the houses, drown the servants and cut off the head of one of their oppressors, a certain Captain Thomas Lovell. "It was only the intervention of 'a gentlewoman' who happened to be passing," reports Lady Antonia, "which dissuaded the women from their violent course, otherwise they would have done the captain 'some great mischief.'"

By articulateness, by immodesty, by fighting the stereotype, the bolder women circumvented their destiny. Actress Nell Gwynn moved up from selling oranges in the stalls to take advantage of the warrant of 1660 that allowed Englishwomen for the first time to play themselves onstage. She then advanced herself further by bearing a child to Charles II. This son of the orange wench was created a duke. A whore's life, Fraser is led to conclude, may be misspent without being necessarily wasted.

Margaret Poulteney, .a young widow secure in her handsome inheritance, spoke for others in her situation as well as herself when she voiced the ultimate declaration of independence: "None in the world can call me to account for my actions." But even the strongest women tended to preface their shows of strength by confessing themselves the "weaker vessel." Perpetual acknowledgment of her own fragility, Fraser writes ruefully, "was one way . . . in which a clever woman could avoid disapproval."

The exceptional woman was forced to assert herself against all the odds. Annual pregnancy was the general rule; contraceptives were not widely introduced until the 18th century. Until then, couples relied on recipes -marjoram, "thyme, parsley, the juice of the herb savin -that did little good. A study of aristocratic women suggests that 45% died before 50, one-quarter of those in childbirth. If perpetual pregnancy did not do a woman in, smallpox well might. Life expectancy was 35. If a 17th century woman should survive to old age, she was in danger of being taken for a witch. In a 1648 treatise, John Stearne explained witchcraft as a woman's game on the ground that females are more "revengeful" than men because of Satan's "prevailing with Eve." Such reasoning ensured that any rise in the standing of women could only be partial and restricted.

Fraser thinks the 17th century woman's limited emancipation crested in midcentury, when Oliver Cromwell shook the established ways of English society. By the end of the century the punishing cycle of a woman's life and the pendulum of history had swung women's status back to just about where it was 100 years before. But in the meantime, women had talked. Women had thought for themselves. In Eraser's phrase, history held the door open briefly and, as we who read the 17th century with 20th century eyes know, nothing was ever quite the same again.

Excerpt

"At the marriage of William Herbert and Anne Russell in 1600, in the time of Queen Elizabeth, the traditional masque followed: 'delicate it was to see eight ladies so prettily and richly attired.' Mary Fitton, a lady-in-waiting, led the masquers. [She] went up to the Queen and 'wooed her to dance.' The Queen asked Mary Fitton what allegorical character she represented; Mary Fitton replied that she was Affection. 'Affection!' said the old Queen. 'Affection is false.'"