ABSTRACT
Since its first formulation over seventy years ago by Clark (1992), the prevailing view of women’s economic and social position in the seventeenth century has been that enclosure and the development of capitalism during the period (on which the classic study is Tawney (1938)) destroyed the self-sufficiency of the Medieval household and, by separating public work from private domesticity, severely restricted the female sphere, reducing the possibilities open to women and eroding their status. By the century’s end women who, in the Medieval household, had been both productive and economically indispensable were confined to a domestic role, economically dependent upon their husbands and denied access to those agricultural, nursing, culinary and cloth-making occupations which had traditionally been theirs. The point may be neatly made by observing that it is during this period that the word spinster, which in Medieval usage had referred to a person gainfully employed (one who spins), comes in legal terminology to be the designation of an unmarried woman and in common usage to refer to an unmarried, and implicitly useless, woman. Critics of Clark’s thesis have argued that it both idealizes the Medieval household and overstates the degree of change during the seventeenth century (Houlbrooke (1984), p. 8, for example, believes Clark exaggerated the decline of productive domestic partnerships and the deterioration in the working life of women, while Prest (1991), p. 170, doubts her contention that the law increasingly marginalized women), but her line is still commonly followed (not necessarily with a Marxist emphasis); see, for example, George (1973); Hamilton (1978); O’Malley (1933), esp. pp. 15-53; Perry (1980), pp. 27-62; and Wiesner (1986). (For an account of the reception of Clark’s work, and a full bibliography of relevant studies, see Amy Louise Erickson in Clark (1992), pp. vii-lv.)
The argument that woman was increasingly identified with her wifely and motherly roles may perhaps find support in the fact that, of the occupations traditionally associated with women, it was obstetrics which continued to be very largely a female province. Midwives were generally women (Eccles (1982),
p. 91), if not exclusively so (pace the famous Chamberlen family of male midwives). Though male midwives grew commoner (especially amongst those attending the upper classes) in the last part of the century, they remained unusual, as the tenacity of the term midwife suggests. Except for the years 1642-60, when the licensing of midwives was carried out by the College of Physicians, the only regulation of midwives during our period was ecclesiastical which, having scant regard to medical skill or experience, concerned itself with the character of the woman applying for a licence (Forbes (1964)). As a result, in the view of Schofield (1986), p. 235, midwives ‘may have provided a reassuring social setting for childbirth, but few possessed the knowledge to intervene effectively in a difficult labour’. Medical skills do not figure very high on William Sermon’s list of desirable attributes, though the advice he gives for behaviour in the delivery room is sensible and sympathetic (139; for a detailed survey of midwives’ handbooks and a summary of obstetric theory and practice, see Eccles (1982)).
