单选题
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Social circumstances in
Early Modem England mostly served to repress women's voices. Patriarchal culture
and institutions constructed them as chaste, silent, obedient, and subordinate.
At the beginning of the 17
th century, the ideology of patriarchy,
political absolutism, and gender hierarchy were reaffirmed powerfully by King
James in The Trew Law of Free Monarchie and the Basilikon Doron; by that
ideology the absolute power of God the supreme patriarch was seen to be imaged
in the absolute monarch of the state and in the husband and father of a family.
Accordingly, a woman's subjection, first to her father and then to her husband,
imaged the subjection of English people to their monarch, and of all Christians
to God. Also, the period saw an outpouring of repressive or overtly misogynist
sermons, tracts, and plays, detailing women's physical and mental defects,
spiritual evils, rebelliousness, shrewish ness, and natural inferiority to
men.
Yet some social and cultural conditions served to empower
women. During the Elizabethan era (1558～1603) the culture was dominated by a
powerful Queen, who provided an impressive female example though she left scant
cultural space for other women. Elizabethan women writers began to produce
original texts but were occupied chiefly with translation. In the
17
th century, however, various circumstances enabled women to write
original texts in some numbers. For one thing, some counterweight to patriarchy
was provided by female communities-mothers and daughters, extended kinship
networks, close female friends, the separate court of Queen Anne (King James'
consort) and her often oppositional masques and political activities. For
another, most of these women had a reasonably good education (modern languages,
history, literature, religion, music, occasionally Latin) and some apparently
found in romances and histories more expansive terms for imagining women's
lives. Also, representation of vigorous and rebellious female characters in
literature and especially on the stage no doubt helped to undermine any
monolithic social construct of women's mature and role.
Most
important, perhaps, was the radical potential inherent in the Protestant
insistence on every Christian's immediate relationship with God and primary
responsibility to follow his or her individual conscience. There is plenty of
support in St Paul's epistles and elsewhere in the Bible for patriarchy and a
wife's subjection to her husband, but some texts (notably Galatians 3:28)
inscribe a very different politics, promoting women's spiritual equality: "There
is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male
nor female: for ye are all one in Jesus Christ." Such texts encouraged some
women to claim the support of God the supreme patriarch against the various
earthly patriarchs who claimed to stand toward them in his stead.
There is also the gap or slippage between ideology and common experience.
English women throughout the 17
th century exercised a good deal of
accrual power: as managers of estates in their husbands' absences at court or on
military and diplomatic missions; as members of guilds; as wives and mothers who
apex during the English Civil War and Interregnum (1640～1660) as the execution
of the King and the attendant disruption of social hierarchies led many women to
seize new roles—as preachers, as prophetesses, as deputies for exiled royalist
husbands, as writers of religious and political tracts.