6 -- n.b. Mary Wack article
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Date: Tue, 13 Jul 1999 13:30:45 -0400
From: H-Net Reviews <[log in to unmask]>
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Subject: Keenan on Frye and Robertson, _Maids and Mistresses_
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (July, 1999)
Susan Frye and Karen Robertson, eds. _Maids and Mistresses, Cousins
and Queens: Women's Alliances in Early Modern England_. New York
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. xviii + 350 pp.
Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN
0-19-511734-4; $19.95 (paper), ISBN 0-19-511735-2.
Reviewed for H-Women by Margaret Keenan <[log in to unmask]>,
Department of History, Tulane University
A New Frontier in Women's History:
Early Modern Female Alliances
In the last two decades, literary critics as well as historians have
produced a great deal of scholarship on early modern
Englishwomen.[1] Scholars have focused on women's writing, work,
religious experiences, and involvement in the early modern political
world. Nevertheless, relatively little has been written about early
modern women's alliances.[2] Thus, _Maids and Mistresses, Cousins
and Queens_ is a particularly welcome addition to the growing body
of work devoted to early modern women. As the book's editors, Susan
Frye and Karen Robertson, point out in the introduction of the
volume, the lack of attention paid to women's relationships is
largely a result of their informal nature. While men took part in
formal and thus more visible alliances such as guilds, universities,
and governmental assemblies, women's alliances were less
institutionalized and thus more difficult to trace. Despite this
obstacle, the various authors of _Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and
Queens: Women's Alliances in Early Modern England_ have been able to
unearth an impressive number of women's alliances.
Although most of the volume's contributors are literary critics
rather than historians, many of the female alliances they document
were comprised of historical women. For example, Elizabeth A. Brown
analyzes the relationship of Queen Elizabeth I with her female
attendants, and Karen Robertson documents the links between
Elizabeth Throckmorton and her female relatives and political
allies. Susan Frye details the ties which Elizabeth Tudor, Mary
Stuart, and Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury created with each
other through their needlework, whereas Lowell Gallagher examines
the nature of Mary Ward's controversial female religious community.
Other contributors to the volume concentrate on female alliances in
literature. Helen Ostovich scrutinizes the relationships among the
female characters in _The Magnetic Lady_, while Simon Morgan-Russell
delineates the alliance that the London wives create in _Westward
Ho_. Various contributors also discuss the relationships between
female authors and their female subjects, as well as the alliances
which writers formed with women at large. Lisa Gim illuminates the
rhetorical alliance that Bathusa Makin and Diana Primrose formed
with Elizabeth Tudor, and Valerie Wayne uncovers the process by
which the anonymous author of _Swetman the Woman-Hater_ "did the
work of a woman's ally" (p. 237).
Some of the most interesting essays in the book blur the line
between historical women's alliances and purely literary ones. For
instance, Ann Rosalind Jones's contribution on maidservants not only
treats Isabel Whitney's poem _A Modest Means for Maids_ as a
literary creation, but also deals with Whitney as a woman who worked
as a maidservant in London and then wrote about her experience.
Thus, Jones is able to examine _A Modest Means for Maids_ not only
as a literary "text" but also as a historical document. Jodi
Mikalachki's essay centers on a vagrant named Alice Balstone who
accused her former master of impregnating her. A great deal of
evidence on which Balstone's story is based is her testimony before
the Dorchester justices. Intriguingly, the language of one of Alice
Balstone's depositions bears striking similarities to the "canting"
literature of the period which describes a mysterious vagrant
underworld. Mikalachki uses Balstone's deposition to challenge
historians who argue that canting literature was patently fictional
and bore little resemblance to the realities that early modern
vagrants faced. While Mikalachki raises the question as to whether
Balstone shaped her testimony in order to fit what her deposers
wished to hear, she maintains that historians have too hastily
dismissed works such as Thomas Harman's "A Caveat, or Warning for
Common Cursitors" as purely literary sources. Mikalachki points out
that Thomas Harman was a Justice of the Peace who claimed to have
interviewed over one hundred vagrants for his work, and yet his
"Caveat" is regarded as literary and thus fictional (and hence less
valid), while Alice Balstone's deposition, which was written years
after Harman's "Caveat" and seems to be based on it, is regarded as
a historical (and thus somehow a more valid) document. Mikalachki
employs rich irony to expose the process by which historians label
documents such as Baltsone's deposition as historical evidence,
while classifying works such as Harman's "Caveat" as literary and
fictional, rather than historical.
All of the critics in this volume who examine literary works apply
historical analysis to their literary endeavors. Many do so with
great skill and attention to historical detail. This should silence
those critics who complain that historicist literary critics are not
"historicist" enough. It is clear that the contributors are quite
familiar with the latest historiographical developments in women's
history as well as cultural, political, and social history.
Moreover, the essayists in this volume utilize a variety of (mostly
printed) primary sources to develop their arguments. Poems and
plays are analyzed alongside government documents, ecclesiastical
records, wills, diaries, personal letters, conduct books, and even
textiles such as needlework. For example, by using Chester
Corporation records, Mary Wack is able to ground her analysis of the
female characters of the Chester mystery cycle plays in the
contemporary politics of the town. Wack begins by considering two
seemingly strange and anachronistic scenes taken from the Chester
plays: the scene from the Noah play in which Noah's wife and her
gossips sing a drinking song, and the scene in which in a female
tapster admits to the adulteration of drink in the Harrowing of Hell
play. Both of these scenes were probably added quite late to the
Chester mystery cycle and have been dismissed by other critics as
belated additions which corrupt the integrity of the plays. For
Wack, these scenes become an opportunity to investigate the way in
which the women of Chester would have viewed these scenes. Wack
shows that a series of laws were passed in sixteenth-century Chester
which restricted women's access to both female sociability and to
job opportunities. In the 1530s, the Corporation of Chester passed
a law which prevented women from holding childbirth and churching
ceremonies (which usually involved "gossiping," and drinking.)
Three decades later a new statute prohibited women aged fourteen to
forty from working as tapsters (that is, from serving alcoholic
drink). Wack skillfully links the enactment and enforcement of
these statutes to the "anachronistic" scenes in the Chester mystery
cycle, making it possible for us to "read" these scenes in ways its
female audience members may have viewed them.
Other intriguing essays in this volume question commonly held
assumptions about race and sexual orientation. Jessica Tvordi
examines Celia's erotic protestations of love for Rosalind in
Shakespeare's _As You Like It_, as well as the possibility of
Maria's romantic attachment to Olivia in _Twelfth Night_. Harriette
Andreadis examines the amorous language which women used to address
other women in their poetry, demonstrating that this erotic
discourse became more veiled after the English Restoration. Barbara
Bowen examines how the poet Aemeilia Lanyer, daughter of an Italian
Jewish musician, constructed herself as a dark "Other," who stood
outside the community of white womanhood. Margo Hendricks suggests
that Aphra Behn may have had a black African grandmother, and that
Behn's racial identity may have influenced her writings such as
_Oroonoko_. The value of these essays is not that they "prove" that
Aphra Behn was black, or that Shakespeare wrote about lesbians in
the sense that we use the term today, but rather to demonstrate that
our perceptions of "early modern Englishwomen" remain too rigid.
While academics and their students may no longer envision "early
modern women" as an unchanging coterie of countesses clad in
farthingales, we still tend to view such early modern Englishwomen
as universally white and unwaveringly heterosexual. Critics like
Tvordi, Andreadis, Bowen, and Hendricks reveal such assumptions to
be false as they expose the fluctuating, culturally constructed
nature of categories of race and sexuality.
As the contributors in this volume deconstruct the category of
"women," they focus on how race, status, and position divided women
from one another and led to the formation of female alliances
directed against other women. For example, Mary Wack recounts how
Alice Baltone, while under arrest, was forced by the prison midwife
and a fellow female prisoner to name the father of her unborn child.
Otherwise, the midwife threatened, Balstone would receive no help
during her delivery. Ann Rosiland Jones reveals that the female
maidservants who wrote "A Letter Sent by the Maydens of London,"
threatened to quit their jobs and move to the country if their
mistresses would not treat them fairly.[3] Kathleen M. Brown details
how three plantation workers in Virginia, an unnamed Indian servant,
Betty Mazey, a white servant, and Mary, a black slave, formed an
alliance against their plantation mistress, Anne Tayloe, when Mary
discovered Tayloe apparently trying to discard the body of a dead
infant. In all three cases women were divided by differences in
status and position. Balstone, a woman who stood at the very bottom
of the social scale, was set upon by a midwife, a woman of the
middling sort with the authority to seek out the names of the
fathers of babies born out of wedlock.[4] The authors of "A Letter
Sent by the Maydens of London" and their mistresses were divided by
rank as well as by their roles of employer and employee. Likewise,
Anne Tayloe was divided from her servants by both social status and
her position as the owner of the plantation. The servants
themselves, however, were also divided by their positions in the
plantation hierarchy. Significantly, when Mary discovered Tayloe
attempting to dispose of the dead baby, she did not confront Tayloe
directly, but she and the Indian woman turned to Betty Mazey, the
free white servant, to do so. It was necessary for Mary to form an
alliance across racial lines because Mary's race and slave status
left her with no right to speak out against her mistress. Thus, the
essays in this volume repeatedly emphasize that race, status, and
position, as well as gender, defined women and dictated the shape of
their alliances.
Jean E. Howard ends the volume with what may be read as a literary
critic's challenge to historians. Howard's notes that historicist
literary critics eagerly read the work of historians, and laments
that historians do not read the work of literary critics to the same
extent. She wonders, in fact, if historians will actually read
_Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens_. Howard is probably
overly pessimistic (and a bit conservative in her estimate of
historians' interest in literary criticism). This book covers an
extremely important topic, and early modern historians of women
undoubtedly will read this book. They, as well as other scholars
outside the field of literary criticism, will find the essays
insightful and thankfully free of jargon. This book will provide
its readers from all disciplines with ideas which will prove useful
in their own work. It should also be helpful in stimulating
discussions in upper level undergraduate as well as graduate
courses. _Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women's
Alliances in Early Modern England_ is recommended for anyone
interested in early modern women and their relationships.
Notes
[1]. A list of the recent scholarship on early modern women would
take up a copious amount of space. The following works, however,
are particularly valuable and helpful for students and scholars of
early modern women. They also boast extremely useful
bibliographies: Margaret Hannay, ed., _Silent But For the Word:
Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writer of Religious Works_
(Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1985); Richard L.
Greaves, ed., _Triumph over Silence: Women in Protestant History_
(Westport, Conn. and London: Greenwood Press, 1985); Jean R. Brink,
et. al., eds., _The Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe_
(Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1989);
Merry Wiesner, _Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe_ (New York
and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Amy Louise
Erikson, _Women and Property in Early Modern England_ (New York and
London: Routledge, 1993); Betty F. Travitsky and Adele F. Seeff.,
eds., _Attending to Women in Early Modern England_ (Newark, N.J.:
University of Delaware Press, 1994); Anne Lawrence, _Women in
England, 1500-1760: A Social History_ (London: Weidenfeld and
Nicholson, 1994); and Sara Medelson and Patricia Crawford, _Women in
Early Modern England_ (New York and Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998).
[2]. A few works dealing with early modern women's alliances have
been published, including Ralph A. Houlbrooke, "Women's Social Life
Common Action in England from the Fifteenth Century to the Eve of
the Civil War," _Continuity and Change_, vol. 2 (1986), pp.
171-189; Barbara K. Lewalski, "Re-writing Patriarchy and Patronage:
Margaret Clifford, Anne Clifford and Aemilia Lanyer," _Yearbook of
English Studies_, vol. 21 (1991), pp. 86-106; Patricia Higgins,
"The Reactions of Women, with Special Reference to Women
Petitioners," in _Politics, Religion, and the English Civil War_,
ed. Brian Manning (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973), pp.
178-222; and Patricia-Ann Lee, "Mistress Stagg's Petitioners:
February 1642," _The Historian_, vol. 60 (1998), pp. 241-256.
[3]. Although other critics have argued that "A Letter Sent by the
Maydens of London" was written by a man, Jones argues persuasively
that it was written by female maidservants.
[4]. Local governmental officials used midwives to discover the
names of men who fathered illegitimate children. It was often
during the birth process, when the mother would be in maximum pain,
that the midwife as well as the other women present (the other women
sometimes being referred to as a "jury of matrons") would pressure
the mother to name the father. Later the midwife and the women who
attended the birth might be called to testify as to the identity of
the father.
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