Gender and the Reformation.

Abstract

The subject of the impact of the Reformation on gender relations has been transformed over the last decade. We know much more about how religious change affected the lives of women; we have become alive to the way gender expectations are reflected even in language which is not explicitly about gender; and it has become a commonplace that the Reformation surely had some impact, for good or ill, on gender and family relations. Indeed, there now seems to be something of a consensus that early modem Europe, in the wake of the European Reformations, was a patriarchal society though there is rather less agreement on what the term patriarchal society might mean. And yet, the Reformation's status as a key turning point in the history of gender is currently under assault. Three recent books which have synthesized the work of the last twenty years in the history of women in the early modem period place little emphasis on the role of the Reformation in altering gender relations. In Women in Early Modern England, Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford write with insight about women's religiosity but do not see the Reformation as marking a major break in the relations between men and women. For Anthony Fletcher, in Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 15001800, the period before and after the Reformation is the epoch of "biblical patriarchy," with scriptural authority and views of biology giving the warrant for female subordination. Change comes with the eighteenth century and the rise of a new view of male and female physiology, not with the Reformation. And Olwen Hufton's The Prospect before Her emphasizes continuities throughout the period formed by the key determinants of women's lives, the life cycle and the hard economics of marriage.'