Passage Five (Women’s Positions in the 17th Century)
Social circumstances in Early Modern England mostly served to repress women’s voices. Patriarchal culture and institutions constructed them as chaste¹, silent, obedient, and subordinate. At the beginning of the 17th century, the ideology² of patriarchy, political absolutism, and gender³ hierarchy⁴ 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 supreme⁶ patriarch was seen to be imaged in the absolute monarch⁵ 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 Christians⁷ to God. Also, the period saw an outpouring of repressive or overtly⁸ misogynist⁹ sermons, tracts¹⁰, and plays, detailing women’s physical and mental defects, spiritual evils, rebelliousness¹², 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 scant¹³ cultural space for other women. Elizabethan women writers began to produce original texts but were occupied chiefly with translation. In the 17th 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 oppositional¹⁴ 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 apparently¹⁵ found in romances and histories more expansive terms for imagining women’s lives. Also, representation of vigorous and rebellious¹¹ female characters in literature and especially on the stage no doubt helped to undermine any monolithic¹⁶ social construct of women’s mature and role.
Most important, perhaps, was the radical¹⁷ potential inherent in the Protestant insistence¹⁸ on every Christian’s immediate¹⁹ 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) inscribe²⁰ 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 17th century exercised a good deal of accrual²¹ power: as managers of estates in their husbands’ absences at court or on military and diplomatic missions; as members of guilds²²; as wives and mothers who apex²³ during the English Civil War and Interregnum (1640-60) as the execution of the King and the attendant disruption of social hierarchies²⁴ led many women to seize new roles-as preachers, as prophetesses, as deputies for exiled royalist husbands, as writers of religious and political tracts.

1.    What is the best title for this passage?
[A]. Women’s Position in the 17th Century.
[B]. Women’s Subjection to Patriarchy.
[C]. Social Circumstances in the 17th Century.
[D]. Women’s objection in the 17th Century.
2.    What did the Queen Elizabeth do for the women in culture?
[A]. She set an impressive female example to follow.
[B]. She dominated the culture.
[C]. She did little.
[D]. She allowed women to translate something.
3.    Which of the following is Not mention as a reason to enable women to original texts?
[A].Female communities provided some counterweight to patriarchy.
[B]. Queen Anne’s political activities.
[C]. Most women had a good education.
[D]. Queen Elizabeth’s political activities.
4.    What did the religion so for the women?
[A]. It did nothing.
[B]. It too asked women to be obedient except some texts.
[C]. It supported women.
[D]. It appealed to the God.