I went, therefore, to the shelf where the histories stand and took down one of the latest, professor Trevelyan’s History of England. Once more I looked up Woman, found “position of,” and turned to the pages indicated. “Wife-beating,” I read, “was a recognized right of man, and was practiced without shame by high as well as low. . .” “Similarly,” the historian goes on, “the daughter who refused to marry the gentleman of her parents’ choice was liable to be locked up, beaten and flung about the room, without any shock being inflicted on public opinion. Marriage was not an affair of personal affection, but of family avarice, particularly in the ‘chivalrous’ upper classes. . . Betrothal often took place while one or both of the parties was in the cradle, and marriage when they were scarcely out of the nurses’ charge.” This was about 1470, soon after Chaucer’s time. The next reference to the position of women is some two hundred years later, in the time of the Stuarts. “It was still the exception for women of the upper and middle class to choose their own husbands, and when the husband had been assigned, he was lord and master, so far at least as law and custom could make him.” (4) (5) (10)
I went, therefore, to the shelf where the histories stand and took down one of the latest, professor Trevelyan’s History of England. Once more I looked up Woman, found “position of,” and turned to the pages indicated.
“Wife-beating,” I read, “was a recognized right of man, and was practiced without shame by high as well as low. . .”
“Similarly,” the historian goes on, “the daughter who refused to marry the gentleman of her parents’ choice was liable to be locked up, beaten and flung about the room, without any shock being inflicted on public opinion.
Marriage was not an affair of personal affection, but of family avarice, particularly in the ‘chivalrous’ upper classes. . . Betrothal often took place while one or both of the parties was in the cradle, and marriage when they were scarcely out of the nurses’ charge.” This was about 1470, soon after Chaucer’s time. The next reference to the position of women is some two hundred years later, in the time of the Stuarts. “It was still the exception for women of the upper and middle class to choose their own husbands, and when the husband had been assigned, he was lord and master, so far at least as law and custom could make him.” (4) (5) (10)
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