RESISTANCE TO GENDER CONSTRUCTION

Although the advent of patriarchal print material popularized the notion that women were subordinate in the gender dichotomy, renaissance women found ways to establish agency within their households. Some women undermined their husbands sexually by “cuckolding,” or sleeping around, on them. Still others physically beat their husbands. Neither of these practices would have been upheld in the public eye, even if they were actions taken by men.1 This type of behavior would have been grounds for the community to hold a form of social protest called a skimmington.

One of the more socially acceptable ways in which women established agency within the household was by asserting ownership over property. The ability to purchase land and thus women’s role in the household economy was dependent upon their age and life cycle experience.2 When their children were of an appropriate age, mothers were able to divert from other forms of domestic labor like herding, cleaning the house, cooking, and gathering food.3 They often entered into more lucrative domestic labor such as brewing as evidenced by John Skelton’s Elynour Rummyng. Often women, especially widows, used their personal earnings and what their husbands left them in their will to purchase real estate.4 In an agricultural economy, land is a promising investment and although it may be perceived as existing outside of the household, it influenced the dynamics within it. This income granted wives and widows a sense of economic independence, and consequently social agency, from their husbands and other men who often attempted to establish social dominance through financial pressure.

Even, adolescent daughters might earn wages in order to have leverage in negotiating their marriages. The traditional marriage practice was that the bride’s family pays a “dowry toward the marriage while the groom and his family promised… a portion of real estate to the bride (usually a third to a half of what the groom owned at the time of marriage).”5 However, the wages that these young women earned and the land they might have accumulated prior to marriage served as a basis for mediating what is commonly known as a pre-nuptial agreement. These pre-marriage settlements were ways in which women could circumvent notions of common law such as coverture.6

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