2 Williams and Echols, 43.
3 Williams and Echols, 221.
4 Olwen Hufton. The Prospect Before Her. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995). 438.
5 Hufton, 441.
6 Hufton, 441.
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| Obstacles and Solutions | |||||||||||
| To call a woman�s efforts to become educated in the Early Modern period a struggle is an enormous understatement. Along with the limited amount of options provided to them, they had the �added burden of being female in a man�s world where the ecclesiastical hierarchy, judicial systems, secular governments, educational institutions, medical establishment, and business community all discriminated against women."1 These systems where oppression operated were kept in place and fueled by the patriarchal construct of valuing the masculine above the feminine to the point where even in their designated sphere of the private, women were less valued in regards to sex (which is what designated them to the less valued sphere in the first place). Areas that women held any type of authority were slowly being diminished by urbanization with the help of the printing press. A good example of this concept is the midwife and her diminishing power as an acting agent of the medical profession and her ability to educate women in regards to their own health or the health of other women. Medical universities gradually began to overtake the practice/apprenticeship system of training throughout the Middle Ages through the standardization of knowledge and licensing as proof of having gained all the knowledge via higher education.2 Women and any information they could have possessed to pass on and educate other women in regards to certain disciplines were slowly being weeded out; their positions of power and autonomy being taken away by rendering their knowledge useless. Similar situations were occurring in the areas of law and theology and while there were the elite, privileged few that became educated, they were �isolated from the rest of society�barred from universities, female students received an education that could not be used as a stepping stone into any career.�3 Women�s theoretical existence was limited; therefore creating a form of invisibility that even as a scholar she could not overcome. | |||||||||||
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| #12 | |||||||||||
| With little practical use for an education, women had to find other ways of expanding their knowledge and they also had to have money and time to realistically have access to such options. An example of women reaching out to further their quest for knowledge was the idea of what Olwen Hufton discussed in her book A Prospect of Her Own of the �corresponding gentlewoman� and her networking process to receive help in gaining an education.4 Two good examples of this are Lady Ann Conway and Mary Astell who were both in correspondence with John Norris. Lady Ann Conway did so with the permission of her husband and carried own close intellectual discourse with not just John Norris but Henry More as well. This was a great way to �[be] guid[ed] towards a deeper knowledge and hence greater self-realization.�5 Mary Astell, also kept up correspondence with John Norris, who would later help to give her credibility despite her sex, by publishing some of their correspondence. Hufton describes her as a woman that was able to �proceed from establishing her academic credentials as a corresponding gentle woman to becoming a critic of the system.�6 She went on to publish A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694) and Some Reflections on Marriage (1700). The important thing to notice about Astell and Conway is that they are publishing and/or accomplishing goals within education at a much later date, past the time of the Early Modern period. Their methods of gaining access to education were still creative however and Astell�s feminist works are amazing to behold. But the issue of which men would back them, if the time period had been earlier, would be a lot more questionable if they had actually gotten access to the pen at that earlier date and time. | |||||||||||
| 1 Marty Newman Williams, Anne Echols. Between Pit and Pedestal: Women in the Middle Ages. (Princeton, New Jersey: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1994). 11. 2 Williams and Echols, 43. 3 Williams and Echols, 221. 4 Olwen Hufton. The Prospect Before Her. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995). 438. 5 Hufton, 441. 6 Hufton, 441. |
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