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The Women of the Working Class in the Early Modern Period |
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Women in the lowest bracket of the social class system were unquestionably the least educated, and given the least amount of opportunities to surpass even the basics of learning beyond domestic duties and some level of literacy. While there was a strict gender divide between men and women, with the male side of the binary more valued and privileged, due to �sequential learning and brief schooling, it [was] likely that poorer men and women as a whole enjoyed much closer levels of simple reading skills��1 There was more solidarity among the lower classes in regards to education, and what basic levels were taught was less regulated by gender. An example of an eight-year-old girl named Elizabeth Gairard in 1500 illustrates how lower class girls were educated: she was taught to say the Lord�s Prayer, the Hail Mary, and the Creed, which �indicat[es] that the curriculum at such lower schools (at least for girls) still consisted largely of rote memorization, not necessarily reading instruction.�2 Teaching methods were slower to advance into more efficient forms of education for reading, let alone writing within the lower class. |
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#7 |
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Due to this rift in the population, very little is know about the lower class and their daily lives and attitudes because no one was literate to write anything down, from how they felt from day to day to signing their names on their marriage contracts. Mary Prior in her book entitled Women in English Society 1500-1800 definitively states, �No example has survived of a female diary below the level of the middle class.�3 Lower class women would not have had the time to work, do their domestic duties, take care of their children and husband, and learn to read and write and then have time in the day to sit down and record elements of their lives. At best �some women from the lower ranks of society�managed to break the literacy barrier by narrating their experiences to others who saw to their publication.�4 Prior gives one example later on in her book of a �poor and illiterate woman, Elinor Channel, [who] was assisted in publishing her message by Arise Evans.�5 Any examples of written material on the lives of lower class women were not written in their own hand and any recordings that have survived are few and far between because the strictures of poverty were too detrimental to any real, accurate or substantial documentation of their lives.
Finally, there should be some mention to exactly what was taught to the lucky women of the lower class that did receive some type of education. The basics of religious prayer and dedication to the state were taught along with education in the domestic realm of responsibilities. Later on in the 17th century, there was increasing need for labor in regards to textiles and clothing so that �training students to enter that sector of the economy satisfied the growing need for labor.�6 In the end their class status controlled where and what they were taught: �While charity school students prepared for working life, convent school girls prepared for a life of managerial responsibility.�7 |
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1 R.A. Houston. Literacy in Early Modern Europe. (Harlow, England: Longman, 2002). 144.
2 Marty Newman Williams, Anne Echols. Between Pit and Pedestal: Women in the Middle Ages. (Princeton, New Jersey: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1994). 217.
3 Mary Prior. Women in English Society 1500-1800. (London and New York: Methuen, 1985). 183.
4 Prior, 183.
5 Prior, 214.
6 Natalie Zemon Davis, Arlette Farge. A History of Women in the West. Vol. 3. (London: Belknap Press, 1993). 127.
7 Davis and Farge, 128. |
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