Abstract
In a variety of early modern texts, the physicality of the woman’s body is represented in explicitly maternal terms and is closely tied to issues of production: the production of domestic goods, of marital satisfaction, of exemplary behavior, and, most obviously, of offspring. Powers of reproduction position women as producers of valuable goods in social as well as familial contexts. At the same time, maternity in the early modern period was associated with a doubleness of identity that only partially coincided with the doubleness commonly associated with femininity at the time. Whereas women in general were directed to be chaste, silent, and obedient in order to counteract the perceived power of their sexuality, mothers in particular emerged as figures who combined the sexuality required for procreation with considerable authority over their offspring, male as well as female.
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Notes
Joseph Swetnam, The Arraignment of Lewd, idle, froward, and un-constant women (1615), in Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus, eds., Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540–1640 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 191.
Thomas Tusser, The Points of Housewifery, United to the Comfort of Husbandry (1580; collated with 1573 and 1577), in Joan Larsen Klein, ed., Daughters, Wives and Widows: Writings by Men about Women and Marriage in England, 1500–1640 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 219
Elizabeth Clinton, The Countess of Lincoln’s Nursery (1622), in Randall Martin, ed., Women Writers in Renaissance England (London: Longman, 1997), 152.
Mary Thomas Crane, “’Players in your huswifery, and huswives in your beds’: Conflicting Identities of Early Modern English Women”, in Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh, eds., Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 215.
John Fitzherbert, The book of husbandry (1534; first edition 1523), in Kate Aughterson, ed., Renaissance Woman: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 1995), 196.
For additional discussion of the mothers’ advice books, see Elaine Beilin, Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 247–85
Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), esp. 283–96
Leigh, dedicatory preface to The Mother’s Blessing, sigs. A2-A5, in Linda Pollock, ed., A Lasting Relationship: Parents and Children over Three Centuries (London: Fourth Estate, 1987), 174.
See Barbara Lewalski, ed., introduction to The Polemics and Poems of Rachel Specht (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), xi–xix
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© 2002 Cristina Malcolmson and Mihoko Suzuki
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Miller, N.J. (2002). “Hens should be served first”: Prioritizing Maternal Production in the Early Modern Pamphlet Debate. In: Malcolmson, C., Suzuki, M. (eds) Debating Gender in Early Modern England, 1500–1700. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230107540_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230107540_9
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