Women on the Threshold

Abstract

In a Whitechapel neighborhood in London in 1610, least seven women stood in the doorways of seven houses, all at work. One of the neighbors, Alice Rochester, called out to another, Jane Lilham: Thou art a whore and an arrant whore and a common carted whore and thou art my husband's whore--this last not an unusual accusation in the repertory of insults that early modern women deployed in reference to other women, if the defamation suits of the period are to be believed. Alice Rochester's words survive in the report of Jane Lilham, who subsequently sued Alice for slander the church court. Jane's testimony was validated by the five neighbors who were working on doorsteps when Alice called Jane a whore. Laura Gowing opens her recent study of church court depositions with the suit of Jane Lilham contra Alice Rochester, perhaps because, as she, Loreen Giese, Martin Ingram, and Sara Mendelson would confirm, the suit contains elements characteristic of so many such depositions. As Gowing puts it, Alice Rochester's charges tapped into a familiar and potent idiom (p. 1). Gowing, Giese, Ingram, and Mendelson have worked extensively with the records of the church courts, as I, I hasten to say, have not. For the purposes of this forum, however, I am less interested in the language of sexual insult in Jane Lilham's deposition than in its spatial locution. What does it mean for the world of early modern women that as many as seven from this one neighborhood could be found on doorsteps the very moment that Alice Rochester chose to call Jane Lilham a whore? After all, know from an extensive body of hortatory literature that early modern women belonged home, and specifically in home. As Henry Smith states in perhaps the most frequently repeated commonplace of domestic sermons and conduct books, we call the Wife Huswife, that is, wife, not a street wife like Thamar, nor a field wife like Dinah, but a wife, to show that a good wife keeps her house (1591; sig. [F6.sup.r]). Edmund Tilney cites approvingly a Numidian tradition reported by Plutarch: their husbands being abroad, the wives kept always doors shut (1573; sig. [E3.sup.v]). And, although Proverbs 9:14--She sitteth the door of her house--refers specifically to a foolish woman, for Robert Cleaver, glossing the verse, that image shades instead into the description of an unchaste woman: herproperty is to be abroad in the streets to meet with companions, and to entice men to folly by her looks and behavior (1615; sigs. [L3.sup.r-v]). Nonetheless, the records of the early modern church courts are crowded with women deponents who observed, overheard, or engaged neighbors when standing or sitting own doors. Women answered the standard interrogatives carefully the outset of depositions, explaining where they were the time in question, why they were there, what they were doing while there, and, implicitly, that they themselves did not contribute to the disruption issue in being there (see Gowing, pp. 236, 239). Both Gowing and Giese have observed that a profession of location the doorstep is among the most common of preambles in witnesses' reports. Women either heard a great noise from within and rushed to the door to look out, or they were already doorstep, shaking out laundry, sweeping, or otherwise busying themselves about necessary household business. If the constructions of Smith, Tilney, Cleaver, and fellow moralists had the cultural currency that consonance and circulation would lead us to believe they had, why would so many women willingly testify on the record and in a legal setting to disreputable behavior? As both Gowing and Giese note, it is critical in cases of sexual slander that the slander be public--otherwise, the litigant cannot claim damage to her reputation in the community. Slander either spoken in the street or called from door to door therefore satisfies a necessary element for a suit for damages, and, in this respect, a position on the doorstep, with its proximity to the public, is self-evidently useful to the purpose. …

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