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Feminism did not invent early modern women, but it certainly helped to promote an interest in their existence, the nature of their lives, and the contribution, commonly forgotten or suppressed, they made to the culture that alternately idealized, denigrated, silenced, and celebrated them. Alice Clark's influential study of women's working lives in the seventeenth century constitutes one important example of the work of a previous generation, but the last twenty years has witnessed an unprecedented quantity and range of discussion by social historians, cultural analysts, and literary critics of the place of women in early modern society. Many of these scholars would identify themselves as feminists, motivated to consider the past by a dissatisfaction with the position of women in the present; others would probably regard themselves as indifferent to the politics of academic inquiry. The distinction between these two positions may be less important than it seems. Books and essays need editors, publishers, and ultimately readers, as well as writers, and whatever the personal attitudes of the authors of all this analysis, it has surely been the vociferous popular feminism of the 1970s and since that has created the demand for so much research on early modern women. We had to learn, of course, to do it. Or rather, we had to discover what it was that we were trying to do. Different disciplines had different projects, even though sometimes it seemed that feminist criticism had more in common with feminist social history than with conventional literary studies. But my own discipline of English faced what was perhaps the most obvious, and yet in some ways the most mysterious task. Self-evidently, we needed to reclaim early modern writing from patriarchal analysis, but what exactly did this mean? In the first instance, it seems primarily to have meant rescuing fictional female characters from critical contempt. Gertrude, it was argued, was a warm, caring woman who had been grossly misrepresented in discussions of Hamlet; Desdemona was not a spineless victim, whatever male critics alleged; and it was Portia who generously and ingeniously saved Antonio's anti-Semitic bacon. The Duchess of Malfi was an important case here, since she was particularly badly in need of rescue. Bradley's tragic-flaw theory of tragedy, brought to perfection in his book in 1904 and diligently applied by his successors to every known Renaissance tragedy for two generations thereafter, left little room for doubt that the Duchess was responsible for her own protracted torture and death through an excess of sexual desire. The Overbury Characters were invoked to demonstrate that early modern widows were not supposed to marry again, and the case was made. A new climate, however, made it apparent that the text of the play repeatedly associated the Duchess with light, the natural world, and fruitfulness; it was her torturers who were consistently depicted as dark and deadly. However obviously misogynist misreadings stood in need of correction, we felt at the same time a certain anxiety about the feminist status of our own readings. The early modern women we were defending so eagerly were, after all, precisely fictional. Once we had unmasked the prejudices of current criticism, what in the world did it matter to feminists, unless, of course, they were also twentieth-century directors, whether the Duchess or Gertrude was a good person or not? Neither, after all, existed in any material sense, either now or then. One answer to that question drew on the relatively unthinking assumptions of conventional criticism. Good fiction reflected the truth about its own society or, better still, timeless truths about life in general, because it expressed the insights of an especially gifted creative artist. Shakespeare in particular could be relied on here, thanks to his great knowledge of human nature. His plays, it appeared, had much to teach about early modern women--or just women, as the critic preferred. …
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