Feminists in Elizabethan England
Susan C. Shapiro describes how a struggle for women’s liberation began about 1580 and continued in Jacobean years.
There may be, Ecclesiastes to the contrary, something new under the sun; but contemporary women’s rejection of both male supremacy and female clothing is definitely not. There have always been, of course, isolated individuals who fought their way up in a man’s world; but midway through the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (about 1580), women began to struggle against their traditional subordinate status on a scale that seemed large to their male contemporaries.
This struggle for freedom and equality, which the adoption of men’s clothing encourages and proclaims, cannot accurately be called a movement since it was totally without organization, and its origins or causes cannot easily be explained.
Some social historians point to the great increase in the number of educated women during the sixteenth century; others to the growing influence of Puritanism, which in preaching the doctrine of ‘ideal marriage’ necessarily also preached spiritual equality between the sexes. Still others argue that the impetus for this women’s rebellion came from the great exemplar of feminine achievement, Elizabeth herself.
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