No abstract

In seventeenth-century England honour was a concept which had meaning for men in the private or domestic spheres as well as in the public spheres of their lives. Indeed, failure to prove an honourable man at home could exclude men from entering any honour community outside it. Above all else, men from whatever social status were only held worthy of honour if they could demonstrate control over their wives, children and servants. Hence honour was a concept which was vital to the upholding of male power. To achieve that power or control men were encouraged to adopt behaviour which laid emphasis on two key gender characteristics which were thought to distinguish them from women: physical strength and reason. As Sir Thomas Smith explained in 1583, God had intended to give the male ‘great wit, bigger strength, and more courage to compel the woman to obey by reason or force’. Men used their claim to reason to legitimise their authority over women; the first Marquis of Halifax explained to his daughter in a letter of 1688:That there is Inequality in the Sexes, and that for the better Economy of the World, the Men, who were to be the Law-givers, had the larger share of Reason bestow'd upon them…Your Sex wanteth our Reason for your Conduct, and our Strength for your Protection.

This book exposes the 'hidden' history of marital violence and explores its place in English family life between the Restoration and the mid-nineteenth century. In a time before divorce was easily available and when husbands were popularly believed to have the right to beat their wives, Elizabeth Foyster examines the variety of ways in which men, women and children responded to marital violence. For contemporaries this was an issue that raised central questions about family life: the extent of men's authority over other family members, the limitations of women's property rights, and the problems of access to divorce and child custody. Opinion about the legitimacy of marital violence continued to be divided but by the nineteenth century ideas about what was intolerable or cruel violence had changed significantly. This accessible study will be invaluable reading for anyone interested in gender studies, feminism, social history and family history.

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0268416002004058How to cite this article: ELIZABETH FOYSTER (2002). At the limits of liberty: married women and connement in eighteenth-century England.

Marriage is a false dividing line to impose on our understanding of childhood, adulthood and parenting in the past. In early modern England neither the dependency which has been associated with childhood, nor the supervision of parents in the lives of their children, ceased with wedding bells. An examination of the parent-child bond beyond marriage within the middle and upper ranks can provide new and important insights into the intergenerational relationships of the early modern past. While parents could contribute to the smooth running of their children's marriages, they could also have a role as instigators of, commentators upon, and arbitrators of the discord which could result in their children's marriages. Motives for parental involvement could be complex, but parents could share in both the sorrows and the joys of their children's marriages. The emotional and financial repercussions of marriage breakdown could have painful effects for parents as well as for the married couple.A n important aspect of our understanding of the relationships between members of the early modern English family has been absent from recent histories. Powerful bodies of historical scholarship have combined to ensure that the role of English parents in the married lives of their children has been neglected. Demographers, keen to dismiss the myth that households in the past contained many generations of the same family living under one roof, have shown that most households in the early modern period were simple or nuclear in structure. Parents and their married children, it has been demonstrated, were rarely co-resident. Relationships with kin, of both first and second