women in literature- medieval to enlightenment
...course she could not know any of the modern feminist movement’s political beliefs about the equality of rights under the law, a product of John Stuart Mill’s philosophy and American Revolutionary politics, but she definitely has positions that she marks out on gender lines. She also takes great delight in demonstrating her ability to dominate her older husbands, and in recounting her successful struggle with young Jankyn, her fifth and last husband (so far!). The Wife of Bath has been interpreted as Chaucer's deliberate moral satire upon the human, especially female, sexual appetite. She can be read as a type of the fallen woman or, in biblical terms, Eve. Remember that, like marriage or identity, "rape" as a crime is something society constructs, and societies tend to construct it differently in differing times and places. 2. “I congratulate my granddaughters on being born in an age so much enlightened. Sentiments are certainly extreme silly, and only qualify young people to be the bubbles of all their acquaintance. I do not doubt the frequency of assemblies has introduced a more enlarged way of thinking; it is a kind of public education, which I have always thought as necessary for girls as for boys. A woman married at five-and-twenty, from under the eye of a strict parent, is commonly as ignorant as she was at five; and no more capable of avoiding the snares, and struggling with the difficulties, she will infallibly meet with in the commerce of the world. The knowledge of mankind (the most useful of all knowledge) can only be acquired by conversing with them. Books are so far from giving that instruction, they fill the head with a set of wrong notions, from whence spring the tribes of Clarissas, Harriets, &c. Yet such was the method of education when I was in England, which I had it not in my power to correct; the young will always adopt the opinions of all their companions, rather than the advice of their mothers.” Mary was an advocate, one of the earliest advocates, for the higher education of woman. Although she had educated herself, she realised that the circumstances in her case were excep...