Excerpt from Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century
The investigation, whose conclusions are partly described in the following treatise, was undertaken with a view to discovering the actual circumstances of women's lives in the Seventeenth Century.
It is perhaps impossible to divest historical enquiry from all personal bias, but in this case the bias has simply consisted in a conviction that the conditions under which the obscure mass of women live and fulfil their duties as human beings, have a vital influence upon the destinies of the human race, and that a little knowledge of what these conditions have actually been in the past will be of more value to the sociologist than many volumes of carefully elaborated theory based on abstract ideas.
The theories with which I began this work of investigation as to the position occupied by women in a former social organisation have been abandoned, and have been replaced by others, which though still only held tentatively have at least the merit of resting solely on ascertained fact. If these theories should in turn have to be discarded when a deeper understanding of history becomes possible, yet the picture of human life presented in the following pages will not entirely lose its value.
The picture cannot pretend to be complete. The Seventeenth Century provides such a wealth of historical material that only a small fraction could be examined, and though the selection has been as representative as possible, much that is of the greatest importance from the point of view from which the enquiry has been made, is not yet available. Many records of Gilds, Companies, Quarter Sessions and Boroughs which must be studied in extenso before a just idea can be formed of women's position, have up to the present been published only in an abbreviated form, if at all.
Another difficulty has been the absence of knowledge regarding women's position in the years preceding the Seventeenth Century. This want has to some extent been supplied through the kindness of Miss Eileen Power, who has permitted me to use some of the material collected by her on this subject, but not yet published.
The Seventeenth Century itself forms a sort of watershed between two very widely differing eras in the history of Englishwomen - the Elizabethan and the Eighteenth Century.
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