![]() ![]() The lower classes may have been freer to choose, Fraser suggests, if simply because less was at stake. ""In an age before the English had properly discovered the rumbustious sport of fox-hunting, heiresses were hunted as though they were animals of prey."" Affection was suspect, though even the well-born sometimes succumbed. ![]() ![]() While Elizabeth I reigned, it was not good form to emphasize woman's weakness but once she was dead (1603), women were valued chiefly for the wealth they could bring to a marriage. Centrally, she succeeds in showing how the ideology of woman as the weaker vessel was belied by women rising to the personal challenges created by the English Civil War, the Great Plague, and the fire of London, quite apart from the risks of repeated pregnancies, then believed to be women's normal state. A panorama of 17th-century English womanhood, presented with Fraser's usual taste for passion and pageantry, and a degree of balance between the higher and lower orders. ![]()
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