The Weaker Vessel

"This is one of the idiosyncratic things on this list, because the obvious thing to choose would have been another of her books, The Warrior Queen, which is much more obviously about queens and power, and is a great book as well. But The Weaker Vessel , which is a social history of women in 17th-century England, was really the first book that, a long time ago, made me think about the experience of being female in history. All the pervasiveness of the social, cultural and historical assumptions about what it means to be male or female come into play in this book. Even though it’s a book about the 17th century and I work in previous centuries, I still find it very thought provoking about the personal experience and the social assumptions that have an effect when you’re confronted by the idea of a woman who rules. Antonia Fraser starts her preface by quoting another historian she’d been talking to, who asked, “ Were there any women in 17th-century England?” – and I know exactly what it feels like to be confronted with that kind of question. Absolutely. Even Matilda – who clearly did end up featuring in the chronicles – was for a long time left in the margins of her own story, precisely because of the difficulty for a woman of having political agency. I’m saying developments aren’t always linear – but there are a lot of continuities. In fact, the striking thing writing about female rule in the medieval and Tudor periods is how striking the parallels are with 20th- and 21st-century politics. Yes, the parallels are extraordinary. People often say, “Well, these problems can be overcome – look at Elizabeth I or Margaret Thatcher.” But what those two women both did was not say, “Women can rule, women can hold power.” They both said, “Yes, OK, most women are pretty feeble, but I am a special woman.” Well, exactly. Look at the iconography of them both, and it’s all about being the exception to the rule. There was Margaret Thatcher presiding over an all-male cabinet. Both of them distanced themselves from other women. Elizabeth I said she had “the body of a weak and feeble woman, but the heart and stomach of a king” – and that battle is still with us. Look at the cabinet now: There’s Theresa May, and we know more about her shoes than anything else. And in other parts of the world where women have taken positions of leadership, it’s often been possible because politics is dynastic. If you look at India or Pakistan, it’s much more akin to a monarchical system where dynastic legitimacy can validate a woman. The parallels are very interesting. So, coming back to your question, there is a lot of continuity – but, within that, for example, there are much more clearly articulated arguments against women’s rule in the 16th century than there are in the 12th. So it isn’t completely linear, and we need to be wary of assuming that."