Virtue reconsider’d: Married women in England during the long eighteenth century: 21

Reassessing the lives of married English women in the long eighteenth century, this multidisciplinary volume challenges assumptions of wifely domesticity and docility, and reveals how wives navigated law, literature and economy to exercise agency within – and beyond – the confines of marriage. Wives stand at the centre of eighteenth-century life yet have too often been overlooked as subjects of serious study. Virtue reconsider’d reveals how married women, bound by the legal doctrine of coverture, navigated a system that curtailed their legal and economic rights and rendered them invisible, even as it offered opportunities for influence, authority, and self-definition. Across law, literature, and economic history, the book uncovers the complex realities of married life in England during the long eighteenth century. It examines how wives operated within and against the structures that sought to contain them, from courtrooms and theatres to print culture and the public sphere. Far from silent or passive figures, the wives recovered here emerge as litigants, authors, landowners, performers, and political actors. Combining meticulous archival research with innovative interdisciplinary approaches, Virtue reconsider’d challenges familiar narratives of oppression to present a more nuanced picture of marriage as both a legal condition and a lived experience. By reassessing the figure of the wife, it invites a rethinking of long-held assumptions about gender, agency, and power in the eighteenth century and beyond. Wives have long been neglected as a topic of scholarly research. The invisibility of married women in England within the historical record, the complexities of their legal and economic status, and an erroneous belief that women’s activities were confined to the domestic has meant that little attention has been focussed exclusively on wives. Now, however, new scholarship is challenging the orthodoxy of previously dominant ‘private sphere’ narratives and demonstrating that the roles available to married women were more nuanced and dynamic than mainstream assumptions have allowed. This edited volume brings together new research from a number of disciplines to interrogate key issues relating to married women during the long eighteenth century: coverture and the law, literary representation and ideology, paid labour and property ownership. In doing so, it also explores new cross-chronological and multi-disciplinary models that will direct future research.

Pagina's: 264, Hardcover, Manchester University Press