Marriage in Seventeenth-Century England:
The Woman’s Story
Alice Brabcová
University of West Bohemia, Plzeň

The seventeenth century represents a fascinating period of English history, drawing the attention of whole generations of historians. This turbulent age saw three major events that had a deep impact on England’ s political as well as social life—the English Revolution, the
Restoration of the Stuarts in 1660 and the Glorious Revolution in 1688. Amidst the turmoil of the events, people’s everyday lives unfolded. While it was men’s preoccupation to keep the country’s political and economic affairs going, women had an indispensable, though far less public, part to play. This paper aims at providing an outline of the seventeenth-century
English marriage, viewed from the woman’s perspective. It touches upon topics such as concluding marriages, basic marriage values, duties of a married woman and possibilities of divorce. Attention is paid to the areas in which the seventeenth-century reality was different from today’s.
In seventeenth-century England, marriage and sexual morals played a far more important social role than nowadays. A family centred around a married couple represented the basic social, economic and political unit. In the Stuart period, a husband’s “rule” over his wife, children and servants was seen as an analogy to the king’s reign over his people—a manifestation of a hierarchy constituted by God. A woman was regarded as the ‘weaker vessel’ (a phrase taken from the New Testament)—a creature physically, intellectually, morally and even spiritually inferior to a man; therefore, the man had a right to dominate her
(Fraser 1981: 1).
In a society strongly influenced by Puritan values, sexual integrity and the status of a married person gave a woman respectability and social prestige. This, together with the fact that it was very