Daily Life of Women in Shakespeare’s England

Delve into the often-overlooked lives and legacies of everyday women in Tudor and Stuart England.

Owing to their privilege and social stature, much is known about the elite women of 16th- and 17th-century England. Historians know far less, however, about the everyday women from the middle and lower classes from the 1550s to 1650 who left behind only scattered bits and pieces of their lives. Born into a narrow class and gender hierarchy that placed women second to men in almost all regards, women from the poor and middling ranks had limited social and economic opportunities beyond what men and the church afforded them. Yet, as Theresa D. Kemp shows in this addition to the Daily Life through History series, many of these women, most of them illiterate by modern standards, found creative ways to assert agency and push back against social norms. In an era when William Shakespeare debuted his plays at the Globe Theatre in London, everyday English women were active in religious movements, wrote literature, and went to court to protest abuse at home. Ultimately, a close examination of the lives of these women reveals how instrumental they were in shaping English society during a transformative and dynamic period of British history.