Gender Roles For Women During The Elizabethan Era

The Elizabethan Era is known to contain certain gender roles for women that are especially demonstrated in Shakespeare’s writing. In his plays, the female characters are established as property of their fathers and their husbands. Throughout “Romeo and Juliet”, this notion justifies the behaviors of Lord Capulet and Lady Capulet especially. These gender normalities can be exemplified in 1.3 after an analyzation of Lady Capulet’s conversation with Juliet regarding her eligibility to be married to the man that she chooses for her daughter.

In “Romeo and Juliet”, the young Juliet’s role is to marry the man that her father chooses for her and to have children. Lady Capulet is evidently a victim of this notion that women are socially expected to

have children at a young age. This can first be assumed when she tells Juliet to “think of marriage now” despite her only being thirteen (1.3 75). It is more exemplified when she tells Juliet that “here in Verona, ladies of esteem/ are made already mothers” (1.3 76-7). This shows that she believes Juliet should already be a mother, simply because other girls in her city are. She also shows her feelings toward the issue by saying “by my count/ I was your mother much upon these years” (1.3 77-8). These lines explain that Lady Capulet believes Juliet is fairly late on her marriage and pregnancy because of the standards that society sets.
To conclude this analyzation of Lady Capulet’s words to her daughter, it can be seen that the roles of women in the society around her lead her to think Juliet is supposed to obey her parents and marry Paris without question. In fact, she tells Juliet that most young ladies her age, including herself, would have already had children. This behavior is included in Shakespeare’s writing because it is similar to the societal normalities that surrounded him during the Elizabethan Era, despite the play taking place in a different time period.