Roles Of Women In The 17th And 18th Century Essay

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the economic role of women was mostly focused around the family economy. How women worked to support their family depended on the kind of household they came from. In farm households they would usually run the farm and do farm work with the smaller children while their husband and older children went off to find work elsewhere so that they could make more money. In artisan households the women would usually sell their husband’s manufactured goods or open a small shop of their own. They would also be in charge of household finances and the entire business while their husband was away, this was also the case in merchant households. Also in peasant households, if the family had enough land to support themselves,

the wife would literally carry items for her husband, such as water, food, seeds, grain, etc. Another way they contributed to their household economy was that if economic disaster struck their household, the wife would be the one to either organize who would be sent off to find more work or who was sent to beg in the streets. Younger women would also work as servants for other households and would work there until they gathered enough money to support themselves and a family. During the agriculture and industrial revolutions women were largely put out of work because the new inventions for agriculture were invented for only male operation so women could no longer help much on farms and overall the new inventions hurt them economically. Textile mechanization also replaced the spinning wheel, which women used to spin thread that hand-loom weavers would then wove. Since they no longer could do much of their old kind of work they formed the cottage industry, which was bonnet making, knitting, button making, glove making, and straw plaiting, but women didn’t earn enough money doing this so most women became domestic servants. In conclusion, women had a large role in the economy during the 17th and 18th centuries but during the agricultural and industrial revolutions, their role in the economy started to shrink.
During the Scientific Revolution women were not allowed to attend universities and become a part of scientific societies, but this did not stop them from participating in this age of new ideas.

Noblewomen and women from the artisan class were most of the women who engaged in this new scientific activity but they could only do so through their husbands or male relatives. In the artisan class women would work with their husbands on particular fields of the new science, in Germany it was mostly astronomy, and when their husband died they would usually take it over. Examples of some important women during the Scientific Revolution are Margaret Cavendish, who was a noblewoman from England and wrote many significant works about natural philosophy and early modern science. She was also the only women in the 17th century to be allowed to attend a meeting of the Royal Society of London. Other important women are Maria Winkelmann from Germany who discovered a comet in 1704 but was not credited for the discovery until 1930 and Maria Cunitz, also from Germany, who published a book about astronomy that many people thought her husband wrote until he added a preface to the book that stated she was the author, not him. Overall during the Scientific Revolution not many women were able to participate due to the many sexist ideas that were prevalent during this time

period.
Francis Bacon was an English natural philosopher during the 16th and 17th centuries and he was a very influential thinker during the Scientific Revolution. I think that Bacon would have been disappointed that there were not many women scientists during his era of the Scientific Revolution and he probably would have wanted women to have more freedom to participate in this era of new scientific ideas and inventions. I also think Bacon would believe that women did not have a large role in the Scientific Revolution because it was difficult for women to participate so few actually did. I think that he would think this because in his book called The New Atlantis, he envisioned a utopian world where there would be equal rights for women. This leads me to believe that he must have believed in equal rights for women at least a little bit.