Tanja Säily
Take-Home Exam, BIr141
Department of English
University of Helsinki
Autumn 1999
In the Tudor and Stuart periods, ideas about women were based on classical thoughts and the Bible. Aristotle saw the woman as a defective man. In his opinion, men were superior, perfect by generation, had wisdom and were apt to rule by nature, while women were inferior, generated imperfectly, had only opinions instead of wisdom and were suitable for obeying by nature. The Bible, too, had negative ideas about women: the story of Eve presented women as inferior and sinful, and Paul's writings emphasised the role of wives as subservient to their husbands and women as chaste, silent and obedient. However, women were also created to be the image of God, so they should not be overly criticised.
These ideas had a strong effect on the status of women. Women's sexuality was feared and they had to stay chaste, so their writing was constrained, for writing gave them sexual license and unchastity, which was unfeminine. Due to this, women had to write lengthy apologies to the beginning or end of their texts. The story of Eve gave justification to the oppression of women in legal matters as well; women and their property basically belonged to their fathers when unmarried and to their husbands when married. They could not act as witnesses, make contracts or administer property, as they were seen as mentally and physically inferior, and married women could not make wills without their husbands. (In practice, however, most husbands did let their wives take care of legal matters.) Wife-beating was allowed for discipline, and raped women would often marry their offender to get back their reputation.
Women and men lived in separate spheres, at least in principle: women lead private lives at home, whereas men spent more time in their public working lives. Nevertheless, theory and practise were not always the same; the negative ideas reflected in laws and philosophical texts were often weakened in daily life, and women had more rights than would seem on the basis of these texts.
In the pre-industrialised society, the key economic unit was the rural household, which was large and self-supporting, so family and work life were not separate. Wage-labour was rare, but the enclosure, a process by which public lands were turned into private lands, would eventually change this, forcing men to sell their work for wages and shutting women out of work life. Furthermore, as the yeomen got more cash, they started buying things instead of making them.
Before industrialisation, most people were dependent on agriculture and human or animal power - not only farmers but also blacksmiths, brewers, soap makers, etc. They had very limited horizons, as most travelled very little and had little communication with the outside world. People were not specialised in a small area: workers were involved in the complete process of making a product.
Industrialisation changed all this. It opened up new prospects: moving to urban areas, raising one's standard of living, etc. The development of coal and oil made more power available. When everything was no longer made at home, households became smaller, except for the poorest families, for whom community and sharing was important. Public and private life were now clearly distinguished - public life meant work and was for men only, private life was the family and the only kind of life available to women.
Tudor schools partly continued the tradition of the Middle Ages, which divided the curriculum into the so-called Seven Liberal Arts: the Trivium, which consisted of grammar, rhetoric and dialectic, and the Quadrivium, i.e. arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. Moreover, one could study law, theology and medicine in the universities. However, the Tudor period also introduced the Humanist Curriculum, which concentrated on studying the life on man and the "here and now" instead of divinity and what happens after death. Roger Ascham, Queen Elizabeth's tutor, set the standards for English school education of his time. School began at age seven; the pupils read a great deal of Latin (Cicero, Vergil, Terrence, etc.) before starting to write their own compositions; double translations (Latin-English-Latin) were also used as a learning method.
Seventeenth-century boarding schools had their own curriculum, which included both classical and practical subjects in Latin and English. Traditional grammar schools were criticised for having too much formal grammar and composition and too little literature; e.g. Milton claimed that they concentrated too much on classical education.
In the 18th century, the large and prestigious public schools focused on classical education, for which they were often criticised. The private schools supported by non-conformists had a different curriculum that included writing, arithmetic, French and physical education, e.g. fencing, dancing and gardening. The curriculum of charity schools, which aimed at preparing young children for apprenticeships, consisted of church catechism, reading, writing, arithmetic for boys and knitting etc. for girls.
Mass education funded by the government began in the 19th century. The Elementary Education Act demanded education for every child, including girls, and required teacher certification. The curricula were more practical than before, and teachers experimented with letting older children help with the instruction of younger ones.
The early Tudor gardens had no formal arrangement; the main types were kitchen gardens, orchards and vineyards, which were there just to provide food or drink. In the late Elizabethan period, however, the aristocracy started to build colossal country homes as an alternative to their cold, dark castles, and decided that they needed an impressive garden to go with the houses. These gardens were very formal: they were usually rectangular in shape, separated from the outside world with a wall and organised with walks and hedges. Topiary was common: bushes were cut into fashionable figures, knots and mazes.
The gardens of the Stuart period continued to be formal, but knots and topiary began to go out of fashion. According to Sir Francis Bacon, gardens should be geometrical and planned for yearly enjoyment, some walls should be covered for rain, there should be a raised area at the centre and fountains, and the land behind the garden should be wilder and more natural. The garden was designed with the house it belonged to: closest to the house would be knotted flowerbeds, then clipped trees, then a more open and less formal area, and everything was surrounded by hedges. People used only specific, often exotic plants.
Baroque gardens started to have curves, but they were still very geometrical. In the 1700s, Alexander Pope among others stressed the importance of naturality - the garden should not be imposed on the place; one should see what is already there and act accordingly. Gardens became more open and had more lawns, and the lines were serpentine-like rather than straight. Lancelot "Capability" Brown's gardens in the late 18th century were green and uncluttered and they would have a lake or stream (he would make one if necessary), sheep and deer instead of flowers, single trees or clumps instead of lines of trees, and fake ruins - their naturality was relative...
The Victorians brought back the formal garden: symmetrical, architectural, bright, with flowers, Tudor-like topiary and separate little theme gardens, such as rose or (fake) rock gardens. Garden journals and books began to be printed as literacy became more and more common; one of the writers about gardens was Gertrude Jekyll, who unified the formal and wild styles and emphasised the importance of choosing colours well.