[Name of the Writer]

[Name of Instructor]

[Subject]

[Date]

Women in Early Modern Europe

Introduction

According to a Czech writer, the western society has always again and again emphasized on its own representation of a society as the society of the rights of men. But before any particular man could have his rights, it was necessary for him to first represent and establish oneself as an individual and to make sure that the other people also accepted him as an individual. It was the French revolution that initiated the idea of and gave birth to the concept of modern politics and also gave the understanding of what human rights are, that have well extended in to the twentieth and the twenty first century. However, the rights of men that were expressed in that period did not extend to the women. In that period, a woman's duties were restricted to the domestic sphere only. (Jane and Alison, 2003)

A woman's job in her home and her duties regarding the raising of her children, were considered as very important because of the reason of maintenance of the family. It was a symbol of the body politics. The uncertainty in the roles of women in the western society, along with what understanding of the woman's nature the society held, have very distant roots in the history of western thinking and how they thought. For example, according to Aristotle, who described women as men who were imperfect, who existed as a result of something gone wrong at the time of conception. According to him, the reason for their existence could be that the parents might have been of very young age, or they might have been of very old age, or there might have been a huge difference in age between the two parents, or probably one of the two parents was not healthy enough. Thus, according to him, a woman is just a fault in man that would occur in the ordinary course of nature. They have noted that while there were very few instances in which women had the authority, but women in many instances did have the power. For Aristotle and his heirs, the role of a woman in the household was just considerable. Since he believed that they were intellectually and physically subordinate to men, their basic function consisted of breeding and reproduction only and not companionship. (Jane and Alison, 2003)

Discussion

In the early modern times, the traditional understanding of the role of a woman was to operate in her private and domestic sphere. So we basically first have to understand how her domestic sphere actually was defined. The household duties of a woman in those times differed from the household duties of women these days. Naturally, the domestic responsibilities of a woman from the early modern times in Europe were different according to what social status she came from. For example, a woman who belonged to a family with a lot of wealth, most probably did not have to cook the food or clean the house herself. The ...