In Early Modern England, both gender hierarchy, with the man at the top, and the husband's role as governor of his family and household — wife, children, wards, and servants — were assumed to have been instituted by God and nature. The family was seen as the secure foundation of society, with the husbands role being comparable to that of God within his universe or the King within his country. Women were continually instructed that their spiritual and social worth resided above all else in their practice of and reputation for chastity. Unmarried virgins and wives were to maintain silence in the public sphere and give unstinting obedience to father and husband, though widows had some scope for making their own decisions and managing their affairs. Children and servants were bound to the strictest obedience. Inevitably, however, tension developed when such norms met with common experience.

     Religious and legal definitions of gender roles and norms are proclaimed in the marriage liturgy from the Book of Common Prayer and in The Law's Resolutions of Women's Rights (1632).

     These norms were urged and modified in advice books dealing with specific family roles and duties. A treatise on household government by John Dod and Robert Cleaver (1598) elaborates on and contrasts the duties of husband and wife. Gervase Markham's book, The English Hus-Wife (1615), outlines the woman's responsibility to understand and administer medicines to her family and to have perfect skill in cookery. Richard Brathwaite's English Gentlewoman (1631) focuses on virtues and activities pertaining to women of the higher classes, drawing attention to expectations of widows' chastity. Dorothy Leigh's often reprinted advice book The Mother's Blessing (1616) emphasised: the need to bring up children with gentleness and to give them a good education. She also urges her sons only to marry women they will love to the end and to make their wives companions, not servants.

     Some texts reveal direct challenges to the cultural norms defining gender and household roles. A pair of texts, Hic Mulier and Haec Vir (1620), call attention to a controversy from the years 1615–20 over women wearing male attire; their title-page engravings display the satirised fashions. (Cross Dressing)

 

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