Roaring Girls

The forgotten feminists of British history

Holly Kyte

• Publisher: HQ
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780008266097
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: History

This bold, gift-worthy and inspiring history tells the stories of ten women who, despite every effort to suppress them, dared to be extraordinary.

When quoting from the same source extensively, the edition has been credited once, at the first instance, to avoid obtrusive page references.

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INTRODUCTION

1 More common were Roaring Boys or ‘Roarers’ – roisterers, thieves and troublemakers who became a recurrent feature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, particularly Jacobean city drama. These stock characters suggested either boisterous young gallants who drunkenly brawled, rioted and swore in the streets or lower-class tricksters and thieves, upsetting the veneer of civility and social order as they went. They make notable appearances in Nathaniel Field’s Amends for Ladies (1611), Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614), the 1622 edition of Middleton and Rowley’s tragicomedy A Fair Quarrel and Philip Massinger’s The City Madam (1632). The 1626 broadside ballad The Cheating Age describes one Roaring Boy as a ‘grim rascal’ fresh from Newgate who swindles the balladeer out of his money, while Overbury’s Characters (1615) describes another who ‘cheats young gulls that are newly come to town’, is a ‘supervisor to brothels’ and ‘sleeps with a tobacco-pipe in’s mouth’. Mary Frith appears to be their first and only female counterpart in the drama of the period, and given their prevailingly negative connotations, the playwrights’ depiction of her in The Roaring Girl as a paragon of virtue seems all the more radical.

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2 This legal obliteration of wives remained in place long into the nineteenth century. As William Blackstone put it in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–9), ‘By marriage the husband and wife are one person in law, that is, the very being or legal existence of the wife is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband.’

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3 The 1632 document The Law’s Resolutions of Women’s Rights explains this particular law succinctly enough in the titles to Section VIII – ‘That which a husband hath is his own’ – and Section IX – ‘That which the wife hath is the husband’s’.

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4 Ephesians 5:22–24.

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5 Although the statistics suggest that women ran only a 6–7 per cent risk of dying in childbirth in the eighteenth century, it was in practice ‘probably the single most common cause of death in women aged twenty-five to thirty-four, accounting for one in five of all deaths in this age group’, and because every woman would likely know of at least one woman who had died either in childbirth itself or from infection contracted soon after it, their fear of it was real and tangible, albeit magnified. See Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (Yale, 1999), pp.97–98.

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6 Anne Laurence, Women in England 1500–1760: A Social History (Phoenix, 1996), p.34.

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7 In his 1728 pamphlet Augusta Triumphans, Daniel Defoe wrote of his despair at the prevalence of this practice, condemning the rise in private madhouses, where treacherous husbands dumped their discarded wives. ‘If they are not mad when they go into these cursed houses’, he wrote, ‘they are soon made so by the barbarous usage they there suffer.’ Catharine Arnold, Bedlam: London and Its Mad (Simon & Schuster, 2008), p.125.

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8 Wife sales were not common or legal, but they went on – there were at least 300 recorded cases in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the prices involved were often meagre – shillings rather than pounds. They hardly ever took place before the eighteenth century, but one was recorded as late as 1928. See Vickery, Suffragettes Forever! The Story of Women and Power (BBC) and Laurence, 1996, p.54.

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9 Laurence, 1996, p.55.

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10 All of these punishments were particularly common practice during the seventeenth century. The use of the scold’s bridle, also known as the branks, was first recorded in Scotland in 1567 and was most prevalent during the seventeenth century, but its usage continued into the late eighteenth century.

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11 Witchcraft first became a felony in England in 1542 under Henry VIII, and the first woman known to be hanged for it was Agnes Waterhouse at Chelmsford in 1566. Witchcraft trials were at their peak, particularly in Scotland, at the turn of the seventeenth century under the influence of witch-obsessive James VI, later James I of England, with panics also occurring in Lancashire in 1612 and Essex in the 1645. Collectively, this led to thousands of women – usually lower-class widows and spinsters – being hanged or burned in the UK for this non-existent crime. In 1712, Jane Wenham became the last woman in England to be condemned for witchcraft, though she received a reprieve, while the last woman to be burned for it in Scotland was Janet Horne in 1727, before it officially ceased to be a capital crime in 1736. Burning women for other capital crimes, however, continued until 1790. See capitalpunishmentuk.org; Catharine Arnold, Underworld London: Crime and Punishment in the Capital City (Simon & Schuster, 2013), p.176.

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12 As Mary Beard explains in her pocket-rocket volume Women and Power (Profile Books, 2017), the ancient world has bequeathed us a problematic legacy in this respect. In life, women were barred from political discourse and, like slaves, denied formal political rights, while in literature they were often metaphorically or physically silenced: from the moment Telemachus tells his mother Penelope to shut up in Homer’s Odyssey to the many rape victims of Classical mythology who are mutilated or transformed into mute beasts to prevent them from accusing their attackers.

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13 See the work of psychologists, neuroscientists and journalists such as Cordelia Fine, Gina Rippon, Lise Eliot and Angela Saini for the evidence that is debunking many of the powerful myths that have long misinformed our gender politics, telling us that men and women’s brains have evolved differently.

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14 1 Corinthians 11:3–9.

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15 Today, women who display an absence of solidarity towards other women might be termed ‘footsoldiers of the patriarchy’, to borrow a phrase from feminist writer Mona Eltahawy, who is particularly courageous at calling out this kind of anti-feminism in the modern world.

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16 See cartoonist Jacky Fleming’s 2016 book The Trouble with Women.

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17 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 1929 (Penguin, 2004), p.88.

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18 Oxford English...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Author’s Note
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction
• Mary Frith: The Roaring Girl
• Margaret Cavendish: Mad Madge
• Mary Astell: Old Maid
• Charlotte Charke: En Cavalier
• Hannah Snell: The Amazon
• Mary Prince: Goods and Chattels
• Anne Lister: Gentleman Jack
• Caroline Norton: A Painted Wanton
• Afterword: Unfinished Business
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• About the Publisher