The Weaker Vessel

The Weaker Vessel examines women’s lives in seventeenth-century England, using biography, legal history and social history to challenge the assumption that women were merely passive dependants. Fraser looks at marriage, widowhood, religion, property, work, political crisis and civil war through the experiences of aristocrats, radicals, writers, servants and ordinary women. The book shows how women were constrained by law and convention while still exercising agency in households, communities, religious movements and the upheavals of Stuart Britain.