Did the Renaissance improve the lives of women or did it entrench women further into traditional gender roles?

The question of “did women have a renaissance” is not something that has not been asked before. In 1977 Joan Kelly wrote an essay addressing this question specifically. In the Renaissance, when the political systems changed from the Medieval feudal systems, women of every social class saw a change in their social and political options that men did not. Celibacy became the female norm and "the relations of the sexes were restructured to one of female dependency and male domination" (Kelly 20). Women lived the life of the underlying sex. Men ruled over everything, even through half a century of Queens.

“When England was ruled for half a century by Queens but women had almost no legal power; When marriage, a women’s main vocation, cost them their personal property rights; when the ideal women was rarely seen and never heard in public; when the clothes a women wore were legally dictated by her social class; when almost all school teachers were men; when medicine was prepared and purified at home; when corsets were

constructed of wood and cosmetics made of bacon and eggs; when only half of all babies survived to adulthood?" (Hull 15).

The above passage says a lot about women in the Renaissance. The role of women was a very scarce role. Women were supposed to be seen and not heard. Rarely seen at that. Women were to be prim and proper, the ideal women. Females were able to speak their minds but their thoughts and ideas were shaped by men. Mostly everything women did had input given by men. Women were controlled by her parents from the day she is born until the day she is married, then she would be handed directly to her husband so he could take over that role. In the time of the renaissance women were considered to legally belong to their husbands. Women were supposed to be typical ‘housewives.'

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