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2 - Roaring Girls and Unruly Women: Producing Femininities

Jennifer Higginbotham
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University
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Summary

In England's Merry Jester (1693), the writer J. S. relates a story in which a pert ten-year-old girl reveals the pressure that girlhood could place on early modern gender ideologies. When admonished by her mother for not looking at the ground when speaking to men, the girl points out, first, that her mother's lesson on female submission has come too late and, second, that there is nothing natural about women deferring to men:

A Girl about ten years old, had got a trick of confidently staring in mens faces when they were talking; for which her mother reproved her, saying Daughter, our Sex enjoins us Modesty, and you ought to be bashful, and look downward when you are in mens company, and not to stand gazing and gaping as if you were looking babies in their eyes: to which the pert girl replied, This lecture forsooth, should have been read in my former ignorant Ages, but every age grows wiser and wiser; that maids of every age know better: Men indeed, may look down on the primitive dust, from whence they were taken, but Man being our original, I will stare in their faces, say what you can to the contrary.

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The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Sisters
Gender, Transgression, Adolescence
, pp. 62 - 103
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2013

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