The Weaker Vessel Quotes

“It was a fact generally acknowledged by all but the most contumacious spirits at the beginning of the seventeenth century that woman was the weaker vessel; weaker than man, that is. ... That was the way God had arranged Creation, sanctified in the words of the Apostle. ... Under the common law of England at the accession of King James I, no female had any rights at all (if some were allowed by custom). As an unmarried woman her rights were swallowed up in her father's, and she was his to dispose of in marriage at will. Once she was married her property became absolutely that of her husband. What of those who did not marry? Common law met that problem blandly by not recognizing it. In the words of The Lawes Resolutions [the leading 17th century compendium on women's legal status]: 'All of them are understood either married or to be married.' In 1603 England, in short, still lived in a world governed by feudal law, where a wife passed from the guardianship of her father to her husband; her husband also stood in relation to her as a feudal lord.”
― Antonia Fraser, The Weaker Vessel

“Research among aristocratic women has produced the statistics that 45% died before the age of fifty,one quarter from the complications of childbirth; these figures do not however allow the debilitations caused by consent parturition.Many women must have died of diseases and conditions related to "the pain and the perel",worn through by ceaseless child-bearing,who didn't actually die in labour.”
― Antonia Fraser, The Weaker Vessel