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Book Reviews : Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England, 1500-1800. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995, pp. xxii+442. U.S.$37.50 (hardcover

This is an ambitious work. Based on sources such as works of drama, conduct books, as well as nine case studies of gentry marriages, it focuses on the changing attitudes to the meaning of gender throughout the early modem period. Part one is an account of the early modem ideological framework of gender, detailing in particular ideas about the body; part two deals with the lived experience of patriarchy; and part three traces the path toward modem gender. Fletcher’s main thesis is that men’s power in history has resided in their ability to transform patriarchy by replacing its ancient scriptural and medical basis with a new secular ideology of gender. Tudor England sought to understand gender by understanding the body. Heat was viewed as the source of strength: physical, intellectual, and moral. Women were colder than men and hence were the weaker vessel, placed on a vertical hierarchy below men. Because there was no precise boundary between heat and cold, these ideas about the body provided shifting sands for a system of gender order. In real life the static, prescriptive, and essentially biblical pattern of acceptable behavior for women could not be upheld. Women could not be dominated to anything like the degree implied by the patriarchal ideal, in the home and at large. Marriages were only in certain limited ways patriarchal in practice: Wives were expected to be autonomous and show considerable initiative in day-to-day household management. In society, women were so important economically, as