Oppression Of Women In Medieval Society

The role of women in medieval society Robert Lacey.

Lacey considers women in the middle ages equal to men and refers both genders with the use of the term “man”. Looking at the laws associated with marriage, Lacey sees a woman’s nuptial as fair. “One Anglo-Saxon law code makes clear that a woman could walk out of her marriage on her own initiative if she cared to, and that if she took the children and cared for them, then she was also entitled to half the property”. He has a perspective of seeing women capable of leaving an unhappy marriage as she chooses. If women were to take their children with them, she was given half of the family estate. This supposes that women in the middle ages did not have it as bad as it was made out to be and somewhat had freedom that women in future centuries would not …show more content…
Bennett considers majority of medieval people to have dealt with some degree of oppression. Her main concern is to do with the oppression of women that were deeply oppressed by their husbands and parents. Her perspective is in a feminist point of view, she admits to men experiencing oppression but she is more biased towards women. In her book ‘Women in the Medieval English’, she says “marriage bought independence for men and dependence for women”. Men and women were both subject to a sense of oppression under the guardian of their parents. But when married, men were not required to engage in domestic activities. But, women did not have the power to do so and were even restrained further by their marriage. They were no longer under the protection of their fathers and were denied the ability to out themselves in public without the closeness of their husbands. Bennett sees the marriage of women during the middle ages to be immensely oppressing as they were only given further household responsibility, with women required to start having children, and