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18th Century European Women

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From the 16th to 18th century European women experienced some level of change in their roles and attitudes towards them. Ideas women were still considered inferior to men still lingered and progress of equal rights still progressed slowly. Around the time the Enlightenment rolled around women were beginning to get involved in the workforce and taking on a new, much bigger role in society.

Some aspects of European women’s lives changed, starting in the Reformation, which saw their roles expand from being a husband’s concubine. Before the Reformation, many humanists and Professor Alberti stressed that a wife’s traditional role should be restricted to the orderliness of the household, food preparation, serving of meals, the education of children, and the supervision of servants. The emergence of the Protestant Reformation, with the likes of Protestant reformers, such as Luther and Zwingli, …show more content…

Married women were to being living demonstrations of their husband’s convictions about the superiority of marriage to celibacy, be models of wifely obedience, and Christian charity. But some aspects of european women’s lives continued, such as the power in which women had in society. During the Reformation Protestants did not break the medieval idea that women were to be subject to men and for male philosophers. Protestant emphasis on marriage made unmarried women suspect, for they did not belong to the type of household regarded as the cornerstone of a proper, godly society, making unmarried and widowed women regarded as a low status in society. Such obstacles saw the attitudes and experiences of European women barely change from the Reformation to the Enlightenment.

The emergence of the Reading Revolution saw the exchange of observations on literature, science, and philosophy amongst the elites of society evolved in gatherings held commonly in a private drawing room, formally called a salon. Most salons were ran by elite women, who also exercised a

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