Sexual Whiggery

Blair Worden

  • The Weaker Vessel: Woman’s Lot in 17th-Century England by Antonia Fraser
    Weidenfeld, 544 pp, £12.95, May 1984, ISBN 0 297 78381 5
  • Family Life in the 17th Century: The Verneys of Claydon House by Miriam Slater
    Routledge, 209 pp, £10.50, March 1984, ISBN 0 7100 9477 9

The history of women has become a lucrative subject. No historical topic offers a better hope of publishers’ contracts, or even, in the United States at least, of academic appointments. Yet if the market is wide, the pitfalls are deep. Some of them have been created by the very forces which have made women’s history fashionable. Just when other forms of Whig history have become discredited, sexual Whiggism has become almost compulsory. Women’s history easily becomes sectarian history: an enterprise in which the past is studied with the purpose less of enlarging present horizons than of fortifying present prejudices.

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