[In The Weaker Vessel] the varieties of social opportunity and experience in the Stuart age indicate the difficulties posed by Antonia Fraser's subtitle, 'Woman's Lot in 17th-Century England'. A better choice might have been 'Meetings with Remarkable Women', for her book has little place for the ordinary or for the silent. In some ways, it is true, 17th-century women did have a common lot. Whatever their class, they were held to be inferior to men, intellectually, morally and spiritually. Institutions and the law, as we would say, discriminated against them. Yet in society they shared little beyond their formal disadvantages. Historical inquiry which treats people as members of a class—a class, moreover, which constitutes a rather sizable proportion of the population—does not always make them more interesting.

We need a more elastic and less anachronistic vocabulary. We talk of 'attitudes to women'—and invite the phrase...