SOURCE: "Women at Large," The Nation, Volume 239, No. 8, September 22, 1984, pp. 244-46.

In the following review, Quilligan contemplates the ideas on women and society that arise from Fraser's Weaker Vessel.

The Weaker Vessel, Lady Antonia Fraser's study of women in seventeenth-century England, opens with a personal anecdote. Fraser described the topic of her new book to a distinguished (male) friend; before vanishing into his club, he turned and asked, "Were there any women in seventeenth-century England?" The Weaker Vessel is her attempt "in part at least" to answer that question. The answer, more than 500 pages long, is armed with a host of anecdotes as telling as the one about the jesting clubman. As any modern historian might have told the fellow, it requires a significant degree of perversity to persist in thinking that history has been a masculine enterprise. Obviously there were women in seventeenth-century England. The question for...