SOURCE: "The Bad Old Days," in Women's Review of Books, Vol. II, No. 9, June, 1985, pp. 17-18.

In the following review, Woods compares The Weaker Vessel with another work on the cultural history of women.

Anyone who investigates the social of cultural history of women is painfully aware of how little of our past is accessible, even the relatively well-documented past of the English speaking culture. Some things are retrievable, including the expressed attitudes of men toward women and the legal and social restrictions imposed by men or women; less well understood are the motives and conditions of men's writing about the nature and position of women, and the actual lives of women themselves. For the England of the Renaissance and seventeenth century, two new complementary studies shed welcome light.

Linda Woodbridge, a literary scholar, uses literary and historical evidence to analyze the sense of threat that men in...