Women, Literacy, and Domesticity in the Public Imagination

Abstract

This chapter lays out the cultural contexts for female literary production in England and the Low Countries, analyzing key works by humanists and reformers on the division between the public and private realm, the nature of the household and domesticity, and female literacy and writing. The chapter examines English and Dutch household theory, most of which displayed Puritan and Protestant reformers’ interests in a new kind of household that mimicked the public realm in its political organization yet also provided a specific intimate space in which women could become teachers and discipliners of their children and servants. The second section of this chapter turns to representations of women in domestic settings in Dutch and English painting, with particular interest in images that represent female literacy. These cultural contexts reveal instability in seventeenth-century constructions of domesticity and the household that created openings for female literacy and self-expression.