Gender Stereotypes in Elizabethan Times

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Gender Stereotypes in Elizabethan Times and in ‘Much ado About Nothing’ During Elizabethan times, there was an unmarried woman on the throne in England, and yet the roles of women in society were extremely limited. An example of this limitation was that only women of nobility were allowed a standard education, whereas if you were deemed not worthy of this by not being born into nobility, then you would be destined to stay at home and learn how to run the household. This would include such skills as cooking, cleaning and sewing. Those women considered to be appropriate for a ‘normal’ education, would be given the knowledge of several languages including Latin, Greek, Italian and French, however this education would cease when they reached the stage of university as it didn’t matter how noble the woman was, they would still not be allowed to attend university and so if they wished to continue their education, they would have to be taught from home. A large amount of restrictions on the life of women were in the field of profession. Women were not allowed to become lawyers, doctors, politicians or writers as well as being forbidden to enrol for the army or navy. This could be because in Elizabethan times, women were seen as untrustworthy and deceitful due to the wide belief at the time that women’s periods were controlled by the moon and that their uterus migrated around the body, causing hysterics and lunacy. The greatest thing that a woman could do at the time was to become a mother, however due to the “untrustworthy nature” of women at the time, the fidelity of the woman was always kept under a high level of scrutiny, as it was impossible to take a test to determine who the biological father of a child was at the time. There were countless other ways in which women were viewed as “the weaker sex” such as the fact that they were forced to become dependent on
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