Politics and Culture

According to Jean Kelly- Gadol, the women of the Renaissance, like women of the Middle Ages,
were denied all political rights and were considered legally a subject to their husbands. Women
of all classes were expected to perform, first and foremost, the duties of a housewife. Peasant
women worked in the field alongside their husbands and ran the household. Middle class
women were exclusively relegated to the private sphere while men monopolized the political
and economic issues in the public sphere. Medieval feudalism permitted homage to female
vassals but in Renaissance Italy, feudalism came to be replaced by powerful city-states. Thus,
the political power of women in many cases vanished. Noble women thus experienced a state
of almost universal dependence on her family and husbands. Women who did not marry were
not permitted to live independently. Instead, they lived in the households of their male
relatives or, more often, joined a convent.  Women were frequently discouraged from
participating in the arts and sciences too. The art work and literature that was created during
this time to celebrate life also emphasized female dependency and male domination. Men had
to perform productive labour, while women stayed at home and to perform reproductive
labour such as household duties and child care. A few wealthy women of the time such as
Lucrezia Borgia, the daughter of Pope Alexander VI, Isabella d'Este, Christine de Pisan and
Artemesia Gentileschi were able to break the mold of subjugation to achieve at the least fame,
if not independence. But even access to the most powerful men in the world did not necessarily
allow a woman to distinguish and express herself. A similar view was held by Merry E. Wiesner
regarding the limited economic role of women during Renaissance.

Kelly-Gadol’s summary of women’s influence in the Middle Ages as compared to the

Renaissance is limited by several factors as firstly, it relies largely upon literary evidence in its
conclusions about women’s power in the Middle Ages; secondly, it is geographically very
specific and thirdly, it focuses only on the nobility. Therefore, it may be fruitful to consider
other scholarship in order to draw on more diverse evidence, a wider geographical area, and a
more inclusive sampling of women. 

 Christiane Klapisch-Zuber’s “The ‘Cruel Mother’” and Stanley Chojnacki’s “The Power of Love:
Wives and Husbands” try to explore Renaissance women’s financial situation as illustrated by
the disposal of her dowry.  Both works demonstrate that women possessed a substantial
amount of economic influence. Klapisch-Zuber’s reflections on the injustice of the conflicting
pressures placed on women to choose among their loyalties reveals that women did indeed
have some amount of choice, and enough power to cause their relatives to court their interest
and favor. Margeret M. King in her work “Mothers of the Renaissance,” suggests that women
may have had a covert role in shaping their culture through their influential role in raising their
sons, with some mothers pushing their sons toward political power, some towards love of
learning, and some towards the establishment of certain religious convictions. Notable
examples include Catherine de Medici, Johannes Kepler's mother, and Susannah Wesley.
Although these women may not have played a deliberate role in the development of
Renaissance culture, history would most likely have turned out very differently without their
influence. 

However we see a contrasting view of Judith M. Bennet that women’s work remained in many
ways remarkably similar in both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Bennett writes that
women’s work was low-skilled, with smaller benefits than men’s, regarded with less esteem,
and took less of a priority than the work of her husband.

Although Kelly-Gadol concludes otherwise, the above evidence seems to indicate that upper
class women did indeed have a Renaissance in terms of the possession of economic power, as
illustrated by the financial clout of women’s dowries, and the ability to influence the outlook of
their culture, as seen in the influence of mothers on their children. Undoubtedly, their power
and ability to influence their culture was not as great as that of their male contemporaries, but
it was there. However, the case of lower class women seems less certain. Without access to the
education or financial resources available to their wealthier contemporaries and working under
very similar conditions to their medieval counterparts, these women seem to have been both
less influenced by and less able to influence the developments of the Renaissance. Interestingly
enough, the same could probably be said of their lower class male counterparts.