Homework tasks due on

Tuesday 7 feb
th
Please work through all three slides
 YOUR TASK: ELIZABETHAN VIEWS OF MARRIAGE
In Elizabethan times women belonged to their fathers (or their brothers if their father died), and then to their husbands.
Women could not own property of their own. This is one of the reasons Queen Elizabeth I never married – she did not want to
give up her power to a man.

The only exceptions were widows – women whose husbands had died. A widow was in charge of her own life and property,
but would be likely to marry again to find someone to protect her and to be the legal guardian to her children.

Women were allowed to marry from the age of 12 in Shakespeare’s time, but often only women from wealthy families would
marry so young. In the play Romeo and Juliet, Juliet is 13, but her mother says by that age she was already married with a
child. Many marriages were arranged for the good of the family and small children might be ‘betrothed’ to each other in order
to join the families together before they were old enough to get married. Many women did not marry until their mid-20s. Men
had to be able to support a household when they married.

Women were not allowed on the stage. All the female parts in plays at the time were played by boys whose voices hadn’t
broken yet – the apprentices. In several of the plays the female characters disguise themselves as men – so the audience
would have seen a man pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man. This happens in Twelfth Night, As You Like
It and The Merchant of Venice.

Reduce the information into three bullet points.

YOUR TASK: PATRIARCHY. Pick 3 of the following tasks:

1. In your own words 2. Use the term correctly 3. Create a question

write a definition: in a sentence: where the keyword is the
answer:

KEY WORD: patriarchy

A system of society or government in which the father or
eldest male is head of the family; a society in which men
hold the power and women are largely excluded from it.
 

4. What other words are 5. Transform the word into a 6. Do we live in a patriarchal
connected to the key word? small image and explain your society today?
thought process behind your
sketch.