- The Weaker Vessel: Woman’s Lot in 17th-Century England by
Antonia Fraser Weidenfeld, 544 pp, £12.95, May 1984, ISBN 0 297
78381 5 - Family Life in the 17th Century: The Verneys of
Claydon House by Miriam Slater Routledge, 209 pp, £10.50, March
1984, ISBN 0 7100 9477 9 The history of women has become a
lucrative subject. No historical topic offers a better hope of
publishers’ contracts, or even, in the United States at least,
of academic appointments. Yet if the market is wide, the
pitfalls are deep. Some of them have been created by the very
forces which have made women’s history fashionable. Just when
other forms of Whig history have become discredited, sexual
Whiggism has become almost compulsory. Women’s history easily
becomes sectarian history: an enterprise in which the past is
studied with the purpose less of enlarging present horizons than
of fortifying present prejudices. Certainly there are historians
of women who have resisted that temptation and who have brought
distinction to their subject, alth