THE GREAT 17TH-CENTURY GENDER SCARE

Smoke alarm A 17th-century engraving of a woman smoking a pipe.

Men in early modern England feared that they were being outnumbered by women.

By the middle of the 17th century, many English men believed that their country was in crisis. Civil war and plague had swept the land. Other countries in Europe and the Middle East appeared to be growing stronger. And now another threat loomed: England, it seemed, was being overrun by women.

As the University of Oxford academic Margaret Pelling details in a new study published in The Historical Journal, men genuinely believed that they were outnumbered by the opposite sex.

Pelling explored a range of contemporary records including books, pamphlets and religious tracts and discovered that women’s numerical supremacy was widely accepted as fact – despite the absence of any statistical evidence to support it. Alchemist John Heydon off-handedly noted in a 1660 volume, “For since the number of females do far exceed the males...”, while the scholar Thomas Browne declared that, due to “the unequal number of both sexes, [polygamy] may also be necessary”.

How had they reached such a conclusion? Pelling points to some key factors behind it. Firstly, the Civil War had resulted in the deaths of huge numbers of men, while others had left for new lives abroad. But men were also responsible for propagating their own fears, fed by misogyny. “Early modern men were most likely to make numerical claims about women when there were too many of a ‘problematic’ kind,” says Pelling. “Women were expected to be silent, chaste and more or less confined to the household, their identity submerged in that of a husband, father or master.”

Unfortunately for those who feared that society’s norms were under attack, mid-17th-century England, with its political and social many reasons to worry that the natural order was being overturned, and the number of ‘problem’ women was, it seemed, on the rise. “Independent women were particularly objectionable,” says Pelling, “especially if they banded together in shows of female solidarity for political or religious reasons.”

This sense of being overwhelmed could prevail in part because people of the time were, in general, not numerically minded. That’s why the work of John Graunt, a haberdasher born in London in 1620, is important. His pioneering analysis of the capital’s mortality records has been celebrated for its contribution to the development of the study of populations. Yet less remarked upon, Pelling argues, is the fact that Graunt’s survey tallied numbers of each sex, and demonstrates that men’s fears of being outnumbered by women were – in London, at least – unfounded.

“As Graunt showed, slightly more men were born than women – which meant that an equal balance could be maintained,” says Pelling. This balance – then as now – was roughly equal: slightly more men are born than women, and slightly more men die earlier.

And, just as the ratio of the sexes remains the same, Pelling believes that the attitudes Graunt addressed still exist in the present day “Even though we now live in the ‘information age’, we can see every day that what Graunt established was true: that our sense of our own demography is both approximate and prone to be dominated by cultural factors.”

By Matt Elton in "BBC History Magazine", UK, November 2016, excerpt p.13. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.