Family Roles, Women, and Sex: Views through Early Modern Europe

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How society views family roles, women, and sex, speaks to the idea of the time. Late Medieval Europe viewed these topics through the lens of the Catholic Church. These views began to a transition toward the lens of the law through events like the Reformation and voyages to the New World. Advances in science changed these ideas for it opened gateways of intellectual discourse. The French Revolution demonstrates the changes to understanding of family roles, women, and sex had changed; from a marriage which was wholesome where sex was sacred and a woman was to rear children to a marriage which was broken where sex was open to public scrutiny.
In the discourse of family relations, views of women, and sex, it is necessary to begin with the standing that Catholicism held on the issues. The nuclear family model was the ideal of the Catholic Church; for this model provided protection, stability, and business connections. Ozment describes the nuclear family as the “total subjection of the wife to home and husband, of the home to the production of children, and of the children to the will of their parents” (Ozment, pg. 2). This view provides that a woman’s only purpose in life was to marry and bear children; if this was not viable she could enter the convent as not to be a finical burden upon her family. The Catholic Church also had strict views on the topic of sex, which was no sex outside of marriage and only in marriage to procreate. This view was held for the Church believed that “an upright person took pleasure only in God and used the things of the world to God’s glory, fallen men and women were enslaved to their lust and passions, no longer masters of their wills, and eager to worship the world in place of its creator” (Ozment, pg....

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...ked “the court, the church, the aristocracy, the academies, the salons, and the monarchy itself” through the lens of sexual sensationalism (Hunt, pg. 91). Sex in society was recognized as a political satire; however views that sex was to be shared privately between man and woman still lingered, for the actions of Marie Antoinette were scandalous for she was breaking the common view of proper sexual conduct.
The French Revolution brought about change in the view of family from a political stance. In late medieval Europe to early modern Europe, there had been a social hierarchy based upon family structure; “the king had been the head of a social body held together by bonds of deference; peasants deferred to their landlords…wives to their husbands, and children to their parents. Authority in the state was explicitly modeled on authority in the family” (Hunt, pg. 3).

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