by Olivia Mitchell
Women read. Throughout the world, female literacy rates are climbing steadily—according to The World Bank statistics, the entire planet has an adult female literacy rate of approximately 82.8% and it is expected to continue rising as better access to education is granted to young women and girls (“Literacy Rate”). Although women are huge consumers of literature, the availability of books to the female population was repressed for a long time—they didn’t need to read in order to have children, which was considered one of their main purposes. While reading literature from the Middle Ages through the 18thcentury, I’ve found myself curious about the target audiences of my text. Although women were reading and writing during this time period, it seems as though there is a common misconception that women simply were never given the opportunity to do either—after all, women have historically been given next to nothing when compared to men. It would be logical to assume that women, not being given equal access to education, wouldn’t have any opportunities to learn (especially when the percentage of literate people was fairly low in general). However, affluent women were expected to be at least slightly literate, if only to make them better mothers and wives (Pak).
Then, of course, there are the women who sought a higher education than their peers and joined convents in order to achieve it. Nuns during the Middle Ages were expected to be able to comprehend biblical teachings, and reading was required. Nuns who were fully committed to their scholarship were given the same level of respect as the men in their class, and some went on to achieve college degrees (Pak). One group of literate nuns during this time were the Syon nuns, who spent their lives teaching religious texts. These women were masters of their subjects, and used teaching as a devotional activity (Grise). This was incredibly important to their duties as teachers; women weren’t allowed to preach, but they could instruct, and they did so through the literature available to them.
Not only devotional women were reading at the time—some wealthy families were able to give their daughters education, granting them access to literacy. One example commonly used in literary studies is the Paston family, who kept roughly a thousand letters, many written by Margaret Paston. Scholars take note of Margaret’s insistence on record-keeping and call into question the way that women were taught to both read and write, as the letters aren’t incredibly literary (Douglas). Through Margaret Paston’s letter-writing and documentation, we are able to see one of the many ways that women were involved in text and literature: practicality.
Works Cited
Douglas, Jennifer. “‘Kepe Wysly Youre Wrytyngys’: Margaret Paston’s Fifteenth-Century Letters.” Libraries & the Cultural Record, vol. 44, no. 1, 2009, pp. 29–49. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25549535.
Grisé, C. Annette. “Prayer, Meditation and Women Readers in Late Medieval England: Teaching and Sharing Through Books.” Texts and Traditions of Medieval Pastoral Care: Essays in Honour of Bella Millett, edited by Cate Gunn and Catherine Innes-Parker, NED – New edition ed., Boydell and Brewer, 2009, pp. 178–192. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.7722/j.ctt14brsm6.20.
UNESCO Institute for Statistics. “Literacy Rate, Adult Total (% of People Ages 15 and above).” The World Bank, 2018, data.worldbank.org/indicator/se.adt.litr.zs.