Women's work and women's writing in the late-seventeenth century: female labour in Aphra Behn and her contemporaries

This thesis explores Aphra Behn’s representation of women’s work. In her comedies and her prose fiction, Behn depicted a necessarily limited range of forms of work performed by women, and these both reflected and were used to express criticism of the conventional and alienating inequalities of a patriarchal society. These working roles – that of the landlady, the housewife and the female servant – are primarily united by the social reality to which their interrogation, and usefulness, tends: women must undertake both physical and emotional work in order to navigate relationships to men, and to negotiate and often mitigate the prerogatives that such men claim concerning the material, financial, sexual and affective resources of women. This work is undertaken both in alliance with, and in isolation from or in opposition to, other women, and in locations that are both ostensibly private and indisputably public. Behn’s concern with the way in which labour and property relations maintain a systematic imbalance between men and woman remains, invariably, in view. I read Behn’s texts in dialogue with contemporary authors who also represented and interrogated women’s occupational identities and activities: Behn both shared in and challenged literary and cultural commonplaces about gendered labour in the seventeenth century, but her critical perspective marks out adversarial relations between men and women with a particular visibility.