Wife of Bath: Sexuality and Gender Equity Topics

For my medieval afterlives course, I have been able to study a lot of women in the Middle Ages. This topic is interesting--the oppression one would think medieval women would be experiencing is a lot less intense than it would seem.

There is still major patriarchal dominance and women have very few rights--but they have a lot more than one would think.

One of my favorite readings happened to be after I segwayed into this topic of sex and different sex issues in the United States. However, Wife of Bath is not in the U.S., it's a very key story to feminist history.

Geoffrey Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale incorporates a complex character who has been a part of several marriages (five to be exact) and has different views on society as a whole and religious tensions with her church.

Now, I originally argued that the Wife of Bath is just a complex, ordinary character. I don't see anything particularly "feminist" right off the bat other than she questions the patriarchal senses of her society.

We see where she questions why her marriages seem wrong to the church, why her sexuality is questioned at all (when she's been part of five marriages), and why there are double-standards between the men of society vs women--that's where she starts falling into "feminist" in the Middle Ages, which is a really interesting thing.

There will be more to come from this. Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale: https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/wife-baths-prologue-and-tale-0