The Weaker Vessel, Lady Antonia Fraser's study of women in seventeenth-century England, opens with a personal anecdote. Fraser described the topic of her new book to a distinguished (male) friend; before vanishing into his club, he turned and asked, "Were there any women in seventeenth-century England?" The Weaker Vessel is her attempt "in part at least" to answer that question. The answer, more than 500 pages long, is armed with a host of anecdotes as telling as the one about the jesting clubman. As any modern historian might have told the fellow, it requires a significant degree of perversity to persist in thinking that history has been a masculine enterprise. Obviously there were women in seventeenth-century England. The question for us, heirs and heiresses of that pivotal moment in early modern England, is: What kinds, and what were they doing?

Fraser's unofficial subtitle gives us a preview of her findings and approach: "Women in 17th-century England—heiresses and dairymaids, holy women and prostitutes, criminals and educators, widows and witches, midwives and mothers, heroines, courtesans, prophetesses, businesswomen, ladies of the court, and that new breed, the actress." That generous list illustrates the book's virtue—its teeming fullness and diversity—and its vice, if such profligacy can be termed a vice—its crowded particularity. Reading The Weaker Vessel is rather like looking at Brueghel's "Children's Games," where each inch of canvas is crammed with life: some groups of figures salacious, some edifying, some enigmatic. Insofar as Fraser gives this picture a unifying theme, it is the powerful impediment posed by the definition of woman as "the weaker vessel." Supported by theological, social, legal and political edicts and backed up by the nearly perpetual pregnancy that seventeenth-century women endured (with fifteen to twenty a not unusual number), this definition shaped a woman's life.

The most obvious counter to this description of seventeenth-century women can be found in the behavior of a great many women during England's civil war, nine years of martial mayhem that preoccupied and disrupted much of the population during the middle years of the century. Fraser tells us that she was first attracted to her topic by the numerous stories she encountered of valiant women who fought in that war. They are the "heroines" of Fraser's subtitle, and include such notable viragos as Mary Lady Bankes, intransigent defender of (royalist) Corfe Castle, who during a siege took command of the castle's upper ward and, aided by her daughters, her women servants and five soldiers, defeated the enemy by heaving stones and hot embers over the walls onto their scaling ladders. By way of contrast, Fraser recounts the tactics of a more "modest" heroine, Brilliana Lady Harley, whose defense of Brampton Bryan Castle relied on manipulations of the attacking (royalist) army's chivalrous reluctance to assault a "weaker vessel." The castle surrendered only after Lady Harley had died and its defenders could no longer rely on the protection due her "sex and honour."

These generally highborn Boadiceas provide the most predictable stories Fraser tells. Far more compelling are the anecdotes that reveal the extensive range of female activity in less traumatic, if no less political, contexts during the revolutionary century between the death of Queen Elizabeth and the accession of Queen Anne. We meet, for example, Mrs. Constance Pley, an indefatigable and successful businesswoman who ran her family's marine supply company, boldly dunning her King for payments constantly in arrears. We meet Cromwell's eccentric granddaughter, Bridget Bendish, at work all day beside male laborers in the salt mines she inherited from her husband and, in the evenings, a brilliant presence splendidly dressed for social occasions. We meet Joan Dant, who began as a penniless widow and died at the age of 84 worth more than £9,000, with business connections in Paris and Brussels.

Fraser's guess as to why seventeenth-century women were permitted to engage in business activities when female authorship, for instance, was a serious social transgression is an example of the acute commentary that accompanies her stories: "After all, business practice in a woman could be seen as an extension of her role as the mainstay of her household, whereas learning and authorship were dangerously unfeminine pursuits." (Just now, when the politics surrounding Geraldine Ferraro have made domestic expertise in its largest sense a qualification for high office, such reasoning seems quite apt.) Fraser is always aware of how the grid that overlay women's opportunities decreed the form of whatever achievements were made. But she does not pause to suggest that the businesswoman may also have been an acceptable and honored figure because no one realized (or would admit) that business was in great part what the civil war had been about: the revolution and the subsequent Restoration had an economic impact as profound as, and more pervasive than, the political and theological upheavals. As for the prejudice against women authors, I suggest that it descended from Renaissance Humanism, which made knowledge of the classical languages, especially Latin, a prerequisite for membership in the ruling elite. It was worth censuring female authorship because it seemed close to laying claim to such membership, just as it was worth omitting classical training from female education (a lack Fraser passionately laments). Very much later, when literature had dwindled into social omament, divorced from the real business of society—business itself—petticoat authors were allowed more freedom, and petticoat entrepreneurs far less.

This is not to suggest that all radical developments in the seventeenth century were unconscious—although a midcentury confusion over what privileges property ownership conferred allowed a temporary accident of local female suffrage, a freedom soon squelched. In the personal history of Elizabeth Lilburne, wife to the famous Leveller John Lilburne, Fraser analyzes the transformation of the "petitioning women" of the 1640s—women who claimed for themselves a "proportionate share in the freedom of this Commonwealth"—into the "despairing—but still soliciting—wife of the 1650s."

One of the most absorbing sets of stories Fraser tells concerns women from the independent religious sects that arose during the period Christopher Hill described as the moment "the world turned upside down." While these women did not float to the top on the breath of sacred inspiration, they could make political claims for themselves that had not been possible before, and Fraser traces the effects of religious experimentation on their lives.

The extraordinary travels and travails of some Quaker women, preaching both in England and New England, do indeed "compel one's awe." One Elizabeth Hooton, although she had petitioned and won from King Charles a certificate empowering her to settle in New England, was hounded wherever she went. She was tied to a Cambridge, Massachusetts, whipping post and "lashed ten times with a three-stringed whip, three knots in each string." Subsequently, "at Watertown, willow-rods were used; at Dedham … she received ten lashes at the cart-tail." Beaten and torn, she refused to give up, persisting in her ministry for five years in Massachusetts before returning to England. Mary Fisher went even further: having suffered her share of flogging in New England, she was later received hospitably by the Sultan and Vizier of Turkey: "There was a certain irony in the fact that the low position of women in the Moslem world enabled the Turks … to appreciate … how remarkable an individual Mary Fisher must be."

Fraser traces a general arc of opportunity for English women that rises to its high point with "The Petition of Women" (for government reforms and the release of imprisoned Levellers) in 1649 and moves toward its nadir as the century draws to a close and the monarchy returns. It is regrettable that there is no considered discussion here of the impact of the Restoration on women's position. Doubtless Fraser's attention to such analysis was diverted by her interest in an intriguing creation of the Restoration: the actress, spectacular star of the new and wittily decadent stage. No women had, of course, played on English stages before Charles II brought back with him a continental taste for seeing pretty women perform—and a concomitant taste for pretty women as mistresses. One of the intriguing bits of information Fraser lavishly dispenses is that the forms of address "Mrs." and "Miss" did not distinguish women in terms of their marital status but in terms of moral categories: "Mrs." was used for respectable women and "Miss" for the other kind. Many of the "Mrs. Johnsons" and "Mrs. Uphills" listed in Restoration dramatis personae bore honorifics which granted respectability where few expected—and many wanted—to find it. "Mrs." was pronounced "Mistress"—which with these actresses was often (and often royally) the case.

In a sense, Fraser can't help but portray the age as a reflection of its monarch or, in the case of Cromwell, its Protector. It is almost as if the undeniably attractive and charming personality of Charies II (a personality Fraser has chronicled in her engaging Royal Charles) was the pivot that turned his glittering world. (Perhaps the character of the King does have an impact equal to the muter political forces of the economy at large.) Oliver Cromwell, another of Fraser's earlier subjects, was not without gallantry himself, and in one of the stranger developments described in The Weaker Vessel, the Protector's own weakness for pleading ladies led to long lines of royalist women asking for mercy (and certificates of sequestration) at the hands of the Committee for Compounding after the civil war. As the imprisoned Thomas Knyvett wrote to his wife in 1644, "Women solicitors are observed to have better Audience than masculine malignants."

Fraser has written lengthy and masterful biographies of three English rulers, James I, Charles II and Cromwell, and is, of course, the author of the immensely and deservedly popular Mary Queen of Scots. That she has chosen not to devote an entire book to any one of the intriguing commoners in her latest work does not mean that for this biographer it takes the lives of innumerable ordinary women to equal in historical importance the life of a single ruler. Her interests here differ, and thus her procedures begin to move her from the study of personality to demographics and social history. For the need to chronicle so specifically the deeds of so many stretches the biographer's art—almost to the breaking point. Because Fraser wishes to exemplify different arguments, she often breaks up an individual woman's story into widely separated chapters. This necessitates many references back ward and forward in the book, which impedes her narrative and blurs the impact of any single figure. If she has felt compelled to sacrifice pace and analysis to inclusiveness, she has done so in order to persuade us that the real experience of seventeenth-century women was in the heterogeneous lives of individuals. Other historians and theoreticians may choose to neaten her picture by other kinds of analysis or feel the need to make her points more precise and explanatory. But it will be hard for anyone to paint a fuller, more vivid or more abundantly detailed portrait of women in seventeenth-century England.