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“Vigor and Virtue: Women, Aging, Body, and Mind”
| When a woman in early modern England entered old age through menopause, the end of her reproductive capacity was on the one hand a loss of a profoundly important means of signaling virtue, whether through the modesty of chastity, or through the duty of motherhood. But for a healthy, well-off, literate woman, it could also be the one time when she might experience a certain distance from identification of the body with feminine, and lay claim to a share in the life of the mind—one that also had the potential to offer a replacement form of virtue in religious devotion and preparation for death. Nonetheless, the very elements of the body that a woman used to develop her mind–eyes, hands for writing, brain cells for memory and reflection–were at risk of decay and the miseries of other illnesses might well intensify. As the body returned to the forefront, the deterioration of the life of the mind might lead to one final phase—this time located in the body as the source of suffering, thus enabling a new (if grim) means of virtue through patient fortitude. These relations could be experienced in a variety of ways depending on how women regarded these years, what they read and wrote, and the type, extent, and timing of their physical debilities. This paper, then, explores the ways in which phases in women’s physical and intellectual capacities and pursuit and portrayal of virtue might intersect in their experiences of early and late old age.
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