If you read enough medieval history, you see a lot of what you would expect regarding the roles of women. Women often labored on traditional tasks in support of a household or non-threatening pursuits if they were from wealthier or higher-status families. Some women became trapped in prostitution. A woman’s freedom frequently was curtailed by a mixture of customary, legal, and religious restrictions, and the necessities related to survival were a strong influence on individual choices.

But you also see a fair number of outliers (among not only the nobility, wealthy families, and families in cities but also widows of all classes, women who never married, and nuns in various orders). You can find some examples of female merchants or shopkeepers or the daughters of educated men leading lives that appear to have given them a great amount of control over their existence.

Men in cities appear to have married significantly later in life than men in villages, so the number of widows in towns and cities, women who inherited some property or rights to property, seems to have been noticeable.

In numerous sources, I’m seeing evidence of differential wages (i.e., women being paid less than men for similar tasks), but also equal wages in places facing extreme labor shortages. So undoubtedly the standard practices of society “encouraged” women to marry or remarry if they wanted a stable and prosperous existence. A common woman could supplement her family’s income, but she was not supposed to earn as much as a male head of household. That kind of social pressure is probably why a lot of the women who appear to be running a business are running inns, bakeries, breweries, and other types of household-work-adjacent establishments. Yet most families needed income and as much of it as they could get. So women show up in the records as active in many other trades, including fish trading, metalworking, and textiles.

A modern reader of medieval history will encounter accounts of a “shifted-forward” life cycle that are startling or alarming to modern sensibilities. As the father of a young daughter, I remember being stunned when I encountered the evidence not only of marriages but of childbirths by young wives or mothers in the twelve- to fifteen-year-old range. I also remember being relieved to discover that those cases were not as common as some historians have stated or implied. A lot of medieval women married in their twenties or not at all.

Add a simple fact to your understanding: every woman (mothers, sisters, daughters, grandmothers, aunts, midwives) knew that childbearing and childbirth were dangerous for women, and they knew about both maternal and infant mortality with an immediacy that modern people in developed countries struggle to wrap their heads around.

A choice to delay marriage or avoid childbirth was a common and logical decision, especially when socially respectable paths like the theoretical or actual celibacy of serving in a household or becoming a nun existed for many women. According to my reading, at one point in time, every county in England had at least one monastery, and many had a nunnery, too. And almost all households who could afford to, at least ten to twenty percent of all households, employed anywhere from one to hundreds of servants.

According to Goldberg, her book (see below) was a response to one question: “How far was marriage an economic necessity for medieval women?” Her key finding, or argument if you’d rather, is that after the Black Death and mid-century pestilences and certainly by sometime around 1377, “women were able to support themselves outside marriage” (351). They appear to have been able to do so as servant laborers and in other types of work at least through the early decades of the fifteenth century.

She also points out that many historians overlook cases in which a female essentially ran the household businesses when the male was ailing or injured. Goldberg’s research has some interesting findings about how lack of access to capital significantly constrained the scope of women’s economic activity. But she sees a cyclical pattern of changing circumstances giving women more economic freedom and then societal reaction forcing women back out of economic spheres of action, with the effect of making a role within a marriage a more prosperous or necessary choice—in other words, a cyclical power struggle.

Add male combat deaths during long, bloody wars to the picture, and you are going to have a social reality in which at any given point in time, women are running a lot of households and businesses, at least for a while.

If historians can miss the ebb and flow of gender roles in society or in a particular region depending upon which decade or data set they examine, the point for a medievalist writer is: you have wide latitude for constructing a believable range of autonomy for your female characters even in more traditional societies. A social role might not be the norm, it might not be the social ideal, but holding it was a possibility that a strong-willed woman often could achieve, albeit perhaps with risks.

Most of the good social histories have at least a chapter or sections in some chapters on the situation for women, but here are a few of the most useful books I’ve found so far:

Judith M. Bennett, A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader and the World of English Peasants Before the Plague, 2021 (1998)

P. J. P. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire, c. 1300–1520, 1992

Barbara Hanawalt, The Wealth of Wives: Women, Law, and Economy in Late Medieval London, 2007

Frances and Joseph Gies, Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages, 1987.

Charles Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages [Good sections on women in households and the economy as well as live-in servants]