Women On The Margins Summary

Women on the Margins written by Natalie Zemon Davis is a book that surrounds three women. This book is concentrated on three women Glikl bas Judah Leib was a wife of a Jewish merchant, Marie Guyart who was the co-founder of one of the first of many Catholic school for Amerindian women in North America, and last but not least Maria Sibylla Merian, who was a German artist and a naturalist when practicing her art she would go by an alias. All three of these women have a few things in common such as they lived in an era where women’s lived were measured in the success of their husbands success. Another thing that these three women had in common was the fact that they also lived during the seventeenth century and also religion had a big aspect of all three of these women’s lives.

Out of these three women from the seventeenth era of the modern early European time I would like to concentrate on a woman by the name of Gliki Bas Judah Leib. This was a woman who had her fair shares of trials and tribulations throughout the seventeenth century. She was a woman who did not enjoy much of her childhood
Gliki and her then husband Joseph had fourteen children, which many of them did not survive. Despite her being married at a very young age, it was not uncommon among many people of the seventeenth century; it was especially common among Jewish people of higher class. “This early age of marriage was much in contrast with that of the Christian women in Hamburg and elsewhere in western Europe, who rarely took their vows before they were eighteen, but it was not uncommon among better-off Jews in central and eastern Europe” (11). I feel that Jewish women have different set of standards upon their lives unlike women who were practicing the religion of Christianity or