UC Irvine

This dissertation offers a history of women’s work as told through stories of women’s virtue. Through Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s representations of serving, laboring, and economically vulnerable women, I examine scenes in which women imagine, negotiate, and discuss their emotional, sexual, and domestic obligations to men in the company of other women. Methodologically, the dissertation combines feminist materialist historicism, histories of women’s labor, affective and social reproductive labor theory, rhetorical history, and Aristotelian virtue ethics to ask how capacities identified as virtue are produced through historically specific forms of work and social relation. To consider the political possibilities of these scenes, I treat literary representation as part of a record of the forms of discourse in which women participated in the production of political and ethical argument. Read alongside these traditions, the conversations among Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s women become legible as literary sites where historically available forms of women’s reasoning are represented, appropriated, constrained, and sometimes imaginatively extended. Across the dissertation, I argue that refusal belongs within this history of virtue. Aristotelian virtue ethics provides a vocabulary for understanding virtue as situational judgment, arguing that conduct is virtuous because a person judges what response is fitting to particular circumstances. The women examined here repeatedly encounter situations in which conventional feminine virtues would require unreasonable, exploitative, or violent forms of availability to men. Their refusals, I argue, constitute consummate exercises of practical judgment. At the same time, these texts repeatedly relocate both these refusals and the practices of care, counsel, vulnerability, trust, and dependence within relations among women, making female community a site for the collective production of ethical knowledge. In recovering these forms of judgment, I join feminist scholarship on women’s friendship, vulnerability, labor, and political thought while insisting upon the importance of class and status in ethical reasoning. I ultimately argue that medieval and early modern literature makes visible a history in which women’s ethical and political capacities emerge not from transcendence of dependence, but from collective efforts to distinguish between relations that sustain lives and those that constrain human flourishing.