England . For extremely noticeable , highly placed women like Elizabeth Tudor , Mary Queen of Scots , and Elizabeth Talbot , Countesses of Shrewsbury "Bess of Hardwick ) in the Renaissance period , and for thousands of largely unidentified women of the merchant and gentry classes in the seventeenth century who thoroughly imitated the possessions of the wealthy , needlework offered the means to perpetuate , use , and even vigilantly restructure the cultural category of "woman " from within a community of women . Women reacted to the unchanging restriction...











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