Feminist scholarship tends to stress the extent to which women in the early modern period were valued only in terms of their commodity value in male-to-male exchanges, and that the primary ties in that society were in fact male-to-male. Luce Irigaray argues that although patriarchal society appears to be heterosexual it is in fact homo-social because the relationships that are acknowledged in patriarchy are political and economic ones amongst men:

Ana Castillo clarifies that, when commodities are ‘given value by men and exchanged by men, but men themselves cannot enter … as commodities’, woman ‘does not exist except as an object of transaction … [and] except through male perception’.

In Jacobean society, though some scholars stress the exceptions, women were dependent rather than autonomous. The distribution of economic resources based on the laws of primogeniture and patriarchal inheritance favoured older men above younger men and men over women.