Talk:Mary Frith

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): SarahK86.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 03:32, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Date of Death
The online version of the Newgate Calendar gives her date of death as 1663 but the article has 1659 - how is this?--Streona (talk) 09:20, 10 March 2010 (UTC)
 * It looks like most sources, including The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography give 1659 as the date of death. Kaldari (talk) 21:35, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

This article offers a full description of Frith's life, with a lot of detail about her actions and the context surrounding her. However, there is a heavy reliance on a source from historyandwomen.com which seems to be a blog. There are multiple sections that are missing citations or have the indication for a citation needed. Kmackiw (talk) 04:04, 3 March 2017 (UTC)


 * I plan to add to the Mary Frith Wikipedia page since it is considered a start up page and can use more information. Besides including more facts about what we know of her life I can also go into more detail on her cross-dressing/smoking and how that challenged gender norms of her day. I plan to use the following sources:
 * Mowry, Melissa. "Thieves, Bawds, and Counterrevolutionary Fantasies: The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith." Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 5, no. 1 (Spring-Summer 2005): 26-48.
 * Rustici, Craig. "The Smoking Girl: Tobacco and the Representation of Mary Frith." Studies in Philosophy 96, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 159-179.
 * Wynne-Davies, Marion. "Orange Women, Female Spectators, and Roaring Girls: Women and Theater in Early Modern England." Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England 22 (2009): 19-26
 * Hutchings, Mark. "Mary Frith at the Fortune." Early Theatre 10, no. 1 (2007): 89-108.SarahK86 (talk) 06:59, 3 March 2017 (UTC)

Article Neutrality
Some sentences in the section "An Eccentric Life" contain material that may be biased or reflects an opinion rather than factual information, which should either be removed or neutralized. This can be seen in sentences such as "However, Mary seems to have been given a fair amount of freedom in a society that so frowned upon women who acted unconventionally." Other sentences in this section lacking a citation could benefit from one for the purpose of identification/clarification of a source. Mmesko1 (talk) 04:59, 31 March 2017 (UTC)Mmesko1

The title of that section, and the first paragraph, likewise seem subjective. JackMeraxes (talk) 02:36, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

Actually pretty much the whole article reads like some form of persuasive essay, doesn't it? JackMeraxes (talk) 02:47, 8 June 2020 (UTC)


 * I notice a tendency when evaluating some articles about people who are mainly of historical interest for being colorful characters to try to make them less colorful in the interest of what's perceived to be "encyclopedic." If we do that too much, readers will be wondering, "Why does this person even merit a Wikipedia article?" Is there any really objective reason why British eccentrics are remembered and liked by readers of history and literature? Pascalulu88 (talk) 16:09, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Mary Frith. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20150224050017/http://www.crimeculture.com/earlyunderworlds/Contents/Cutpurse.html to http://www.crimeculture.com/earlyunderworlds/Contents/Cutpurse.html

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 11:07, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

Boarding School Reference
The article states in the eccentric life section that Mary's uncle tried to reform her behavior by sending her to New England. I ask because she was born in the 1500s, and this part of the section, from context, appears to have happened when she was a child or young woman. But my understanding is that the New England geographic area wasn't known/explored/settled by whites until the early 1600s. If this incident occurred when she was older, I could maybe see it being possible, although for a while settlements and colonies were few and far between. Is there a rederence for this fact that might shed more light on the time frame? JackMeraxes (talk) 02:45, 8 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Good point! Pascalulu88 (talk) 16:10, 5 October 2023 (UTC)