By David A. Bell
The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, 1500-1800 by Olwen Hufton (Knopf, 638 pp., $35).
Consider a few scenes from the history of women in Europe:
1. In the late seventeenth century, at Versailles the young Duc of Saint-Simon asked an influential courtier for his 14-year-old daughter's hand in marriage. The courtier replied that the girl in question had already committed herself to the church. Not to worry, Saint-Simon countered brightly. Any of her six younger sisters would do. What he really wanted, he explained, was to marry the family.
2. In 1721, in the Breton capital of Rennes, following a disastrous fire, the city fathers undertook to rebuild the city's drainage system. In one of the old drains, workers uncovered the skeletons of eighty newborn infants, apparent victims of infanticide at the hands of their mothers.
3. In 1576, in England, the legal age of consent for females was lowered from 12 to 10.
4. In early modern Ireland, it was an established practice for penniless sons of the minor gentry to abduct and to rape young heiresses. Having been deflowered, the women found their reputations hopelessly compromised and, in many cases, had no choice but to marry their rapists.
5. In the early modern Netherlands and Britain, more than 200 women were discovered to have passed themselves off for years as men. Some of them fought in the British and Dutch navies, where they became legendary for their bravery. Several more contracted marriage with other women. In a few rare cases, while disguised as men, they even committed bigamy.
These are just a few of the facts and stories, often horrifying, sometimes darkly comic, occasionally inspiring that Olwen Hufton recounts in her sparkling history of the prospects awaiting women in Western Europe between 1500 and 1800. It is a book that revels in the gritty details of forgotten lives. Ranging with enormous skill and knowledge from the glitter and pomp of Versailles to the shining stoops of Amsterdam's middle class houses (and just who was wash ing them?) to the fetid urban slums and dark, wretched, dirt-floored farmhouses, often shared with farm animals, where most early modern Europeans were born and died, Hufton aims at nothing less than a total history of these women's experiences. To a remarkable degree, she succeeds. And yet in some important ways she fails, and in so doing Hufton reveals some of the limits of the sort of history that she writes.
Hufton's sort of history is not merely "women's history," it is also what is sometimes called "history from below." The latter method represents a turning away from the doings of the rich and powerful in order to bring the forgotten masses of the common people back into the light of historical analysis. In 1974, Hufton produced what is still one of the masterpieces of this historiography, The Poor of Eighteenth Century France, which presented a sweeping and evocative picture of how most French men and women actually lived in the age of Diderot and Madame de Pompadour.
Always uncomfortably close to the knife-edge of subsistence, Hufton's humble subjects managed to make ends meet through what she called an "economy of makeshifts," supplementing the insufficient yields of their miserable plots of land by spinning wool, repairing tools, growing grapes wherever a vine could catch a ray of sun and a hundred other such expedients. Every year, millions of them would take to the road as migrant laborers, tramping hundreds of miles in search of the odd penny (and just as importantly, leaving one less mouth to feed at home). And if an irrepressible tide of bad luck slopped over these meager defenses, they would slide from poverty into indigence and destitution, desperately resorting to theft, beggary and prostitution to keep from starving (one in thirteen women in Paris in the eighteenth century earned money from prostitution), sometimes even committing infanticide, and finally succumbing by the tens of thousands in times of famine or plague.
Hufton also laid out lucidly the ways in which the poor struggled to avoid such a fate. The heroines of her history were the peasant girls who would set out, between puberty and their mid-20s, to accumulate a dowry sufficient to make a good match and to establish a household prosperous enough to survive bad times. Putting in endless hours of harsh, dreary labor as domestic servants, or risking early death from tuberculosis working in the damp textile factories of Lyons or Lille, balancing the terrible loneliness of their situations against the dangers of seduction and pregnancy, facing all manner of obstacles, they patiently accumulated their pitifully small stakes, one battered copper coin at a time. Some of them met their goal; more did not.
By turning from France to Western Europe as a whole, from the eighteenth century to the entire period that historians call "early modern" and from the poor of both sexes to women of all classes, Hufton has now accumulated many other heroines. They are fully on display in her new book. There is the eighteenth-century Dutch midwife Catharina Schrader, who claimed in her memoirs to have assisted in 4,000 deliveries over more than fifty years. "The widow of a surgeon, who may have endowed her with some anatomical knowledge above the run of midwives," Hufton writes, "she was inherently suspicious of medical men when it came to the delicate business of bringing babies into the world."
And there is the seventeenth-century Venetian nun Arcangela Tarabotti, who penned eloquent works in praise of women and who denounced, far more cogently than Diderot (who wrote a novel on the subject), the practice of putting girls in convents against their will. "Her vocabulary is that of the Enlightenment which has yet to take place. The convent is hell when free will is excluded." There are also the more familiar figures of the early feminists Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges, who in 1791 wrote a "Declaration of the Rights of Woman" to protest her exclusion from the Rights of Man. But still standing front and center is the humble peasant girl, whose difficult progress from child to servant, to wife, to mother and finally, perhaps, to widow, forms the heart of the book's first 250 pages.
There are villains aplenty, too. "Edward Coke, the father of English liberties in his struggle against the absolutist tendencies of the Stuarts, tied his daughter to the bedpost and whipped her until she agreed to the match he had arranged for her," Hufton writes acidly, adding a little superfluously that "the marriage was a disaster." There are the textile owners who mercilessly exposed their mostly female labor forces to deadly working conditions, and the clerics and the philosophers who considered women nothing more than reproductive vessels, possessed of inferior powers of reasoning as well as uncontrollable lust. There are the legislators who wrote women's supposed inferiority into law, and the writers who enshrined it in poetry and prose. There are the Irish abductors. Above all, there are the priests and ministers and judges who, between 1560 and 1660, condemned tens of thousands of women to death for witchcraft. While men as well as women were accused of that crime, the learned prosecutors singled out a particular social type for particular attention: elderly, isolated, poor and often infirm women who survived only on the grudging charity of their neighbors. In their trials for witchcraft, Hufton writes, "the most tragic aspects of the female predicament were converted into a potential capital offense."
Hufton's genius as a historian is for selecting striking, visceral details that bring something of the smell and the feel of the early modern period out of the ground. Indeed, she has a particular fascination with dirt and the things that live there. She reports that one luckless farmer was found after his death to have harbored no fewer than thirty-nine separate species of worms in his digestive tract. She also relates that mothers considered the scaly infant skin ailment called cradle cap a natural protection for the developing skull, and allowed it to form a hard crust that remained on the child's head for years. "There was something of a cult of bodily filth," she explains. "It was believed that the body produced fluids that were needful to good health and which should not be washed away but merely sponged to remove odor. James I [of Great Britain] never washed more than his fingers . . . . " History from below, indeed.
It is when Hufton soars high above the level of the soil, and attempts to survey the broad landscape of her subject, that her touch becomes a little less sure, her tone markedly more hesitant. A degree of hesitation is understandable, to be sure. How can one possibly generalize about women from Sicily to Scotland and Brittany to Bavaria, over a period that ranges from Luther to the French Revolution, and across every social class? Hufton's conclusion is remarkable mostly for its lack of large claims. It is that women's lives, like men's lives, changed relatively little during these 300 years. For most women, the simple struggle for existence remained paramount, and meaningful choices about spouse, career, children, residence and so on remained severely limited.
The single most important changes between 1500 and 1800, in Hufton's account, derived from modifications in the structure of European religious life: witchcraft trials ended, in many countries convents were dissolved, charismatic sects that offered women spiritual outlets declined in importance, and religious observance became more tightly associated with "private" life--thus giving rise to the stereotype of women as particularly pious. Beyond this, a few women gained more liberty in regard to marriage, took part in a consumer revolution that allocated a special place to them as arbiters of fashion, and increasingly found work outside the home. Still, for the millions of peasant women engaged in back-breaking labor scratching subsistence out of the ground, these developments amounted to little more than distant whispers.
In this emphasis on the material constraints of life, and on the slow pace of change across the centuries, Hufton presents a very different view of the period than the view given by most of the leading women's historians working today. These historians tend to dwell less on obscure peasants and more on female writers and political figures, less on specific individuals and more on the way women and men generally were represented, mostly in the realms of literature, the arts, the law and politics. If Hufton deals with the history of women, they deal with the history of gender, by which is meant both the relationship between the sexes and the way this relationship figures in different areas of human endeavor. They tend to write cultural history rather than economic and social history, and to see the centuries that Hufton covers as notable for complex patterns of cultural change, as traditional forms of patriarchy broken down--often to be succeeded, they claim, by new and more rigorous forms of separation and discrimination.
The differences among the historians are in large part generational. Hufton, with her "history from below," belongs to a cohort of scholars trained in the heyday of the Annales school, when leading historians (particularly of France) concentrated on the slow patterns of climactic, demographic and economic change over the longue duree. It is wholly characteristic of this approach that Hufton turns only with a certain reluctance to women's participation in the realm of culture and "mentalities" after thoroughly immersing herself in the grit and grime of economic and social history. Inevitably, cultural themes get slighted. Writing by women receives a subtle, if overly compressed, thirty-nine pages, but the fascinating subject of actresses gets just two pages, and women painters (admittedly a rare species, but including such well-known figures as Vigee-Lebrun) are dismissed in a single paragraph.
Hufton also belongs to the first, pioneering, optimistic generation of feminist historians, linked to the women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s, who saw their task as recovering the stories of those women left out of history as it had been written by men, and who believed that their work, through its capacity to inspire, could palpably further the cause of women's equality. The subsequent generation of women's historians are far more complex in their analyses, and also far less certain about the potential of political action, given how deeply and intricately they perceive gender roles to be entwined with the social and cultural foundations of the modern world. Contrast Hufton's stories of inspiring heroines with Joan Wallach Scott's recent book Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man. The very first page of Scott's book brings up "the downside of feminist experience: its intractable contradictions, the obsessive repetitions that seem to doom one generation to relive the dilemmas of its predecessors, and its inability to secure equal representation for women even when a long-sought goal such as the vote has been won." Through the prism of Scott's analysis, the writings of an early feminist such as Olympe de Gouges seem inspiring, but also deeply problematic.
Hufton has certainly read and absorbed the more recent "gender history" (her bibliography runs to forty-nine closely printed pages); but she remains distinctly suspicious of it. Again and again she warns against "overspeculation," against concentrating on the "theoretical or 'generic' woman and man" at the expense of "real women" and "the vast majority of people." Again and again she cites recent feminist studies, only to ask: "How do such representations relate to the lives of real men and women?" Against postmodern feminists who sometimes treat the very category of "woman" as a "social construction," she starkly invokes biological difference: "In the early modern period, biology has to count for something. No one, for example, could plough a five-inch furrow in a condition of advanced or even early pregnancy."
To some extent, it is hard not to sympathize with Hufton's point of view. These days, works of gender history, like most sorts of cultural history, often require the reader to press through a forbidding thicket of theory, only to reach a discussion which bases vast claims on the close reading of two or three texts. The language is frequently thick with jargon. Attention is lavished on textual and visual "representations," to which vast power and influence are attributed without much consideration of how widely they circulated, or how women and men of the time received them. After a large dose of this, Hufton's insistence on the lives of "real women," and her ability to conjure up the sights and smells of the past, comes as something of a relief.
Still, a more lucid style and a more vivid subject do not by themselves make one work of history superior to another. How illuminating is Hufton's approach, particularly in regard to the present-day situation of women, compared to that of the leading gender historians? A definitive answer to this question will have to await the publication of Hufton's second volume, which will cover the massive transformations in women's lives that have occurred since 1800. But consider one founding feature of political modernity that Hufton dwells on at length, on which she has carried out pioneering research: the French Revolution.
The women's historians of the 1960s and 1970s concentrated on putting women back into the story of the Revolution: the handful of women such as de Gouges and Madame Roland, who established reputations for themselves at the time; the larger but still small number who joined revolutionary clubs and associations; and the considerably larger number who figured in the great revolutionary crowds that stormed the Bastille. Hufton herself did seminal work on that classic revolutionary figure, the female bread rioter. Subsequently, though, attention has shifted to broader and more abstract questions of gender. Why did the Revolutionary government never consider giving women the vote? (The question did arise, not only in the writings of early feminists but also in those of a major thinker such as Condorcet.) Why did the (male) revolutionaries first tolerate the creation of women's political societies and then, in 1793, abruptly close them down? Did these actions signify the sequestration of women in a purely domestic "private sphere"? More recently still, leading women's historians have made ambitious attempts to view the Revolution as a whole through the prism of gender. Lynn Hunt has offered a psychoanalytic interpretation of the event that makes the revolutionaries' hysterical treatment of the mother-figure of Marie-Antoinette (whose trial in 1793 focused as much on her supposed abuse of her son as on her alleged treason) just as important as their execution of the "father of his country," King Louis XVI. Joan Scott has asked what the exclusion of women from the suffrage says not only about the situation of women themselves, but about the contradictions of the liberal democracy that the Revolution helped to "engender."
These are the sorts of arguments that Hufton, without dismissing them entirely, tends to find unduly speculative and insufficiently supported by the evidence. It is true that literary and political texts studied by many gender historians tell us relatively little about the actual lives of the vast majority of women, and drawing large generalizations from them is indeed speculative. Yet these texts can sometimes furnish insights into the dynamics of political and cultural change that Hufton's subject matter cannot.
Consider a short book published in France in 1798, by a judge named G. Boucher-Laricharderie, on the subject of how the Revolution had wrought changes in the French national character. Rather than discussing the effects of liberty and equality, or the Terror, Boucher preferred to dilate on the changing roles of men and women. Before 1789, he wrote, queens and mistresses had dominated the royal court, and the rest of French society had slavishly followed their example: "In all conditions and all ranks, women were granted the same predominance they had usurped over kings and ministers. Thus the humiliating expression, nothing gets done without women, was in every mouth, and governed all behavior."
This state of affairs made France the laughingstock of Europe, but Boucher could take consolation from the fact that it no longer prevailed. "This strange domination," he wrote sententiously, "expired on July 14, 1789." Eight years later, he continued, the French had come to understand that women "deviate from their natural purpose when, as Rousseau energetically put it, they make men of themselves. Women should limit their learning and the use of their talents to whatever makes them good mothers and excellent wives. They should have no other dominion than that of grace and sweetness, for the very delicacy of their organs, which makes them so successful in the realm of charm, makes them incapable of grasping those grand insights that constitute the science of government."
Hufton spends relatively little time on texts of this sort, whose influence is uncertain and whose relationship to the lives of "real women" is dubious. To be sure, Boucher enormously exaggerated the power of women in France before the Revolution, as well as the extent of their retreat into a "dominion of grace and sweetness" thereafter. Hufton suggests that opinions like his represent little more than variations on the timeless theme of male misogyny. And yet Boucher's text is a remarkable one. It not only posited natural differences between men and women that rendered the latter biologically unfit for political life, it also put these differences at the heart of Boucher's conception of politics as a whole: a state could only function properly if women stayed in their own, proper, private sphere.
Moreover, Boucher expressed in particularly blunt and telling language a point of view shared by many others of the period, including Rousseau. Not everyone agreed with them. Condorcet famously asked "why individuals exposed to pregnancies and other passing indispositions should be unable to exercise rights which no one has dreamed of withholding from persons who have the gout all winter"? But why did Condorcet's egalitarian ideas (not to mention those of Olympe de Gouges) fall on such barren soil? Why did the drafters of the Napoleonic Code subsequently do so much to restrict women's legal rights? Indeed, why did women not receive the right to vote in France until 1944, and why do they still have such a feeble presence in French politics, poor Edith Cresson notwithstanding?
Attributing all this to misogyny is not sufficient. Such an explanation begs the questions of why certain people embraced misogyny and others resisted it, and why, at a moment when the French were throwing so many other ancient prejudices onto the bonfire, they maintained and even reinforced this one. That is why it is important to trace more exactly the nature and the operation of sexual ideologies through close readings of works such as Boucher's. These sources reveal how powerful men understood the world around them at the turn of the nineteenth century. The world may have resisted these men's attempts to muster it into a new order, but the attempts still remain crucial to our understanding of historical change.
Hufton would probably not deny this point. But for her it is precisely the world's resistances, the messy, complex and half-regimented reality of history, that most profoundly matters. This is what she lavishes her attention on, what she describes with such intelligence and panache. The Prospect Before Her is a tour de force. It stands as a monument to history from below, and to the first generation of women's history. But if we are to ask how our own world, and the present-day relations between the sexes in all their complexities and their contradictions, emerged out of the patriarchal peasant culture that Hufton describes, we have to look not only at the resistances, at the enormous inertia of traditional societies, but also at the attempts made to force them into new channels. And here Hufton's successors may prove better guides.
David A. Bell teaches history at Johns Hopkins University.