The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany (review)

Recently a colleague asked me over lunch that age-old question whether women really have a history, for isn’t their story eternal? Ulinka Rublack’s book reminded me of the differences that women’s history makes. For many of us, the gift to the field arises from learning to interpret what is different, and struggling to merge that knowledge with a greater enterprise. An eternal story in itself.

I say this about the difference a study can make not so much because this excellent book takes us into the specifics of a time and place, sixteenth and seventeenth century Württemberg, but because at the heart of the text lies a meditation on sexuality, motherhood, female historical identity, and the early modern legal prescriptions which aimed to establish and to enforce attitudes about these.

In brief, the text consists of seven chapters. The first three discuss gossip and accusation, trial procedures, and property crimes. The final four address crimes of sexual activity, infanticide, and married life. Sex and biology, or the ways women were rendered in terms of these, are dominant throughout. That focus could fuel impressions of women’s history as an unchanging story. Rublack’s primary argument, however, is that change did occur for women in early modern society through a new ethic of absolute patriarchal order and a policing of the boundaries of female behavior.

The text contains a number of themes: the use of law by elites to reinforce gender hierarchies “rooted in a distinction between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’”; a strengthening of patriarchal order; the naturalization of motherhood; community policing; and a changing atmosphere of crisis and disorder. Because the book divides its chapters into types of crime, it does not move chronologically, nor with any logic related to space. One never loses track of the general idea that women were affected by a changing moral order. But one does not easily maintain a clear sense of how change was occurring according to any one theme. Still, that is not a major drawback.

We learn that crimes for women were not of the same shape as crimes for men. Survival, or better yet thriving, was key for both, yet what thriving entailed for women and how they were allowed to pursue it could be distinct. These women stole in order to support friends and lovers so that they might have the relations they fantasized as possible if just a little more time or a bit more money or a bit more heart could be available. They fell prey to unwanted pregnancies, to infanticide, to lives that they tossed forward onto the road in the hope they might know the autonomy which their day told them was the individual’s capacity.

These are largely peasant or working class women, frequently without parents or community support. Little in their lives inspired a belief that complacency would yield improvement. In fact the pregnant, or even sexually active, single woman knew her situation was socially volatile and threatened her own survival. These women aimed to manipulate authorities and confidantes alike in the struggle for what they clearly felt was their right, i.e. life itself, and they confirm the independent mindedness of even the most oppressed or officially subordinated members of a society.

A felt sense of gender bias was not absent, though primarily witnessed in the accounts of slightly older women who stole portions of food so that their pay equaled that of males. Unlike wealthier women whose cases I have seen in Cologne, these working class women did not hint at the bogusness of male judicial authority. But both groups showed evidence of not agreeing with the superior position of men whom they saw as their social equals, that is, as men like their own husbands, sons, and fathers, and as men whose ways they felt long familiar with.

Rublack’s book attests to the difference that is women’s history, but less so to the difference that women made...