Louder than Words: Ways of Seeing Women Workers in Eighteenth-Century France (review)

Decades ago, feminist readers of Diderot's Encyclopédie noticed that although the text rarely spoke about women as workers, the engravings were full of them. That observation has finally been developed into an excellent full-length study. In addition to the engravings of the Encyclopédie, published between 1762 and 1772, Geraldine Sheridan has added illustrations from the Descriptions des arts et métiers, studies of specific trades made by the Académie Royale des Sciences. These were begun in the 1690s, often with a scholarly researcher and an artist visiting a workplace, after which detailed engravings were made. Some of the Descriptions were finally published between 1761 and 1788, but many remained unpublished. Taking the published and unpublished plates from these two sources together, Sheridan has found over two hundred images of female workers, including more than thirty that have never before been published. For readers of this journal, then, this book is a gold mine of original sources, as well as a graceful and insightful analysis. Texas Tech Press is also to be commended for the image quality, which makes close study of these engravings possible.

As Sheridan explains in her thoughful introduction, the purposes of the Descriptions and the Encyclopédie differed. The Académie Royale des Sciences sought to enable technological progress by presenting and promoting best practices, so the engravings are ideal types, not illustrations of one particular workshop. The plates often show a scene of the work process at the top, with details of tools, machines, the product at various stages, and variations in the product below. Diderot's agenda was similar, but more pointed: he regarded the guilds as barriers to the type of rational progress favored by the philosophes. Thus the plates in the Encyclopédie are even more stylized, with the scene at the top showing workers sitting by themselves, each carrying out one stage of production, in a spare room devoid of the bustle and communication that were common in a normal workshop. In both, the women are generally shown dressed simply but neatly, with few distinguishing facial or physical features.

Neither group of engravings presented the full range of women's work, as they largely overlook domestic servants and the casual sector, but what is here is astounding. Sheridan organizes the book by type of occupation, with a chapter on the traditional economy of agriculture, mining, and fishing; a second on artisanal trades, including luxury products and essential goods; a third on textile production, because this was such a large employer of women; a fourth on manufactories, those sites where workers were gathered together, often using large machinery; and a fifth on commercial activity.

The plates showing agriculture, mining, and fishing make clear how physically demanding much of women's work was: they haul heavy nets in shore fishing; rake sand for shellfish and kelp; wind huge windlasses bringing baskets of coal and (male) workers to the surface; carry baskets with more than a hundred pounds of wood, fish, or charcoal briquets; climb up and down ladders inside of smokehouses to put herring on racks. In the urban artisanal trades, women engage in a huge range of occupations in which skill, training, ability, and strength are all required: they make and paint fans, prepare gold filigree, ornament snuffboxes, make artificial pearls from glass, plate mirrors, decorate buttons, reel, spin, and warp silk, and weave ribbons. Only rarely does the text accompanying the plates (begrudgingly) note their skill, however, and sometimes it even refers to them in the masculine, as an ouvrier. Recent studies of the rise of consumption in the eighteenth century have stressed the role of women as purchasers of the new consumer goods; Sheridan's book makes clear just how many of these new products were made by women.

The first volumes of the Encyclopédie and the Descriptions were published in the same year as Jean...