The Household and the Making of History: A Subversive View of the Western Past (review)

Using an interdisciplinary approach, Hartman answers one of the crucial questions that economic historians ask, Why did Western Europe singularly usher in the modern world? Previous historians have offered two theories predicated upon the idea that Western Europe was a unique and dynamic center of political and economic change. One theory holds that Europeans were more inventive due to their new system of national states; the other places the impetus upon Europe's early capitalist structures. Building on Hajnal's theory, Hartman argues that "a prior and distinctive development" occurred before these two "interdependent master-processes" (3). ¹ What laid the foundation for major economic and political changes of the emerging modern world, according to Hartman, was the distinctive European family and household system, "whose most crucial feature, late marriage for women, appeared in the manorial regions of northwestern Europe at the end of the Roman Empire" (243). A reliance on female labor and late marriage for women "generated a set of shared experiences, attitudes, and values that profoundly affected how people in the region thought and behaved" (243). Hartman persuasively argues that this "crucial feature" deserves to be placed at the center of all of Western history for a proper understanding of the past. Indeed, she suggests that sixteenth-century religious upheaval, the scientific revolution, the growth of nation-states, the Enlightenment, witch hunting, homophobia, and the emergence of capitalism and democracy can be fully understood when this distinctive Western phenomenon is considered.

This unique early Western European pattern—first instituted to serve the landholding needs of patriarchs—unintentionally spurred several developments that contributed to the emergence of a modern mentalité. The ordinary peasant family's decision to keep females working at home and postponing marriage until their mid-twenties, provided an environment in which men and women had more choice in spouse selection. It also increased female survival rates and encouraged "life-cycle service"—a strategy devised by families when the need for labor lessened. Young female domestic servants moved frequently from place to place, often under yearly contracts, which offered women "greater personal responsibility for their fates," as well as many opportunities to meet potential mates—outside of parental control (57). "Life-cycle service" led to an early reliance upon the nuclear family as the chief residential form because extended wage-earning employment for both sexes promoted pooling of resources and a desire to establish new and independent households. Hartman suggests that for most "ordinary young persons, their release from patriarchal networks that continued to hold them fast in so many other [early marriage] societies can be recognized to have come not from the outside but from their own families' collective deliberation and action" (100).

This "collective deliberation and action," and the unstable nuclear families that it produced, ultimately led to a pervasive and persistent Western belief in the importance of gender difference, a sexual hierarchy favoring men, and women's resistance to male dominance. The peculiar Western European marriages that developed because women married later, amplified women's agency—in both the home and beyond—as it served to undermine the authority of men as strict patriarchs. "Since new brides and grooms were typically the only resident adults in brand new households, shared decision making in running those households was more likely to occur from the outset, especially as women often brought resources they themselves had earned to the creation of those households" (32). Unlike the early-marriage system's multi-family households in the rest of the world, these Western European nuclear families fostered innovative decision making—in both long- and short-term planning for the increasingly fragile family's existence—that would be fraught with friction and conflict. These unstable gender relationships and...