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

As I was examining the evocative images in Geraldine Sheridan's book, I summoned my teenage daughter to look at the engravings of women carrying fifty pounds of herring on their backs and participating in the grueling work of shoreline fishing. Her horror was palpable, and we agreed that we are very lucky to lead privileged lives in the twenty-first century.

This is a powerful book. Sheridan explores the nature of women's work under the Ancien Régime, taking as her key sources two sets of images from the eighteenth century: those of women working from Diderot's Encyclopédie, and those from the Description des arts et métiers published by the Académie royale des sciences. Both collections consist of thousands of plates, not all of which were published, which Sheridan tracked down in various manuscript repositories. These visual images are the crux of her book and the primary source evidence for her richly developed interpretation of women's work in the hundred or so years prior to the Industrial Revolution.

Sheridan examines women's work in five areas: the traditional economy (agriculture, mining, and fishing); artisanal trades (including ornamental and luxury products—such as fans, feather-dressing, and lacemaking—and essentials, such as candles, nails, and pins); textile work; manufactories, or larger, proto-industrial production; and commercial activity. She moves back and forth between the historical literature and the evidence she finds in the engravings, which she both interprets and problematizes. Her clear prose elucidates the complicated work processes presented in the images.

Gender is central to her analysis, in ways that reinforces the work of historians such as Olwen Hufton and Daryl M. Hafter. However, Sheridan's careful exploration and contextualization of these images introduces evidence about the nature of women's work that some may find surprising. Despite Jean-Jacques Rousseau's insistence on the fragility and domestic nature of the female sex, women often performed work that was physically demanding, indeed rejected by men as too unpleasant. Status associated with types of work, not the degree of physical exertion, drove the gender division of labor; women were field workers, porters, diggers, and haulers, doing work for which they received half a man's wages, and half a man's food allowance. While men sometimes argued that certain kinds of work were too dangerous for women, it was usually only in the context of efforts to exclude women from higher status (and better paid) jobs. Backbreaking labor was the lot of rural women; their urban working class sisters died at a young age in the lethal silk and textile workshops.

Sheridan highlights what her engravings conceal as much as what they reveal. Shadowy women are nearly hidden in the backgrounds of certain prints, such as that of a shipbuilder's yard, carrying heavy loads (191, Pl. 4.5). Guild regulations restricted the work women could legally do, and yet, the images show women working side by side with men, performing the skilled work of gold and silver filagree (91, Pl. 2.7), among other forbidden trades. Still, the images underrepresent the actual work performed by women as engravers tried to show the ideal rather than reality. This meant minimizing the participation of women in guild-controlled practices. And few plates illustrate the trades that women dominated. The poorest women sold all sorts of items on city streets, "from food to matchsticks"(203), but they do not figure in the images. All-female workshops, such as those of seamstresses and the linen drapers guild, were ignored. Sheridan points out, "It would appear that these women who broke with the dominant patriarchal forms tended to remain invisible to the 'technological' writers and researchers: again, skill, knowledge, and commercial acumen were easily overlooked when they were solely the province of women" (79).

This is an oft-repeated theme: skill and experience were undervalued or denied as such in women at the same...