Surveying European Women's History since the Millenium: A Comparative Review

Attempts to survey modern European women's history have come a long way since the 1970s. From Becoming Visible: Women in European History, edited by Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (1977; 1987; 1997), to the remarkable five volume History of Women in the West, edited and overseen by Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot (English edition, 1992–94), via Patricia Branca's brief, role-centered Women in Europe since 1750 (1978), Priscilla Robertson's eccentric and entertaining An Experience of Women: Pattern and Change in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1984), and Marilyn J. Boxer's and Jean H. Quataert's innovative thematic approach in Connecting Spheres: Women in the Western World, 1500 to the Present (1987; 2000), we can now draw on a vastly broader scope of knowledge about women of every rank, religion, and situation (urban or rural).¹ These edited essay collections, while chronologically comprehensive, never pretended to be synthetic or truly comparative as did Bonnie G. Smith's 560 page synthesis Changing Lives: Women in European History Since 1700 (1989).² Undoubtedly the most ambitious synthetic effort to date is A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present, by Bonnie S. Anderson and Judith P. Zinsser (1988; 2000).³ There is no doubt that women's history is infinitely richer, vastly more informed, nuanced, complex and comprehensive, reflecting the diversity of the women being studied as well as the mass of findings. But have we arrived at a truly comprehensive, comparative history of European women?

We now know enough to launch studies that explore similarities and differences, along with change over time and space. Yet comparative work that bridges more than two countries remains at an early stage. The expertise of most Anglophone scholars, largely national and monolingual (or, at best, bilingual) limits their capacity to work in the primary sources of more than a few prominent European countries, a handicap that becomes increasingly apparent as women's history scholarship in Hungarian, Russian, various Slavic languages, and Greek advances. Reliance on secondary works, especially in English or French, becomes increasingly necessary and increasingly problematic. Scholars based in Europe, notably Anne Cova, now spearhead efforts to encourage comparative analysis among other European-based women's historians. With few exceptions, however, these colleagues remain bounded, even more than we Anglophones, by the...