Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France ed. by Daryl M. Hafter and Nina Kushner (review)

The chapters in this book explore the diversity of women’s work during the long eighteenth century, paying particular attention to questions of women’s economic agency, work identity, and, in the words of the editors, “the gendering of work and the workings of gender” (1). Collectively, the chapters amply demonstrate how women at all levels of society contributed to, and helped to shape, the economy. All of them are supported by tried and true, if not particularly innovative, methods of research in archives, examining notarial records, tax rolls, contracts, and the like.

This collection certainly encourages the conclusion that women were everywhere in the eighteenth-century French economy, far beyond the activities of traditional female occupations, despite the legal and cultural barriers that they faced. Restrictions of space preclude commenting on all of the contributions, but some more than others hew tightly to the collection’s central themes.

Rafe Blaufarb opens the volume with an exploration of a seeming oxymoron—female lordship—revealing it to have been a common phenomenon across France. He thereby challenges the current consensus about the extent of women’s formal legal incapacity, particularly concerning property rights. Nancy Locklin follows with a challenge to the supposed all-inclusiveness of the family-economy model by showing that women sometimes ventured outside it (a point that Daryl M. Hafter’s chapter later in the volume reinforces); she points to a much stronger work identity than historians have usually assumed. Jane McLeod continues a common theme in these pages, the divergence between rhetoric and practice, in her discussion of the widespread participation of women, notably widows, in printing and bookselling. For Jennifer Palmer, women were key players in the burgeoning transatlantic commercial economy. They protected their property and family businesses through a creative use of marriage contracts, powers of attorney, and wills while their husbands were away taking care of property in the colonies. Similarly, James Collins gives women a central place in the unfolding consumer revolution of the eighteenth century, not just as consumers but also as producers. The tax roll data that he mines demonstrate women’s increasing occupational specialization, a key indicator of a modern economy, thus calling for a reconsideration of women’s roles in the emergence of modern consumer capitalism.

The editors’ claim—that this volume stages a particular historiographical intervention by refusing to confine women within the family economy and by providing examples of successful working women at a time when opportunities were supposedly contracting—is largely accurate. It is less so in their hope to redirect the narrative of women’s history and to display new methods for historians to use in its study. In the afterword, Bonnie Smith rightly recognizes the contributions of these studies to women’s labor history and women’s identities in the past, but her call for a new paradigm “in women’s history in which women are de-isolated . . . by considering women’s labor history in even wider contexts” intimates a shortcoming of this volume (226); the recent and increasingly sizable literature about early modern work in general finds few citations in these chapters. Hence, readers of this volume might mistakenly conclude that historians have not seriously attempted to integrate women into that history when several, including this reviewer, have clearly done so.