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

During a period in which the law bound women to particular social roles, many women rendered themselves necessary and central to economic life by successfully “exploiting gaps” in the structures of patriarchy (p. 17). Evidence of this participation is slowly making its way into in the historiographical record, most recently in Daryl M. Hafter and Nina Kushner’s edited volume, Women and Work in Eighteenth Century France. The book brings together an outstanding group of French historians who collectively strengthen our understanding of women’s contribution to the French economy during the “long 18^th century.”

As the editors note, in a period when everyone worked, it should not come as a surprise to find that women made up an important part of the labor force; nonetheless, the extent of female industry and women’s agency in fulfilling labor roles has received less attention.¹ Moreover, the extant works overwhelmingly focused on female contribution to production and subsistence that came within the context of the family, with women therein practicing less skilled labor. Thus, Hafter and Kushner are legitimized in claiming that the studies in this collection work to “destabilize the family economy model” (p. 7), and do so in an interesting, and effective way.

While this effort to move from the model of the family economy is not new of itself,² the volume’s strength lies with its breadth, and readers will take from the scholarship a broad and convincing understanding of another of the book’s aims: to show that women’s independent presence in the French economy was more common than we might think. The variety of protagonists and their activities (included, but not limited to printer wives, elite prostitutes, dedicated artists, hard-working tailors) presented in these essays coalesce to offer students of French history a much fuller picture of female labor than that unearthed in earlier studies focusing on gendered labor.

The collection works so well in part due to the existence of a handful of themes that the essays touch upon in complimentary ways. Though these themes are several, for the purposes of this review, I will focus on three in particular: firstly, discrepancies between law and practice in women’s work; second, the notion that women’s labor provided the opportunity for female agency and work identity; and third, the centrality of women’s work to the French economy and economic development, particularly at a time that historians have identified as one of economic contraction.³

The ability to locate female labor in the interstices between law and practice speaks volumes during a period in which legal restrictions hindered many varieties of female activity. The majority of guilds excluded women, and women were denied a legal personality in all but certain exceptional circumstances. Yet, Rafe Blaufarb’s examination of legal cases involving female lordship in Provence demonstrates that “female lords exercised the business of lordship in the same way as their male counterparts” (p. 19). Essays by Jacob D. Melish, Jane McLeod, and Jennifer L. Palmer demonstrate the power of wives and widows in running business ventures, in spite of the statutory view that women were unfit to take control of certain industries. Although cultural dynamics might have prevented some women from navigating the business world as successfully as a man might have (such was the case of Mme Regnaud de Beaumont in Palmer’s essay on transatlantic commerce), the general conclusion seems to be that expressed in McLeod’s essay, that in innumerable cases, “state officials subordinated gender considerations to other interests, family advancement, ideological control, and market expansion” (p. 125). With female labor supplementing tax roles, state officials had no problem turning a gender-blind eye to revenue.

A number of the essays in this volume, including Nancy Locklin’s piece on women tailors, Nina Kushner’s contribution on elite prostitutes, and Jacob Melish’s essay on “the power...