Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain by Amanda E. Herbert (review)

Whether soaking in the mineral waters at a spa, making sugary confections for close friends, or providing spiritual companionship to each other on transatlantic Quaker missions, middling and elite British women carefully nurtured homosocial relationships. Amanda E. Herbert’s Female Alliances takes the reader into this female-centered world and reveals the significance and the intensity of the emotional bonds that tied women together. The book stresses the importance of sociability to the construction of female identity in the early modern period. During the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth century, women defined their autonomy in relation to each other. They did not adopt the increasingly “solitary” (12), self-disciplining, and individualistic notions of subjectivity that scholars traditionally associate with modernity. Indeed, the author classifies such accounts of the modern gendered “self” as depressing and inaccurate. Instead, she argues that “relational acts of sociability” (13) constructed early modern womanhood. Herbert’s focus on the communal dimensions of women’s lives results in a positive and even celebratory evaluation of femininity, one that diverges from much of the scholarship on women and gender in the Anglo-Atlantic world.¹ Female Alliances is decidedly not a study of how male-dominated institutions, patriarchal laws, or paternalistic fathers and husbands constrained women’s legal, political, and economic agency. Men are largely absent from the book. Rather than treating gender as an external category imposed upon women by masculine authorities, the author offers an alternative and refreshing account of women defining the terms of their own femininity.²

The first two-thirds of Female Alliances explores the language, the rituals, and the spaces that fostered same-sex friendships. Chapters 1 through 4 enliven the abstract concept of gender identity by showing elite women in action. They wrote passionate letters to each other that integrated classical and medieval models of friendship with newer prescriptive literature. Friends used these epistolary practices to forge and nurture intense emotional connections across the British Isles and, in some cases, the Atlantic Ocean. The author also counters interpretations of prescriptive literature as serving a solely disciplinary function. Prescriptive literature did not only shape social practices; it was also “constitutive of modern gender identity” (45). Advice manuals and manners guidebooks taught women to be “sociable, loving, and conscientious of others” (48) and encouraged homosocial bonding to flourish. The book’s original study of homemade gifts provides one example of how the prescriptive ideals of gendered behavior influenced social practice. Herbert’s analysis of gift giving also challenges portrayals of elite women as frivolous consumers of exotic goods. On the contrary, they invested a great deal of thought and time into making “emotionally charged” (69) keepsakes for their closest confidants. Women candied fruits, concocted exotic perfumes, and painstakingly embroidered mementos for each other, and these treasured handmade artifacts helped to strengthen their emotional ties.

Female Alliances takes the reader inside the kitchens and the bedchambers and outside to the yards and gardens where women worked and socialized together. The book’s study of household inventories, prescriptive guidebooks, and handwritten cookery and medical manuscripts reveals a largely harmonious world of female labor, where higher- and lower-status women cultivated herbs, churned butter, and brewed beer in the feminized spaces of the home. Working together on these gendered tasks fostered relatively egalitarian and harmonious dynamics between mistresses and their servants. In her study of women’s work, Herbert again emphasizes the importance of prescriptive literature in fostering homosocial bonding across the boundaries of rank and wealth. Household guidebooks instructed women to display an “overwhelmingly positive” (103) attitude toward domestic labor. Elites readily internalized these messages and presented themselves as cheerful and cooperative laborers in their handwritten recipe books. Even the circulation of manuscript recipe collections among friends had the potential to “advance female independence” (108) by enhancing women’s knowledge of exotic ingredients and medical treatments.

The book promises to cover a...