- Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France ed. by Daryl M. Hafter, Nina Kushner
This collection of ten essays on women and work in the long eighteenth century is a major contribution to labour history, as much for the local arguments presented as for its larger intervention into historiography. The volume amply illustrates that the role of women in this proto-industrial age has been grossly underestimated, even by historians of gender, with regard to the sheer numbers of women working as well as their influence, power, and presence across the range of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century work-places. A number of themes recur, first among them the fall of the family economy as a distinct model for understanding women’s work at this time. As Nancy Locklin defines it, this model, ‘which prevailed for decades, is based on the assumption that the male head of household has a profession and that his wife and children essentially work for him’ (p. 33). We are instead given a rich picture of women working outside the home to supplement the family income, despite the fact, cited a number of times, that women were paid half of what men received for the same work, if only because women were so often excluded from guilds. Nevertheless, as Daryl M. Hafter notes in an essay containing well-chosen examples of women’s contributions to pre-industrial growth in France, society recognized the value of women’s work to the point that men were advised never to marry a woman who could not ‘earn her share of the family wage’ (p. 197). As Bonnie G. Smith points out in an Afterword, the popular current belief that second-wave feminism forced the entry of women into the workplace ignores this history; this volume thus contributes to placing the nineteenth-century turn against working women into historical context. A second recurring theme is the impressive amount of authority many working women wielded. As Jacob D. Melish illustrates, women collected money, handled small loans, kept the accounts, and thus managed, in a broader sense, businesses and the men within them, including their husbands. Nor should noble women be seen as outside this structure, for they petitioned courts and ran their estates, independent from or alongside husbands, as Rafe Blaufarb explores in a study of the comtesse de Sade. (It would have been helpful if the author had explained exactly how this comtesse was related to the infamous divin marquis, as this relationship is acknowledged to be part of the appeal of the piece.) Among the most noteworthy chapters is Nina Kushner’s elegantly written study of femmes galantes, or professional mistresses, whose relationships to their patrons were governed by ‘formal informal’ (p. 52) oral contracts covering a wide range of payments and gifts. Kushner demonstrates that the work performed by these women was recognized by the existence of an entire police unit, the Département des femmes galantes, which adjudicated disputes between patrons and mistresses. Informal contracts gave these women a defined place in their society, allowing them, alongside women in many other and quite diverse situations, to establish a meaningful work identity, despite the odds.
