Women’s Labor, Self-Fashioning, and Historical Imagination

This issue highlights new interpretations of labor, family, and feminist history as well as divergent uses of biography. Its themes reflect a shared attention to creative reading of sources that range from dowry letters to diaries to family photographs, revealing secrets to feminist historiography. Two articles uncover previously unrecognized patterns of women’s work essential to the early modern Mediterranean and trans-Atlantic economies. One study from the world of work bridges the temporal divides between Muslim and Christian rule in Granada, and the other explores Spanish women’s control over the domain of household possessions, even when husbands generated income from abroad. The remaining four articles deal with various manifestations of women’s self-fashioning. Some strategies were open and collaborative as in the public search for celebrity, others reflected a reforming impulse to refashion science for the non-specialist, and still others mirrored implicit strategies of silence to mask hidden and seemingly shameful genealogical heritages. As you will see, at times these resourceful approaches reveal as much about our authors as their own subject matters.

Our first article by Elizabeth Nutting examines an overlooked episode of women’s work. It mirrors a renewed scholarly interest in labor history, which was formative in shaping the questions and challenges of early women’s history in the late 1960s and 1970s but then was partly overtaken by the “cultural turn.” Nutting consciously positions her article in this modest revival, determined to place “women, their work, and silk production back into the stories of conquest, conversion, and expulsion in Granada and into economic change in the Mediterranean.” Her inquiry centers on women’s work in the silk industry in Granada, Spain from 1400 until 1571, when Spanish officials permanently expelled Moriscos (Muslim converts to Christianity) from the city. The ban destroyed the foundations of the highly coveted silk industry in this bustling center, which rested on Muslim women’s cultivation of silk worms and silk spinning. Christian city magistrates at the time failed to understand this vital female economic contribution; it also has gone unexamined by subsequent historians interested in the early modern Mediterranean political economy. While poorly paid and marginalized, Muslim women were the lynchpin of the industry, insuring its vibrancy and survival in the Nasrid period, from 1400 to 1492, and into the early Christian conquest of Granada. Although the dyeing and weaving industries in Granada were eventually perpetuated by Christian male workers, after expulsion the region lost the sericulture and silk spinning industry that had been a fixture in the economy since the eighth century. Within a few years after 1571, officials had to import raw silk from Naples and other regions in Spain. The article, Nutting also claims, rests on legal and literary sources beyond the Ottoman archives that scholars of Islamic history have underutilized.

Lauren Beck explores the transatlantic ties between Spain and colonial Mexico through family formation, separation, and letter writing. She draws on many methodological approaches for her fascinating account of family relationships solidified by what she calls “matrimonial materiality” and possessions, a domain of women’s influence, power, and work even in the face of geographic separation. Beck temporally examines marriage patterns reshaped by the Council of Trent that, in its requirement of consent, blended the new couples’ households and their multiple goods and possessions. In ways reminiscent of earlier women’s labor historians, Beck returns historians’ attention to the household as a locus for research. But, here, it is not social reproduction at stake but rather dowry bargains that juridically guaranteed women control over the dowries contributed by their fathers and husbands. Beck unexpectedly labels the dowry process “feminist.” By Spanish law, women administered their own property when parents died and husbands were absent. And men were absent; many were on the move reconquering Spanish lands from Muslim rulers or colonizing the “new world” for Christianity. If patterns emerged from this matrimonial world, women back home could use matrimonial goods to engage in professional activities or, in the face of illicit relationships (for the “twice married,” for example), successfully denounce unfaithful husbands and recover the dowries...