The Making of Modern Woman: Europe 1789-1918 (review)

Lynn Abrams's The Making of Modern Woman is a comprehensive survey synthesizing the major findings of thirty plus years of research into nineteenth century European women's history. Reading it inspired me to reread the essays of Joan Kelly, the pioneering feminist historian. Almost thirty years ago Kelly asked a provocative question: did women have a Renaissance? In her essay of the same title she argued that women's lives had to be seen outside of traditional historical periodization and demonstrated how, in fact, the notion of a "renaissance" in the period between the mid fourteenth century and the mid sixteenth century was inadequate for understanding women. For instance, the very concepts that theoretically unshackled men from feudal obligations—such as notions of individuality—relegated women to a more "modern," but also private and subservient status.¹ Kelly did not completely abandon dominant understandings of temporality—centuries remained, as did many of the key periodizing structures (whether Antiquity, Renaissance or Modernity). But these dominant structures were viewed more as multifaceted prisms that refracted the object under study and opened up new ways of seeing. In this process women's experiences were not only examined in a dynamic relation to (male defined) conventional periodization, but new concepts and questions emerged that suggested broad reinterpretations of the very periodization and narrative being (cautiously) used. In a later essay Kelly developed her concepts of what it would mean to write such dynamic histories. She called for a "doubled vision" focusing on the past, a form of analysis that dynamically integrated both the close attention to the specificities of women's lives and the investigation of the broader social world shaping and being shaped by women's existence.²

Abrams both succeeds and falls short of the goals spelled out by Kelly decades ago. The Making of Modern Woman demonstrates that Kelly's call for a more gendered understanding of historical periodization and historical development has been heard. Early on Lynn Abrams states she "does not present an alternative history of the nineteenth century—all the traditional points are featured—but rather a history of that period from a woman centred perspective... Just as historians have used high politics or ideological trends to chart the period, I use women's experiences and a gendered perspective to structure this account of the nineteenth century."³

Abrams organizes her three parts thematically rather than temporally, thus providing a framework that is based on the structures shaping women's lives. Part I focuses on dominant discourses with an emphasis on the female body and socialization into femininity. Part II examines women's daily lives emphasizing their familial relations and responsibilities, the variety of their labors and the constraints on their freedom to support themselves and to develop alternatives to domesticity. Finally, Part III examines power and politics linking women to the broad currents of nationalism and imperialism, outlining the development of feminism and questioning the definitive historical break supposedly established by the First World War. This format allows Abrams to examine the structures and commonalities uniting women: the dominant discourses relegating women to an inferior status; the female life cycle and the body; familial roles and expectations; women's exclusion from political life; their subordinate position in the labor market; the double burden of reproductive/productive and/or unpaid/paid labor; etc. Simultaneously we can locate these structures in the broad trends (and contradictions) of modernity—e.g. industrialization; the development of bourgeois domesticity; class distinctions and inequalities; liberal political discourses of citizenship and rights—and see how women were systematically rendered inferior and constructed as "other." If Abrams had to choose one aspect of this traditional understanding of the nineteenth century as the most transformative for women, I believe she would point to the impact of industrialization. Women may not have had a Renaissance, but Abrams's account certainly argues that they had...