The strife is oe'r, the battle done
Amy Louise Erickson
GENDER, SEX AND SUBORDINATION IN ENGLAND, 1500-1800 by Anthony Fletcher Yale, £25, pp. 448 THE PROSPECT BEFORE HER: A HISTORY OF WOMEN IN WESTERN EUROPE, VOLUME I, 1500-1800 by Olwen Hufton HarperCollins, £25, pp. 654 John Ray, in his collection of proverbs published in London in 1670, thought it
worth noting that though in no country of the world are men so fond of, so much governed by, so wedded to their wives — yet hath no language so many proverbial invectives against women.
The dichotomy between doting practice and pejorative theory is one which has struck men with greater force than women, possibly because women have perforce been preoccupied with the practice, and have had little time for the theory.
Surveying dramatic literature from Shakespeare down to penny ballads, politi- cal theory, conduct books and scientific works, Anthony Fletcher asks us to believe that the period from 1500 to 1800 (or rather from 1580 to 1700, since those are really the parameters of his text) saw a fun- damental shift in western thinking about both men and women. The social cosmolo- gy, originally defined as a hierarchy, the `great chain of being', came to be modelled as a series of opposing interests. Biological knowledge, too, slowly dropped the model of human beings which saw the female as simply an inferior sort of male, in favour of a `two-sex' model of irreconcilable opposite sexes. Open misogyny was rejected and men attempted to rationalise women's sub- ordination on the basis of their 'finer sensi- bility'; women were
desexualised by the elaboration of a newly perceived gender construction but at the same time their moral, intellectual and spiritual qualities received much more open and evident validation and acknowledge- ment.
Despite spending most of his pages dis- cussing women, Fletcher's most original insights sights are into the conception of what it Is to be a man — or perhaps what it was to be one, since he is keen to emphasise how changeable any such conception is. His dis- cussion of 'effeminacy and manhood' in the 16th century, and of the socialisation of upper- and upper-middle-class boys in grammar schools in the late 17th and 18th centuries is fascinating and, for this review- er, completely novel.
Fletcher sandwiches a pretty exhaustive survey of the archival research done on real women and ordinary lives in the middle of his elaborately baked theoretical baguette. But the relationship between the two between Fletcher's theoretical castles, and day-to-day life in hovels — is unclear and unexplored. Did real people notice the massive ideological shift which Fletcher claims was taking place over their heads? It would have been interesting to have some discussion of that critical question.
Where Gender, Sex and Subordination is about strife — how English gentlemen con- structed patriarchy and mastered their own fears, and how English gentlewomen con- tested the system designed to control them physically and verbally — The Prospect Before Her is about the compromises imposed by the sheer material necessity of getting on with everyday life. In Hufton's book, Fletcher's battle of the sexes is trans- formed into a protracted negotiation. Olwen Hufton's people are so real you can practically smell them: in 1500, the pre- dominant odour is the straw mattress on the dirt floor, 'a communal bed shared by • all the family', with parents and children eating from wooden trenchers, living in wattle and daub houses 'with flies, rats and mice and in close proximity to livestock'. By 1800, the reader is living with the peas- ants in houses of stone and brick, with glazed windows, flagged floors and clothes made of flimsy fabric, no longer handed down from generation to generation. Hufton deals with the theory too — 'beliefs about what was appropriate to men and to women' — but it is the everyday details which hold the reader spellbound through 500 pages. Including all of Western Europe in her scope, Hufton's coverage necessarily reflects the varying amounts of study undertaken on different areas, and she frankly admits her view is a personal one. But it reflects an impressive lifetime spent in archival research, thinking and teaching about women's lives.
The Prospect Before Her is organised around the female life cycle and women's work — but then there is a strong argu- ment that society as a whole at this time necessarily centred on the female life-cycle and women's work. In fact, this book is the closest any historian has come to a bal- anced history of people in Western Europe during the 300 years from 1500 to 1800.
The life cycle of youth, courtship, mar- riage, childbirth and widowhood receives wonderfully detailed description and analy- sis. But for someone who coined the mem- orable phrase 'spinster clusters' to describe housefuls of single women and widows come to cities and towns for employment and familial support, it is surprising that Hufton allots unmarried women hardly more than a few pages. Certainly marriage was the overriding aim of girls, as it was for boys, and in general the survival and com- fort of both sexes depended on it. But despite the current fashion for believing that marriage as an institution is in irre- trievable decline, the truth is that a consid- erably higher proportion of the population marries today than did so in the centuries between 1500 and 1800. In some sections of society, marriage was a rare privilege. Hufton notes, for instance, that before 1650, three quarters of the female children of the Milanese aristocracy became nuns. The sheer numbers of unmarried women deserve a more thorough treatment than Hufton gives them. After all, unmarried women were instrumental in changing women's position. It was precisely the unmarried among the middle and upper classes who formed the leaders of the suf- frage movement and the multitudinous other campaigns for the improvement of women's position in the 19th century.
But that is a small fault in a large book. The Prospect Before Her is beautifully and plentifully illustrated with graphic as well as textual illustration, and it will make a superb present at any time of the year for family and friends of both genders.
Mum, this cat followed me home. Can I keep it?'
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