::: readings

Carolyn Steedman — “Reproduction and Refusal” in Landscapes for a Good Woman (1986), 83-97 (788-794).

I was much more excited by the title of this piece and the initial quote than by the actual article itself. I was hoping that she would talk about the changes over the past 100 years more than just about her own emotions concerning pressures to reproduce or not.

It is short though and talks a lot about the emotional pressures that go along with wanting or not wanting children. She definitely falls within the first wave of feminism that was seeking to be more than “man” than it was more fully “liberated women”

Quotes from the text:

“One can hardly tell women that washing up saucepans in their divine mission, [so] they are told that bringing up children is their divine misison. But the way things are in this world, bringing up children has a great deal in common with washing up sauceopans.” [Alice Schwarzer] (83)

“Accounts of mothering need to recogize not-mothering and recognizing it, would have to deal in economic circumstances and the social understanding that arises out of such circumstances.”

“It is historical accounts like this that may be used to reveal the social sepcifictiy of wanting and not wanitng children in the first palce, and wanting and not wanting them once they exist. Ambivalence has been characterized as a mental structure unique to the borurgeois family…” (90)

Victoria De Grazia — “The Family Verses the State” in How Facism Ruled Women, ITaly 1922-1945 (1992), 77-115 (625-646).

Challenging the traditional interpretation of top-down politics, De Grazia argues that families, and particularly mothers, in Italy’s Facist Regime played significant roles. Indeed, as they saw it, the State owed them something after they had given it their wedding rings, firstborn sons, and time. They demanded things in return, and were ready to organize to request them. In one sense, they had truly “married” themselves to the state, only now (as a marriage partner) they demanded something back in return.

Quotes from the text:

“…it creates for itself in what it suppresses and what is at the same time essential to it, an internal enemy–womanhikn in general.” — georg wilhelm friedrich hegel

“this rallying to the cause did indeed appear to seal a new union between Italian women, their families, and the fascist state”

“Yet the ring ceremony also generated unorthodox messgages about the realtionship between women, their fmailies, and the state. the very gesture of traind in gold bands for cheap tin substitutes cast uncertainty on whether a woman’s first obligation was to the Dice, facism, and the nation or to her spuse, children, nad kin as decreeed by suctom, sacred church vowsw, and pronatalist sloganeering.”

“The dictatorship thus became trapped in a paradox of its own making.”

“…in Wesern socieites, becomeing more nuclear and more dependent on the state and the market to carry out protective, educativce, and recreational functions they previously had not needed or had once fulfulled themselves.”

“all int he state, nothing outside the state”

“far from being incenties fo family growth, the family allowance system was thus tied to cutting wages to substandard levels.”

“the idea that their offspring belonged to the nation and that in case of war they had to be sacrificed to its well-being. The dictatorship thus combined paternalism in the familiar, humanitarian sense with a murdeous, abstract claim on the lives of dependendts; it obsessed about the pricledged bond between mothers and children, and the brutally violated it.

“Thus facism’s cult of the family in the service of the state was undercut by antistatist attutde that might be characterized as ‘oppositonal familism.’”

Susan Grayzel, “Women’s War Work: Remunerative, Voluntary and Familial” in Women and the First World War (2001), 27-50 (588-602).

Understanding the role women played in the ammunition factories and elsewhere on the “home front” of WWI is crucial to a complete understanding of how relationships between men and women changed in the 20th century. Indeed, perhaps more than anything else, the first world war propelled the Western world on a trajectory that led it to its current position. This is true even though many things went “back to normal” after the end of the war. Still, the seed had been planted and the old molds broken.

Grayzel explores this and other changes in the lives of women during the war.

Some quotes from the text:

“One of the more visible changes in women’s lives during the war came with their entrance into a wide range of occupations, some of which had never before included women.” (27)

“Women entered not only wartime factories, but also banks and places of business and government as clerks, typists, and secretaires. They were found running trams and buses, deleiving milk, and even joinly newly-created armed forces auxiliaries and become police officiers” (27)

[often they would work in the same filed of occupation as their husband who went away to war, but not always.]

“In Britain, the decision to institute conscription in 1916 followed the creation of a National Register in August 1915, recording the age, sex, and occupation of all men and women between the ages of 16 and 65.” (28)

“[Women] became important figures of wartime propoganda.”

“In either case, the question of pay became a heated one; if women earned less than men for the same job, they undercut male employment. On the other hand, paying men and women equally seemed far too radical and, some argued, unfair since male workers were undoubtedly superior. As a compromise, womena nd men were paid the same for piece work, but not for time rates.” (30)

Employment for women within medicie grew during the war bothe because of the expansion and prefessionalisation of nursing servies and of new opportunites for medical training and for women doctors” (37).

“the wartime world required this service from women, but the postwar world was not always sure what to do with the women who had performed it.” (41)

Lloyd Bonfiled, “European Family Law” in Family Life in the Long Ninenteenth Century 1789-1913 (2001), 109-154 (551-574).

Legal histories focus, as does this one, on the effects governments have on familied. It is, undeniably, important, especially when one begins to talk about legal custody of children. This article talks about the change of the legal status of women.

By the nineteenth century, many reforms had already taken place, giving women more right to the legal custody of their children, and of the legal status of married and divorced women.

This definitely falls under the category of Law, Church, and State, as well as Family Economy and Marriage and its Dissolution.

Anthony Fletcher, “Living Together” and “Marital Violence” in Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800 (1995), 173-191; 192-203. (236-251)

Anthony Fletcher, in these two chapters of his larger work, highlights the positive and negative aspects of family life, and the changes which developed over time.

Living Together

“The Restrictive ideology of sermons and conduct books, it is suggested, contrasts with a more permissive reality in the way that men and women conducted their married lives” (173).

“There was a sense in which this notion was something very positive and important in men’s conception of how a marital relationship should work in practice. There was something of their manhood which they wanted women to share, while at the same time they wished to see their ultimate authority over women jealously guarded” (174).

“Many marriages in this period were broken prematurely by the death of one of the partners: the documentation associated with such personal tragedies affords further insight into the depth of emotional attachments. ‘I want her at every turn, everywhere and in every work. Methinks I am but half myself without her,’ wrote Oliver Heywood in his diary” (175).

“Lady Ann Fanshaw… wrote [about her husband after his death], ‘we never had but one mind through our lives, our souls were wrapped up in each other, our aims and designs one, our love one and our resentments one’” (176).

“Many gentry married girls who had been well trained for the role of household manager in adolescence. It was very common to send teenage daughters away to stay with relatives or friends to learn this art with a view to their marriage” (177).

“How particular partnerships worked depended, of course, upon personality and relationship. There were strong women with great drive who might seem intractable but whose organising abilities persuaded their husbands to tolerate their failure to be submissive” (180).

“On the other hand, there were sad quiet women who had no stamina for their practical tasks of ordering a household and hardly coped without their husband’s presence” (181).

“A wife’s overriding duty was to be fruitful. Moreover in a patrilineal society there was tremendous emphasis on the importance of the birth of sons” (181).

“Lady Hutton told her husband in 1678 that she would gladly have laid down her life to procure hm a son” (182).

“So failure to conceive brought anxiety and in some cases anguish” (182).

“Women who persuaded their husbands to allow them to breast feed were exceptional in the upper levels of society… Breast feeding and sex were seen as incompatible by clerical moralists and men were in general unwilling to forego sexual pleasure for the sake of the relationship of mother and child” (183).

“The biological and social role of a fertile married woman made her life arduous. ‘All the time of their lives is ensnared with troubles,’ declared the Duchess of Newcastle, who was herself childless: ‘what in breeding and bearing children… and if they have children, what troubles and griefs do ensue? Troubled with their frowardness and untowardness, the care for their well being, the fear of their ill doing, their grief for their sickness and their unsufferable sorrow for their death.’… Women approached pregnancy expecting to be ill and if they were not so at some stage it was regarded as something to worry about” (184).

“By and large, though, men faced the fact, in a way that modern husbands cannot imagine, that their whole future — of their marriage, of a health brood, of inheritance — was on the line when their wives’ confinements came. Sometimes a difficult pregnancy was a prolonged agony for both partners and men’s emotions could be really stirred” (185).

“Parents, it has been argued convincingly, made a very large emotional investment in their children in early modern England and expected little in return” (190).

“Judith Bennett has described marriage at this time as based upon a ‘voluntary egalitarianism shadowed by inequality’. Even in sharing, she notes, the husband’s greater material resources bespoke inequality; even in sharing, she argues, ‘the husband’s power remained merely suspended, not fully yielded’” (190).

“Theory, legal precept and the rhetoric of puritan clerics in their conduct literature, despite its lyrical passages about conjugal love, were all stacked against women’s being allowed to contemplate the realisation of loving mutuality in their marriages. Yet we cannot dismiss all the anecdotal evidence of wills, monuments, letters, memoirs and diaries which testifies to many people’s happiness int he married state at this time” (190).

“It does seem that where all parties had the chance of consent there was a better chance of contentment” (191).

“The whole success of early modern English patriarch, it can be argued, lay in its flexibility and its capacity, as a gender system, to sustain modifications, cushioning and mitigation” (191).

Marital Violence

“We are concerned in this book with a society suffused with personal relationships of dominance and submission, a society in which the use of violence was accepted as a necessary means of maintaining order in hierarchical relationships, both within and outside the household. Wife-beating is an issue at the core of early modern patriarchy and it relates to personal dynamics at the innermost level of marital relationships. We must set beside everything that has been said in the previous two chapters some deeply entrenched beliefs about the relative power of husband and wife. England was no different from other European countries at this time in having a legal code which allowed husbands to inflict what was called ‘moderate corredtion’ on their wives, besides beating children and servants when they found it necessary. There were some guidelines, such as that the violence should not draw blood and that if a stick was used it should be no thicker than a man’s thumb, the original source of the idea of a rule of thumb. This doctrine was reiterated by a judge as late as 1782. It was assumed that correction meant punishment and the law in this sense did not give men a right to beat their wives at random or on a whim. But such limitations still left the question of what was ‘lawful and reasonable correction’ wholly open” (192).

“In so far as men may have been learning in the period between 1500 and 1660 that force was not the answer, that they had to rely instead upon persuasion and the strength of their personalities to get their way with their wives, outside puritan circles the contribution of the religious message to changing attitudes was probably small” (200).

“Around 1800, a very significant shift in function of charivari occurred. While the humiliation of unruly women remained a prominent theme in some regions in the nineteenth century, it was wife-beaters who became the principal target of the ritual” (202).

“How far there was an actual decline in the employment of violence by men as they enforced patriarchy in England between 1500 and 1800 is an open question. What is clear is that charivari remained over these centuries a legitimate way of saying that violence in the home has real limits and that during the period after 1700 it became a men’s violence rather than women’s which was the focus of community attention. Puritan teaching may have played some part in changing attitude to domestic violence, but what we are seeing here is long-term and deep-seated change at the grass roots of English society” (203).

Monica Chojnacka and Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Ages of Women, Ages of Man (2002): “Regulation of Teachers” and  “The day of a university student” (44-47), “Regulations of a city brothel” (61-62), “Battle for the Pants” (140), “A widow reflects on her life” (272-274).

Regulation of Teachers

Students were forbidden to marry as long as they remained students.

Mandatory attendance at Church services throughout the week.

Daily schedule of a student to include lectures and reviews.

Blasphemy specifically outlawed

Regulations of a city brothel

Human trafficking is not new, sadly, to today but was practiced then as well.

“In past times and still today wanton knaves often take women and daughters from other areas and put them in or sell them to the city brothel. Then such persons are kept in the brothel against their will by the brother manager and his wife, so that they can not leave the brothel, although some of them would willingly turn away [from this life] and do penance” (61).

Battle for the Pants

Obviously there were concerns that some women were too “uppity” and would take control of the family when this was seen as the man’s role.

A widow reflects on her life

In this piece, the widow who has not taken refuge in a convent is remembering and immortalizing her husband’s goodness and hoping to pass this on their her children

Mary Hartman, “Marrying Early and Marrying Late” in The Household and the Making of History (2004), 34-69.

Hartman focuses in the both the beginning and the end of this chapter on the interesting understanding one can gain by reading between the lines of Thomas More’s Utopia. In response to this work Hartman writes:

“Yet while practices outside household in Utopia have been recognized as responses to actual sixteenth-century social ills, commentators have not attempted to analyze in the same way the households More fashioned. His multifamily residences, with each Utopian bride moving into an existing household headed by the eldest man in the groom’s family, were hardly common in England save in the upper classes. Most English households, as More well know, had but one married couple in residence. True, Utopian couples were closer in age than those in most early-marriage societies, and in this regard they resembled English ones. But the obsequious handmaidens of Utopia would never be confuse with the spirited and aggressive mistresses of real English households.”

She then goes on, continuing:

“Just as his portrait of Utopian life beyond households is recognized as More’s critique of English society, Utopian domestic arrangements need to be seen as a critique of English society, Utopian domestic arrangements need to be seen as a critique of actual English households. That More showed such exquisite care in devising a stable, almost static, household system as the foundation of all other institutions in Utopia was no accident. He obviously recognized that the single-family households that dominated in England were rather precarious. In Utopia, More could expressly invent laws and customs to shore up households. Better still, he could supply the base of enduring multifamily residences that functioned like those in more typical early-marriage societies, where adult sons stayed put from one generation to the next. He could also control disruptive demographic growth by holding population constant in each town” (37).

Perhaps one of Hartman’s most unique and insightful point is that all of the literature of this time that was against women was in reaction to the strengthening power of women in the household. If men didn’t feel threatened, she reasons, why would they employ societal pressures so pervasively to reinforce gender roles that degraded women?

“Scholars long took this pervasive misogyny for granted. Only with the rise of women’s history have they noted that women at this time were widely perceived to be gaining the upper hand within households” (38).

She points out that the obligations of both sexes began to be more similar than different, and as a result the power structure of male dominance began to be threatened in the perception of many men.

“By the sixteenth century, the experience of the sexes overlapped even more. A recent study of early modern England, for example, argues convincingly that outside the rands of the elite, there was considerable congruity between the childhoods of girls and boys. At leas up to the age of ten, ordinary laborer and small farming households devoted the same resources to daughters and sons. Also, until they went into service in the early teens, children of both sexes were educated at home” (50).

and later concludes:

“The economic contributions of young women and men as single laborers over many centuries have finally begun to be reckoned in this long period of semifreedom, or semidependency, peculiar to the northwestern European life cycle. Yet much remains to be sorted out in the chain of causes and consequences of late marriage. Not only do we not know why people married late in the first place, we understand too little about the effects on consciousness and behavior as an entire society early came to the terms with a resulting loosening of the bonds of kinship that in so any other places continued to hold the generations of peasants together, often quite literally in the same place” (57).

Commenting on the changes in sexual behavior necessitated by this change in marriage patterns, Hartman states:

“What set northwestern Europe apart was thus far more significant than sexual repression from the outside. It was instead the painful, protracted coming to terms with a new sexual order altogether, one in which real control over young women’s and men’s sexuality was ceasing to reside with the older generation, and especially with male elders acting in the larger service of family property and name. wile church, state, and local community played a part in channeling youthful sexuality, and still do, what is striking about this region in the early modern era is its adjustment to the peculiar freedoms and constraints of distinctive family structures that obliged young women and men alike to assume responsibility for their own sexual behavior” (62).

She concludes the chapter where she began, commenting on the social commentary of Thomas More’s Utopia:

“All this brings up back to Sir Thomas More, whose implied criticisms of English households in Utopia speak to shortcomings of the dominant family regime from the viewpoint of a concerned head of state trying to ensure stability in the polity, as well as of a troubled head of household trying to secure wifely obedience at home. The family arrangements More ordained for Utopia can now be recognized as those of any early-marriage regime, but with an important qualification. While mandating large multifamily households, he retained what is being argued here as the chief feature of northwestern European family arrangements, namely, later marriage for women” (68).

and continues,

“It all worked in Utopia, but only because More said so. In real life, later marriage for women appears to have been exactly what made women so uppity in the first place — and, for that matter, families so unstable, youth so unchaste, and much else that troubled him. It appears that despite his weakness for somewhat later, companionate marriage, More recognized causal links between household structures and behavior within and beyond households. In any case, his perception in these matters was keener than that of most commentators, then or since” (69).

Mary Hartman, “How Northwestern Europe was Strange: Marriage, Households, and History” in Household and the Making of History (2004), 1-33.

In the first chapter of her larger work, Hartman begins with a discussion of the development of the discussion on the topic of social change in Europe from the medieval time-period to present. She finds that there have been many “mistaken notions” (2) and a desire to “divide [the world] into distinct societies” in which “social change in a coherent general phenomenon” and “large-scale change takes all societies through a more-or-less standard set of stages; and that times of rapid change necessarily entail a range of disorderly behaviors such as crime, suicide, and rebellion” (3). In this work, however, she intends to argue “that each master=process was itself dependent upon a prior and distinctive development within western Europe — or, more precisely, within northwestern Europe” (3).

Much of the problem with the recent work of scholars on the topics of social change in Europe over the past thousand years, Hartman argues, is that despite an expansion of history to include new areas, such as social history, women’s history (with their well-founded assumptions and arguments that “the activities of more ordinary men as well as women must always figure into accounts of what makes history run”), these scholars have rarely truly “contested the ingrained view that all the historical action that truly matters takes place in arenas beyond the household” (4). She continue:

“The downside of this extraordinary proliferation of research fields, however, is that collective historical attention has been diverted before a number of critical issues in social history and connected fields — especially demographic, family, and women’s history — were adequately addressed. What is more, risk-taking seems to have been invested more in claiming legitimacy for new specialties than in showing just how each expands historical understanding, resolves ongoing controversies, or upsets the existing consensus on various topics.” (5)

Of particular importance to the arguments developed by Hartman is the work of John Hajnal in his monumental work, “Two Kinds of Preindustrial Household Formation Systems” (published by the Population and Development Review in 1982) which draws a very important line across Europe, dividing practices regarding marriage and family, or, more specifically, that in certain countries (predominantly those in northwestern Europe, “most women as well as men from the medieval era on married comparatively late and were much closer in age than their counterparts in early-marriage societies” and “a significant number, 10 to 20 percent–and more women than men–never married at all” (6). The ramifications of this, and the subsequent changes it brought, is the topic of Hartman’s work.

Mary Hartman cites Peter Laslett’s work “Characteristics of the Western Family Considered Over Time” (published in the Journal of Family History in 1977), pointing to four specific affects that a later marriage caused, which are:

“First, the family group was confined to one set of parents and their offspring. Second, the age of the mother during childbearing was late, ‘both in experience of the mother and also in the period of fecundity.’ Third, the years separating spouses were few, with many wives older than their husbands and marriages ‘tending towards the companionate.’ Fourth and last, many households contained unrelated servants, making a ‘peculiarity in the individual life cycle of those who went out to service as well as a characteristic of the domestic group.’” (19)

She later adds to this list something that should not be underestimated, which was that because individuals were leaving their own households and entering society unwed, “moving from house to house, often on annual contracts, [these individuals] could readily make the acquaintance of potential marriage partners — and tat they could do so in the absence of parental supervision. This ‘life-cycle’ domestic service was an experience without parallel in societies where early marriage is the rule” (20).

Hartman notes “There is, of course, nothing remarkable, these days anyway, about young persons being close in age at marriage, or taking charge of selecting their spouses, or saving to support themselves in households of their own” (29), but it is precisely the fact that this development began in northwestern Europe at a time much earlier than elsewhere that is of interest, because it is the beginnings of our modern system.

Hartman concludes her chapter, saying:

“Attentiveness to how late-marriage societies worked will be argued to provide new clues to some old mysteries, including the very large one about the source of a widespread insistence upon gender differentiation, as well as upon a hierarchy favoring men. What I shall present as a fairly swift undercutting of a material and ideological buttresses for such beliefs and related pracitices, owing to late-marriage arrangements, raises serious questions about theories that contiue to invoke universal and inexorable mechanisms, whether biological or psychological, to account for what is labeled “male dominance.” Observable elemets of family structure will be argued instead to fo a very long way toward explaining the pervasiveness and longevity of patterns of gender differentiation and hierarch.

These elements, as noted at the outset, will aslo make it easier to explain otherwise baffling evidence that in a rather brief period of time, the ways people spent their daily lives in northwestern European-based societies came to have less to do than ever before with whether they were biologically male of female. An advantage of taking comparative household and family-formation systems into account in addressing the conundrum of a still pervasive insistence upon differences between the sexes is tat unlike most other explanations, this one will be shown to be amenable to empirical scrutiny and applicable, with predictive as well as analytical force, to gender arrangements anywhere.

…

The late-marriage system of family formation will be presented as the vehicle most reponsible for generating novel political structures, tranformed means of livelihood, and fresh socila, cultural, and intellectual systems in the period known as the “early modern era,: from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries. Along the way, I will also show how the system’s very instability exposed for the first time the common ingredients whose presence has ensured, in nearly all societies, the familiar impulse to differentiate roles, qualities, and status by sex…” (32-33).

My Thoughts:

Mary Hartman has, in my opinion, identified one of the crucially important dividing factors of the modern family with what came before. Recognizing the tremendous role of marrying later plays in the life of the individual, of the family, and ultimately of society, this shift cannot be underestimated and needs more exploration as Hartman proposes. She claims that this interpretation will withstand empirical analysis as well, which, while I believe her, I have not tested, nor have I looked deeply into any of her sources.

My Questions:

If a later marriage is responsible for the significant changes that occur in gender roles, what is responsible for the change to a later age of marriage?

Charles Reid, “The Right of Paternal Power” in Power Over the Body, Equality in the Family: Rights and Domestic Relations in Medieval Canon Law (2004), 69-97. (108-122)

Reid discusses the changing role of paternal power in the family from Roman through medieval Europe, specifically highlighting the shift from absolute controll (even over life and death) to a more moderated controll as informed by Chrisitian ideals. In his introduction, he writes the following:

Medieval theology and law conferred on the father broad authority over his household. his wife, his children, and other members of the household were entrusted as a matter of law, in the firswt instance, to the good judgement of the father, who enjoyed what the canon and Roman lawyers came to call the “right of paternal power.” This was a right grounded on the scriptural teaching that the husband was the “head” of his wife, but it was not a right that was to be used abuseively. Rather it was intended to be utilized in conformity with a broader Christian understanding of the family as a kind of spiritual womb, where children were to be taught above al to know and love God, and spouses were to minister to each other with “maritial affection.” A study of rights and the medieval family mist prpoerly consider both the powers accorded to the father under the rubric of this right of paternal power (ius patria potestatis), and the limitations placed on the scope of this right.” (69)

He is clear to point out, and do so convincingly, that “The canonists and civilians of the tweth and thirteenth centuries did not create their law of domestic relationships on a blank slate. they were instead the inheritors of a substantial doby of law and teaching from late antiquity which sometimes even made use of rights language to describe domestic relationships, although these usages were never worked through systematically” (69). In the following section, entitled “The Impact of Christianity” he continues the narrative, “Christianity, in its earliest forms, adopted and adapted some aspects of the Greco-Roman synthesis on marriage and rejected other aspects altogether. It has been observed that many early Christian metaphors tended to be subversive of the language of authority that surrounded the Roman legal conception of the family. Where Roman law emphasized hierarchical power and submission, Christian metaphors focused on equality” (72).

In summary, Reid writes:

What one sees in the decretalist analysis of the right of paternal power is a careful reworking and systematization of Roman-law sources in the light of Christian revelation and the demands of Christian charity… The right of paternal power, finally, was not absolute. It was conditioned by a series of other rights and obligations. Although women were ordinarily subjected to the authority of their husbands, the law recognized certain areas of equality. Although children were subject to the authority of their fathers, the law recognized that they enjoyed the freedom to make choices, such as the decision to marry. Although fathers possessed a certain freedom to dispose of their property through a will, this testamentary right could not be exercised to the detriment of their children” (96-97).

My Thoughts:

I find Reid’s arguments and historiographical approach much more convincing that Stone’s or evey Herlihy’s. He presents a picture of change and systhesis that seems to be neither overly simplistic nor too complex. I find his understanding of the intersection of two different mindsets, that of the Roman empire and then the Christian faith, to be intelligent and thought-provoking.