::: 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.’”

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.

Raffaella Sarti, “Home and Family: Bringing Things Together or Setting Up Home” in Europe at Home (2002), 42-75 (407-423).

Deciding how to organize one’s family, and especially how this would play out as families became more nuclear and the number of possessions grew, is an interesting topic and the one that Sarti decides to explore in this article.

Many factors contribute to the differences between individuals in how this process plays out, among them: class, demographics, socio-economic organization of the area, andd so.

Sarti notes that there were those who could never safe up enough to get married. This brings up some interesting points, highlight both a later age for marriage now that individauls were saving up to get married as well as the growth in those who never got married.

One of the complaints about “privledge” in Europe during this time was that with privledge came obligations to marry others of similar social class. This limiting met with resistence among some young couples but held a substantial amount of social pressure and ultimately would not be overthrown at large.

Sarti also describes the changes in women’s doweries during this time.

Suzanne Desan, “Reconstituting the Social After the Terror” in The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (2004), 249-282 (355-388).

In the aftermath of the French Revolution there was a lot that was changed back to something more similar to what it had been than what it became. In other words, there was a complete revolution and things changed, and then changed back again. Desan analyses this as it applies families and the changes that had been instituted.

It should be noted that most of the changes brought on by the French Revolution were changes in the laws of the land concerning a given topic, and not as much the underlying facts or pressures.

The laws were then changed back, in many cases, and over time as the underlying pressures changes, so too did the laws again. Most of the laws herein discussed have to deal with inheritance or other more legal aspects of the law as well as divorce (although Desan doesn’t talk about that as much).

One quote from the text:

“The social order is entirely overturned,” commented two voacal opponents of France’s new inheritance laws.”

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).

Jeffrey Watt, “Impact of Reformation and Counter-Reformation” in Family Life in Early Modern Europe 1500-1789 (2001), 125-154. (219-234)

In answer to the question “What changes were brought by the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation?” Jeffrey Watt answers at the end of this piece by concluding “All told, continuity outweighed change in the domestic life of Europeans of the Reformation era, and the similarities in the family life of Protestants and Catholics outnumbered the differences” (254). The evidence he sites throughout his arguments, however, argues exactly the opposite of this. His misinterpretations (for my opinion is that this conclusion is precisely that) stems from his narrow understanding of the Reformation. He seems to want to fit it into a neat, easily definable event, with a clear beginning and end. Similarly, his final interpretation seems to unnatural in its conclusion that the similarities between the Protestants and the Catholics outnumbered the differences. Of course they did! Protestants were not forming a new world religion based off of a brand new understanding of the universe; they were attempting to return to the undiluted roots of their already existent religious tradition.

What Watt should have focused on was the overall change that was the Reformation, comparing society against itself. His statement that “continuity outweighed change” would be accurate if he understood the “continuity” of the ages to be, as Shelley puts it, “mutability”, or, in other words, change. This does not, however, seem to be his understanding. But regardless of his intepretation, the follow are some of the points he makes throughout his text:

“Luther’s theological dispute in many ways seems far removed from the family, but the Reformation that he initiated affected the institution of the family in a variety of ways. Luther and other reformers–including John Calvin, the most important theologian of the Reformed Protestant movement–affirmed a belief in the “priesthood of all believers,” insisting that all Christians could communicate directly with God; they need not go through the medium of a priest. This notion fostered an atmosphere in which some religious education and worship was transferred from the church to the family. Protestant and Catholic reformers viewed marriage and the family as the most fundamental building blocks of society and generally attributed sundry social ills to problems in the household” (125).

“Protestantism’s most obvious impact on the family pertained to marriage” (126).

“In one sense, reformers enhanced the married state by rejecting the Catholic belief that celibacy was superior to matrimony” (127).

“Luther, however, insisted that marriage was of this world, just as women, houses, and courts were; like them, marriage was subject to the state, not the church. Virtually all areas of continental Europe that converted to Protestantism experienced to varying degrees the secularization of the control of marriage” (127).

“In Protestant areas, clerical influence over the control of marriage validity thus tended to be reduced but not eliminated. It must be noted, however, that this process had actually begun in many places before the Reformation” (128).

“Throughout continental Europe, Protestant governments not only created new tribunals to deal with matrimonial litigation but also passed laws that generally modified marriage in a variety of ways” (128)

• “they reduced the impediments to marry” (i.e. “consanguinity” and “affinity”) (128)
• “Protestant reformers railed against clandestine marriage, condemning it because it undercut parental authority and could be the source of legal complications” (129)
• “A third and, in the long run, the most significant change in marriage law was the introduction of the possibility of divorce, as opposed to annulment or separation, and subsequent remarriage” (130).

On the topic of divorce, Watt cites the following as justifiable grounds for divorce during this time, namely:

• adultery or desertion (133)
• and of these, “adultery was more often cited against wayward wives thant unfaithful husbands” (134)
• but “Conspicuously absent among recognized grounds for divorce was cruelty” (135)

The importance of parental consent, Watt observes, became far more important when the status of the two individuals was vastly different, stating “Although matrimonial ordinances usually said nothing about class, wealth and social status were in fact important factors in contract litigation” (138), and later states, “The poorer a family, the less influence parents had on their sons’ and daughters’ choice of spouse” (141), citing that “In seventeenth-century Holland, parents were apparently able to prevent marriages regardless of their children’s age; they generally used this power to veto only when there was considerable discrepancy in the social status of the two parties” (142).

Education

Developing their their understanding of the importance of the family “as the most effective means of preventing… social disorder” there developed a “[Dramatically increased] interest in early childhood” during the Reformation period. Watt continues:

“Luther became convinced that the family, not the Church, was the most fundamental ’school for character.’ … Luther and other reformers sought to encourage religious education int eh home [even] further, promoting private family devotions and exhorting parents to lead the religious education of their children. Luther viewed male household heads as ‘bishops in their own homes’ and thus responsible for the religious education of family members” (143).

“One scholar has gone so far as to describe the Puritans as the first ‘modern parents’” (145).

“Protestants on the continent and in England published unprecedented numbers of books on child-rearing” (145).

“In this era of religious strife, education was viewed as the key to securing the religious allegiance of the young. Although Luther, Calvin, and other reformers saw the family, the microcosm of society, as a most important arena for religious indoctrination, they did not always trust the judgment of individual parents in providing sufficient instruction to lead their children down the straight and narrow path.  They therefore viewed mandatory catechism classes and the creation of schools as a vital compliment to education in the family” (145).

“Following Luther’s lead, Protestant reformers and magistrates throughout continental Europe called for the establishment of schools and for mandatory school attendance” (146).

“Since they beleived that everyone–not just the clergy–should read Scripture, Protestant reformers believed that primary education ought to be widely avalaibe” (145).

“The education level of Catholics lagged behind that of Protestants for both boys and girls” (147).

Sexuality

Although canon law had condemned equally the illicit sexuality of both men and women, in practice a double standard prevailed in many parts of late medieval Europe, whereby a male’s sexual indiscretion were punished less severely than a woman’s” (148).

“[The] stricture sexual morality [of the Protestant faith] contributed to a growing intolerance of illegitimacy” (148).

Watt goes on to point out that Protestant societies placed a greater emphasis on discovering who parented an illegitimate child and then requiring at their hands a greater responsibility for the care and upbringing whereas Catholic countries tended to establish institutions of care for orphans or illegitimate children. He then concludes with the line cited above that: “All told, continuity outweighed change in the domestic life of Europeans of the Reformation era, and the similarities in the family life of Protestant and Catholics outnumbered the differences” (154).

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).

Marzio Barbagli and David Kertzer, “Introduction” in Family Life in Early Modern Times, 1500-1789 (2001), ix-xxxii. (168-180)

In this three volume work, Marzio Babagli and David Kertzer solicit the expertise of a number of specialists in their attempt to bring together a synthesis of leading scholarship. In their introduction they write:

“Over the past 35 years hundreds of scholars from many countries, in many languages, and from a variety of disciplines–historians, demographers, anthropologists, sociologists–have published studies focusing on family life in the past. In doing so they have made use of new sources of information, new approaches, and new interpretations. These works have tremendously enriched our knowledge of Western family history, demolishing many commonly accepted stereotypes of what family life was like in the past, and undermining many commonly accepted theories of social change.

“By their vary nature, as pioneering empirical studies these works have typically focused on a very limited geographical areas–few parishes, a town, or somethings a small region–and their results have primarily been published in journals and books not easily accessible to non-experts. What has been lacking to date is a work of synthesis by the leading scholars int eh field that makes the results of this new research available to a broad public, while focusing on both a long sweep of history and on Europe as a whole.” (ix)

Topics that are covered in the introduction briefly include the myth that everyone in pre-industrial Europe married, and did so at a young age; a discussion on population growth at the end of the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century; the importance of the Protestant Reformation (beginning in October of 1517); and the differences between various areas of Europe (mostly drawn along the line between Catholicism and Protestantism, which is almost identical to what is known as the Hajnal line).

The final paragraph of the introduction reads:

“We have here given only a brief overview of the nature of family life in early modern times, trying to provide a sense of how it differed from family life today and attempting along the way to dispel some common, but erroneous stereotypes. We have also emphasized the need to distinguish among different regions of Europe, and to identify those aspects of the family that changed over the three centuries from 1500 to 1800. The chapters that follow, examining a series of aspects of family life in the comparative perspective, offer a rich view of European family life in the past.” (xxxii)

My Thoughts:

There is not much for me to say, seeing how this is merely the introduction of a collection of essays, and not the essays themselves. The historiographical content is, however, of importance and serves to reinforce the things already discussed and learned, namely, that family life underwent important changes which were the results of various pressures and occurred differently at different places in Europe, largely along line of Protestantism and Catholicism following the beginnings of the Reformation in early years of the 1500’s.