CHANGE AND CONTINUITY
Why are women restricted to playing cameo roles in these grand narratives of European history? And how do historians who focus on women's history tackle these assumptions about the gendered nature of change and continuity? One obvious explanation for women's exclusion is that they were not the diplomats, the generals and the politicians.
It was men who were the fighters, legislators, thinkers, and, if the traditional narrative is believed, they were the makers, inventors and sole breadwinners too. However, there are other reasons for exclusion. In the words of one chronicler of women's lives: ‘There is no doubt that the plot of women's history is no less complex than that of men's. But we may assume that time as lived by the female part of humanity does not pass according to the same rhythms and that it is not perceived in the same way as that of men.'4 This proposition has been eagerly taken up by women's historians whose writings testify to this perceived difference in the way women experience time.In place of a standard chronological framework structured by major political events or wars, historians of women have often taken the female lifecycle as the prime organising principle of their works. It is an approach especially attractive to historians of women since it encourages the examination of the relationship between ‘historical time' and ‘individual time'.5 The first half of Olwen Hufton's magisterial history of women in early modern Europe moves from marriage through motherhood to widowhood; Bonnie Smith's survey of European women since 1700 opens with the story of a marriage, an approach which creates a personalised account of three centuries of women's lives.6 The result has been that women's historians of the post-Enlightenment period have written alternative historical narratives using different measurements.
In the Anglo-American literature, one such narrative — dubbed Golden Age to Separate Spheres — has achieved considerable status, in part perhaps because it sits comfortably alongside mainstream explanations of historical change and does not threaten to undermine dominant accounts.7 This alternative narrative is exemplified by Davidoff and Hall's Family Fortunes, an influential study of the English middle classes in the formative capitalist period. The narrative goes something like this. Women enjoyed considerable freedom, status and ‘authentic function' during a ‘golden age' for women in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This age came to an end when, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the capitalist industrial economy arrived with an ideology of separate spheres which placed women in the home and men in the world of work, politics and war. This caused women's power in society to decline, constrained their ambitions, almost imprisoned them in their homes, denied them freedoms in leisure, recreation and enjoyment, and denied them access to accumulated capital and the status and power this conferred. Women were restrained by domestic conceptions of their femininity by which they were, after 1800, being judged in terms of their piety, purity, submissiveness and spiritual motherhood. Whilst disabling in one sense, this ideology became within middle-class circles a cult of domesticity and‘true womanhood' which, ironically, gave women a sense of special destiny. Women felt morally superior in this industrial civilisation, propagating a separate woman's culture centred on the church, the home and philanthropic endeavour. This it is argued gradually evolved into a proto-feminist consciousness, empowering women by their own moral action within the home. In this way, a different chronology seems to be created for the writing of women's history.
However, one feminist scholar, Judith Bennett, argues that this is not really a new chronology at all, but merely an accommodation to the male historical narrative: ‘we have synchronized transformations in women's status with major historical turning points, even though we have found regress for women in the midst of seemingly progressive historical change.'8 Women's historians, argues Bennett, are reluctant to shake off the traditional periodisation of European history even when women's experiences do not fit that framework.
The recognised historical turning points remain male, she says; women's historians have merely chosen to interpret their impact differently (and usually in a negative way). As a result, there is a view amongst some women's historians that the ideology of separate spheres has been used merely to explain women's exclusion from the formative political and economic processes of the nineteenth century, and not to provide a truly alternative women's narrative.The most obvious alternative women's narrative is that of continuity: that women of all ages until the late twentieth century experienced essentially the same subordination to men in work, play, politics and leisure, and were confined to the duties of home and motherhood. Recent trends in women's history have certainly preferred to stress the continuities in women's experience and status over the longue duree — continuity over centuries when other historians would look at change. In this narrative the traditional watershed events such as revolutions and wars recede from view, to be replaced by the apparently timeless experiences of one half of the population: marriage, childbirth, work, widowhood. It is this willingness to rethink traditional periodisation that marks women's and gender history as a transformative discipline. Here the emphasis is on long-term structural changes — such as the transformation of the economy — rather than immediate or revolutionary change. In this approach, evident changes in women's experiences mask underlying and fundamental continuity. Judith Bennett has written of a patriarchal equilibrium which, for centuries, has sustained women's subordinate status despite the very obvious changes that happened in women's lives.9 Olwen Hufton acknowledges that, for three centuries, 1500 to 1800, ‘everyone who survived the birth process... was a lifelong hostage to the constraints imposed by economic circumstances and belief patterns and was socialised into a set of values, visions, ways of doing things, dependent on class.'10 Early modern historians have quite convincingly argued that continuity is the more accurate characterisation of women's position over at least three centuries.
Most importantly, they deny that there ever was a golden age for women in the past, showing that women's subordination and oppression were as evident in the feudal and neo-feudal worlds of 1000 to 1500 as they were under capitalism and industrialisation thereafter.11 Moreover, Amanda Vickery has forcefully argued that the separation of spheres between men and women was a constant in history, and not a creation of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century middle classes. Women, she says, were always confined to the home whilst men dominated in the world outside. In her support, historians of women's work have recently stressed the continuities in terms of the proportion of women in employment, in the types of work undertaken (low skilled, low status, low paid) and the sectors in which women were to be found. Women's experiences may have changed, but their status remained much the same.Yet, the historian is inexorably drawn to change. It would be strange if she did not make special claims for her particular period of interest (thus implying change from the period before). It is a natural product of being a historian. In any event, as Bennett concedes, historical change is more fun than continuity.12 This book argues for the necessity of embracing both change and continuity. The narrative of this book accepts the historian Amanda Vickery's call for a less heroic chronology, and sympathises to some extent with her rejection of separate spheres as the quintessential organising principle of men's and women's lives in this era. Nevertheless, the nineteenth century was heralded by fundamental ideological and economic shifts which took most of the century to work through.13 There were manifest changes to women's experiences during the period, and some of these changes were quite sudden. It would be a dereliction to ignore them. The status quo was disrupted by the French and industrial revolutions on a number of levels — ideological, political, economic, financial, cultural and personal — across much of Europe.
Even if we allow for the virtues of the continuity narrative, the narrative does come to a stop in Europe in the twentieth century (largely after 1950) when women won new powers, rights, liberties, and self-identities. That change in women's experience started sometime, and it started in the nineteenth century — not for all women, not all at the same time, and not everywhere, but nevertheless change there was.The way this ‘big change', the liberation of European women, began in the nineteenth century is not at all straightforward. It is complex and seemingly contradictory. We explore in this book how the Enlightenment constructed a woman's distinctive nature in terms of home, motherhood and piety, not in terms of skill, ability, reason and worldly ambition. We shall see how this dichotomy between female and male spheres had a profound impact on women's experiences and opportunities. Women endured constraints from men and from themselves upon their education, their employment opportunities and the possibility of an independent existence from men. But, at the same time, though very slowly, the pervasiveness of this domestic ideology also underpinned the ways in which women themselves started to engage with politics. The construction of female difference began to be used as a strength by women to stake a claim to a greater share of power. In short, women of the period themselves acknowledged the distinctiveness of separate spheres to their era, and exploited it as it had never been exploited before (or possibly since): using the domestic piety and morality of the respectable woman to stake a claim to social power. They brought the principles of their domestic world to the forefront of politics and social change. If for no other reason, it is because our sisters in the nineteenth century acknowledged the distinctive power of separate spheres that we, too, as historians of their experience, must acknowledge its distinctiveness then and its positive role to them.