WOMEN'S AGENDA
Women's history not only focuses attention on chronological issues of change and continuity. It also changes the historical agenda. One of the great contributions of women's history has been the introduction of new topics to the agenda — reproduction, motherhood and sexuality for instance.
This asserts the significance of the personal in historical understanding, and in this the role of women's bodies — their functions, opportunities, exploitation and exuberance — is an important aspect of the unfolding story ahead. This is reflected in many of the early chapters of this book where we look not only at how women were perceived as mothers, for instance, but also at how they experienced it.But women are not just bodies. They are also part of the grand narratives of Europe. Women were on the barricades, they were killed by bombs, they stood on political soapboxes, and above all they worked — in industry, commerce, mining and shops. Women's history changes the agenda within these narratives. By focusing on the personal as it relates to the social, by thinking about the political importance of representations of sexual difference, women's historians and historians of gender relations have begun the process of rethinking some of the grand narratives of European history in the nineteenth century. AsJoan Scott has reminded us, ‘gender is one of the recurrent references by which political power has been conceived, legitimised, and criticised.'14 The formation of nation-states, for example, is now seen as more than a mere political, diplomatic and economic achievement. It is seen as a gendered process whereby moral as much as geopolitical borders were policed, and national identities forged with symbols of masculinity and femininity. The era of mass politics encompassing the rise of ‘popular' political parties is in many respects a misnomer when one remembers that the citizen was, until the very end of the century, male, and the disenfranchisement of women was often justified by their nature.
Gendered understandings of the ways in which ideas about sexual difference are used in the labour market have altered our understanding of the industrial revolution, of the organisation of production and of the emergence of the labour movement.Thus, a woman's eye view of the nineteenth century would not, in all likelihood, be solely concerned with those traditionally ‘essential' female spheres of activity like the home and motherhood. Neither would it focus solely on the long march of women from political and legal subordination to some measure of equality — although, of course, the story of women's rights activism and organised feminism does have a prominent place in the narrative. Rather, women's perspective on the past must include the interaction between ideas about women (and men) and the ways in which these ideas are put into practice in all realms of human activity.
This book, then, aims to place women squarely within the traditional grand narratives of the nineteenth century in order to reflect how the agenda within them is being changed by women's historians. The nineteenth century as the bourgeois century, as the age of revolution and as the age of empire are three of the narratives that must be re-evaluated according to the agenda of women not merely as onlookers but as participants in the political and economic upheavals of the age. The nineteenth century was not a man's world. Women were at the very centre of the century's defining developments: they were revolutionaries on the barricades and protesters demanding bread and justice; they were workers in the fields and in the factories helping to fuel Europe's industrial revolution. Likewise women were deemed essential to the emergence of the nation and the consolidation of empire — as mothers, educators and minders of the hearth. However, we should bear in mind that on the human scale, at the level of the individual woman, change was mostly gradual and unremarkable. The macro perspective which presents the nineteenth century as a series of overlapping and cumulative revolutions conceals the reality for ordinary people.
For most women, change could be measured in terms of the number of children born and how many survived compared with their mother's generation; in terms of the nature of work opportunities on offer; in terms of the kind of marriage relationship expected and experienced; in terms of access to wealth, power, and political and civil rights. And in these terms, for the majority of women, the continuities outweighed the changes.The book examines the lives of European women both in terms of their own lifecycles and within a broader social, economic, intellectual and political framework. It does not present an alternative history of the nineteenth century — all the traditional turning points are featured — but rather a history of that period from a woman-centred perspective. This inevitably means making some hard decisions about prioritising certain experiences over those traditionally included in historical surveys. Just as historians have traditionally 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. In this sense I follow the entreaty of Gianna Pomata who has argued that: ‘Nowadays a women's history textbook should not be written either to legitimate women's history as a separate field or to pursue the objective of an integrated and unified notion of historical knowledge. It should be written instead simply to reflect, with unavoidable partiality, that multiple, non-unified vision that is emerging from current research.'15
There is also a methodological issue to be considered: should women of the nineteenth century be regarded as victims or agents? The historian of women who adopts the perspective across the longue duree gets herself entangled in a perpetual spiral constituted by two interwoven strands. The first concerns how far ‘events' — political, ideological, economic, social — impacted upon the lives of women; the second concerns how far women themselves influenced the course of those events.
This tension between passivity and agency sits at the heart of any study of women's history, and it lay at the very centre of early feminist analyses of women's condition and the potential for change. For Marion Reid, whose voice we heard at the beginning of this chapter, the conundrum was at the heart of the feminist agenda: women first of all have to recognise their position and then act as agents to shape their own lives. Most non-gender historians who attempt to include women in their grand narratives tend to see them as acted upon — women are included as passive vessels in a historical landscape that has already been determined. Certain ‘important’ or ‘significant’ events such as the French Revolution retain their pride of place; women are added on as extras, cheering from the sidelines or engaging in spontaneous riot. Nothing these women do changes the story substantially. Women’s historians, on the other hand, have attempted to put women at the centre of history as agents in historical change. Historical currents are shaped by women’s agency. The question ‘what difference did it make?’ is no longer posed in a sceptical frame of mind, as numerous women’s historians have demonstrated: the difference was fundamental. A good example is that of the industrial revolution in England, where women’s historian Maxine Berg and others have shown that high productivity at the technical sharp-end of industrialisation by low-waged labour — women and children — fuelled unprecedented economic growth.16 The industrial revolution simply could not have happened so quickly or so successfully without female labour. So, women were agents not passive victims in nineteenth-century Europe. They were not led kicking and screaming to the barricades — they went themselves.There is no longer any excuse for ignorance about the position and experience of women in the states of northern and western Europe. Women’s history is vibrant there, whilst our understanding of women in the southern European states is growing, especially as materials become available to the English-speaking world.
Anglo-American historians have always pursued a keen interest in Russian women, but the relatively slow emergence of women’s history in the east European states has meant that research is only now reaching the public domain. As an historian of Germany and of Scotland, my feet are planted firmly in north-west Europe. My perspective is informed by my knowledge of the western European pattern of development and my immersion in the watershed events of modern European history. The narrative I write is driven by the experiences of the most economically and politically advanced states on the understanding that most of Europe was affected by similar economic and political trends, if at different times and different speeds. No country was left untouched by the eighteenthcentury intellectual revolution or the nineteenth-century industrial revolution. Yet, at the same time, it is important to give voice to the experience of women at the geographical and social periphery of the advanced economies. In any work of women’s history, then, there are various categories of analysis as well as gender to be deployed: geography, economy, ethnicity, religion and social class. Each affects the experiences of women in Europe.But in looking at such factors, one of the findings of this book is that centre and periphery were not as far asunder as the historian may be accustomed to think. It is not so much the differences but the similarities of women's experiences across the varied European landscape which has been the most striking feature in compiling this work. Notwithstanding differences of religion, geography and geology, climate, political regime and stage of economic development, women from the west of Ireland to the Urals were subject to similar pressures in their personal lives. They experienced similar patterns of work, and the ways in which they challenged their subordinate status bear a remarkable likeness. The differences are of degree rather than of substance and, more often than not, the differences between women are regional, that is within countries, rather than between them.
Not all states were as industrialised as Britain by 1900, but most contained regional pockets of intense industrial development, usually specialising in one sector. Conversely, much of Britain, and especially the western and northern peripheries, retained an agrarian character so that the women of the far north of Scotland had more in common with other women in the Nordic countries or the fishing villages of northern Spain than they did with their sisters in the textile mills of northern England.The agenda of women's history is therefore far from simple. Women's history does not, cannot and should not stand apart from the rest of the historical agenda. Women were central to every aspect and every event of European history from 1789 to 1918. To be a historian of Europe, you must think about the history of women and what light it throws upon the whole experience of the continent.