Sources

Where is the family to be found in sources on the past and how can we know about women’s relationship with the family from these sources? Historians of the family have great fortune in that the family as an idea or as an institution is ubiquitous in sources chronicling the social and cultural history of the European past. At the same time, these sources are often opaque or partial and, for the historian of women, they may result in considerable frustration by omitting them altogether or by ascribing to women so-called natural characteristics or roles.

How do people tell family stories? Traditionally, historians of the family started with parish records of births or baptisms, marriages and deaths and the population census as the most comprehensive records of family structure in past times. The method known as family reconstitution, whereby demographers attempted to reconstruct families from disparate data before the census did it for them, has been subjected to considerable criticism on the grounds that there was no attempt to deconstruct the categories used by those who recorded the data and no acknowledgement of the complex kin relations that existed within and between families. In Britain, the nineteenth-century population census may be similarly simplistic and misleading. As many historians have pointed out, the census conflated family and household and assumed that this social unit could be captured at a moment in time representing a general picture of the population in any parish, county or, indeed, the entire country. Thus the family was conceived as a hierarchical structure wherein all inhabitants of the household were related in some way to the head, normally an adult male unless there were no adult males present. Women generally appear as subordinate household members, not least if they were married. The decision in Britain in 1881 to label all married women as ‘unoccupied’, whether they undertook paid employment or not, is well known to historians, but this well-documented category shift must alert us to the likelihood that the categorisation of women’s occupations in general is open to question or at least multiple interpretations. For instance, the label ‘wife of’ in the occupational category may have many different meanings depending upon the precise circumstances in that particular parish. In Glasgow’s Gorbals parish, for example, wives of Jewish tailors working at home or in small workshops were frequently categorised by census enumerators as ‘tailor’s wife’ in the late nineteenth century, but from what we know of this community it is likely that these women were working in partnership with their husbands. In the far north of Scotland, on the other hand, women were far more likely to be identified as workers in their own right on account of women’s strong identity as producers. For instance, in 1881, only three adult women in the whole of Shetland were defined as ‘dependant’.23 Notwithstanding these caveats, the census can be an illuminating source, if merely for identifying the sheer diversity of household structures and the suggestion of the complex relationships that must have existed within them.

Historians of women may have criticised historical demography for its denial of women as social actors, but they have not eschewed demographic data altogether. Statistics showing average age at marriage, marriage rates, fertility rates, and so on provide a broad canvas, showing change over time and between different localities and social classes. For example, we know that western and northern Europe experienced a fertility decline from around the 1870s and that birth rates fell markedly after the Second World War after a brief post-war baby boom. What these statistics do not say is how smaller families were achieved in terms of decision-making between couples, and feminist historians have attempted to fill in the gaps, positing that shifting power relations between men and women may have influenced family size.

At the other extreme in methodological terms, oral history and written forms of personal testimony, such as autobiography and diaries, have contributed new insights into women’s relationship with the family. When Elizabeth Roberts determined to research the lives of ‘ordinary’ working-class women in the north-west of England in the pioneering days of social history in the 1970s, she was obliged to rely on oral history for her source material. Roberts’s book A Woman's Place and the sequel, Women and Families illuminated family life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from women’s perspectives, addressing subjects such as marriage, birth control, family budgeting and neighbourhood networks.24 Indeed, personal testimony redresses the balance of demographic data by revealing the permeability of family, the familial relationships that extended beyond households, the strategic marriage links, the networks of female kin, the importance of siblings, aunts and uncles, cousins, grandparents, indeed a whole series of familial relationships that are not constrained within a single household. The fairly common practice of children being brought up outside their birth family, often by grandmothers or sisters, owing to poverty or lack of space, emerges vividly in oral histories whereas an entry in the census would merely hint at the familial relationships at work.

Beyond these quantitative and qualitative extremes, the historian searching for women and family need not search far but may need to exercise his or her imagination a little. All kinds of legal records present narratives of particular aspects of family life, albeit mediated through legal language and the dominant discourses of the day. Divorce and separation records present an invaluable perspective on married life in those parts of Protestant Europe where civil divorce was available. In addition to detailed descriptions of a breakdown of a marriage, the reader can often discern the expectations for marriage and family life held by the spouses as well as the idealised models of conjugal life promoted by the state. So, for example, when Christian Wesel sought to divorce his wife Sophia in the Hamburg court in 1830 we gain a clear idea of his expectations of married life and specifically her responsibilities to the marriage. On the day of their marriage in May 1825, Sophia had promised to ‘lighten his life with love and loyalty and by means of sincere thriftiness to preserve his earnings’. But, claimed Christian, soon after their marriage his ‘modest hopes and dreams’ had turned into a nightmare as it became clear that Sophia ‘knew neither honesty or thrift’. By contrast, Emilie Beil stated that ‘the hoped for happiness and married contentment’ that she had anticipated had not materialised because her husband conducted his life outside the home and returned home every night in a drunken condition.25

Prenuptial marriage contracts, not uncommon amongst the propertied classes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and wills and testaments may all illuminate both ideal concepts of family and the grubby reality of family life. For instance, Kristin E. Gager’s analysis of legal adoptions in early modern France utilises notary records to argue that the model of the family founded solely upon blood ties promoted by the state was rejected by couples and single women who wished to perpetuate family through inheritance, bypassing biological reproduction.26 Lis and Soly, in their study of eighteenth-century Brabant and Flanders, exploit family requests for the incarceration in correctional institutions of unruly or disorderly members to show how families attempted to stabilise family life by removing those who threatened its fragile economic and psychic equilibrium.27 The law intervened in most areas of family life and at all stages as a regulatory mechanism. It was brought into play at times of tension (for example at the point of marriage breakdown or to mediate in an inheritance dispute) or merely to establish the contractual relationships implicated in family life in the past.

Beyond family law, though, it is not hard to find family implicated in all kinds of official records generated by the criminal and civil courts across Europe. Religious and secular authorities responsible for distributing poor relief had much to say about familial responsibilities as well as providing detailed information on the material conditions of individuals and families requesting support. The civil courts dealt day in, day out with situations embedded in family relations: unmarried mothers petitioning the court to demand child maintenance from the fathers of their children; cases of breach of promise whereby one party - usually the woman - sought financial redress from the man she believed had promised her marriage; cases of domestic violence; and all manner of disputes concerning property. And even criminal cases reveal to the historian the everyday workings of family and kin. Criminal prosecutions for all kinds of misdemeanours, from theft to infanticide, invariably illuminate webs of familial relationships within which defendants were enmeshed. In the case of female defendants this is especially noticeable as women in past times were publicly defined by their relationship to the family: they were daughters, wives, widows and mothers.

Historians interested in the use of language and in the way it constructs the ways we conceptualise the world have made use of literary texts to unravel and indeed to challenge structural definitions of family. Naomi Tadmor’s stimulating study of family and friends in eighteenth-century England is particularly concerned with how concepts of the family were used by people in the past and, from there, with re-evaluating social views about family. Using diaries, conduct books and popular novels, Tadmor demonstrates how eighteenth-century people conceived of family as a household unit that included kin but was not exclusively comprised of kin.28 Moving forward to the twentieth century, Michael Peplar has examined the mass media and film for representations of family in post-Second World War Britain. He shows that marriage and the nuclear family dominate these representations whereas the extended family is marginal, albeit conceptualised as morally and materially supportive. From Brief Encounter (1945) to Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) suggestions of alternative scenarios to marriage and the nuclear family are ultimately rejected.29

The universality of the family in Western culture means that it is recorded everywhere, as an abstract concept, as an ideal, or as a material set of economic and intimate relationships. The task for the historian of women is to remain critical of dominant concepts of family and to look for ways in which women themselves talked about and practised family.

The following three sections discuss three different conceptions of family, family life and the place of women within it. The first section on the eighteenth century conceptualises the family as a fluid unit, often contiguous with the household. In this period, broadly speaking, family was not exclusively defined by relations of blood or consanguinity; rather it was conceived more as a godly household and economic unit. The second section, on the nineteenth century, is concerned with the new model of familial domesticity. Less an economic unit, the family gradually became increasingly private and self-contained and practised what has been termed ‘self-conscious familialism’.30 The twentieth-century family discussed in the third section is a hybrid thing, more flexible than its Victorian predecessor, less of an economic unit than the early modern household and probably more open to public gaze and interference while at the same time becoming the prime locus for intimacy. Of course, these chronological boundaries are falsely imposed and conceal long-term continuities across the period as well as moments of profound change and differences between and within European states and social classes. The position and experience of women in relation to the family will be explored within these three frameworks: the eighteenth-century flexible family, the nineteenth-century self-conscious family, and the twentieth-century hybrid family.

The flexible family, 1700-1800

Samuel Johnson in 1755 defined the family as ‘those who live in the same house’.31 The eighteenth-century European family was, in many ways, indistinguishable from the household, not necessarily in terms of its size or structure, but rather in the conceptual sense of belonging. Before the nineteenth century, the family was not analogous to the home. It was not necessarily a self-contained unit consisting of blood kin, or at least it was not conceptualised in this way. As John Gillis states, ‘most people lived for much of their lives according to the rhythms and the spaces of families other than their own by birth or marriage’.32 For this reason, historians of the early modern period have tended to conflate family with household, which in turn implies ‘a domestic unit with decision-making autonomy about production and consumption’.33 Of course, in some instances the household consisted of little more than a stem family consisting of a married couple and their children engaged in household production. In others though, the household was a fluid entity consisting of a variety of kin such as widowed mothers, siblings and stepchildren, and non-kin such as servants, lodgers, wet nurses, tutors and apprentices, while at the same time family members might be short - or long-term residents in other households. However, family could also denote consanguinity, degrees of relatedness by blood and kin ties, but these family members might not live under the same roof. According to Flandrin, ‘in former times, the word “family” . . . referred to a set of kinsfolk who did not live together, while it also designated an assemblage of coresidents who were not necessarily linked by ties of blood and marriage’.34

The disassociation of family from blood kin and its association with a more heterogeneous household has appealed to historians of women for whom the modern idea of the nuclear, conjugal or male-breadwinner family has been too bound up with women’s role in reproduction. The early modern household, on the other hand, appears to offer women a variety of roles encompassing production, reproduction, consumption and nurture. Unlike the nineteenth-century family, which has become synonymous with the ideology of separate spheres thereby marginalising females from tasks ascribed economic value, the household, with its complexity of functions, its apparent permeability between work and family life with no apparent gender hierarchy, may appear to offer women a space freer of the constraints associated with the bourgeois model of the home.

At first sight though, the early modern household was a patriarchal institution whereby power was invested in the male head of the household. In both agrarian and urban communities, legal and moral authority rested with the head. Male heads derived this authority from their ownership and right to inheritance of land and property, but also from traditional notions of authority disseminated by the church and moralists who attempted to conceptualise the potentially unruly household as a disciplined unit in need of guidance. Patriarchal authority was not uniform in nature across Europe but could incorporate the male head’s right to dispose of family property, the right to supervise family labour, the right to represent the family and, within the family, possession and custodial rights in respect of a wife and children.35 These privileges were dependent upon the head’s reciprocal responsibilities to the household and his ability to conform to the role of good father and husband.

However, this ideology of the patriarchal household has recently been called into question by those who have researched the workings of the household as a domestic economy incorporating production and consumption and to which all members of the co-resident group contribute and interact. Complex households containing a variety of kin and non-kin engaged in varied and conflicting interactions. As Julie Hardwick points out, for middling households in early modern Nantes, ‘to perceive household relations only as simplistic patriarchal oppression is to ignore the greater complexity that day-to-day demands and negotiations created’.36 Lines of authority often bypassed the head of the household as wives, servants, lodgers and children formed alliances and engaged in conflict in the course of day-to-day household management. In this scenario, women were variously positioned as subordinates and as authority figures, depending upon their social relationships with one another. For instance, the supervision of domestic servants was usually a woman’s responsibility placing the wife of the head of household in a position of authority over other women, yet solidarities amongst women also developed across these lines of authority. Similarities in age and life course, as well as day-to-day personal (and often intimate) contact, may have facilitated bonds between women of different social classes. In middling households the ‘hierarchy of household chores’ was not always strictly drawn, with wives carrying out some tasks such as taking care of the linen and sewing alongside servants. Female networks that crossed lines of authority contributed to the good and orderly running of the household and sound menagement or Haushaltung (a concept of household economy that incorporated financial probity, respectability and hard work). Women thus assumed important roles within the household and, as Hardwick points out for France, although this entailed considerable responsibility, it also offered them opportunities for acquiring power.37

At the same time, male heads of households could forfeit their authority if they were judged to have neglected to manage the household diligently. Men who drank excessively, who were lazy, who were wasteful with money, could find themselves publicly remonstrated for their lack of competence in household management. A case from agrarian southern Germany illustrates this well. In 1743, Dorothea Thumm submitted a complaint to the Neckarhausen church court about her son-in-law David Falter who she accused of not being ‘as diligent as he should be’. He had neglected his Haushaltung by hiring others to carry out his farm work and by ‘loafing around’. He complained that his mother-in-law Dorothea scolded him, calling him a ‘bad manager, gambler, and drunkard’. She merely wished that he would be a more competent manager of the household.38 The point here is that the concept of the household and more especially its efficient management implied mutual obligation of the sexes wherein each member of the household had duties and responsibilities (rather than rights and power). A husband who failed to fulfil his duties could be stripped of his authority, his ‘right to manage’. By the end of the eighteenth century, wives, in alliance with the authorities, could remove a husband’s right to manage by subjecting his property to inventory or even a forced sale if he was judged to be in danger of indebtedness and hence putting his entire household at risk.39 Such cases contrast starkly with disputes heard in the nineteenth century when household management became almost exclusively associated with women.

In order to examine the position of women within the family in this period, we must do so on two levels: the economic and the personal or, in other words, their relationships to the productive unit (the household) and the reproductive unit (marriage and family). The marital alliance was the economic and emotional basis of the household and, for the majority of European women who did marry, it was in theory a guarantor of status in society. It was also potentially a source of emotional sustenance and, for a few, a springboard for achieving their own goals.

The marital relationship was the keystone of the early modern family economy. Only those who married had the opportunity to found their own household, and many European states made economic viability a condition before permission to marry was granted. The financial and material contribution of both spouses was essential. Sons of peasants brought land and maybe a farm inheritance, artisans brought their tools and their skills. Men of the middling classes brought property. In southern Europe, daughters of peasants and artisans traditionally entered marriage with a dowry consisting of some cash and material goods - maybe furniture, linen, a spindle, a loom. In Sicily, a trousseau of embroidered whitewear was the conventional dowry of a peasant girl. In Greece, the dowry might include a house or land as well as a trousseau.40 Elsewhere in the western Mediterranean the dot was more common, meaning property or goods bequeathed to the man and the woman and often interpreted as a more egalitarian way of transferring property from one generation to the next. In theory then, both spouses started marriage on a roughly equal footing.

On this basis, and despite the plethora of laws that objectively assigned the wife to a subordinate position within marriage, women expected to be treated with respect by their husbands if they fulfilled their side of the marriage bargain. On the other hand, a husband who reneged on his side of the unspoken contract could anticipate his wife’s opprobrium. The understanding of the complementary nature of the household economy was often central to marital disputes in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. In the German states, for instance, where marital disputes were aired before the church courts and, if sufficiently serious might proceed to the civil courts for a legal separation or divorce, it is clear that mutuality between the spouses was highly valued by wives when the household economy was based upon a rough equality. Disputes that took place in the context of the egalitarian household economy concerned men’s unacceptable behaviour that threatened to destabilise the family economic unit. Drinking, laziness and violent behaviour were deemed a danger to the Haushalt (household economy). As Sabean notes, these marital conflicts were not ‘hierarchical dramas’ about who ruled the house, but rather women were asserting their authority within the discourse of marital reciprocity.41 A husband who neglected his business and his family had no moral right to expect his wife to treat him with any respect.

Marriage for the peasant, artisan and middle classes in eighteenth-century Europe was also an economic relationship that required the contribution of both spouses. Prescriptive household literature, although envisaging quite distinct male and female spheres of economic production and a gender hierarchy, nevertheless regarded male-female relations as interdependent. One seventeenth-century German household-economy text exemplified this attitude which made little distinction between the public and the private sphere. Accepting that the husband and wife would have different qualities, nevertheless both had to cooperate in separate management of their respective realms: men in the fields, women in the house, the dairy, the garden.42 The ‘ideal was harmony within hierarchy’ and this kind of arrangement was not merely a prescriptive fantasy. In eighteenth-century France, one observer reported how

In the lowest ranks, in the country and in the cities, men and women together cultivate the earth, raise animals, manufacture cloth and clothing. Together they use their strength and their talents to nourish and serve children, old people, the infirm, the lazy and the weak. . . No distinction is made between them about who is the boss; both are.43

Historians of the industrialised economy have become accustomed to the notion of differential value assigned to male and female labour.44 Yet, within the household or family economy, women’s productive work - agricultural or proto-industrial - and reproductive work was clearly valued by other members of that household and by the community. The fact that a sexual division of labour prevailed was not necessarily an indicator of inequality. The Languedoc proverb, ‘A dauntless woman in the house is worth more than farm and livestock’ sums up the belief that woman was valued as a producer.45 Her work in running the house combined myriad tasks: cooking, cleaning, caring for children, lodgers and apprentices, looking after livestock and tending the kitchen garden. In addition she would participate in agricultural tasks such as hoeing, singling and the harvest, and she would undertake domestic manufacture in the form of knitting, sewing and the production of farm goods for sale and for home consumption. Wives of landless labourers hired themselves out to other households as well as working in rural industry, straw-plaiting, spinning, sewing, knitting and lacemaking. In families of the middling classes, women supervised servants, looked after other household members such as boarders, supervised apprentices, spun linen cloth for their own use and may even have worked on smallholdings as did the wives of Nantes’s notaries, where they supervised the grape harvest, helped to gather in vegetables and sold the produce.46

This bucolic image of the self-sufficient, mutually supportive family within which women had a valued place should not be overstated however. Shifts in economic structures could play havoc with family relationships. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, coinciding with economic changes that reordered economic relations between husband and wife, the nature of marital conflict altered. As the family economy became unviable, it was superseded by an economic system that valued women’s production of goods and services for cash. In these conditions, a renegotiation of reciprocities is evident whereby women’s adaptability to new market relationships encouraged them to assert their authority within the marriage relationship. In Wurttemberg in southern Germany women became more involved in the production of cash crops and raw materials for the textile industry. In Gottingen wives of artisans began to earn money wages in domestic service. Elsewhere in Europe, such as in soft-fruit-producing areas of Scotland and olive - and grape-producing regions of Italy, the nature of male and female roles changed substantially and the household economy was no longer a suitable economic unit. Woman’s role remained pivotal, but perhaps not equal. The consequence was a shifting balance of power in the family as women insisted on maintaining some control over their earnings and criticised their husbands’ tendency to squander resources.47

Proto-industrialisation, whereby whole villages of families could be employed in their own homes producing consumer goods for capitalist merchants, had a profound impact upon the dynamics of family life. The traditional and practical separation of spheres disappeared as working the land receded and the whole family - men, women and children - were engaged in production as a team, ‘transforming the sexual geography of daily life’.48 In these circumstances, it is suggested that the traditional sexual division of labour began to break down and the distribution of tasks became more flexible. Some historians have argued that women’s greater access to the means of production and their engagement in the market meant they accrued greater power.49 Yet it appears that as independent family businesses were absorbed into a putting-out network run by the merchants, husbands maintained their authority within the home by becoming representatives of their families in their dealings with the merchants, and women took prime responsibility for childcare and housekeeping in addition to being proletarians in their own homes.50 It was this family production unit that was transferred to the early industrial system.

The family economy in the transition to industrial capitalism was infused with gender inequalities. In the Loire region of France, where domestic handloom-weaving survived in the face of mechanisation longer than elsewhere, men’s pride at maintaining their skill was retained at the expense of the proletarianisation of their wives and daughters who were forced to find waged work to supplement their menfolk’s meagre and declining piece rates.51 Thus women were employed as sweated outworkers in their own homes producing lingerie and shoes for the new luxury consumer market. Women bore the costs of the weavers’ survival. In the Italian silk-producing area of Como, where agriculture continued to exist side by side with industrial production, it was the women who became proletarianised, exploited by factory owners and their own husbands.52 The family economy then, was a system that could subordinate women at the same time as placing a value on their labour.

As gender relations within the rural labouring family were being reshaped in the late eighteenth century by the forces of market capitalism, amongst the middling classes, family relationships within and furth of the family core were being strengthened, and women’s role was bolstered in the process. Women became key figures in the mobilisation of kin, which in turn provided the emotional and material ballast for the making and sustaining of family in this social milieu. These practical kin relationships were mobilised in instances of matchmaking and marriage, at baptisms, in the care of the elderly and infirm, and in financial arrangements.53 In these households and kinship networks women were the active family makers, the ‘generators of kin alliances’.54 Women fostered female relationships centred upon female maternity rituals. Confinement and childbirth have been interpreted as a time and a space of empowerment for women, and they had their own rituals to welcome newborns at a time when baptisms tended to be occasions of male sociability. Women were also active net-workers in relation to marriage alliances, often playing a key role in the choice of a suitable spouse. Once a woman was engaged to be wed, the kin community of women would work to help her accumulate her trousseau of linens. This fostering of female networks may well have provided the basis for emotional support and material aid amongst communities of women. Women formed small informal credit networks at a time when men controlled the legal borrowing and lending of money. And in cases of spousal cruelty a ready-made network of kin roundabout could be invaluable, something that applied to women of the working classes too.55

Amongst the middling classes then, women’s role was becoming more embedded in the domestic life of the family, presaging developments in the nineteenth century that saw a much closer relationship of women and home. By contrast, woman’s role in the working-class family was becoming more production driven, potentially giving her greater access to networks and relationships beyond the family, but in reality tying her into a patriarchal household system that incorporated the female double burden of homemaking and wage-earning.

So far we have been focusing on the place of married women in the family, but in early modern Europe up to 25 per cent of women never married, and the vast majority of those who did were widowed. What place was there for these women in the flexible family and what was their role? The flexible boundaries of the early modern household meant that unmarried and widowed women could find a place for themselves, either incorporated into the household of kin or, if finances were tight, of an unrelated family. However, as one eighteenth-century commentator on the condition of women astutely remarked of the spinster, ‘Should her destination be to remain an inhabitant in her father’s house, cheerfulness, good temper, and an obliging resignation of her will to that of others was her duty.’56 A woman who was not attached by marriage to the household head was to sublimate her needs to those of the household and above all, she had to be useful.

Olwen Hufton has noted that

All women lived in societies in which marriage and motherhood were regarded as the norm, spinsterhood and infertility as a blight, and in which the notion of the family economy, of the family as a composite unit permitting the sustenance of the whole, was axiomatic.57

She suggests that women who lived outside the family inhabited a kind of ‘twilight existence’. Similarly, Miriam Slater argues that spinsterhood condemned a woman to ‘a lifetime of peripheral existence... a functionless role played out at the margins of other people’s lives without even that minimal raison d’etre - the possibility of bearing children’.58 There is some truth in both of these statements. Marriage was the only sure route to a sustainable independent household for women, but at the same time, the demographic and economic pressures on most households - frequent illness and indisposition, high mortality, recurrent childbirth and the need for more labour - meant that the accommodation of single women was often functional rather than a burden. Spinsters fulfilled a wide variety of functions in the family: as carers of the elderly, the infirm, widowed fathers and children, as housekeepers and nurses, as companions and governesses and as workers, material contributors to the household income. An extra pair of hands made all the difference. In the Shetland Islands, for example, where women were left to run the crofts in the absence of men at the fishing in the summer months, a spinster sister or widowed aunt was a common addition to the household. Indeed, a woman who did not have extra help around the house would have struggled to manage her productive and reproductive roles. Hosiery production, croft work and domestic and childcare chores were not compatible. ‘Dey wida needed till a been wirkin braaly anxious at it an probably maybe been anidder woman ida hoose fur I couldna see a hoose wi wan wife ida hoose doin dat, alang wi aa da rest o her wark’ (They would have needed to have been working really hard at it and probably maybe [there would have been] another woman in the house for I couldn’t see a house with one wife in the house doing that along with all the rest of her work) commented one resident of the islands.59 More common was the employment of single women as domestic servants in rural households. Those who did not become betrothed might remain as ‘servants-in-husbandry’ as this was a more secure prospect than trying to make a living alone. In the towns, the service sector was so large in the eighteenth century - in London it has been estimated that up to one thirteenth of the entire population was in service - that it acted as life-cycle transition for young women who could be safely incorporated into another’s household, and it offered older unmarried women a place within a household economy, albeit increasingly physically separated - in living quarters situated in distant parts of the house they served - from the family who employed them.60

However, in England and Scotland a remarkable number of elderly spinsters and widows did manage to make an independent living with access to a small amount of

Land - often waste land - and maybe some livestock. Such women had become of no use to their families, regarded as too infirm or elderly to contribute meaningfully to the household economy. Plenty were the ‘widows and single women of the poorer classes who lived alone in some tiny cottage away from the village, built perhaps surreptitiously on a bit of waste and hidden among fern and furze and bramble’.61 Those who were not incorporated into the family of blood kin or into an unrelated family and who could not survive alone only had one alternative: institutional care outwith the family, an option more common in urban areas such as Amsterdam where, by the middle of the nineteenth century, almost one half of the never-married elderly lived in homes for the destitute.62

In the middling classes, the options for unmarried women were somewhat more constrained. Absorption into another family was possible but in a more limited sense. Some spinsters were sent to live with female siblings, especially if there were young children to care for, or they became companions to elderly relatives. The governess has become the ubiquitous image of the middle-class spinster in service, but it was not until the nineteenth century that opportunities expanded in this line of work as the more affluent middle classes began to employ governesses for their daughters.63 Some unmarried women did find a role within a family business but they were rarely able to escape the discipline of family altogether. In the case of Hester Pinney, whose life is so nicely reconstructed by Pamela Sharpe, her success as an autonomous tradeswoman in the early modern lace trade of the English West Country and London did not bring the benefit of independence from patriarchal authority. As Sharpe points out, ‘it is an anachronistic idea. . . to think that economic means could free a woman from the bonds of a potentially suffocating web of connections who were both relatives and business associates’.64

The early modern family, in Gillis’s words, ‘enabled individuals to form familial relations with strangers and to feel at home away from home’.65 Within this flexible concept of family, women could move from one household to another assuming a variety of roles: daughter, servant, wife, mother, worker and carer, often simultaneously. In this scenario, family was not intimately associated with women’s roles. ‘Doing family’ was not uniquely women’s work. Women slipped between roles according to economic need. However, by the end of the eighteenth century, women’s relationship to the family was changing in most regions of western Europe. As the early modern household economy gave way, gradually, to the modern domestic family, woman’s role altered. It became more circumscribed, the value of her familial or domestic labour changed, and the work of sustaining family life became uniquely female.