The time span of this book - 1700 to the present - is fundamental to its rationale. It was also chosen to reflect a potentially manageable period, which would have something useful and coherent to say about women’s experience. It is a period for which a ‘grand narrative’ for women has been created, and we need to engage with that narrative and question it. There is no particular magic about 1700. The inheritance from an earlier period has important resonance for the modern era. A number of social, economic, political and ideological shifts have their roots in the eighteenth and even the late seventeenth century, such as the revolution in science, epistemology, the Enlightenment and industrialisation. Eighteenth-century developments in commerce, ideology and politics were crucial for women as was women’s contribution to them. They help explain the emergence of women as more visible actors across the three hundred years covered by this book. Using this longue duree, we can disentangle the dominance of narratives of industrialisation and bourgeois femininity that shape so much of our perception of the past. One of the organising principles in this history of European women was to place the bourgeois era and the domestic model into perspective. Indeed, over the longer span of time, one is inclined to agree with Pam Sharpe who sees the Victorian period as an historical aberration.17 Thus, starting with the eighteenth century allows a more balanced exploration of the key changes of the modern period, while bringing the story to the near present allows contemporary women to make links between themselves and the past. Often it is dealt with on its own, or handled as a sociological rather than historical period. For many women’s studies students, we are lucky if they study any history at all, while across history departments, student interest focuses on the ‘modern’ period. Thus the long span gives substance and purchase to an understanding of our own time, which is firmly attached to its moorings. At the same time, the book is not cast in a modernist, or Whig, view of history that sees a linear progression to the modern. We would explicitly eschew such a construction. Indeed Karen Hunt asks, ‘is this the least interesting question to be asking?’ (p. 220).
To be pragmatic, it is also the period we know best and thus this book comes out of years of reading, teaching and researching women’s history. But it is a long period, and while Wiesner, Wunder and Hufton were able to adopt a thematic or topical approach to their accounts of the preceding three centuries, it is not realistic for the period from 1700.18 We are operating in a more literate culture and one where a primacy on collecting, investigating and writing about life emerged as a central concern. To paraphrase Salieri, in Amadeus, ‘We have too much history.’ One of the historians’ jobs is to make the past explicable, and dividing it up into palatable, understandable chunks is part of that task. Each chapter has an internal chronology, roughly mapping onto centuries, that allows the authors and, subsequently, the readers to reflect on the continuities in female experience, as well as to measure the character of changes. There is a certain pragmatism operating here. By following a parallel structure for each chapter, readers can read across periods or across topics. On the one hand, much of the secondary material that exists is organised around centuries and, on the other hand, so are many courses. Thus, using these familiar periods facilitates the way the book may be used.
A fundamental task of any historian is to decide how to ‘manage’ time. The way we decide about periods of time and how we label them are not neutral, but embody interpretations and are ‘bound up with both historians’ other tasks and their mental maps of the past’.19 In shaping chapters, we clearly recognised that a single chronology does not map across the themes. While centuries are only spuriously coherent, they have the advantage that you know when you are talking about. But definitions of a century are also contentious and reflect different regional and cultural experience. In Britain, the ‘long’ eighteenth century runs from 1688 to 1815, while in France a ‘short’ eighteenth century from 1715 to 1789 makes sense. Also, in writing about Europe we have to recognise that language shapes how we might label the period that we study. The authors in this book have variously defined these time periods - and indeed have struggled with them in shaping their narratives. As Pat Starkey says, ‘there will inevitably be some untidiness around the edges as developments spread themselves across our artificially imposed boundaries’ (p. 178-9). A couple of examples show how the authors worked within the agreed framework to develop their own discussion. Anna Clark and Sian Reynolds used dominant themes to shape each of their chapters. In Clark’s case, the demographic revolution of the mid-eighteenth century is therefore discussed in the nineteenth century, as contemporaries became aware of it and as it informed debate and political action. Reynolds, however, used time and theme to structure her analysis, as she explains
The three central chronological sections, here described as the ‘long’ eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, will each take a particular focus: . . . [each] witnessed some new development of gender balance. For the first period, roughly 1680-1810, the centre of interest will be the performing arts: theatre, music, opera and dance. For the ‘long nineteenth century’ (1789-1914) the chosen focus is the written word: reading, translation and writing. Finally, the ‘long twentieth century’, from about the 1890s to 2000, will consider the visual and fine arts, including photography and cinema. In each case, there will be excursions forwards and back in time as appropriate. (p. 334)
One further example of how this long duree could be shaped was implemented by Tammy M. Proctor who saw developments in women’s leisure shaped around three spaces that mapped onto the three centuries: community, nation and world. So, a bit of ‘untidiness’ and blurring of boundaries shapes each internal narrative. Indeed, all of us would agree that we have employed ‘excursions forward and back in time as appropriate’.
Throughout this book, we have not privileged continuity or change. The history of women is often seen as flowing onward without clear breaks, the continuities are often as important as the changes, and an important case has been made for framing studies in terms of the continuities in female experience.20 Few, however, have adopted either continuity or change as an intellectual straitjacket, and few historians have tried to apply ‘continuity’ unilaterally to the period covered by this book. An exception, however, is Bonnie Anderson and Judith Zinsser’s bold if challenging abandonment of periodisation altogether in A History of Their Own, where great swathes of time are covered in thematic chapters.21 Yet a fundamental question of historical inquiry is ‘What happened?’, which tautologically suggests something did happen and that something caused it to happen. Questions about change are fundamental to producing historical understanding. We cannot privilege either continuity or change without simplifying historical explanation; we need to unravel multiple influences in a given situation. Pam Sharpe draws attention to the potential restriction that a preoccupation with the tension between continuity and change can create. Indeed she argues that:
We no longer need to be hampered by overarching narratives of ‘continuity’ versus ‘change’. . . . In a multi-faceted economy. . . some women’s lives saw continuities, others changed. What must concern us now is understanding these individual experiences within the broad framework of the economic past.22
Continuities and connections run throughout the past 300 years, but the character of change in women’s lives is also profound. The simple fact of the dramatic shift in women’s formal political rights or the range of occupational or educational choices serve to illustrate this. Thus, we have mapped the continuities and changes, acknowledging that both contribute to our understanding and elucidation of women’s lives.
World History
