Transnational history

This book is a transnational history of women in Europe from approximately 1700. It is organised topically rather than either geographically or chronologically, and it is structured around single-voiced examinations written by scholars working across Europe and the USA. It was conceived as largely western and central European, incorporating Britain and Ireland, and treating regional variation as more significant than political boundaries. One of the greatest challenges has been to confront our own perceptions, exploring beyond our individual research areas to produce a genuinely transnational European history. The authors have striven to ensure Europe is embraced, and research on Belgium, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, the Baltic and southern Europe has been incorporated, though we would acknowledge that our own areas of familiarity have often shaped our thinking. Shared European traditions, histories and cultural developments permit an emphasis on aspects of both similarity and difference, and provide the basis for a more coherent approach, which would be difficult to sustain if widely variant cultural traditions were introduced. Some of the authors have drawn on eastern Europe, but a fully integrated history of Europe awaits both the research and an author bold enough to take it on. The state of research in women’s history in eastern Europe, including European Russia, and the relative lack of information in languages the authors can read have also limited how much can be incorporated. There have been inroads on this lack of knowledge in the West about the East, such as research by Jane McDermid, Barbara Alpern Engel, Rose L. Glickman, Linda Edmondson, Beatrice Farnsworth, Lynne Viola and the recent translation of work by Natalia Pushkareva, to name a few. Work on areas outside of Russia is also beginning to trickle through.4 Research such as this has begun to inform and influence western views of eastern European women, so that perhaps that metaphorical ‘wall’ is also coming down.

Moving beyond national stories is a fundamental principle of this history of women in modern Europe. Mary Nash has argued that

A fully comprehensive view of European women’s history has yet to be established. North/South, periphery/centre divides still persist in existing perceptions. . . Meta-narratives identified as being representative of European women’s history, but based on a selective reading of British or French studies are still accepted as. . . a ‘European discourse’.5

Writing ‘national’ women’s histories has been important in reclaiming history for European women and for analysing the gendered character of nation-states.6 Indeed, a common refrain has been concern about the lack of research on women in the national context.7 Thus the creation of national women’s history networks, many dating from the period after the founding of the International Federation for Research in Women’s History (Federation Internationale Pour la Recherche en Histoire des Femmes) in 1987, provide a focus and a network for promoting research and for asking questions about the future direction of European women’s history.8 These organisations point to the international and national links within European women’s history and to the vibrancy of research interests in these areas.

So, if we want to move beyond what Karen Hunt calls ‘the myopia of national histories’ (p. 221) to unsettle the boundaries, how do we do it? The scope and scale of this book, chronologically, geographically and topically, imposes the necessity of strategies through which we can explore women’s differing experiences in western Europe over the past three centuries. Differences of class, nation, locality, age, sexuality, motivation and access to power describe women’s lives as much as the similarities created by gender. It is impossible to cover everything. Rebecca Rogers draws attention to how little transnational work has been done on education; Sian Reynolds would testify to how little integrative work has been done on cultural fields. Essentially we have focused on highlighting areas of common ‘European’ experience but have remained sensitive to important differences. We have concentrated on key developments, trends and features and have tried to draw out the shape of European women’s history, not a series of sub-plots based on national experience. So, for example, Pat Starkey can say, in her vigorous analysis of European religious traditions, ‘women have frequently experienced in remarkably similar ways the blessings and disadvantages of their faith and the institutions that seek to guard it’ (p. 180). In some ways, this was probably the greatest challenge to Karen Hunt’s analysis of polity and citizenship since these are necessarily tied to nation and national identity. We have also striven to ensure that no single national perspective shaped our arguments; the story is, however, illuminated with examples that come from across Europe, so French, Finnish or Italian women make an appearance. When they do so they represent their European sisters - or provide counter-examples to the main account.