| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Rebekka Habermas. Frauen und Männer des Bürgertums: Eine Familiengeschichte (1750–1850). (Bürgertum; Beiträge zur Europäischen Gesellschaftsgeschichte, number 14.) Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. 2000. Pp. viii, 456.

Rebekka Habermas's microhistory of nineteenth-century German bourgeois families is a distinguished contribution to an already impressive body of recent scholarship on nineteenth-century civil society. Its importance lies in its solid presentation of two theses: that the social roles and identities of middle-class men and women cannot be explained without understanding the mutually constitutive nature of male and female gender; and, further, that bourgeois private and public life are too interwoven to be handled as discrete analytical categories. While these arguments may not be particularly new to Anglo-American readers, Habermas's meticulous research in showing how the everyday practices of husbands and wives of two families shaped public and private bourgeois lives notably advances the historiography on civil society in Germany. Gender analysis has taken a decidedly subsidiary, if not peripheral, position in the historiography on civil society, and this study exposes the blind spots of prevailing models. This book ought to stimulate the same rethinking that Catherine Hall and Leonore Davidoff's Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (1987) did for anglophone historiography. Both persuasively demonstrate that the family was the principal site for shaping not only home life and women's lives but also men's attitudes and their socioeconomic roles in the larger reaches of public society. . . .

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