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REVIEWS
| The Household and the Making of History: A Subversive View of the Western Past. By Mary S. Hartman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xi plus 297 pp. $70 hardback, $25 paperback).
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| Mary S. Hartman has been challenging traditional historians since she wrote her study of nineteenth-century British murderesses, and co-edited a collection of essays from the first Berkshire Conference on Women's History. Her goal in the 1980s, as now with her carefully structured, extended analytical essay on the significance of women and the early modern household, was to "provoke reassessment" of standard interpretations of familiar narratives (5). In The Household and the Making of History she begins with the familiar question: what set Western Europe on a new course after 1500 and caused the rapid development of mercantile and industrial capitalism? |
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Her "subversive" answer literally turns European men's and women's history upside down. Instead of political, economic and social forces causing this transformation of Northwestern Europe, the beginnings of "modernization," Hartman argues that it was a new pattern of social relations that established the necessary preconditions for these broader changes (31, 33). She credits identification of this new pattern, this "prior distinctive" set of anomalies, to the English economic historian John Hajnal. In his 1965 article, "European Marriage Patterns in Perspective," he noted three differences that distinguished northern Europe from other agricultural regions: late marriage ages for women as well as men; significant numbers of women not marrying; ratios of women to men more or less equal. In seeking an explanation for these anomalies, Hajnal looked to broader economic and social developments. Peasant girls as well as boys became wage laborers. Daughters and sons in these households left home at about the same age, became servants to other peasant families, part of the proto-industrialization of rural areas, or migrated to nearby urban areas to serve in other households. With wages, young women could make more independent choices about their lives; they did not need to marry to have a livelihood; families allowed infant daughters to survive because their labor would be as productive as that of their brothers. |
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