Women in Eighteenth Century Europe

Margaret Hunt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317883876
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Was the century of Voltaire also the century of women? In the eighteenth century changes in the nature of work, family life, sexuality, education, law, religion, politics and warfare radically altered the lives of women. Some of these developments caused immense confusion and suffering; others greatly expanded women's opportunities and worldview – long before the various women's suffrage movements were more than a glimmer on the horizon. This study pays attention to queens as well as commoners; respectable working women as well as prostitutes; women physicists and mathematicians as well as musicians and actresses; feminists as well as their critics. The result is a rich and morally complex tale of conflict and tragedy, but also of achievement.

The book deals with many regions and topics often under-represented in general surveys of European women, including coverage of the Balkans and both European Turkey and Anatolia, of Eastern Europe, of European colonial expansion (particularly the slave trade) and of Muslim, Eastern Orthodox, and Jewish women's history. Bringing all of Europe into the narrative of early modern women's history challenges many received assumptions about Europe and women in past times, and provides essential background for dealing with issues of diversity in the Europe of today.

Chapter 1

Hierarchy and Difference

To early modern people, domination and subordination were the very warp and woof of reality. Efforts to subvert the old order, or even to rethink its hierarchical assumptions, tended to be viewed, particularly by those at the top, as assaults upon God’s plan. The eighteenth-century ‘Age of Enlightenment’ is, of course, associated with a series of systematic attempts to do just that. But throughout the century, and still more urgently in the face of the revolutionary movements that brought it to a close, conservative sentiments continued to issue from the mouths of most preachers, inform childrearing, define labour relations, and permeate the laws. There were, to be sure, always doubts as to whether or not God had personally ordained abuse and exploitation by status superiors (many thought not), but hierarchy and inequality remained the default mode. A central feature of this system was the assumed superiority of most men over virtually all women. And yet, even this apparently simple proposition was anything but straightforward when arrayed next to the many other status categories that helped define early modern life. In this chapter we try to untangle some of these categories and think about how they affected the lives of flesh and blood women.

Defining and Enforcing Subordination

Varieties of women’s subordination

In the normal course of events a woman would leave the authority of her parents, or, if she was a servant, her master, and come under the authority of her husband (or, in compound or complex families, her father and mother-in-law¹), often for the rest of her life. That life was supposed to be, and often was, a fairly narrow one. As a woman she was presumptively unfit for most prestige-bearing and potentially powerful roles and opportunities, including the parish clergy, higher education, the military, many skilled crafts, village and town governance, and official state policy making – unless she happened to be an aristocrat or a queen. The amount of wealth and status a woman could accumulate was similarly quite constrained and often dependent upon her connections to men. Women were far more likely to accrue status by virtue of their husband or male relatives coming into an inheritance or advancing in their craft, profession or status-group, than by their own talents or connections.

One of the central markers of status for women was the ability to delegate heavy or time-consuming tasks away to other women or girls. Bearing children conferred status at least in part because of the labour and, often, wages children could contribute. In areas where domestic service was common, even a not-very-prosperous woman might preside over a meagrely paid maidservant, perhaps a young, half-starved, local orphan, or someone whose family could not afford to keep her. In areas where serfdom or slavery flourished, the ownership of other people was a major source of prestige for the better-off. In regions characterized by large, complex or multigenerational households a woman’s status rose considerably when she had daughters-in-law to supervise (before she acquired daughters-in-law she had, obviously, to have borne sons).² Money was also important. A minority of women could and did exchange subordination to a husband for financial independence later in life, especially in legal regimes that favoured, or at least were not incompatible with, wealth accumulation by women. But both the ability to control other women’s or children’s labour and financial independence were very contingent where women were concerned. Prosperity could count for little if a wife lacked the support and loyalty of her husband, or if he routinely beat her, publicly shamed her, or took and spent monies earmarked for her widowhood and old age. Everywhere demographic bad luck (the early death of a spouse or failure to bear children) affected women’s economic and social status more than it did men’s; moreover, they were very vulnerable to having their property and inheritance rights trampled upon by relatives. Consequently, the proportion of women who actually achieved a comfortable and honoured old age, while not negligible, was probably never large. It was extremely easy for women to fall through the tattered safety net of family obligation and love, and because of the many constraints and limitations upon them the landing was often rock-hard.³

The everyday disadvantages of femaleness were greatly complicated by other factors. Stigma was an open and unapologetic feature of early modern life, and it had many faces. There were literally stigmatized people, those with birth defects (for instance a hare-lip or a withered arm), obvious skin-diseases, or acquired disabilities, such as polio or a face ruined by smallpox. Many other kinds of stigma were essentially social. In much of Christian Europe people of illegitimate birth were barred from many employment opportunities, including guild membership, municipal citizenship and the priesthood; often it was difficult, and sometimes it was impossible for them to inherit from either parent. Bastards of either sex were, on the whole, undesirable marriage partners, and in some places, especially late in our period, they were disproportionately likely to be abandoned or starved in infancy.⁴ Certain occupations also bore the mark of stigma, which is to say that they were considered sufficiently dirty, polluting or uncivilized to render their practitioners (and their kin) unfit for borough citizenship, guild membership, or marriage to honourable people, and sometimes access to the sacraments of the Catholic Church. Women who married men in these groups were, in many places, unwelcome at other women’s gatherings or otherwise shunned. Depending on the place, stigmatized occupations could include: executioners, skinners, tanners, shepherds, charcoal-burners, traveling musicians, actors and actresses, professional women mourners, grave-diggers and prostitutes.⁵ Ethnic and religious minorities endured many gradations of stigma. This diverse and variable group included Jews, the Roma (Gypsies), Africans, the Scandinavian Saami, various Russian ‘tribal’ groupings, Protestants in some Catholic countries; Catholics in some Protestant countries, Muslims in Russia, Shi’ites in the Ottoman Empire, and many others. In the early modern period the numbers of the potentially or actually stigmatized expanded considerably with Europe’s incursions into the Americas, Asia, Africa and the Pacific, and especially with the exponential growth of the transatlantic slave trade.

Norms and practices relating to stigmatized groups varied greatly. A disability could be somewhat offset by a supportive and loving family, and some disabilities evoked more pity than others. Bastardy could be partially balanced out by a high-born father, by wealth, and, probably most important of all, by having a father who loved and acknowledged all his offspring. Among Muslims, children born to concubines inherited equally with a man’s legitimate children if he recognized them as his own; some illegitimates in Iberia and its colonies also inherited on an equal basis with their legitimate half-siblings.⁶ Single mothers were not everywhere bereft of support: charities sometimes helped them; and in some places they seem to have been supported by their families and assimilated back into the marriage or the labour market with little fuss (see Chapter 3). Jews were treated far better in some cities or realms (Amsterdam, Ottoman cities like Salonika/Thessaloniki and Smyrna/Izmir, and in many parts of Poland) than in others. Toleration allowed a respite, albeit sometimes only temporary, from the siege mentality and crippling economic burdens that persecution usually brought with it. This inevitably affected women for the better. In early modern Poland, on the whole a place of opportunity for Jews despite some shocking outbreaks of mass violence, Jewish women sometimes supervised charitable collections in their communities, and a few were very active in estate management, sometimes forging close working relationships with Christian noblewomen.⁷

Slavery and serfdom

In the English and Dutch colonies and former colonies, slavery was tantamount to social death.⁸ Slaves had no right to property. African abductees had their family ties systematically destroyed, and the new families they tried to form could be broken up on an owner’s whim. Though in many places it was, technically, against the law, in practice male slave-owners had virtually unlimited sexual access to their slaves. The children of free men and slave women were considered illegitimate, did not usually automatically inherit from their white fathers, and remained slaves unless special steps were taken by their owner to manumit them. Manumission was relatively rare, and increasingly illegal, so for most people slavery was a life-long status that they passed on to their children and their children’s children. Slaves could not, for the most part, sue in court, much less sue their masters. In addition slavery was so strongly linked to race that even free people of African descent inherited a variety of legal and cultural disabilities, as well as the possibility that they or their children might be kidnapped and re-enslaved. This is the model of slavery that most northwestern Europeans are most familiar with: it is what prevailed in the British and Dutch West Indies and in the North American colonies (later the United States), and there is general agreement that it was one of the most extreme forms of slavery in recorded history.⁹

Slavery looked quite different in the Ottoman Empire, while Spain, Portugal (and arguably France) and their colonies lay between the extremes. One would not want to exaggerate the contrasts. To take the Ottomans first, it is quite clear that their form of slavery was saturated with coercion. It is true that some slaves sold themselves (or were sold by their families) into slavery – because, as we will see, enslavement tended to be a temporary state and was quite often a route to upward mobility. But many others, particularly those of African or Balkan origin, were dragged by force from their home-lands and their families. The forced march of central African and Sudanese captives north across the Sahara desert to slavery among the Ottomans was every bit as brutal and dangerous as the Middle Passage of slaves to the New World. In some other respects, however, slavery in the Ottoman mode was a hybrid form, located somewhere between slavery, indentured servitude, and fictive kinship. In the Ottoman Empire slaves were generally freed after five or seven years, and if they were not they could petition the courts to free them. They could also arrange to have themselves sold to a new owner if their first owner mistreated them, and they had a right, enshrined in the Qur’an, to purchase their freedom. Strong social pressure, sometimes buttressed by the law, was brought to bear on masters who refused to let their slaves go.¹⁰ Masters were supposed to feed and clothe their slaves with the same food and clothes they themselves wore and ate, and to consider them their brothers, and freeing a slave was not only to be done in expiation for a variety of crimes or missteps, but was mandated (as several hadiths¹¹ report) if a master struck or otherwise mistreated his slave. The position of slave women is especially indicative of the hybrid character of Ottoman slavery. A woman did not have the right to refuse sexual relations with her master and many women were specifically bought for sexual purposes. On the other hand, a slave who bore children to her master could not be sold and was automatically freed on his death if she had not been previously. In addition, her children were free and inherited equally with the master’s other children if he acknowledged them, though this was entirely up to him, and it would have been greatly in the interests of his other wives for him not to do so.¹² Ottoman slaves tended to have marriages arranged for them, either before or after manumission, by their owners or former owners (which was probably usually considered a benefit), and often subsequently became valued members of their master’s or mistress’s clientage network. This not infrequently led to extraordinary upward mobility: many of the most powerful people in the Ottoman Empire in the early modern period were slaves or former slaves, and the Sultan himself was invariably the son of a slave. Women could also move up through slavery, and often did, especially if they were attractive and musically talented or had administrative or accounting skills; moreover, the Qur’an strongly encourages men to marry their slaves, and even to choose pious slave-women as wives over less-pious free ones, and forbids an owner to prostitute his or her slaves ‘if she [the slave] desires chastity’.¹³ As one authority, Y. Hakan Erdem, has remarked, ‘[t]he Ottoman slave system was an open one in which slaves were continually integrated into society as full members …’¹⁴ On the other hand, it is also clear that black slaves (who became significantly more common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than they had been) were much less likely to experience this sort of upward mobility than white or Ethiopian slaves were, and they tended to be consigned to menial household tasks (African women could sometimes improve their lot by becoming wet nurses, a very important position in elite households, not least because it conferred a form of kinship between the wet nurse’s own children and the children she nursed).¹⁵ The treatment of slaves prescribed in the Qur’an and hadiths was clearly an ideal. It did demonstrably affect the conditions under which slaves lived: many slaves did become fictive kin and marry up into the families or networks of their owners; it is likely that it emboldened slaves to try to better their lot, and it certainly translated into very high manumission rates. Still, there is no question that Ottoman slavery, especially to the extent that it was located in the private household (as female slavery, at least, almost always was) could be abusive and exploitative in ways that were quite comparable to what we see in other closed family systems. And many slaves (perhaps especially menial slaves, who were also likely to be Africans), achieved manumission only to find themselves, essentially, abandoned to their fate.

Similar paradoxes and inconsistencies characterized slave conditions in the various Iberian and French colonies. Slaves’ living and working conditions, especially in the West Indian and Brazilian plantation economies, were often horrific. Slaves did have a right to petition the court for manumission if they were ill-treated, and they could also purchase their own freedom, but one wonders how well either of these worked on remote plantations (throughout the early modern world legal rights tended to be more available to people in or near urban areas). Be that as it may, slave manumission does seem to have been a good deal more common in the Iberian colonies than in the Northern European colonies. Unlike in the Ottoman system, slave-women in the Iberian colonies did, in theory, have the right to refuse to have sexual relations with their master (and, as we will see, it was sometimes enforceable in court). Moreover, in both Portuguese and Spanish colonies, and to some extent in French ones, this was buttressed by strong, if inconsistent, pressure from the Catholic Church and the courts on owners to marry slave-women with whom they cohabited (assuming the men were not already married, that is) or at least to provide child-support. One result was a significantly higher rate of interracial marriage than one sees in the Northern European colonies (where cross-racial marriage was more likely to be illegal), with some children of slaves even ending up as heirs to a share of the estate of their mother’s former owner.¹⁶

Conversely, even with their somewhat more liberal views on intermarriage, there is also much evidence of race prejudice in Spain, Portugal, France and their colonies. One symptom of this was that municipalities were perpetually trying to forbid slaves, and often free blacks or mulattos too, from gambling, dancing, playing loud music, or wearing clothes or personal adornments that seemed to compete with those of white and/or free people. There were also a variety of laws (which all historians agree grew more onerous over the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) excluding blacks and mixed-race people from public office or from attending university, limiting their ability to bear arms, and generally seeking to deny them the benefits and the opportunities afforded to free whites. Predictably, in a world where white men routinely preyed sexually upon non-white women, considerable discursive and legislative effort was expended to define black and mixed-race women as essentially dishonourable (because they were allegedly naturally disposed to ‘sexual ardours’)¹⁷ while white women were supposedly both honourable and chaste. This doctrine was convenient for white men because it left women of colour more vulnerable to both verbal and physical sexual attack. It was convenient for white women because it suggested that the paternity of ‘entirely white’ children was far more certain than that of mixed-race children. In short, it struck a pre-emptive blow against the efforts of slave-women concubines to get the white fathers of their children to recognize them as their own,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Plates
• Acknowledgements
• Publisher’s Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Hierarchy and Difference
• 2. Families
• 3. Sexuality and Reproduction
• 4. Food and Consumption
• 5. Work and Money
• 6. Paths of the Spirit
• 7. Cultures of Women
• 8. Civil Society and the State
• 9. Age of Revolutions
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Bibliography
• Index