Mary S. Hartman. The Household and the Making of History: A Subversive View of the Western Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xi + 297 pp. $70.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-82972-4; $25.99 (paper), ISBN 978-0-521-53669-1.
Reviewed by Anne McLaren (School of History, University of Liverpool)
Published on H-Albion (April, 2005)
What Makes History Run?
What caused northwestern Europe's extraordinary trajectory? From about 1500 changes occurred in that region that made it the engine of developments we associate with modernity, on track to becoming a dominant global force by the nineteenth century. Yet until this point this area--England, the Low Countries, much of Scandinavia, northern France, and German-speaking lands--had been a remote and somewhat backward region, peripheral both geographically and in terms of European culture. Scholars of a macro historical turn of mind have grappled with this question in various guises. Now, in this wonderfully rich and exciting book, Mary Hartman provides a satisfying answer to that riddle, and presents us with a new big picture. She does so by focusing on the household.
Hartman argues for a perceptual shift. She wants to dislodge historians' ingrained view that what makes history run is what various groups and individuals--overwhelmingly elite males in various permutations--do in arenas beyond the household. She is not the first historian to direct attention to the family as the building block of society, or to argue that household organization has important implications for other forms of social and political organization, even psycho-social constitution; one thinks of Philip Greven, Alan Macfarlane, Lawrence Stone, and, of course, Peter Laslett. But she is the first to highlight peasant families as necessary (if not necessarily self-conscious) actors in the drama, and to factor in the gender-specific experiences of men and women.
Hartman's causal agent is what has come to be called the "Western family pattern," and specifically the late age of marriage for women that she identifies as its key ingredient.[1] Agricultural societies the world over have generally conformed to a standard early-marriage pattern. Families usually arrange their children's marriages. These take place when the couple are quite young, with the woman on average 7 to 10 years younger than the man--often at or shortly after the onset of her puberty. Once married, the young couple move into the husband's family house, headed by the paterfamilias. In these societies few people, men or women, remain single. Traditional sex roles are clear cut, and are structurally reinforced within the family and the household. But from the high Middle Ages, for reasons that remain unexplained, the marriage pattern in northwestern Europe diverged from this norm. From this time, outside the ranks of the aristocracy, those women who married did so comparatively late, to similarly aged male partners, in unions that they themselves were likely to have agreed upon and organized. Once married, these couples tended to set up their own households, rather than being absorbed into the man's family household. A significant number, 10 to 20 percent, and more women than men, never married at all. The result was a degree of volatility within the family and the household that profoundly influenced Western society at every level, in the old world and the new. That volatility, and its consequences, continues to resonate through our contemporary society--witness high levels of divorce, the diminution of the stigma attached to illegitimacy, and, most recently, the furor over homosexual marriage. For Hartman these features of modernity, and many others, represent the working through of this aberrant Western family pattern.
The pattern itself was identified in the mid-1960s, part of the pioneering work of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. Hartman argues that at that point historians and demographers took a wrong turn. They focused on the family's nuclear structure as the key to the big picture that they hoped to project, in part because that variable lent itself to manipulation through the use of then newly fashionable quantitative methods. Instead she follows John Hajnal, whose work she repeatedly references, in identifying late age at marriage, specifically for women, as the crucial element. For, as Hajnal argued in his seminal 1965 article, "European Marriage Patterns in Perspective," in societies where family households combine most social, political, and economic functions--that is, in most human societies, through most of recorded history--changing the age at which females marry will likely precipitate a host of other changes, from the economic through to the cultural and political. We might look here, he speculated, for the economic transformations that eventually led to the industrial revolution, as young women deferred childbearing and instead contributed their labor to their natal households, directly or outside the household as waged laborers. The nature of the marriage bond itself must change, he suggested: the "emotional content of marriage, the relation between the couple and other relatives, the methods of choosing or allocating marriage partners--all this and many other things cannot be the same in society where a bride is usually a girl of 16 and one in which she is typically a woman of 24... These things are perhaps obvious," Hajnal concluded, "but they have not been much explored, at least not in histories which trace the emergence of modern Europe" (qtd. in Hartman, pp. 23-24).[2]
In other words, faced with the same survival imperative as families in all other agricultural societies, the great majority of families in northwestern Europe responded in ways that fundamentally changed the key institution of marriage--and from there the family, the household, and the wider societies of which they formed the constituent elements. Armed with an impressive grasp of literature by historians, demographers, sociologists, and anthropologists, Hartman sets herself the task of beginning the exploration that Hajnal proposed.
One of her most interesting findings concerns gender hierarchy. Here Hartman draws on recent work by anthropologists, especially David Gilmore, to suggest that a sexual hierarchy that advantages males is neither a necessary nor an inevitable feature of human society.[3] It is instead a "particularly tenacious" variable that presents in both early- and late-marriage societies (p. 188). It occurs not, in the first instance, as a means of ensuring male dominance, but rather as a by-product of strategies designed to preserve and strengthen the households created by these two different marriage patterns. The comparison is instructive, suggesting how what appears to be the same asymmetry between the sexes is in reality "re-enacted, even re-created, in different social contexts" (p. 180). The late-marriage pattern that came to predominate in northwestern Europe made marriage an achieved status--and one that large numbers of men and women would never attain. It simultaneously inaugurated the slow but epochal process whereby men's and women's identities have come to be at least semi-detached from their biological identities as male and female. Composed of two adult members only, in a union at least partially voluntary, these late-marriage households could not afford, and at one level did not need, the strict gender boundaries characteristic of early-marriage households. The exigencies of running this kind of household dictated that women must on occasion act, and be regarded as, "deputy husbands"; their age and the experience that they had accrued as single women equipped them to do so. Thus a rough kind of equality rooted in practical necessity characterized late-marriage households, even if the divide between women's and men's work remained, as it remains today, a kind of "semipermeable membrane" that women passed through more readily than men.[4] Then, more strongly than now, "woman's work" signaled degradation.
Yet the blurring of the lines of demarcation between men's and women's roles--their growing proximity, within and outside the household--unleashed enormous anxieties, especially concerning male identity. It inaugurated what Hartman describes as a period of profound adjustment, in which men and women had to rethink issues of identity from first principles. In the early modern period, that anxiety accounts for the proliferation of multiple discourses--medical, religious, legal, political, social--that endlessly rehearsed two linked propositions: that the sexes were categorically different, and that women were inferior to men. That God so decreed was taken as a given, even if empirical evidence proved to be equivocal or even contradictory. "Souls have no sexes," wrote one New England Puritan divine. "In the better part, they are both men."[5] After 1750 the assurance of providential sanction steadily lost ground. "For the first time, the idea of preordained male and female attributes, and a sexual hierarchy in men's favour, was openly suspected of having some mortal origins" (p. 262). It is from this point that, according to Hartman, we can date the more conscious focus on gender order that has proved to be, and continues to be, characteristic of the modern age in the West. For Hartman, the long, difficult process of adjustment that began in the sixteenth century might be nearly at an end. In an epilogue that some will see as unduly optimistic, others as didactic if not polemical, she argues that the peculiar trajectory that she describes has given us the means, should we choose, to finally end the system of gendered power relations.
In writing this book Hartman has not tried to produce a revisionist narrative of the Western past, but rather to sketch what such a history might look. She convincingly delineates various ramifications of the late-marriage pattern, ranging from the emergence of popular egalitarian political movements in the early modern period to the problems that planners have encountered when introducing Western models of modernization in parts of the world where early-marriage households remain the norm. Describing the work as "subversive" strikes me as misleading, however, and does a disservice to her achievement. This is a bold prospectus that invites us to "reassess ... what we think we already know about the making of the modern world" (p. 5) by acknowledging the centrality of the household to human history. In her final chapter, Hartman calls for scholars to produce their own histories, by adopting her perspective and building on her investigations. No doubt, she concludes, the resulting histories will continue to feature such major narrative elements as Enlightenment ideals, the growth of nation-states, and capitalist transformation. But these and other developments deemed to be characteristic of "Western civilization"--many of which, as she acknowledges, continue to deserve our respect--will look rather different once we reintegrate the household. They will turn out to owe "rather less than has been imagined to the isolated activity of elite men educated in the classical tradition," and rather more to the "agency and creativity of untold numbers of poor, illiterate persons, women as well as men," who, in acting to meet the "sacred needs" of the family, "laid the groundwork for some utterly novel religious, political, economic, and cultural configurations" (p. 278, p. 94).
Notes
[1]. Hartman uses "Western family pattern" because of its widespread acceptance but makes it clear that the late-marriage pattern was the dominant form solely in northwestern Europe. I am following her example.
[2]. John Hajnal, "European Marriage Patterns in Perspective," in Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography, ed. D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley (London: Arnold, 1965), pp. 101-43; p. 132, quoted in Hartman, pp. 23-24. Hajnal re-emphasized the significance of late age at marriage for women in a sequel article, "Two Kinds of Pre-industrial Household Formation System," Population and Development Review 8 (1982): pp. 449-494.
[3]. David Gilmore, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
[4]. Mary Beth Norton, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800, 1st ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), p. 13, cited in Hartman, p. 131.
[5]. Laurel Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 106, quoted in Hartman, p. 112.
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Citation:
Anne McLaren. Review of Hartman, Mary S., The Household and the Making of History: A Subversive View of the Western Past.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10467
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