Amy M. Froide. Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. vii + 246 pp. $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-927060-6.
Reviewed by Michelle Dowd (Department of English, University of North Carolina at Greensboro)
Published on H-Albion (June, 2006)
Marital Status and the History of Early Modern Women
Amy M. Froide's timely and important book Never Married demonstrates that marital status was one of the most significant categories of difference in the early modern period, shaping the historical experiences of Englishwomen between 1550 and 1750. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including financial records, ecclesiastical court depositions, family papers, diaries, and personal writings, Froide provides a wealth of evidence to document the lives of women who did not marry, a group long neglected by scholars of early modern history, who have tended to assume that marriage was the cultural norm in the period. By shifting focus to singlewomen, this study also posits a new interpretative framework for thinking about a variety of early modern social issues, including inheritance, family and kinship, work, and the urban economy.
Froide turns our attention away from what she calls "ever-married" women (wives and widows) to "never-married" women: women who remained unmarried during their lives. The book emphasizes archival research and concentrates particularly on urban singlewomen in the provincial towns of Southampton, Bristol, Oxford, and York. Following an introductory chapter, Froide establishes the significance of marital status to her study in a chapter that distinguishes singlewomen from widows. In her third chapter, she re-examines the history of the early modern English family and inheritance patterns from the perspective of the never-married woman. She then considers singlewomen within the early modern urban economy, discussing these women's work in service, various trades, and business partnerships. Chapter 5 analyzes the important civic roles played by singlewomen in provincial towns, including their roles as moneylenders and (fascinatingly) in some instances as voters. Froide concludes her study with two chapters that look at discursive representations of never-married women, both in popular literature and in writings by singlewomen themselves.
Froide's study refreshingly challenges many longstanding historical narratives about early modern women. For instance, categorizing women in a binary fashion (married vs. not married) has led many historians to claim that unmarried women as a group enjoyed more social and economic independence than their married sisters. Froide complicates this binary logic by introducing the third category of the never-married woman and demonstrating that there were crucial differences between the lived experiences of singlewomen and widows. Most notably, never-married women were far more socially vulnerable than were widows, who enjoyed social, legal, and economic privileges that were not available to lifelong singlewomen. In addition, by rethinking the early modern family in terms of never-married women, Froide dramatically overturns conventional understandings of the nuclear family, revealing the central importance of sibling relationships and extended kinship networks. Looking at women's history through the "prism of singleness" enables Froide to produce an original and compelling account of social and economic life in early modern England (p. 85).
I found Froide's argument to be most convincing and well documented in its early chapters, particularly when her focus is on the family and the urban economy. Her archival research yields examples that are not only persuasive, but rich in detail. I found particularly fascinating her arguments about singlewomen's wills in chapter 3, most notably the ways in which these women sometimes managed to "circumvent the coverture of their married sisters" by insisting that bequests go not to their brothers-in-law, but directly to their sisters (p. 58). Never-Married also demonstrates brilliantly that several chronologies frequently associated with women's economic history do not necessarily represent the lives of all early modern women accurately. She suggests, for example, that economic and employment opportunities for some never-married women, unlike those of other Englishwomen, may have actually increased by the eighteenth century, evidence that contradicts the general hypothesis posed by historians since Alice Clark that women's economic opportunities declined during this period. This is the type of paradigm-shifting research that characterizes Froide's study at is best.
Overall, I felt that the book's final chapters on representations of singlewomen were less persuasive than earlier sections. I was convinced by the basic chronology that Froide presents in these chapters: the lack of recognition of singlewomen in Medieval literature gave way first to the literary acknowledgement of these women and then, by the end of the seventeenth century, to negative stereotypes including the still-resonant term "old maid." However, though Froide openly acknowledges many of the methodological difficulties involved with reading literary sources for historical insights, I still thought that several of her individual examples were unconvincing. For example, Froide posits Robert Herrick's widely known poem "To Virgins, to Make Much of Time" as evidence that "public awareness of lifelong singlewomen came to the fore" in the 1640s. This reading of the poem ignores, among other things, the royalist politics embedded in Herrick's cavalier nostalgia, taking too literally, or perhaps making too much of, the poem's ostensible subject matter. Also, while Froide's argument that the pejorative term "old maid" developed in early modern literature at the same time that singlewomen gained social and economic power is fascinating, this point would be more persuasive if the literary evidence presented in chapter 6 were integrated into earlier discussions of singlewomen's financial independence rather than designated as a separate body of evidence. Along the same lines, the separation between literary representations and the writings of never-married women made in chapters 6 and 7 tends to reify women's life writing as necessarily distinct from other forms of cultural representation. That is, Froide's organization reinforces the notion that social perceptions of singlewomen articulated by mostly male authors existed independently of women's written responses to these ideas, a formulation that oversimplifies the complex textual and ideological embeddedness of all forms of written discourse, including women's personal writings.
Despite some hesitations about the method and argument of her chapters on literary evidence, however, I find Froide's overall conclusions to be convincing, insightful, and significant. Never-Married is a study that will profoundly affect how we think about the history of early modern women. Froide has introduced a new and vitally important category of social difference into our critical lexicon, offering a crucial challenge to assumptions about marital "norms" in early modern England. Froide's scrupulous, original research and insightful findings will no doubt garner Never-Married a wide and well-deserved readership.
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Citation:
Michelle Dowd. Review of Froide, Amy M., Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11839
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