A Comparative European Perspective: Comment on "Confronting Continuity"

Abstract

Judith Bennett's elegant essay is timely and thought-provoking. The sometimes explicit, but even more frequently implicit bias toward in the historiography of women's history that she addresses certainly calls for a considered response. In what follows, I offer a series of remarks intended to develop a comparative perspective on the historiographical problem Bennett identifies here. These remarks will be based on recent work concerning continental European women's history during the last 3 centuries. A look at this scholarship, which developed to some extent in dialogue with the dominantly English historiography of an earlier period invoked by Bennett, may serve to expand, enrich, and even to complicate her analysis. First, let us consider the question of continuity versus change with respect to issues of historical period. It remains my impression that the issue of continuities in women's history may loom far larger for historians who investigate the history of ordinary women in pre-industrial (e.g., medieval and early modern) times irrespective of their geographical location. The earlier time frame certainly accounts for some of the perplexities confronted by Judith Bennett in her study of brewing over several centuries; it also accounts for the perplexities confronted by the Annales historians, who have characteristically worked—in Braudelian fashion—within a framework of the longue durA©e. The long focal length of the Annalistes' lens necessarily obliterates individuals, events, and change in favor of structural continuities. In this perspective, even when ordinary people do make an appearance, women—and sexual politics— are all too frequently absent, as Susan Mosher Stuard and other critics have underscored.1