European Women and Preindustrial Craft ed. by Daryl M. Hafter

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 249 here cannot be represented as a well-integrated whole” (p. 6). In­ deed, they are not; they are a hodge-podge of thoughts that fail to advance knowledge of humankind’s achievements very far. Fre­ quently based on misinformed views of history, the essays are, in fact, often misleading. Mansel G. Blackford Dr. Blackford teaches business history at Ohio State University. He is the author of The Rise ofModem Business in Great Britain, the United States andJapan (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988) and eight other books. European Women and Preindustrial Craft. Edited by Daryl M. Hafter. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Pp. xv+204; illustra­ tions, figures, tables, notes, index. $29.95 (cloth); $14.95 (paper). Revisiting the problem ofwomen’s work and industrialization, this collection of ten monographic essays emphasizes continuities and their meanings, but does not neglect change. Daryl Hafter provides a useful introduction to place the studies in their historiographic context, and notes five common themes on the relation of technol­ ogy and society that motivate their authors. These are: the relation­ ship of women and gender to technical skill; the extent of markets for women’s products; the moment and conditions in which the no­ tion emerged that women are less able than men in technical mat­ ters; the economic and social meaning of domestic craftwork for entrepreneurs, women workers; the ways and means by which female work was socially embedded. Despite the generalizing efforts of the editor, the chapters vary both in the weight they give to the themes mentioned and in their approach. Although many of these essays are excellent and persua­ sive in their individual arguments, together they do not form a cohe­ sive whole. The chief messages I detect in the first section of the collection, titled “Handicraft and Invention in the Eighteenth Century,” are that women were sometimes skilled workers in preindustrial manu­ facture (here the skilled women verdigris producers of Montpellier discussed by Reed Benhamou are emblematic); that sometimes women’s preindustrial skill translated into a skilled position after industrial change (here Inger Jonsonn’s case of Swedish scutchers is salient); and that women’s ability to perform the central craft ofa productive process, despite their exclusion from formal apprentice­ ship, made them critically important to the household production unit in a period of deterioration of guild protection and privileges (here the silk weavers of Lyons so well described by Daryl Hafter are the case in point). In this period of transition to industrialization, there were many trajectories for industries and workers, men and women. 250 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The message in part 2 (“The Persistence of Handicraft in the In­ dustrial Age”) is more general. All of the chapters trace continuity in the 19th century of handcrafting. The role of women and the extent of their agency in the process varies, however. John F. Sweet shows that in Le Puy, where lace making had a long tradition, women sometimes served as intermediaries between the merchant capitalists who ordered particular patterns and types of lace and marketed it, and the poorly paid lace makers themselves, about whom much less is known. Despite their vulnerability as wage earners, the lace makers were able while the industry throve to make deals for better pay. The problem, of course, was that handmade lace, despite its long survival, finally succumbed to a mixture of changing fashion and machine-made lace. Whitney Walton’s study of white embroidery in Lorraine reveals some aspects in common with lacemaking. Interestingly, when Swiss competition loomed, based on more efficient and higher quality embroidery done with a wooden hoop stretching the cloth on which the sewing was done, rural women resisted its introduction. This effort failed, as it simply made the frame costly and unrewarding to merchant capitalists who in turn could not compete in the international market; lace manu­ facturers fought free trade, arguing for the moral value ofhomework as away to “supplement” agricultural incomes. In the city of Nancy, women used the frames, and that branch of the industry stayed more competitive. Nevertheless, shifting fashions, the disappearance of U.S. markets in the Civil War period, and a switch...