Family History vs. Women in History: A Critique of Tilly and Scott

Abstract

Women, Work, and Family is not just another contribution to the growing market for women's history. Since the publication of Joan Scott's and Louise Til ly's long essay, Women's Work in Nineteenth Century Europe, many histori ans have waited for the expansion of the article into a book.1 Some have hoped to find documentation for the argument tentatively proposed in the earlier piece?that lower class women during the European industrial revolution did not readily incul cate new individualistic but instead clung to tradition, familial values, which determined their behavior in marriage and at work. Other histori ans, skeptical about this argument from the first, waited to see if dubious asser tions about women's atavistic motivations could be substantiated by historical re search. Unfortunately, it is difficult to imagine anyone, of either persuasion, who will not be disappointed by this book. Instead of investigating historical questions about working women's atti tudes and behavior, Professors Scott and Tilly have chosen to write a study which not consider questions about the connections among women's work, status, power, and 'consciousness.' (8) Not only does the book slight these problems, it focuses, perplexingly, not on women, but on an historical epiphenomenon called the family. The fact that the authors have chosen to view the family as the primary locus of women, whose economic, social, and political relations with the