Lost Stories of Women’s Alliances and Networks

Abstract

Lost Stories of Women’s Alliances and Networks Claire Schen (bio) Amanda E. Herbert. Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. xi + 256 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-0-300-17740-4 (cl). Eleanor Hubbard. City Women: Money, Sex, and the Social Order in Early Modern London. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. xii + 297 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-960934-5 (cl); 978-0-19-872204-5 (pb). Carol Pal. Republic of Women: Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xv + 316 pp. ISBN 978-1-107-01821-1 (cl). Susanah Shaw Romney. New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century America. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014. xviii + 318 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-1-4696-1425-0 (cl). An early goal of women’s history, and of history “from the bottom up” more generally, was to recover lost stories and histories. Each of the books covered in this review reveals the actions of women in shaping the world around them, stories that the authors argue had been lost over time to a dominant narrative that drew on official, often published accounts of important events. The authors’ thorough archival research unveils the significance of women’s involvement in the development of new economic opportunities and social communities, empires and imperial alliances, and networks built on shared intellectual and sociable pursuits. Women contributed to and even laid the foundations for these larger projects by fostering and maintaining intimate ties among friends, family, and associates. While the foci of the books vary, their early modern female subjects shared a reliance on networks and manuscript, rather than print, culture and exchange. These modern historians—Eleanor Hubbard, Amanda Herbert, Carol Pal, and Susanah Shaw Romney—unearthed women’s networks and manuscript production through careful archival research. We begin with the earliest, chronologically speaking, and the most geographically focused of the books. Eleanor Hubbard’s City Women analyzes one city—London—albeit a large and rapidly growing commercial [End Page 172] powerhouse, with international reach. Networks, primarily those established within neighborhoods and among members of a household, are prominent in her study, as are further examples of the kinds of work in which women engaged that necessitated their use of alliances. As we will also see with Susanah Shaw Romney’s research, Hubbard develops a strong sense of the lives of ordinary women as well as some prominent inhabitants of the city through her use of legal, institutional, and civic archives. These sources allow her to reveal how women described their lives and work as they entered courts and hospitals and interacted with city leaders and officers. She also utilizes print sources that were produced and circulated in London between the late sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. Hubbard organizes her book around the stages of many women’s lives, from their search for positions or preferment through their deaths. Hubbard identifies the twin “anxieties” coursing through the city, “sexual and economic,” and finds that economic concerns trumped sexual ones and created “unexpected opportunities for women” (4; 2). These English women might have understood the concerns of the Dutch women, as we shall see, to maintain the economy on which they and their families depended and that ultimately built an empire. Hubbard’s opening chapter on migrants’ search for employment describes the rapid growth of London’s population, a development that must be acknowledged in writing the history of the city. Hubbard goes into helpful detail on these migrants by drawing upon other published demographic studies and reading the Consistory Court records in an interesting way—to hear the life stories these women told before they gave their depositions. Doing so allows Hubbard to reach conclusions about their age at arrival, revealing that the greatest percentage arrived between eighteen and nineteen and a half years and remained in the city much later in their lives. Their age at arrival in turn explains why the job of “woman broker” existed and why the search for respectable help and a respectable position was so important for female migrants (26). Hubbard also makes clear that independent...