Reply to the Hilden Critique

Abstract

Patricia Hilden does not like Women, WorK, and Family. She also did not like articles that preceded it. Her dislike is so strong that she feels com pelled not only to offer a critique of book's conceptual approach, but also to attack it in every way she can. That leads her to cheap accusations about our use of evidence. (For example, a quotation we use to discuss dangers of child birth and infant mortality, she says we use to illustrate the dangers of female midwivery, as if we were champions of view held by eighteenth century anti-feminist doctors. Moreover, she says we have distorted context in which Olwen Hufton originally used quote. That is not true. Hufton uses quota tion to talk about what actually could happen at childbirth, just as we do.) It also leads her to downright silly characterizations about our unconscious Hegelian ism. In fact, our approach is if anything, overly materialist, because it portrays family as product of economic forces above all. We argue that it is growth of an industrial economy that creates family wage economy and shapes relations of family members to one another. Demographic patterns, too, book maintains are product of economic transformations. That, it seems to me, is evident even to most naive reader. There is in this book no static family moving through history fulfilling its ideological function. Hilden evidently cannot distinguish Hegelianism from historical materialism. If she can, she has purposely misrepresented book's position so that she can hurl what she considers yet another insult at it. It is pointless to review all of petty distortions that fill Hilden's cri tique, (among them charge that we deliberately obscure sources of archival information so that others cannot check them), but one other must be mentioned. To imply that Eric Hobsbawm is an enemy of women's history who prefers not to take women seriously as objects of research' ' is first to misrepresent (deliber ately) his position and, second, to obscure historical and political bases for that position. A critic of a particular approach to women's history, which Hobsbawm is, is not an enemy of all women's history. Hobsbawm rejects femi nism as an ideological guide to historical investigation, but he accepts impor tance of women as historical subjects. Indeed, his suggestion that women's expe riences as mothers and wives might have helped shape their sense of self is a serious one which has also been put forward by E. P. Thompson and Natalie