Society for French Historical Studies

Abstract

The Society for French Historical Studies met in Lexington, Kentucky, in March 1997 for its annual look at the state of scholarship in French history. As has been the case in recent years, labor was a marginal category in a conference increasingly devoted to cultural history. However, some of the more interesting work occurred at the intersection between histories of class and the new perspectives provided by scholarship on gender and the construction of identity. Participants in a panel on Gender, Work, and Politics in the Longue Dur?e: The Shifting Boundaries of Women's Work confronted why women's work was valued and remunerated at a rate less than the work of men. Traditional explanations attribute the discrepancy to the ways in which women have participated in production: Female workers lacked formal training or skills, and their work patterns were unstable or trun cated because of family obligations. Social scientists have improved upon such simplistic explanations with complex, well-researched monographs and more imaginative syntheses in the last two decades. Joan Scott, how ever, has challenged social historians to examine problems of causality more closely, suggesting the concept of gender as an analytical tool with which to assess long-term changes that are still understood largely as eco nomic phenomena. The three panelists responded to Scott's call by addressing how women challenged the constructed gender boundaries of women's work in France. Carol Coats examined the cultural assumptions shaping women's work and women's family roles during the sixteenth century. Comparing notarial records from the middle of the century to a set of records from 1610, she showed that widows saw the boundaries of their authority and autonomy increasingly constricted?a pattern supported by other local studies of widowhood during the period. Widows were increasingly denied access to traditional economic activities as well, such as hiring male appren tices. Clare Crowston assessed women's guild systems in Paris during the eighteenth century, examining how gender assumptions contributed to the ways in which they were created and regulated. Economic competition