On Bonnie S. Anderson and Judith P. Zinsser's A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present

...I have never been to school...

...I never heard of Jesus Christ...

...They tell the story of European women as an entity, not divided or significantly affected by nationality...

...This is a useful counterweight to a centuries-old approach that presents the history of men as if it represented the history of women as well...

...While offering a broad overview, the authors also stress a few major themes, such as class differences, women's power and influence, and women's struggle against misogyny...

...This kind of specificity is lost through over-generalization...

...New York: Harper & Row, 1988...

...The authors accomplish the difficult feat of reconstructing the past experiences of anonymous, often illiterate women, without portraying them merely as passive victims of circumstances...

...It is an excellent introduction to the subject of European women's FALL • 1989 • 571 history...

...They decided to synthesize recent scholarship in women's history in order "to counter the subtly denigrating myth that women either 'have no history' or have achieved little worthy of inclusion in the historical record...

...but this organization is not as appropriate to a narrative history spanning more than a millennium and encompassing several national entities...

...The authors' disregard for national entities has the effect of emphasizing similarities while disregarding differences...

...Starting from a conceptual framework that is representative of current scholarship in women's history, Anderson and Zinsser go considerably further: They conclude that the similarities of women's condition based on gender are greater than the distinctions between women based on class, nation, or historical era...

...The authors of these important and informative volumes, Bonnie S. Anderson, a historian at Brooklyn College, and Judith P. Zinsser, a member of the humanities department of the United Nations International School, came to their task because of the disparity between their traditional training in European history, which omitted the history and activities of women, and their own growing knowledge of women's history...

...Women's work, whether inside the home or outside of it, has been undervalued...

...Each describes women's physical setting, their work, their familial and property relations, and their ideas and intellectual strivings...

...they take pride in their work, their children, and their own contributions to family and community...

...For example, industrialization proceeded quite differently in various continental countries and in England...

...We learn the exact composition of some fifteenth-century dowries in Avignon...

...In omitting this, Anderson and Zinsser follow a tradition that deals with sexuality and reproduction mostly from the demographic perspective...

...The result of this approach is ambiguous...

...One can argue, and I think Anderson and Zinsser show convincingly, that women also created what has sometimes been called a "women's culture," an alternative mode of thought and organization, a series of "free spaces" in which women could develop their own way of life and formulate their own vision of society...

...The overall effect of this organization is to illustrate the importance of class differences among women, something the authors deny in their basic conceptual framework...

...In the late 1970s, this approach was innovative and called attention to the continuities in the female experience, such as the sameness of housework and domestic work over several centuries...

...It is arresting, certainly, and forces our attention 572 • DISSENT away from the traditional framework of patriarchal history, which is all to the good...

...Finally, the misogynist tradition, which denies women's full humanity, reappears "in every era and every European nation...

...These observations have been widely accepted by historians in the field, although many of them would include in the list of women's commodities the universal feature of control of women's sexuality and reproduction by men...

...I have had no shoes to go in to school...

...We empathize with the learned Renaissance women, forced to give up their sexual and familial role in order to pursue their learning...

...They participated in creating that world, maintaining it, transmitting its values to their children, and, within its confines, they bargained for improvements in their own conditions...

...It also made the self-perceptions of women the focus of attention, especially since most of the documents in the collection were first-person accounts...

...I think God made the world, but 1 don't know where God is...

...To say that the "solution" for transforming the historical account so as to include both men and women as principal actors has eluded the authors of this book is not to say that anyone could have done much better, given the present state of scholarship in the field...

...This may seem to bear out the authors' thesis, but it does so at the cost of distorting the historical evidence by ommission...

...The departure from traditional chronology is probably the most problematic aspect of this book...

...Their book is interesting and well-based in representative scholarship in European women's history...

...It] gives a basic commonality to the lives of all European women...

...The peasant women of this account have dignity...

...As stated above, the accounts of the various groups of women, such as peasants, ladies of the manor, urban workers, and so on, offer a vivid group portrait in which differences by class are dramatically made visible...

...Last, but by no means least, they introduce the reader to a fascinating array of individual women, some wellknown, but mostly not, whom anyone would find worth knowing...

...The description of "The Constants of the Peasant Woman's World: The Ninth to the Twentieth Centuries" is remarkably vivid, precise, and imaginatively reconstructed from historical, artistic, literary, folkloristic, and demographic evidence...

...Such free spaces were often seriously confined by patriarchal constraints, such as the female abbeys and convents of the early Middle Ages, or the female salons of the eighteenth century, which depended for their existence on the salonieres' ability to please the men who supported them...

...These advantages still operate...

...The social histories of "Women of the Castles and Manors," "Women of the Salons and Parlors," and "Women of the Cities" are equally well done...

...It places women at the center of inquiry...

...They have succeeded admirably...

...This theoretical approach leads them to the novel organization of these two volumes...

...The more radical feminist analysis, which sees the question of sexual control by men over women as a central aspect of women's historic situation, in my opinion offers a richer and more complex perspective...

...These negative cultural traditions have proven the most powerful and the most resistant to change...

...Yet in this account it appears that for women the process and the outcome were everywhere the same...

...Further, "until very recently all women were defined by their relationship to men...

...In fact the enactment of labor-protective and mother-protective legislation varied greatly in different countries, as did the specific ways in which welfare-state legislation addressed the needs of women...

...They have provided us with a thoughtful and carefully selected synthesis that is not only worthwhile in its own right but challenging in the questions it raises and fails to resolve...

...It tires me a great deal, and tires my back and arms, . . . I can't read...

...We are told the impressive yet heartbreaking life stories of famous French courtesans in the eighteenth century and are introduced to the new opportunities and limitations under which nineteenth- and twentiethcentury women struggled for education and selfsupport...

...While differences of historical era, class, and nationality have significance for women, they are outweighed by the similarities decreed by gender...

...Most women have always had to work at other than domestic chores...

...I am well aware of the advantages of this approach, because I organized a collection of women's history documents in this way, disregarding chronology and emphasizing aspects of the female experience as organizing principles...

...The broad thematic approach is particularly appropriate for dealing with groups of women who are not easily accessible through traditional sources...

...The organization of this book departs deliberately from traditional historical patterns...

...The authors say persuasively, "Traditional approaches to history must be adjusted and augmented to include the female as well as the male...

...Interestingly, the way this book is organized has the effect of contradicting the authors' thesis in regard to class...

...the double burden "of caring for family and home and earning additional incomes has characterized the lives of most European women and differentiated them from men...

...Women, throughout historical time, have lived in a world dominated by men...

...Above all, women have shared in the major transforming events of history, whether they caused them or not, whether they adapted or transformed them...

...it has the effect of flattening women's history to a degree that distorts its reality...

...The authors explain their conceptual framework in the introduction: Their central thesis is that "gender has been the most important factor in shaping the lives of European women...

...Instead, they tell the story of women by concentrating on women's functions within European society...

...Most women have lived their lives as members of a male-dominated family and have been responsible for childrearing and household maintenance...

...But that is a matter of the authors' philosophy on which reasonable people could well disagree...

...The voices of common women speak strongly and unforgettably, such as the testimony of eleven-year-old Eliza Coats, who told an English parliamentary commission in 1842 that she and her brother pushed carts loaded with coal in the mines...

...It is this later point that is lacking in the design of this book...

...And taking off from Joan Kelly's insightful remark that "one of the tasks of women's history is to call into question accepted schemes of periodization," they threw periodization out altogether, except for major periods such as the Middle Ages, the world from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and the modern world...

...In these volumes they have offered us a somewhat disembodied slice of actual history, the history of women told as though the history of men did not exist...