In 1703 a luckless excise officer was deputed to fine Jean Johnston and Jean Miller for smuggling. They battered him over the head with a rake, punched him repeatedly, then stripped and redressed him in women's clothing. They shoved the notice about the fine into his mouth and made him swallow it whole. It is the actions of ordinary women like Johnston and Miller that the fourteen authors of Women in Eighteenth Century Scotland draw on to assess how women were agents of historical change in Scottish society.
As the subtitle suggests, the book is divided into three sections. “Intimate lives” examines birthing practices, courtship, illegitimacy, and unhappy families. Particularly notable is Katie Barclay's analysis of how culturally specific and changeable is the concept of “love.” This emerges from her work in the newly developing field of the history of emotions. Like several contributors to the volume, Jane Rendall uses literary methods. Through a case study, she outlines how one elite woman used fiction writing in order to participate in political debates about the reform of family law. This article could as easily have been placed in the second section, “intellectual lives,” which makes extensive use of female writers' work, from autobiography to travel writing to technical scientific texts. Pam Perkins's gendered analysis of Highland travel writing is especially worthy of note. Despite striking similarities in how, why, and where real men and women ventured, she explains how traveling was associated with masculinity and tourism with femininity. Her evidence also suggests women were energetically throwing themselves into the physical challenges of hills, crags and lochs many decades before we assumed leisured women participated in “outdoors sports.” Two complementary articles significantly advance the historiographies of eighteenth-century schooling and of women's and girls' experience of education. Lindy Moore demonstrates that schools for females, often dismissed by historians, produced young women with practical, cultural, and social skills not only vital to their own success in the household or wider economy but highly valued by their family in order to access the “right” social circles. Betty Hagglund delves into women's self-writing to emphasize girls' dependency on informal education, erratic formal schooling and the necessity of sympathetic male relatives. It is a nice touch that one of the girls investigated is Mary Somerville, the scientist featured by Margaret Carlyle and James Wallace in their article. The entrepreneurial schoolteachers discussed by Moore would recognize themselves in Deborah Simonton's assessment of Aberdeen businesswomen in the final section on “public lives.” Simonton shows that despite formal barriers, women were ubiquitous in a variety of trades. One of these was dressmaking, and Louisa Cross demonstrates that the fashionable clothing trade was used to demonstrate civility and cosmopolitanism, increasingly important for national, family and individual identity. Women lived public lives not only through business and consumption, but through exerting political power. Rosalind Carr's evaluation of how women accessed and exerted political influence through landholding is an incisive corrective to the notion that change is the only constant. She shows how land continued to be the source of power for elite women despite the changing context of Union, dynastic conflict, and Enlightenment politeness. At the other end of the social scale, the women examined by Anne-Marie Kilday exerted power through violence in the home, to defend family and livelihoods, and to express community grievances. The range of female experience and behavior encompassed by the collection of essays is vast, from farm girls hungry for reading material to entrepreneurial owners of inns, and from young Edinburgh ladies decorating their dresses with lace to Johnston and Miller's assault on the excise officer.
Clearly women's history in Scotland is developing apace. However, as in this collection, it remains geographically unbalanced. Corey Andrews's study of elites' perceptions of slavery in the West Indies is the only one that deals with Scots beyond Scotland's physical borders. His article brings women into the growing historiography that examines Scots' influence in empire, and it draws Scots into the debate as to how empire was gendered. The rest of the articles deal with Scots within Scotland, though few evaluate their theme evenly across the land. Some regional gaps in the historiography are being filled: Kilday's work elsewhere has coaxed the under-studied southwest from the shadows, and in this book she effectively integrates the area into her study of criminal women. With the exceptions of Carr and Perkins who serve the region well, the northwestern half of the country is touched on but lightly by most contributors. Language need not be an issue: there are plenty of Highland sources to keep Anglophones busy for decades to come. However, scholars who can access Gaelic material are absolutely necessary if we are really to understand women's participation in the culture, society, and politics of eighteenth-century Scotland. This volume has succeeded in achieving a balance between studies of rural and urban areas, featuring some of each and several who consider both. However, considering the point made in the excellent introduction that the majority of the population lived rurally and worked in agriculture, our understanding of the eighteenth century would be enhanced by an increased focus by Scottish historians on rural women. Far from being a criticism of the editors, these observations demonstrate that the collection accurately reflects the state of current scholarship and in many cases develops it in exciting directions.
