In Women, Rank, and Marriage in the British Aristocracy, 1485–2000, Kimberly Schutte uses quantitative and qualitative evidence to examine how the aristocracy ensured its continuation—and therefore “power and prestige” (1) through its daughters' marriages. In part one, “The Statistical Side of the Story,” she provides multiple graphs and diagrams about marriage rates (married/unmarried) and types (endogamous/exogamous) across 750 British aristocratic families. Schutte has compiled an impressive database of 6,413 women using peerage and baronetcy genealogies, although she admits the limitations of her methodology: such genealogies are notoriously error ridden. In part two, “The Less Statistical Aspects of the Story,” she uses the diaries and correspondence of around 200 women. This qualitative evidence leads to chapters on the marriage market, family alliances, and elopements. Schutte also includes a useful biographical appendix of all the women who get a mention.

There are some problems: despite excellent use of printed collections of women's papers, all the manuscript sources are from the British Library and a major gap in the secondary literature is James Daybell's work on early modern women's letters. The book also started life as a doctoral thesis and this does still show a bit in over-repetition of the central argument, referencing problems, and chronological elisions that decontextualize evidence (for example, the cultural contours of “the London Season” over time). However, Schutte's book adds much more value to the historiography and scholarship than the shortcomings of its research methodologies and stylistic problems would suggest.

Schutte finds that approximately 50 percent of female members of the aristocracy practiced endogamy over five hundred years, from 1485 to the end of the nineteenth century, and that there was a marked preference shown for marrying into old titled families. A woman's marriage was intended to increase the power and social prestige of the natal family, and when someone like Richard Boyle, first Earl of Cork, “a new man,” married his daughter into an older titled family he discovered that even £10,000 could not buy her social respect.

Schutte is very eager to confirm the argument, à la Lawrence Stone and Jeanne Fawtier Stone's An Open Elite? England, 1540–1880 (1984), that the elite was closed and self-perpetuating. Schutte's aim was to add gender analysis to this argument, proving that women were “vital to the preservation of noble rank identity” (13a3). The approach works most effectively with the qualitative evidence. The impact is powerful when the reader learns how “prodigious angry” Betty Bentinck's family was in 1720 when she eloped with a physician (146). When Sackville Tufton proposed to Mary Sackville, before even speaking to her, apparently “800£ a year pin money, 3000 jointure, and 50,000£ for younger children … was favourably received by Mother and Daughter” (121). Women were the matchmakers and they policed the boundaries of social propriety. When men married outside rank, women could be vicious about their spouses, calling them vulgar and likening them to donkeys.

Schutte admits that the quantitative evidence is more ambiguous about rank identity. The 50 percent rate of endogamous marriages demonstrates “a strong, though not overwhelming [my emphasis], tendency of aristocratic women to marry within rank” (26). After all, the argument could be turned around: if approximately 50 percent of aristocratic women married outside rank, then the question about whether or not the aristocracy was an open or closed elite is left rather unanswered.

Schutte's statistical research does, however, complicate the picture intriguingly. Hypogamous marriage (marrying downwards in title) was avoided. In the seventeenth century, closer to 60 percent of women's marriages were endogamous, and this temporary rise in endogamy was accompanied by a decline in hypogamous marriage, from around 25 percent in the sixteenth century to around 18 percent after 1611, when the rise in baronetcy numbers devalued this hereditary title. Even more interestingly, a continuous decline in hypogamous marriage followed, accompanied by an increase in marriages outside of title altogether, rather than even higher levels of endogamy. Exogamy occurred in over one-third of cases in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, up from about a quarter in the centuries before. The money of the mercantile rich, it seems, spoke louder than the landed estate of a baronet. Indeed, Schutte concludes that it increasingly became the case that “it was better to remain unmarried than to make a bad match” (73). Her statistics for unmarried women (notwithstanding underrepresentation in the genealogies) reveal an increase from less than 5 percent in the sixteenth century to greater than 15 percent in the nineteenth century, which maps exactly on to the point at which British society began to discuss the “problem of surplus women.”

The complexity of Schutte's overall statistical analysis is hard to encapsulate in a short review, and I leave it to the reader to discover the finer details of marriage patterns broken down by decade and the comparison between daughters of the old and new nobility. Some of the most interesting discussion is to be found in Schutte's analysis of the “Britishness” of the British aristocracy. The political context in each century had a considerable impact on whether or not the English were marrying into the Irish aristocracy or the Irish were marrying into the Scottish aristocracy, and so on. Striking, if unsurprising, is Schutte's conclusion that the use of marriage as a means to maintaining rank and status was a system that collapsed in the 1920s. After this, only about 25 percent of aristocratic women married endogamously. This Schutte puts down to liberalization of attitudes, the changing role of women, and the dreadful loss of sons suffered by the British aristocracy during the First World War. However, until this seismic demographic shift, aristocratic rank identity was “personified in the woman” (25) and the culture, at least, of closed ranks depended most heavily on the social (and sexual) restraint of women. Therefore the evidence of this book—both quantitative and qualitative—helps to confirm the conservatism (often manifest in societies through a sexual double standard) of the British aristocracy. It further confirms the remarkable robustness of the cultural fairy tale of a woman marrying well: Schutte mentions the 1981 marriage of Lady Diana Spencer to Charles, Prince of Wales, but the new Duchess of Cambridge also springs to mind.