In a recent piece for the New Statesman, the signature Glosswitch writes this about the political dynamite that is the female body: “Female bodies (well-fed, unshaven, unperfumed, free) are the truly powerful bodies. If they were not, men would not have created so many laws, institutions and doctrines aimed at controlling them and appropriating the work they do” (August 14, 2015). I will return to this thought momentarily.

In Household Politics, Don Herzog opens with a lengthy quote from Jonathan Swift’s poem “The Lady’s Dressing-Room.” In it, the male gaze makes an inventory of the smelly and greasy paraphernalia left behind after a woman’s careful and lengthy toilette: sweat, spit, scabs, and the smelly contents of a chamber pot. The man recoils; how disgusting the female body is under the stays and the powder. Herzog wants us to believe that Swift is not on a misogynist rant; he is making fun of men who cannot handle the physical reality behind the fantasy of “The Lady.”

By using Swift’s poem so early in the book, Herzog wants to do two things: first, give the reader a taste of his sources—poems and plays, satire and songs—and, second, assert that his interpretation of Swift’s poem contributes to the book’s main aim, which is a myth-busting of ideas of gender and the household in early modern England. So, what is the myth? His starting point is that there is a widespread idea that early modern England was so comprehensively steeped in misogyny and the belief in men’s natural superiority over women that people were blind to it and never questioned it. Male superiority, according to this myth, was generally regarded as natural or necessary. Herzog refers to this as “the big sleep thesis” and sets out to dismantle it by showing that there was, in fact, lots of debate and controversy over these issues. The poems, plays, and songs are his main evidence. The busting of the big sleep thesis is part one of his aim. Part two sets out to bust yet another alleged myth: that there was a sharp separation of spheres—public and private—and that men were identified with the public while women were relegated to the private. Here, Herzog argues that the public—private distinction is multifaceted and that even though women were “private” in one sense—they were kept out of political influence—they were very much public in the sense that they were regarded as generally sexually accessible and that their sins (equaling loss of chastity at the hands of men) made them legitimate targets of prying intervention.

In addition, Herzog seeks to establish that the early modern English household is correctly regarded as “political.” His point here is a conceptual one. Politics should not necessarily be understood as having to do with the institution of government. Politics is controversy over legitimate authority, including domestic authority. Contemporary sources reveal—songs and poems again, but now also court cases of domestic violence—that there was a whole lot of conflict in family settings, notably between servants and masters. These conflicts never threatened the social order, since (and here the author claims to have busted his last myth) it is wrong to think that social order requires consensus. Conflict is not a threat to social order but a part of it. In fact, there is a constitutive relation between conflict and social order. Because of the prevalence of conflict, then, Herzog concludes that the early modern household was political.

Now, this reader does not have a problem with any of Herzog’s conclusions: In early modern England, there were diverse views over and debate about women and the family; male authority over wives, children, and servants was not simply and meekly accepted by all. The biggest problem with this book is that we kind of knew that already. This need not have mattered very much if the book had been set up differently. Historians and other scholars of the period might be unfamiliar with these songs and plays. If Herzog had started out saying something like “We know that early modern England was a complex and violent place, marked by upheavals in almost all respects: political, philosophical, scientific, theological, and so on, so let us see what picture we get when we look at popular culture,” then this could have been a good read. The discussion about the concept of politics has the material of an interesting article.

Instead, Herzog sets out—in sardonic tones—to dismantle what can only be described as a straw man. Who subscribes to the big sleep thesis? After reading the book to the end, we still do not know. There is a footnote (n. 8, p. 3) with three references, none to work published later than the 1980s, which are claimed as examples. As foes go, that is a bit meager. Can he seriously think that this is the common view? Occasionally he merges the reader with the foe, slapping a “diagnosis” of conflict aversion on a “you” (p. 193) who is supposed to be who—me?

Herzog’s sources are to a large extent satire, but satire is a distancing genre; it mocks the mainstream, the establishment, received wisdom, pompous certainty, and the vanity of the powerful. Satirical depictions of ridiculous men and of women wearing the breeches do not disprove that the established norm structuring society was male superiority and female subordination. On the contrary, it strongly indicates that the norm was just that. And the existence of controversy shows that the norm was not uncontested; it does not disprove that the norm bottomed out in hierarchical ideas about male and female nature. “Nature” was a normative concept. Songs of satire neither prove nor disprove that female subordination was regarded as natural and necessary among those men whose power might be contested, but not to the extent that they could not wield it freely and—ridiculous or not—make and promulgate the laws and doctrines “aimed at controlling [women] and appropriating the work they do,” as Glosswitch put it. Many early modern women never questioned their appointed lot, but some did. We know that. But they also knew that behind any merry song or lewd poem, they were up against an overwhelming monolith of power, intent on capitalizing on perceptions of women’s nature to keep them ignorant and pliant. Herzog gives scant attention to feminist thinkers of the day, maybe because they are part of the “learned abstractions” (p. 38) of theory, or “blather,” as he puts it. “Men are possessed of all Places of Power, Trust, and Profit,” wrote Mary Astell in Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700): “Who shall contend with them?” Who indeed?

Herzog’s argument taking place against the vacuum that is the “big sleep thesis” easily prompts a reviewer to say the obvious: Any reasonable person knows that there was no big sleep! But we do not know this because there was satire. We know it because power does not work like that. Power cannot afford to sleep, not then and not now.