During a period in which the law bound women to particular social roles, many women rendered themselves necessary and central to economic life by successfully “exploiting gaps” in the structures of patriarchy (p. 17). Evidence of this participation is slowly making its way into in the historiographical record, most recently in Daryl M. Hafter and Nina Kushner’s edited volume, Women and Work in Eighteenth Century France. The book brings together an outstanding group of French historians who collectively strengthen our understanding of women’s contribution to the French economy during the “long 18^th century.”

As the editors note, in a period when everyone worked, it should not come as a surprise to find that women made up an important part of the labor force; nonetheless, the extent of female industry and women’s agency in fulfilling labor roles has received less attention. ^{Footnote 1} Moreover, the extant works overwhelmingly focused on female contribution to production and subsistence that came within the context of the family, with women therein practicing less skilled labor. Thus, Hafter and Kushner are legitimized in claiming that the studies in this collection work to “destabilize the family economy model” (p. 7), and do so in an interesting, and effective way.

While this effort to move from the model of the family economy is not new of itself, ^{Footnote 2} the volume’s strength lies with its breadth, and readers will take from the scholarship a broad and convincing understanding of another of the book’s aims: to show that women’s independent presence in the French economy was more common than we might think. The variety of protagonists and their activities (included, but not limited to printer wives, elite prostitutes, dedicated artists, hard-working tailors) presented in these essays coalesce to offer students of French history a much fuller picture of female labor than that unearthed in earlier studies focusing on gendered labor.

The collection works so well in part due to the existence of a handful of themes that the essays touch upon in complimentary ways. Though these themes are several, for the purposes of this review, I will focus on three in particular: firstly, discrepancies between law and practice in women’s work; second, the notion that women’s labor provided the opportunity for female agency and work identity; and third, the centrality of women’s work to the French economy and economic development, particularly at a time that historians have identified as one of economic contraction. ^{Footnote 3}

The ability to locate female labor in the interstices between law and practice speaks volumes during a period in which legal restrictions hindered many varieties of female activity. The majority of guilds excluded women, and women were denied a legal personality in all but certain exceptional circumstances. Yet, Rafe Blaufarb’s examination of legal cases involving female lordship in Provence demonstrates that “female lords exercised the business of lordship in the same way as their male counterparts” (p. 19). Essays by Jacob D. Melish, Jane McLeod, and Jennifer L. Palmer demonstrate the power of wives and widows in running business ventures, in spite of the statutory view that women were unfit to take control of certain industries. Although cultural dynamics might have prevented some women from navigating the business world as successfully as a man might have (such was the case of Mme Regnaud de Beaumont in Palmer’s essay on transatlantic commerce), the general conclusion seems to be that expressed in McLeod’s essay, that in innumerable cases, “state officials subordinated gender considerations to other interests, family advancement, ideological control, and market expansion” (p. 125). With female labor supplementing tax roles, state officials had no problem turning a gender-blind eye to revenue.

A number of the essays in this volume, including Nancy Locklin’s piece on women tailors, Nina Kushner’s contribution on elite prostitutes, and Jacob Melish’s essay on “the power of wives,” attempt to show that women derived a sense of identity from their work activities, and that certain professions allowed women the agency to make choices about their economic contributions to society. Of all the essays, I found Kushner’s the most convincing in this vein, with her demonstration that women serving as prostitutes in the elite demimonde possessed substantial potential to earn money and wield power over both clients and dependents. Locklin’s article similarly succeeds in showing how it was possible for women to regard their work as a meaningful part of their lives, yet concedes that “the marks of a work identity tended to be found in a very limited number of trades, and only in those identified as ‘women’s work’” (p. 48). Melish presumes that the wives of shopkeepers took satisfaction in their employment, suggesting avenues for identity, willingness, and agency. A difficulty in advancing this theory, however, is a dearth of first-person sources, and the fact that many of the women described are exceptions; thus typical markers of historical identity such as self-expression or outward appearance are less present as ballast for such line of argumentation.

The final theme to highlight is also the one that was most successfully presented throughout the volume–that of the very real presence of successful women workers in the 18^th century. Several of Kushner’s elite prostitutes lived in the lap of luxury and McLeod’s printer widows, as holders of printing licenses, were often the undisputed heads of the households. James B. Collins makes a convincing argument for the crucial role of female labor in the growth of cities and the development of capitalism in 18^th-century Europe and Daryl Hafter demonstrates “the ubiquitous presence of women working in almost every sort of craft” (p. 179). Both Hafter and Collins leave us with an understanding that far from being merely consumers or unskilled contributors to French economic growth, women performed jobs requiring skill and expertise, such as pharmacists, schoolmistresses, and textile manufacturers.

As a whole, the collection successfully meets its aims in challenging French historians to view successful female workers in the 18^th century as typical, rather than anomalies, and is a welcome contribution to the literature of labor and gender in 18^th-century France. Although the editors in their introduction, along with Bonnie Smith in her afterward, concede that further research would only reinforce these early findings, it seems clear that a previous tendency to elide women’s contribution to the pre-Revolutionary economy is unfounded. The brevity of the essays left this reviewer wanting to learn more about certain cases, such as the contribution of women to transatlantic commerce, which Palmer’s essay covered, but limited to the case of one family. One might be disappointed in the paucity of coverage of women’s work and questions of change in the period after the French Revolution, touched on only in Judith A. DeGroat’s essay. Finally, Cynthia M. Truant’s essay “Many Exceptional Women,” about female artists seemed the most out of place in this collection, missing the opportunity to pursue many of the book’s themes, such as that of identity, instead focusing more on the structure of guilds and academies than the actual work of female artists.