Amanda Herbert's Female Alliances is at once ambitiously broad and narrowly focused. It is broad in its goal of addressing “all of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain: Scotland, Wales, England, Ireland, the West Indies, and the British colonies in mainland North America” (8) and in its claims to shed light on the lives of women from laborers to aristocrats. In practice, however, this is a much more focused study. Herbert's evidence comes primarily from the lives of “elite” or “genteel” women, the same group that formed the basis of Amanda Vickery's The Gentleman's Daughter (1998). Moreover, each chapter presents a case study closely examining a very small group of women—or, in the case in the last chapter, one woman.
Herbert deliberately uses the term “alliance” to encompass a variety of relationships among women, which she argues were central to the creation of “feminine gender identities” (13). Thus she examines kinship and friendship, but also networks of patronage and employment between women of different status. Beginning with chapters on friendship, gift exchange, and domestic work, she then considers women away from home: those visiting spa towns and, in a very different realm, Quaker women who traveled with female companions on preaching missions. The picture that emerges in this book is one in which women's relationships with other women were essential to their well-being.
In this telling, men were largely absent from the domestic and social spaces in which these networks developed, and the content of Female Alliances reflects this absence. We hear relatively little, for instance, about marriage. Herbert's work thus offers a refreshing shift of focus away from some of the usual concerns of women's history. It also portrays a mostly harmonious society, where women of higher and lower status worked together with little class conflict or resentment. In this respect, her study hearkens back to the women's history of the 1970s and early 1980s and its presentation of women's space as fostering an idealized sisterhood. But Female Alliances does not offer a simplistic vision of “separate spheres”; instead, it delves into the specifics of women's activities in order to reveal female networks at home and abroad. Thus it shows mistresses and servants sweating in the heat and smoke of the kitchen; friends sharing sweetmeats at Bath; and Quaker preachers seeking solace from their “Yokemates” when faced with violence.
Given its ambitious geographical and temporal scope, this is a fairly slim book, coming in at just under two hundred pages of text. It is briskly paced and engagingly written, and Herbert employs visual images to bolster her argument. She makes particularly imaginative use of a 1675 drawing of Bath to illuminate activities in that spa town, drawing the reader's attention to details (like vignettes of children clinging to adult swimmers) that show bathers mixing health regimens with leisure. But I frequently found myself wanting more—more detail, more evidence, more analysis. An example from the chapter on gift exchange embodies both the strengths and weaknesses of Herbert's approach. In the chapter, she presents a close reading of four “gift objects . . . chosen for their utility in reflecting women's experiences” (53): marmalade, perfume, embroidery, and a painting. Her analysis of the marmalade, made by Anne Clifford, discusses the importance of preparing sweets as a way for elite women to demonstrate both domestic skills and luxurious consumption. Herbert argues that the marmalade, which Clifford presented to some female visitors, indicates “alliance and friendly support” (62). In the seven pages devoted to this incident, however, only the last two specifically address Clifford's gift; the rest of the section provides rich context about the significance of fruit, sugar, and domestic production in elite women's lives. We are left with little evidence to support Herbert's assertion of the meaning of this particular gift, as Clifford herself simply noted in her diary that she made it and gave it away. The other sections in the chapter follow a similar pattern. Herbert's arguments are certainly plausible, and the context she provides is fascinating, but the individual gifts she discusses are left to carry the weight of the argument with relatively little concrete evidence to establish what they meant to their participants.
Herbert highlights the importance of female alliances in the last chapter through a discussion of one woman who lacked them. Using Sarah Savage's diary, Herbert argues that Savage's dissenting religion combined with her personality to isolate her from the normal patterns of feminine sociability, and that she suffered as a result. Rather than relying on female friends, Savage turned to religious practices and, above all, books to provide the support and guidance that most women found in each other. Herbert provides a thoughtful and persuasive close reading of Savage's writing, but it is not entirely clear that Savage experienced her social isolation as the great loss that Herbert suggests it must have been. If solace could be found in books, family, and church, then perhaps female alliances were one (important) element of women's identity, rather than the critical factor.
Gaps and questions are perhaps inevitable in such an ambitious study, which traces women's experiences from shops to ships, from cooking to missionary work, and which is equally attentive to the importance of material, emotional, and spiritual support. And the strengths of this work outweigh the questions it raises. Herbert ably teases out meaning from fragments of information such as recipes or accounts along with meatier sources such as diaries and correspondence; readers will find a trove of information about the mundane and quotidian aspects of women's lives as well as more dramatic stories of violence and piracy. If Herbert's claims are often suggestive rather than conclusive, this is largely because of the fragmentary nature of the evidence on which she relies. Female Alliances offers a model for an approach to women's history that employs detailed case studies to illuminate broad social patterns, and it presents an impressive argument for the critical role that female networks played in all aspects of early modern life.
