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tiamatschild) wrote2010-03-29 01:15 pm
tiamatschild) wrote2010-03-29 01:15 pm
Entry tags:
Well. Hmmm.
Over the weekend I read Olwen Hufton's The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe 1500-1800. In a lot of senses it was really interesting and informative and good but -
But.
I could not help but notice that in five hundred pages not one reference was made to any women of color living in Europe, enslaved, free, or indentured. You would think, from this book, that there were no such women in Europe between 1500 and 1800. (The only acknowledgement of any peoples of any colonized country is in the context of wealthy widows gone off to Canada to be missionaries. They don't appear beyond that one reference to them as the objects of mission.) But I know this is not true. It's a major flaw in the work. I kept expecting to come to at least a section on women of color and never ever did!
Jewish women are noted only in passing, and then solely in the context of the importance of women's role in enculturating women's roles, particularly in cultures under siege. While this is obviously vital, it can't at all be the only way in which Jewish women's lives differed from the lives of Christian women. I wanted to know more! But it's never followed up on. (Actually, coming back up to here, I think Jewish women might get mentioned again briefly in the section on widows and guilds, but I can't find it.)
Women who might, if they lived today, consider themselves LGBT are not quite this invisible in the text. There's about two and a quarter pages on them, and passing references to various courtesans as bisexual (this is actually kind of annoying in its own right - "the bisexual Insert Name Here" construction starts to have a certain ring of biphobia to it when it is used consistently as shorthand for how scandalous or unconventional the person referred to is). The first paragraph of this is devoted to essentially saying that gay women are impossible to see in the record, and that nothing can be said about them. Of course, two pages later, Hufton mentions two court cases involving women alleged to be sexually involved with other women, which indicates that women who were attracted to other women were somewhat more visible then that first paragraph would seem to indicate. (Not no evidence, just not as much evidence as for men.)
The next two pages are mainly about women who cross dressed. Some of these people fully enacted masculine roles in all aspects through out their life spans having picked them up. Some of them dropped them again. Hufton makes a very strong distinction between people whose romantic status we know nothing about and the very small number of people who married women, and were brought up by their wives in the courts for fraud. I'm not sure precisely what she means by this distinction. She refers to 'sexual exploits', but in fact the marriage to women does not tell us much about this at all, since the key to the court case being a fraud case would be that the husband delayed and avoided sex with the wife. It's entirely likely that this was a spurious claim in some cases at least, but it's not a foregone conclusion, and I'm uncomfortable with her phrasing. "Sexual exploits" indeed!
All of this is within the chapter entitled "Of Difference, Of Shame, and Of Abuse". It also includes rape statistics for the time period, such as they are, and discussions of marital abuse. This makes me squidgy. You see LGBT people lumped in with rape and abuse fairly frequently, and I never like the implications. It's true that being LGBT tends to make you more vulnerable to the latter two, and her 'difference' includes having a disability or simply never marrying, but...
We should, while I'm here, discuss the framing of the rape statistics.
Okay. *deep breath* Obviously these reported cases are undoubtedly a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of the actual rapes that were being committed. I highly doubt that only three women and children were raped in London in the course of a year. Hufton notes this, and uses the 95 percent of modern rapes are never reported statistic. The thing is -
Actually, the proportion of cases involving children to cases involving grown women is pretty much what modern inquiries into rape and childhood sexual abuse would lead us to expect. According to "Rape in America", a study conducted in 1993 by the National Victim center, 29 percent of all the rapes reported in their survey were committed before the victim was eleven years old. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, children under twelve account for 34 percent of all sexual assault cases reported to U.S. law enforcement agencies as of 2000.
Obviously the picture is unlikely to be exactly the same in early modern England, several hundred years earlier and an ocean away. But what these statistics do suggest is that Hufton is wrong to imply that children were over represented proportionally in the rape reports made to the authorities. The proportions involved may actually be somewhat lower than what was really going on. Most children who are sexually assaulted are assaulted by a family member, which makes it far less likely that child will tell anyone, or that if they do the child's parents will ever report it to the authorities. There are conflicting loyalties here, especially if the punishment for rape is hanging. The sexual assault case of a child is not necessarily easier to bring to court.
I read that paragraph, and it made me angry. It's true we can't know for sure what was going on because rape has never been reported at anything like the rate it is committed, and in the time period in question the issue is complicated by a even more complete non-recognition of marital rape, but children are intensely vulnerable to rape, and a proportion somewhat less than that which we see in modern studies is unlikely to be highly exaggerated. I think it's problematic and potentially dangerous to people now living to suggest that it is.
I don't know what to say about it. In many ways it was a very good and interesting book. Her chapter on riots, women, and the French Revolution is particularly fantastic! I also really enjoyed the discussion of the different mechanisms for dowering. But these things concerned me deeply.
But.
I could not help but notice that in five hundred pages not one reference was made to any women of color living in Europe, enslaved, free, or indentured. You would think, from this book, that there were no such women in Europe between 1500 and 1800. (The only acknowledgement of any peoples of any colonized country is in the context of wealthy widows gone off to Canada to be missionaries. They don't appear beyond that one reference to them as the objects of mission.) But I know this is not true. It's a major flaw in the work. I kept expecting to come to at least a section on women of color and never ever did!
Jewish women are noted only in passing, and then solely in the context of the importance of women's role in enculturating women's roles, particularly in cultures under siege. While this is obviously vital, it can't at all be the only way in which Jewish women's lives differed from the lives of Christian women. I wanted to know more! But it's never followed up on. (Actually, coming back up to here, I think Jewish women might get mentioned again briefly in the section on widows and guilds, but I can't find it.)
Women who might, if they lived today, consider themselves LGBT are not quite this invisible in the text. There's about two and a quarter pages on them, and passing references to various courtesans as bisexual (this is actually kind of annoying in its own right - "the bisexual Insert Name Here" construction starts to have a certain ring of biphobia to it when it is used consistently as shorthand for how scandalous or unconventional the person referred to is). The first paragraph of this is devoted to essentially saying that gay women are impossible to see in the record, and that nothing can be said about them. Of course, two pages later, Hufton mentions two court cases involving women alleged to be sexually involved with other women, which indicates that women who were attracted to other women were somewhat more visible then that first paragraph would seem to indicate. (Not no evidence, just not as much evidence as for men.)
The next two pages are mainly about women who cross dressed. Some of these people fully enacted masculine roles in all aspects through out their life spans having picked them up. Some of them dropped them again. Hufton makes a very strong distinction between people whose romantic status we know nothing about and the very small number of people who married women, and were brought up by their wives in the courts for fraud. I'm not sure precisely what she means by this distinction. She refers to 'sexual exploits', but in fact the marriage to women does not tell us much about this at all, since the key to the court case being a fraud case would be that the husband delayed and avoided sex with the wife. It's entirely likely that this was a spurious claim in some cases at least, but it's not a foregone conclusion, and I'm uncomfortable with her phrasing. "Sexual exploits" indeed!
All of this is within the chapter entitled "Of Difference, Of Shame, and Of Abuse". It also includes rape statistics for the time period, such as they are, and discussions of marital abuse. This makes me squidgy. You see LGBT people lumped in with rape and abuse fairly frequently, and I never like the implications. It's true that being LGBT tends to make you more vulnerable to the latter two, and her 'difference' includes having a disability or simply never marrying, but...
We should, while I'm here, discuss the framing of the rape statistics.
At the Old Bailey and the London Sessions between 1730 and 1830, 294 cases of rape and child molestation were presented (almost three per year) and of these 57 (about one-fifth) were for the abuse of girls under then and 28 of the accused were hanged. This proportion should not be regarded as in any way indicative of the real picture. Confidence in a successful prosecution may have led parents to report child molestation more readily than women would report instances of rape in which their characters were on trial.
Okay. *deep breath* Obviously these reported cases are undoubtedly a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of the actual rapes that were being committed. I highly doubt that only three women and children were raped in London in the course of a year. Hufton notes this, and uses the 95 percent of modern rapes are never reported statistic. The thing is -
Actually, the proportion of cases involving children to cases involving grown women is pretty much what modern inquiries into rape and childhood sexual abuse would lead us to expect. According to "Rape in America", a study conducted in 1993 by the National Victim center, 29 percent of all the rapes reported in their survey were committed before the victim was eleven years old. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, children under twelve account for 34 percent of all sexual assault cases reported to U.S. law enforcement agencies as of 2000.
Obviously the picture is unlikely to be exactly the same in early modern England, several hundred years earlier and an ocean away. But what these statistics do suggest is that Hufton is wrong to imply that children were over represented proportionally in the rape reports made to the authorities. The proportions involved may actually be somewhat lower than what was really going on. Most children who are sexually assaulted are assaulted by a family member, which makes it far less likely that child will tell anyone, or that if they do the child's parents will ever report it to the authorities. There are conflicting loyalties here, especially if the punishment for rape is hanging. The sexual assault case of a child is not necessarily easier to bring to court.
I read that paragraph, and it made me angry. It's true we can't know for sure what was going on because rape has never been reported at anything like the rate it is committed, and in the time period in question the issue is complicated by a even more complete non-recognition of marital rape, but children are intensely vulnerable to rape, and a proportion somewhat less than that which we see in modern studies is unlikely to be highly exaggerated. I think it's problematic and potentially dangerous to people now living to suggest that it is.
I don't know what to say about it. In many ways it was a very good and interesting book. Her chapter on riots, women, and the French Revolution is particularly fantastic! I also really enjoyed the discussion of the different mechanisms for dowering. But these things concerned me deeply.