These past few weeks, I have spent a lot of time thinking about the topics for my historiography essay. The one ‘common denominator” that have always had when looking at topics for my m writing has been that I have wanted to do a transnational history which is related to women and gender. Last semester I took the module “Men and Women 1500-1800”, a module which focuses primarily on the daily lives of women in Early Modern history, and themes such as marriage, women in work and sexuality. What I learned through the models is that in order to study Gender history, especially in the early modern period historians have to take an approach which focuses on what most would call ‘the private sphere’. This is partially due the age old framework that the private is feminine and the public is masculine, as most sources available on women are related to the ‘private sphere’ as women were excluded (at least ordinary women were) from publicly exercising power outside of the domains of the home.
The sources that we looked at ranged from marriage contracts, to private letters, to shopping lists, and court documents. All sources which for most of the time looked at the individual, private lives of women. When reflecting on this, I saw an immediate connection with micro-history. When approaching gender studies, especially in the early modern period historians have to attempt to look at individual stories for most of the time. If women were confined to a private sphere, then it is the private lives of women which will give us a more detailed and accurate picture of women at that period, whilst also showcase their exclusion from the ‘public sphere’. Natalie Zemon Davis is well known for using micro-history as a tool to for studying gender history, most notably in her book ‘Women on the Margins’.
If women are mostly absent from documents relating to economics and property, travel, and even literature and intellectual history during the Early Modern period, it is perhaps through a microhistory, which speaks of ordinary women’s lives, that we will truly be able to paint a picture which reflects the complexity of women’s lives. This could also be relevant to exploring women of upper classes which (outside of immigrant or slave women) had the greatest chance at leading ‘transnational lives’. As Isabelle said in one of her blogposts, Microhistory isn’t actually little, and the exploration of women’s live through a micro-historical lenses could help us position women in a ‘transnational’ or ‘public sphere’, which they rarely appear on in the Early Modern period.