Description:
This book, from a pan-European network of historians from twelve countries, examines the ways that the European urban experience was gendered over time and across borders. Situated in eighteenth-century urban culture, the chapters in this volume evaluate the economic activities and agency of women in these commercial communities. It addresses a number of questions which speak to how women specifically negotiated and articulated their relationship to the gendered urban economy. The book is an integrated collection of local studies, employing both quantitative and qualitative approaches, but with a very coherent approach. It is embedded in an urban / economic / gender approach which unites the chapters and which is drawn together by the editors in their introduction and afterword.
Review Quotes:
'This collection broadens our knowledge about women in 18th-century towns by extending the geographic focus to Scandinavia and central Europe. The contributors examine women's experiences and contributions to a variety of urban settings and provide insight into women's roles as financial brokers, peddlers, migrants, medical consumers, and landholders. The essays put gender squarely at the center of the development of European towns.' - Amy Froide, University of Maryland Baltimore County, USA
'This book demands that we rethink our tendency to categorise, demonstrating dextrously that to do so limits our ability to read the experiences and agency of oft overlooked individuals engaged in the urban economy...In its emphasis on diversity of experience and insistence that agency is a fluid and multifaceted construct, this collection successfully establishes the need for gender to be both a more prominent and better integrated dynamic in our interpretation of the past.' - Nathan Booth, University of Manchester, UK