Philobiblon

In England and American we’ve had, according to common labels, second and perhaps third wave feminism: thoroughly ethnocentric labels.

The first-wave of feminism, although we’ll never be able to recover it unless time machines are invented, was probably paleolithic, but reading any period of history the continual presence of such “waves” soon become obvious.

I’m reading Natalie Zemon Davis’s Society and Culture in Early Modern France, which contains her famous essay on “Women on Top”. (It must be the single most-cited article that I’ve come across so I thought I had to buy the book: abebooks came through again, it’s amazing how often American bookshops are cheaper, even with the postage. The price of the book was about £1!)

Writing about charivaris, “a noisy, masked demonstration to humiliate some wrongdoer in the community”, Davis says: that while in the countryside protests against second marriages were dominant, in the cities most common were those against domineering wives. She says: “there were important and little-understood changes going on in the relations between men and women in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, reflected in the charivaris against henpecked husbands, in the worsening position of women in French law, and in the independent interest of some city women in Protestantism.” (Stanford Uni Press, 1979, p. 117.)

So much historical writing still seems to read the conduct books and other injunctions to women and assume they were meek and complicit in their own oppression; I very much doubt that has ever been the case!