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Sex in an Old Regime City: Young Workers and Intimacy in France, 1660-1789 1st Edition

by Julie Hardwick (Author)
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 6 ratings
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Our ideas about the long histories of young couples' relationships and women's efforts to manage their reproductive health are often premised on the notion of a powerful sexual double standard.

In Sex in an Old Regime City, Julie Hardwick offers a major reframing of the history of young people's intimacy. Based on legal records from the city of Lyon, Hardwick uncovers the relationships of young workers before marriage and after pregnancy occurred, even if marriage did not follow, and finds that communities treated these occurrences without stigmatizing or moralizing. She finds a hidden world of strategies young couples enacted when they faced an untimely pregnancy. If they could not or would not marry, they sometimes tried to terminate pregnancies, to make the newborn go away by a variety of measures, or to charge the infant to local welfare institutions. Far from being isolated, couples drew on the resources of local communities and networks. Clerics, midwives, wet nurses, landladies, lawyers, parents, and male partners in and outside the city offered pragmatic, sympathetic ways to help young, unmarried pregnant women deal with their situations and hold young men responsible for the reproductive consequences of their sexual activity. This was not merely emotional work; those involved were financially compensated. These support systems ensured that the women could resume their jobs and usually marry later, without long-term costs. In doing so, communities managed and minimized the disruptions and consequences even of cases of abandonment and unprosecuted infanticide.

This richly textured study re-thinks the ways in which fundamental issues of intimacy and gendered power were entwined with families, communities, and religious and secular institutions at all levels from households to neighborhoods to the state.
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  1. ISBN-10
    0190945184
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0190945183
  3. Edition
    1st
  4. Publisher
    Oxford University Press
  5. Publication date
    August 13, 2020
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    9.4 x 1.1 x 6.1 inches
  8. Print length
    294 pages
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"In a monograph that now appears on many course syllabi, Hardwick uncovers how women in early modern Lyon took charge of their sexual and reproductive lives with much community support. The scope of the book pertains to "young urban workers"...The book makes bold contributions to contemporary conversations about gender violence and abortion. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, in the recent Dobbs decision, drew on seventeenth century barrister Matthew Hale's writings to claim that "an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment" had "persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973." Hardwick takes her readers across the channel and behind the law's normative façade to show how popular urban mores contrasted with such interdictions and how extensive early modern women's bodily autonomy could be." -- Benjamin Bernard, Eighteenth Century Studies

"Grounded in the archival stories of young workers in early modern Lyon, this study effectively challenges much accepted wisdom about the mechanisms of sexual discipline. Hardwick explores intimacy, illegitimacy, marriage formation and pregnancy through a holistic rending of what she terms the 'archive of reproduction'. This approach offers a nuanced and provocative reading of the complexities of intimate relations that applies far beyond her archival focus on Lyon.... In excavating how local regulation and informal policing worked about reproduction, Hardwick resituates our understanding of the pressures and possibilities for women as a matter of gendered power in significant ways. Simply put, this is an absolute must read for anyone interested in the history gender, sexuality and power." -- Katherine Crawford, Social History of Medicine

"Captivating reading for anyone interested in early modern European social or gender history. By weaving together subtle analysis with deeply human stories, Hardwick gives us unparalleled insight into an almost inaccessible aspect of working people's lives: the world of intimacy and emotion, courtship, and reproduction in early modern France." -- Suzanne Desan, H-France

"Hardwick's book...lays out not just the precarious and contingent lives of workers but also makes a forceful argument for integrating the history of sexuality more fully into the social history of work, showcases an innovative approach to the archives, and redefines our understanding of the relationship between the state and ordinary life in the Old Regime.... The reader comes away with an understanding of both the familiar and unexplored ways that young women and men engaged with one another three centuries ago. We witness their fears about sex and pregnancy, for example, and the ways a single night could change the course of an entire life....Ultimately, Hardwick paints a picture of working-class sexual life that revolved around navigating the constraints and opportunities constructed by a community invested in ensuring that young people could find and keep sexual partners." -- Andrew Israel Ross, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas

"Hardwick has produced a nuanced and persuasive case-study of early modern urban sexual behaviour which deserves a wide readership.... The richness of the material enables Hardwick to situate her subjects within the built environment and rural hinterlands of the early modern city too, and her attention to space (as practised place) and topography enables her to offer evocative reading of the evidence." -- Tim Reinke-Williams, Urban History

"Hardwick's... monograph, based on a diligent exploitation of the municipal and departmental archives of Lyon,...provides a usefully thought-provoking corrective, and an evocative illustration of one of the most important general discoveries of the past half-century of historical scholarship." -- Henry C. Clark, French Studies

"A new, sometimes surprising, and always compelling approach to the history of intimacy in the early modern period....It is also a book about growing up, settling down, or breaking up in old regime Europe....This book represents an incredible feat of archival research....[and] is written in such a lively style that these details lie under the surface....Hardwick's book is part of a major new approach to understanding women's lives in the early modern period in terms of their lived experiences and not only the prescriptions of moralists and men." -- Tom Hamilton, Gender & History

"Hardwick's book convincingly challenges current arguments about eighteenth-century attitudes toward sexuality and, in particular, the disciplining of women's sexuality. This alone make the book worth the read." -- Carol L. White, Clayton State University, XVIII New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century

"Historiography has come a long way since Foucault and first-wave feminism. In Julie Hardwick's compelling study of youthful intimacy in early modern Lyon, the word 'patriarchy' never even appears. This is not because the city was a sexual utopia...but because our understandings of the early modern state, law and gender have changed. A royal edict of 1556 against clandestine pregnancy which supported much of the disciplining narrative turned out to be misunderstood by historians and mostly ignored at the time....Her close reading of hundreds of cases reveals not a parade of sexual transgressions in need of discipline but commonly accepted courtship practices that went wrong.... Far from disciplining young women, then, the Lyon court disciplined men for failing to keep their promises. In so doing they restored women's honour." -- Jan Machielsen, Times Literary Supplement

"Through an examination of young workers' intimacy, Hardwick...upends the commonly accepted idea that disciplining women's sexuality was a major goal of the early modern state and shows how communities pragmatically accepted and managed consequences of physical intimacy, including out-of-wedlock pregnancy....She finds that communities accepted young people's intimacy and pragmatically worked with couples to manage the consequences....The community support systems that developed, encompassing clerics, lawyers, wet nurses, midwives, and landladies, were part of the larger old regime economy and sought to minimize the disruptions of pregnancy to women's roles in the labor force and their chances of marriage later on." -- CHOICE

"An eye-opener and a veritable tour-de-force, Hardwick's book offers a fascinating window into sexual standards in ancien régime France and reveals a stunning and complex system of communal complicity. Her careful exploration of Lyon's archival records sheds new light on the lives and intimate stories of ordinary working-class young adults pre-1789 and offers a new historiography of sex at the time." -- Evelyne M. Bornier, Seventeenth-Century News

"A superb reconstruction of a lost world of intimacy and power. Julie Hardwick's absorbing, enriching work reveals the common language of love; the balance of force and caresses in courtship; the pragmatic concerns of marriage; and the solutions to unplanned pregnancies, showing the capacity of young women and men to shape their own circumstances and tell their stories." -- Laura Gowing, King's College London

"Sex in an Old Regime City explores a topic that seems well beyond the reach of historians: sexual intimacy between urban adolescents at a quarter of a millennium remove. Julie Hardwick's remarkable study is based on the 'archive of reproduction' accumulated around the biological and emotional consequences of that intimacy ― ranging from pregnancy declarations, paternity suits, notarial documents, doctors' prescriptions, religious injunctions, infant autopsies and hospital archives through to billet-doux and foundlings' tokens. Hardwick's humane and sympathetic eye reveals a richly delineated world that has poignant continuities as well as contrasts with our own." -- Colin Jones, Queen Mary University of London

"A boldly written and brilliantly researched tour-de-force. Drawing upon meticulous archival work, Julie Hardwick explodes our understanding of what we thought we knew about pregnancy declarations, licit intimacy, and patriarchal discipline and reveals a far more complex system of communal complicity. Sex in an Old Regime City is a must-read for all scholars of the early modern world, especially those interested in legal, social, and gender history." -- Meghan Roberts, Bowdoin College

"This well-written and impressively researched book sheds important new light on sexual intimacy, reproduction, and marriage among young adults in eighteenth-century France. Stories of the lives and loves of ordinary working people bring their previously inaccessible intimate world to life." -- Clare Crowston, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"Hardwick invites us to ponder the distress and relief of mothers who consigned newborns to fathers or strangers, not to mention latrines and limbo, without implying that they shared our sensibilities or that we can penetrate their sentiments...This searching and subtle account of safety netting in another place and time provides much food for thought. It is not a long book, but it is a big one. It provides an object lesson in how to make the most of records from a world we have lost, with humility and humanity." -- Jeffrey Merrick, American Historical Review

"This remarkable book supplies a model for how creatively to read legal documents to listen in on the secret and the unspoken...Sex in an Old Regime City recounts many intimate relationships between male and female workers, but even more effectively brings to life an entire urban community and animates the ways that love and sex took place within a dense matrix of landladies, bosses, notaries, and priests." -- Jennifer M. Jones, Rutgers University, Early Modern Women

"In her impressive new book, Julie Hardwick provides a compelling account of young workers' intimate lives in Old Regime Lyon based on extensive and exacting archival research. With hermasterful command of the sources,Hardwick vividly illuminates working class heterosexual intimacy in this beautifully nuanced study." -- E. Claire Cage, University of South Alabama, Journal of Modern History

About the Author

Julie Hardwick is the John E. Green Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Family Business: Litigation and the Political Economies of Daily Life in Seventeenth-Century France (OUP, 2009) and The Practice of Patriarchy: Gender and the Politics of Household Authority in Early Modern France.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Oxford University Press; 1st edition (August 13, 2020)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 294 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0190945184
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0190945183
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.23 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.4 x 1.1 x 6.1 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 6 ratings

About the author

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Julie Hardwick

Julie Hardwick

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Julie Hardwick is the John E. Green Regents Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin and works works at the intersections of legal, economic, social and family/gender history in France. She grew up in the U.K, and did her PhD at Johns Hopkins University.

Her new book, Sex in an Old Regime City follows two earlier books, The Practice of Patriarchy: gender and the politics of household authority in early modern France (1998) and Family Business: litigation and the political economy of daily life in early modern France (2009). She has many essays in edited collections, and her articles have appeared in The American Historical Review, The Journal of Social History, The Journal of Modern History, The William & Mary Quarterly, The Journal of Women's History, European History Review, History Compass, and French Historical Studies. She has held two N.E.H year long research fellowships and was the distinguished invited research scholar at the Gender and Work Project at the University of Uppsala in 2014. She was the founding director of the Institute for Historical Studies at UT.

Her next book project is in progress: Hanging Bankrupts: credit, crime and the transition to capitalism.

Follow her on twitter - https://twitter.com/DrJulieHardwick

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