Women's Agency: Then and Now. (2024)

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'Agency' is a venerable concept in the study of women and gender in many disciplines. Examining women's agency in the past has taken on new urgency, however, in the current moment of resurgent patriarchy, Women's Marches, the global #MeToo movement, and anti-femicide protests around the world. I have recently edited a collection, Challenging Women's Agency and Activism in Early Modernity, for which most of the essays began as presentations and conversations at the tenth Attending to Early Modern Women conference, held in 2018 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. (1) The conference theme, action and agency, was one that several members of the organising committee and I decided on while sitting in the airport of Washington DC, on our way home from the Women's March in January 2017, wearing our pink puss* hats. The conference and volume subthemes-choice, confrontation, challenges, and community-also grew out of that conversation, and the experience of collective action that we and millions of others around the world had just shared. For this article-which began as the keynote for the Oxford conference on early modern women's agency-I will briefly survey recent thinking about agency as a concept, both in general and within women's and gender history, and then discuss some of the ways in which women's agency has figured in early modern cultural and economic history over the last several decades. Drawing on Allyson Poska's notion of 'agentic gender norms', (2) I consider whether women's agency might have been a matter of norms as well as actions, that is, whether people expected women to be capable, economically productive, qualified, and skilled while simultaneously ascribing to patriarchal norms about women's weakness and irrationality. I highlight several research areas in which women's agency has been a particularly important theme in recent scholarship, including women's letter-writing, rule, consumption, and business networks, and examine arguments about women's and girls' agency that have emerged in debates about the role of women's work in European economic expansion. At the end I briefly connect early modern developments with some trends in women's work and other aspects of their lives that have emerged because of the COVID pandemic.

Agency has been a key concept in history since at least the rise of the 'new social history' in the 1970s, with social historians asserting that individuals and groups beyond white male elites had the capacity to act, make choices, and intentionally shape their own lives and the world around them to some degree. (3) Debates about how much agency various individuals and groups had have recently focused on consumers and children, among others, and especially on enslaved people. (4) Some historians, along with scholars in other fields, extend agency beyond the human to animals, arguing that although they do not share human cognitive abilities and self-awareness, animals display some degree of intentionality and self-directed action, and thus are agents. (5) Some biologists and ethicists extend agency to plants. In The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, for example, Peter Wohlleben argues that trees experience pain and have memories; communicate with each other in forests, warning one another of impending danger; and sustain the wounded or diseased among their number by sharing nutriments. (6) Suzanne Simard has shown that trees use their roots to share information and nutrients through huge networks of thread-like fungi in what she calls the 'Wood Wide Web'. (7) Plants sniff the air for chemicals emitted by neighbouring plants, and respond by producing protective toxins against insect attacks or growing in a certain direction, or otherwise act in ways designed to produce a better future, one way we can define 'agency'.

Agency has also been extended to non-living objects, including natural phenomena, natural and human-made material structures, technology, and texts. Sometimes this is dispersed among humans and nonhumans, as in Bruno Latour's 'actor-network' theory-the social theory that everything in the social and natural worlds acts or participates in shifting networks-or Ian Hodder's notion of 'entanglement'-the idea that the interrelation between humans and material things is the origin and defining characteristic of human culture. (8) This notion might seem very postmodern, especially when it is couched in high-theory speak, but we premodernists are very familiar with people who think nature and the objects within it have agency, as nearly everyone we study did. In fact, some scientists who study the development of the human brain point out that a propensity to see agents everywhere is a logical evolutionary adaptation. Our minds have a bias towards over-detection of agency because this is usually a less dangerous error than missing a predator lurking behind a rock. As Jennifer Larson writes in her history of Greek religion, this is why 'our agent detection tool tends to be hyperactive' and we see purposive beings everywhere. (9) In many languages, grammar encourages us to find agents. We correct students and criticize politicians and lawyers who rely on the passive voice: mistakes were made, children were killed.

'Agency' has been an enduring notion in women's and gender studies as well, one of four key concepts highlighted in a 2016 forum in Gender & History. (10) Here the historian of modern Africa Lynn Thomas provides a sensitive discussion of why agency has been such a powerful concept, particularly for periods and places in which scholars seek to overcome an emphasis on victimisation or passivity. (11) She critiques the limitations of what she terms 'agency as argument', the ways that 'agency often slips from being a conceptual tool or starting point to a concluding argument, with statements like "African women had agency" standing as the impoverished punchlines of empirically rich studies'. (12) Agency, she asserts, has become a 'safety' argument, that is, an uncontroversial conclusion applicable to nearly every situation. (The same is true, I would argue, about 'gender is socially constructed'. Forty years ago this was a novel idea, and now it's the starting point and does not have to be demonstrated.)

In critiquing agency as argument, Thomas agrees with Joan Scott, who has also commented about ways in which histories 'designed to celebrate women's agency began to seem predictable and repetitious, just more information garnered to prove a point that had already been made'. (13) Ultimately both Thomas and Scott do not reject the concept of agency in women's and gender history, however, but instead argue that we must be open to its different, historically contingent forms and, in Thomas's words, 'to the multiple motivations that undergird meaningful action, motivations that exceed rational calculation and articulated intentions to include collective fantasies, psychical desires and struggles just to get by'. (14)

Scholars of the early modern period have been important voices in these discussions of agency. Here the most important recent contribution has been Allyson Poska's, in a 2018 forum in Gender and History on early modern patriarchy. (15) There she discusses what she labels 'agentic gender norms', by which she means a parallel set of expectations, shared by women and men alike, in which women were viewed as capable, economically productive, rational, qualified, skilled, and competent. These did not displace the standard patriarchal norms in which women were judged mentally, physically, and morally inferior, and thus as subject to male authority, but operated alongside them. Poska notes that across Europe queens and noblewomen were expected to engage in political activity on behalf of their families, so were educated to do so. In many places women were given guardianship over children, with full confidence in their capabilities. Laws gave men power over their households, but also limited this, as did inheritance practices and marriage settlements. Women expected to earn a living, and migrated when they could not. Female writers and artists produced works not despite patriarchal disapproval, she argues, but because 'early modern society recognized the talents of female artists' and women writers were 'supported by the literary culture of the period'. (16)

Many of the essays in Challenging Women provide support for Poska's idea. Grethe Jacobsen notes that sixteenth-century Danish kings chose noblewomen as crown fief holders-individuals with formal power and authority over crown property-because they expected the women would administer royal estates effectively. They did just that, but the fact that women made up 15 per cent of all crown fief holders during the sixteenth century was ignored by contemporaries and by later historians unable to imagine non-royal women holding formal power. (17) Joyce de Vries explores the ways in which seventeenth-century artisan families in Bologna included looms and thread in the trousseaux they provided for daughters because they expected women would support their marital families through textile production. The goods a bride brought with her to her marriage ensured some continuity with the past and provided a material base for the future, anchoring a rich and nuanced realm of female agency in early modern Italy. (18)

Early modern women thought and wrote about agency as well as exercising it. As Mihoko Suzuki explains, 350 years before Peter Wohlleben and Suzanne Simand argued for the sentience of trees, Margaret Cavendish wrote 'A Dialogue between an Oak, and a Man Cutting it down', in which the oak pleads with the man to let it stand, and 'let me live the Life that Nature gave'. When the man argues that the oak could be transformed into a ship-'Thus shall you round the world, new land to find'-the oak characterises this transformation into a ship as subjection: 'With sails and ropes, men will my body tie; | And I, a prisoner have no liberty.' In other poems concerning the environment and the earth, Suzuki notes, Cavendish anticipates twenty-first-century understandings of humans' destructive effects on the environment. Her series of poems on atoms, in which she assigns not only motion, but also agency, to matter, offers parallels with contemporary concepts of 'vibrant matter' and notions that objects or nature have agency. Cavendish's writings about animals, plants, the environment, and matter led her to challenge the prevailing assumption of the unquestioned superiority and dominion of man over all creation, and to critique man's use and abuse of all other creatures and the natural environment, thus also anticipating recent ecofeminism. (19)

In the essay that opens the collection, Angela McShane demonstrates that white women of all social classes in Britain and colonial North America, from indentured servants to Quaker matriarchs, smoked and took snuff, a practice that enabled freedom of conversation in a mixed social sphere, and created a canvas on which women could 'proclaim' themselves through actions and objects. (20) Tobacco use required much paraphernalia, and shops in larger cities offered pipes and tobacco boxes made especially for women, who then decorated and personalised them. One of these has initials and a hand-drawn phallic image in the bottom, right where your finger goes to pick up snuff. Though the poor were attacked for the pleasure they took in tobacco as in so much else, tobacco habits provided white women of all classes with important emotional support, and time for leisure, which they alone had the power to determine. As other essays in the collection demonstrate, women exercised agency in other ways as well, running family businesses, creating networks for the exchange of portraits, establishing mixed-sex literary circles, and forming writing communities that reached across the Atlantic and the Pacific.

None of this is very surprising for those of us who have been doing early modern women's history for a while, but what Poska is encouraging us to do is drop the clause that often-explicitly or implicitly-precedes our discussion of these findings: 'despite patriarchal norms...'. She argues that women did these things because people expected women to be competent financial managers of family business establishments and knowledgeable patrons of the arts, expected women to engage in conversation or arguments about literary or religious issues in mixed social settings (sometimes while dipping snuff), expected women to travel if God called them or family circ*mstances required this. With their actions, women thus defied certain social norms, but fulfilled others, what Poska describes as a process of 'making choices about which set of gender norms they acquiesced to and attempted to enforce'. (21) They were thus what we might term code-switchers, choosing one set of norms over the other. Or they recognised that patriarchal norms and agentic norms were not always in opposition to or separate from one another, but they sometimes intersected and braided with one another.

The woman who painted the self-portrait I chose for the cover of Challenging Women, Louise Hollandine of the Palatinate (1622-1709), is an excellent example of women choosing certain gender norms, and how these could shift and intersect throughout one's life. (22) The granddaughter of Britain's James I and the daughter of Frederick of the Palatinate and Elizabeth Stuart, Louise was born in The Hague after her parents had fled from Prague at the onset of the Thirty Years War. She began drawing lessons as a child-part of the standard training for upper-class girls, and fully in line with patriarchal norms-and showed great talent in portraiture, one of the many early modern women who did so. (23) The cover portrait is among her self-portraits, painted when she was in her late twenties, holding a paintbrush and wearing an elegant brooch and necklace, but also a striped shirt and flat multicoloured hat. These latter would have been clearly understood as 'gypsy' apparel at the time, which Louise Hollandine could have found in the printed costume books that were popular reading material in her milieu. (24) Why she chose to portray herself this way is not known, though portraits and self-portraits in clothing understood as 'exotic' were fairly common in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. So her art clearly reflects her own distinctive choices, but her life does so even more: to the horror of her staunchly Protestant family, when she was thirty-five she fled from home in disguise, became a Catholic nun in France, and was appointed abbess of the Cistercian Maubisson Abbey. Here she spent the rest of her long life, painting to the end, including more self-portraits.

Challenging Women and the Oxford conference that inspired this collection are not the only sites where women's agency in the early modern period is being emphasised and explored, of course. When I set out to prepare a fourth edition of Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe in 2018, I tried to integrate the new scholarship that had emerged in the decade since the third edition, an amount that is truly astounding. (25) Not only does that amount itself provide an argument for women's agency-how else could there be so much to write about?-but whatever the topic, most of the new scholarship argues for some level of women's agency. Yes, patriarchal expectations and/or institutions were a powerful force, but in whatever case the author is examining, this woman or these women successfully resisted, and wrote, composed, painted, ruled, migrated, lived alone, had sex and often children out of wedlock, worked, ran businesses, and so on.

As I incorporated new work in my fourth edition, what shrank were men's voices, expressed through laws, treatises, sermons, and other sorts of works, and what grew were women's actions, and sometimes women's voices. The chapter on education got retitled 'Literacy and Letters', to reflect its lengthier discussions of informal settings for women's learning-including households, reading circles, salons, and virtual communities linked through letters-and of women who participated in the new social and cultural institutions of the 'Republic of Letters'. (26) Scholars of women's letter writing, such as James Daybell and Julie Campbell, explicitly analyse letter-writing as an example of agency, through which women expanded their rhetorical and persuasive skills as they developed epistolary strategies. (27) The chapter on gender and power has less on women's exclusion from structures of authority and more on the actions of female rulers and the women who accompanied armies. John Knox, Jean Bodin, and Robert Filmer are still there, but I also note that most early modern dynasties expected women to engage in political activity or even rule on behalf of their families, so educated them to do so. (28) The colonial chapter has expanded sections on European women who moved around Europe's colonial empires, and far more on Indigenous, enslaved, and mixed-race women, about whom we know so much more than we did just a decade ago.

For example, we now know that changing taste among Huron and Algonquin women and men in western New York shaped what colour cloth mills in Yorkshire made, and that preference for certain patterns in West Africa, especially among women, shaped what cloth European traders brought in by sea or African traders by land, as Giorgio Riello and Robert Duplessis have shown. (29) In Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians, Sophie White has examined the ways in which material objects such as beds, windows, laundry soap, and, especially, clothing provide evidence of cultural interdependence and mixture in the Louisiana territory. The choices that Native American women made about how to furnish their homes, how to dress when meeting a priest, and how to distribute their material wealth after death became indicators to French authorities of how well their project of 'Frenchification' was working. As White concludes, women's blending of cultures through material goods served to blur racial lines; their exercise of cultural, social, and economic power was both marked by material culture and produced by it. (30)

In Europe, beginning in the seventeenth century, women of all social classes chose lightweight and vividly dyed calico imported from India for their garments, so much so that commentators complained that differences between social classes were not as evident as they had been earlier when women of different classes wore distinctively different clothing. Attempts to ban imported Indian cloth or expand codes of sumptuary laws to forbid servants and poor people from wearing new types of luxuries so as to prevent this social blurring and bolster local cloth production were never very successful, as women resisted bans and convinced their menfolk to do so. (31) Both men and women paid attention to changing styles, but urban women took the lead in the spread of fashion, whether they were shopgirls and servants buying ribbons and hats or wealthy women purchasing elaborate gowns and wigs. (32)

Changing fashion provided work as well as consumer goods for women. For example, French and Dutch immigrants to London, many of them women, made new types of women's headwear and clothing items such as lace collars and ruffs, introducing new techniques of bleaching, starching, thread-dying, and button-making that they taught to local women; the local London weavers objected, but tax records indicate that foreign households continued to make and sell items. In the late seventeenth century, one-piece mantuas became more fashionable for women than the two-part bodice and skirt, and women also began to use bone, iron, or wooden stays to pull in their waistlines. Because mantuas were a new type of garment, they were not restricted by tailors' guild ordinances, and women began to make them and also to make and fit women's corsets with stays. Male tailors petitioned Parliament in 1702 to prohibit women from mantua-making, but this national campaign failed. Most towns in England continued to try to prohibit women from doing these tasks, but in York the tailors' guild instead decided to admit women, and by 1750 a third of all its members were female, mostly making mantuas, sometimes in shops that had many apprentices. The York mantua-makers were among many groups of women who, as Deborah Simonton and Anne Montenach note in their new collection, Female Agency in the Urban Economy, 'could defend themselves and exploit legal systems with their loopholes and contradictions to achieve economic independence and power'. (33)

And this was not just in England. By Dominique Godineau's estimate, two-thirds of those making new consumer luxury goods in Paris in the eighteenth century were women. (34) In Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France, Clare Crowston demonstrates that elite women-including Queen Marie Antoinette-often owed huge sums of money to their dressmakers, who designed and made elaborate clothing on the assumption that these women would pay, but they did not. As she argues, credit was both a central part of actual economic exchange and a 'cultural currency' through which people built and lost reputations and gained and lost power and influence. Other wealthy people, including noblewomen, also borrowed money at a ferocious rate, sometimes becoming deeply indebted, yet people continued to loan them money for the access to power and influence they could provide. (35) (Rich people refusing to pay what they owe is a very old practice.) Debt and credit were webs in which objects, words, gossip, and sometimes cash went in every direction. (36)

Women's business networks sometimes extended far beyond the local. As Susanah Shaw Romney has demonstrated in New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century America, women formed an essential part of the networks created by religion, family, trade, friendship, neighbourhoods, and godparentage that bound together the Dutch Atlantic. Unmarried servants, soldiers' and sailors' wives, middling-status artisans' wives, poor young widows, and many other women bounced from one port and one ship and sometimes one spouse to another, loaning money, serving as business partners, and trading in goods as they forged a new imperial economy. Married women and daughters worked alongside their husbands and fathers in the family economy, single women and widows worked on their own, and married women carried out different types of work than their husbands. (37)

Women's work has become part of debates over the biggest economic story of the period, conventionally called 'the rise of the West', and now in world and global history circles usually called the 'Great Divergence', using the title of the extremely influential comparative study of England and the Yangzi delta in China by Kenneth Pomeranz published in 2000. (38) The debate is about timing and causes, and generally sets Pomeranz, Bin Wong, and the rest of what is called the 'California School'-who argue that coal, navigable rivers, and colonial possessions were the most important factors-against those who highlight a range of intellectual, cultural, political and economic factors: science, individualism, productivity, Protestant Christianity, and so on, what Niall Ferguson has recently termed 'killer apps'. (39) My colleague and historian of China David Buck has characterised the whole debate about divergence as one about 'pluck' vs 'luck', an apt summary. (40)

Early modern women's work has become a part of this debate because Jan de Vries-definitely in the 'pluck' camp-and more recently Jan Luiten van Zanden, Tine de Moor, and others at Utrecht have argued that the work of young unmarried women was crucial for northwestern Europe's economic breakthrough, what they see as a 'Little Divergence' within Europe that preceded the 'Great Divergence' between Europe and the rest of the world. Young women, they argue, participated in the growing high wage economy, because of which they decided to delay marriage. Thus 'Girl Power', as they term it, was behind the 'Little Divergence'. Being economic historians, they count things, so have come up with what they initially termed the 'girl-friendly' and more recently the 'female-friendly' index of five factors: monogamy, female inheritance, exogamy, neo-locality, and a fifth factor that is either consensus or nuclear households. They have mapped these across Eurasia, finding societies at the two edges to be more female-friendly than those in the middle. They note that their map finds Spain, Italy, and Romania among the female-friendly places, but do not explain why these areas were not part of the Little Divergence. (41) (They also make absolutely no use of scholarship on women's work carried out by people who are not economic historians, by the way, nor anything published in a journal of women's and gender history.)

This narrative of 'girl power' is appealing to students, and the idea that women's work actually did affect economic developments is not one that I want to downplay, as that would take us back to where were forty years ago, when an archivist in Stuttgart told me 'women didn't work in this city in the sixteenth century, so you'll find no sources about that here'. But I try to balance this emphasis on female agency with caution derived from the work of feminist economists and economic historians: that girl power was not necessarily girl empowerment, especially during a period of falling real wages when a longer period working was required to accumulate the resources needed to set up an independent household upon marriage, which remained the surest way to economic well-being. Van Zanden and de Moor's claims have been refuted by Jacob Weisdorf and Jane Humphries, who use a huge range of sources to develop a wage series for unskilled women workers in England. They find that although there are short-term blips upwards, in general women lost ground to men and were not part of any high wage economy. (42) Tracy Dennison and Sheilagh Ogilvie have come to a similar conclusion, answering their own question 'Does the European Marriage Pattern Explain Economic Growth?' with a clear 'no'. (43) So those plucky young women working for wages certainly exist, but the framing story is not simply economic expansion, but also proletarianisation, prostitution, population growth, and poverty, which is what the broad range of research on women's work by historians of all types has taught us.

And there were plenty of plucky women elsewhere, another reason not to wax too rhapsodic about the girl power of north-west Europe. Work by historians of Spain and the Spanish Empire has challenged the notion that women in northwestern Europe were more industrious or innovative than those elsewhere on the continent (thus supporting the findings of the Utrecht group's map, though not their conclusions). Allyson Poska's Gendered Crossings: Women and Migration in the Spanish Empire, for example, discusses a late eighteenth-century effort by the Spanish Crown to recruit peasant families to settle Patagonia in what is now southern Argentina. Voyages included storms, pirates, disease, scurvy, seasickness, mutiny, naval warfare, awful weather, and for a large number of the women in the group, childbirth while on ship. In the cold and windy steppes of Patagonia, and later in new towns outside of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, women bore and raised children-generally twice as many as their counterparts in Spain-fed their families, and cared for the sick and dying, thus fulfilling the gendered expectations of the Spanish Crown. But they also established farms, buying slaves to augment or replace their labour, thus assimilating quickly to colonial ideas about labour and status, and they moved around the Spanish New World colonies to take advantage of better opportunities. (44)

In China, Japan, and India, as well as Europe, cloth production was increasingly commercialised, rural households intensified their labour to produce more cloth, and women were essential to its production, from field to finished product. Cloth production was organised differently in different parts of the world, but everywhere it relied on the labour of men, women, and children. In fact, as Pomeranz notes, by the late eighteenth century it was Western Europe, not China or Japan, that was marked by a growing ideal of a gendered division of labour in which women did not work for the market. (45) A 'cult of domesticity' could be found everywhere, but in China this included what Francesca Bray in Technology, Gender and History in Imperial China has called 'womanly work' for the market even among quite wealthy families. (46) Thus, in China as well as in Europe, agentic gender norms operated alongside the more familiar patriarchal ones. This contributed to a much higher male-female wage gap in Western Europe than in China, a situation that Weisdorf and Humphries's new and fuller data has underscored.

That wage gap did not keep European women from working, of course. Jane Humphries's many articles use nonstandard sources to construct estimates of women's participation in the labour market that differ from those in most other studies. She finds, among other things, that in the nineteenth century-the height of 'separate spheres' and Victorian domesticity-45 per cent of adult women in England earned some income. (47) Maria Agren and a group of her colleagues in Sweden have developed a new method for trying to measure this, recording all verbs and verb phrases that describe tasks in a wide variety of sources from the period from 1550 to 1799, developing a huge dataset of more than sixteen thousand references. This 'verb-oriented method' allows them to analyse quantitatively the incidence, character, and division of work in an era when almost everyone-men, women, and children-did multiple tasks throughout the course of the day, to say nothing of over a lifespan. They find women working everywhere, with married women (and widows) performing a wider range of work than single women, either as a joint endeavour with their husbands or something unrelated. (48) Wives even accompanied the Swedish armies, cooking, doing laundry, and scouring the countryside for food and supplies, as did wives of soldiers for other armies as well. (49) Soldiers' wives who remained at home were expected to support their families on their own when their husbands were away, as were women whose husbands were away for other reasons.

Newer research on women working has not only found that they did, but that early modern people expected them to, thus reinforcing Poska's notion of 'agentic gender norms'. People expected everyone except small children to carry out tasks that would support themselves and their family, if they had one. They expected single women to work, widows to work if they were physically capable, and married women to work. Alexandra Shepard's Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status, and the Social Order in Early Modern England and other recent studies note how married women emphasised their own labour when they appeared in court, both because they did work hard, and because they knew this would get them a more sympathetic hearing from the judges. (50) What Simonton and Montenach see as 'loopholes and contradictions' in legal systems that allowed women to work might actually reflect agentic gender norms in which they were expected to earn a living.

With this insight, I went back to my first book, on German working women, and found the same thing: widows from the cities in Germany I know best appealed to authorities not for charity, but to keep working. Female stocking-knitters appealed for the right to use the knitting frames that male stocking-knitters were using to make their work faster, thus to work more, not less. Female medical practitioners argued that their neighbours and patients saw their healing practices as perfectly appropriate. (51) Sometimes these arguments worked.

But these agentic norms, in which women's and girls' work was viewed as normal and natural, existed alongside patriarchal and gendered ones, in which 'work' increasingly became tasks that carried an occupational label, whereas cooking, cleaning, laundering, care for family members, and anything else done in the home was not 'work', but 'housekeeping' or at best 'domestic work', a lesser form. This more gendered notion of work gained traction, so that by the later eighteenth century, wealthier male officials, professionals, merchants, and craft guild masters increasingly regarded wives and daughters who did not engage in productive labour as a sign of status, and were careful not to call what their female family members did in the home 'work'. As we all know, by the nineteenth century, this fiction came to be part of 'middle-class respectability', and women who did bring in cash through their labour outside or inside the home, by taking in boarders or sewing, for example, downplayed its significance or hid it. (52) And the men who began measuring and counting labour ignored it, which is why we need all those alternative ways of measuring work that people like Humphries have devised to figure out how many women in nineteenth-century Britain worked for money.

Unsurprisingly, patriarchal and agentic gender norms often ran in parallel or intersected within the same person. Protestant pastors stressed the wife's subordination to her husband and described her as his helpmate, but expected this 'help' would include work to support the household. Martin Luther, for example, regularly spoke about wives' responsibility to obey their husbands, but just as regularly praised his actual wife Katharina von Bora for the beer she brewed for the large Luther household, and the fruits and vegetables that came from the orchards and gardens she oversaw. (53) Authorities required a man to marry when he became a craft guild master, as they recognised the work of a wife as well as a husband was needed for the shop and household to survive. But they set wage rates for women at about half of those for men, even for the same tasks, not a ringing endorsem*nt of women's work capacity. They justified this with the idea that all women were 'married or to be married', so were either single and had only themselves to support or were married and were simply helping their husbands. But they also knew that many households were headed by women, because they collected taxes from them or recorded them as 'too poor to pay taxes' in city tax rolls. They recognised that women's working was essential, but curtailed how and where they could do so. Concepts of women's work in early modern Europe were contradictory and inconsistent, a paradoxical view that influenced economic developments during the early modern period, and shaped ideas about what qualifies as 'work' to today, though such views never lessened the work that women did, of course, then or now. (54)

At a University of Glasgow conference, 'Invisible Hands: Reassessing the History of Work', held in 2018, my keynote lecture stressed how much the early modern economy throughout the world ran on girl- and woman-power. (55) I used this to counteract the false narrative many people have about women's work being something new, and to highlight ways the early modern world is similar to the contemporary one. (56) In 2019, 47 per cent of the paid labour force worldwide was female, and in some countries this was more than 50 per cent. Equity in participation was accompanied by greater equity in pay. The gender pay gap persisted, but it was slowly shrinking. The World Economic Forum predicted that gender parity on four broad benchmarks-women's participation in politics and the economy, and their access to health and education-was about a century away. (57)

But the global COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the fragility of many gains for women. The sectors hardest hit by pandemic lockdowns were fields in which women were more likely to be employed-including tourism, hospitality, and retail, as well as jobs in the informal sectors of developing countries. According to a study by the World Bank, women in Latin America were 44 per cent more likely than men to lose their jobs at the onset of the crisis, and more than 20 per cent of women who were employed before the pandemic were still out of work in 2021. (58) Other regions have similar numbers. Mothers in particular left the workforce because their jobs disappeared or schools and day care centres closed and they were faced with the impossible task of handling the majority of childcare and homeschooling. Levels of women in the labour force dropped in 2020 to what they had been in the 1980s. This has meant a dramatic decline in family income, along with food and housing insecurity and potential long-term ripple effects in terms of career advancement and retirement income. Oxfam estimates that women globally lost $800 billion in income in 2020. (59)

And it's not just work. Incidents of domestic violence against women and children have risen precipitously in households where multiple family members were confined to prevent the spread of contagion and alternative safe spaces were closed. 'Safer at home' was an unattainable goal, not a reality. Women, particularly those with young children, report increased levels of stress and anxiety. Maternal health outcomes have slumped around the world over the course of the pandemic. Gender parity in anything is now much further away than it was in 2019. (60)

The pandemic has also shown us how important it is to increase women's participation and leadership in every sector, however. Female national leaders did better than their male counterparts at fighting the virus, with much lower death rates and better infection control. Places where there are strong women's groups to counter intimate partner violence saw fewer deaths, and those with significant female labour union membership saw less gender difference in job losses. Countries and regions where patriarchal gender norms have been loudly reasserted over the last several decades generally fared worse than those in which more egalitarian and agentic gender norms have been maintained or become stronger.

As feminists, we are surprised by none of this, but as scholars of the early modern period, we have something distinctive to add to the discussion. We can help counteract the nostalgia for an invented past and suspicion of change that so often fuels the reassertion of patriarchy with our knowledge that women of the early modern period-real and imagined-were active agents in many ways and places. They were expected to govern, work, furnish their homes, oversee their children's education, travel, write, develop business networks, and handle the family budget, and they did. Their legacy can inspire us as we continue our research on the past, and also as we work to improve women's lives in the present and make the future one in which gender parity is delayed as little as possible.

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

(1) Challenging Women's Agency and Activism in Early Modernity, ed. by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Gendering the Late Medieval and Early Modern World, 13 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021).

(2) Allyson Poska, 'The Case for Agentic Gender Norms for Women in Early Modern Europe', Gender & History, 30.2 (2018), 354-65, in 'Forum: Early Modern Patriarchy', Gender & History, 30.2 (2018), 320-76.

(3) For an overview, see Cornelia Hughes Dayton, 'Rethinking Agency, Recovering Voices', American Historical Review, 109.3 (2004), 827-43.

(4) On consumers, see David Blanke, 'Consumer Choice, Agency, and New Directions in Rural History', Agricultural History, 81.2 (2007), 182-203; and Erica Reischer and Kathryn S. Koo, 'The Body Beautiful: Symbolism and Agency in the Social World', Annual Review of Anthropology, 33 (2004), 297-317. On children, see Kelly Duke Bryant, 'Clothing and Community: Children's Agency in Senegal's School for Sons of Chiefs and Interpreters, 18921910', International Journal of African Historical Studies, 47.2 (2014), 239-58. On enslaved people, see Walter Johnson, 'On Agency', Journal of Social History, 37.1 (2003), 113-24; Jessica Millward, 'On Agency, Freedom and the Boundaries of Slavery Studies', Labour/Le Travail, 71 (2013), 193-201.

(5) Chris Pearson, 'Dogs, History, and Agency', History and Theory, 52.4 (2013), 12845; David Gary Shaw, 'The Torturer's Horse: Agency and Animals in History', History and Theory, 52.4 (2013), 146-67. My thanks to my colleague Nigel Rothfels for these references to agency in animals.

(6) Peter Wohlleben, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, trans. by Jane Billinghurst (Vancouver, BC: Greystone Books, 2015).

(7) Daniel Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses, updated and expanded edn (New York: Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017); Suzanne Simard, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest (New York: Knopf, 2021).

(8) Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Andrew Martin, 'Agents in Inter-Action: Bruno Latour and Agency', Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 12.4 (2005), 283-311; Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relations between Humans and Things (London: Polity, 2012). See also Linda Nash, 'The Agency of Nature or the Nature of Agency?', Environmental History, 10.1 (2005), 67-69; Andrew M. Jones and Nicole Boivin, 'The Malice of Inanimate Objects: Material Agency', in The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, ed. by Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 333-51.

(9) Jennifer Larson, Understanding Greek Religion: A Cognitive Approach (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 74-75.

(10) 'Forum: Rethinking Key Concepts in Gender History', Gender & History, 28.2 (August 2016), 299-366. The forum also discusses intersectionality, gender crisis, and gender binary.

(11) For an interesting reflection on this from a medieval historian, see Barbara Newman, 'On the Ethics of Feminist Historiography', Exemplaria, 2.2 (1990), 687-715.

(12) Lynn M. Thomas, 'Historicising Agency', Gender & History, 28.2 (2016), 324-39 (p. 324).

(13) Joan Wallach Scott, The Fantasy of Feminist History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 38.