Ale, Beer, and Brewster in England: Women's Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600.

By Judith M. Bennett (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. xiv plus 260pp. $49.95).

This is a good book, offering much to students and their teachers as well as to medieval historians. Judith Bennett has taken as her subject the development of the brewing trade in England and the disappearance of women from participation as the trade grew in size and prosperity. Her book carefully documents a series of technical and social changes by which the commercial brewing of ale by women was largely replaced by the brewing of beer by men. Beer lasted longer because it contained hops, and so could be brewed in larger quantities and for greater profits. Single women lacked the capital resources for the larger scale operation, while married women who may have been more affluent were legally unable to form partnerships. All women lacked the authority necessary to direct a largely male workforce in brewing enterprises which could employ over twenty men. A further masculinising factor in the brewing of beer was its association with supplying the military and the navy. By the sixteenth century, Bennett shows, men dominated the brewing trade.

The source materials for the history of women's work are always elusive and difficult. Women's work in service areas and small-scale enterprises means that documents are virtually non-existent. Yet we know from fragments of surviving evidence that women engaged in a range of economic activities. Bennett offers a careful discussion of the records of the Assize of Ale. In a separate appendix, to which the reader is courteously directed, she explains the difficulties of the material, its pleasures and challenges, and how she has used the evidence to trace the declining participation of women.

As historians of women continue to point out, women cannot be treated as a single category. In medieval and early modern times, their position was affected by class, marital status, geographical location, and age. Bennett shows how women's legal status as wives was central to the difficulties of their position and their absence from the sources. The legal fiction that wives were under coverture, and therefore that their husbands should answer for them, obscured their presence in the brewing trade. But Bennett also demonstrates that in some villages, wives disappeared into the legal persons of their husbands faster than in others. She is thus able to map the real disappearance of women from brewing separately from the legal fiction which disguised their presence. (pp. 163-70)

Women's participation as citizens can in part by traced through their presence in the gilds. Bennett shows that women were members in larger numbers than had previously been observed; nineteenth-century historians failed to include women who were wives in the count of members of the Brewers' Gild of London. Yet women shared only in some facets of civic life in the gilds. Even a husband who was not a brewer or a gild member was more likely to be at the company dinner than was his wife who was the active worker. (p. 72)

Of broad historical significance is the question of continuity or change. Historians are accustomed to look for transformations, and in the history of women's work, the Marxist paradigm has been dominant. Against the picture of women's work being altered by the impact of industrialisation, Bennett has for some time argued that we need to pay attention to continuities. Women's work over the centuries is more characterised by low status and low pay than it is by change. Within that paradigm of stasis, she traces a series of historical processes which affected the position of women as brewsters and alewives.

Bennett has a chilling view of patriarchy and its workings. If a venture prospers, she claims, women fade from the scene. (p. 11) In early modern times, society became increasingly hostile to women exercising authority. Literary representations of alewives show them as greedy, dishonest and lustful. These negative depictions, which literary scholars have largely ignored, were widely disseminated through society. Bennett argues that such stereotypes help to explain why women were associated with disorder, and why civic authorities and male authorities generally sought to restrict women's participation in brewing.

There are issues in Bennett's book to be weighed by teachers of history: she is good at posing problems and asking questions. Her own engagement with the position of women today, and with her women students who ask questions about women's work, makes the book immediately of interest. In addition she points out that there are methodological issues in self-identifying as a feminist historian. 'You're biased' say her students, leaving the conventional conservative historical establishment in apparent possession of the unbiased truth. (p. 12 & n. 15) Her clear articulation of her position as a feminist historian combined with her careful research make her arguments compelling. There is a message here for both feminist and medieval historians.

Bennett's accessible and important study should make historians more cautious of generalising about broad shifts in the patterns of women's work and encourage more detailed studies of women's participation in individual trades. It should also demonstrate to medievalists that an analysis of gender can provide a new perspective on the complexity of historical change.

Patricia Crawford The University of Western Australia