The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany.

The Crimes of Women in Early Modern Germany. By Ulinka Rublack (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. ix plus 292pp. $70.00).

Recently a colleague asked me over lunch that age-old question whether women really have a history, for isn't their story eternal? Ulinka Rublack's book reminded me of the differences that women's history makes. For many of us, the gift to the field arises from learning to interpret what is different, and struggling to merge that knowledge with a greater enterprise. An eternal story in itself.

I say this about the difference a study can make not so much because this excellent book takes us into the specifics of a time and place, sixteenth and seventeenth century Wurttemberg, but because at the heart of the text lies a meditation on sexuality, motherhood, female historical identity, and the early modern legal prescriptions which aimed to establish and to enforce attitudes about these.

In brief, the text consists of seven chapters. The first three discuss gossip and accusation, trial procedures, and property crimes. The final four address crimes of sexual activity, infanticide, and married life. Sex and biology, or the ways women were rendered in terms of these, are dominant throughout. That focus could fuel impressions of women's history as an unchanging story. Rublack's primary argument, however, is that change did occur for women in early modem society through a new ethic of absolute patriarchal order and a policing of the boundaries of female behavior.

The text contains a number of themes: the use of law by elites to reinforce gender hierarchies "rooted in a distinction between 'nature' and 'culture'"; a strengthening of patriarchal order; the naturalization of motherhood; community policing; and a changing atmosphere of crisis and disorder. Because the book divides its chapters into types of crime, it does not move chronologically, nor with any logic related to space. One never loses track of the general idea that women were affected by a changing moral order. But one does not easily maintain a clear sense of how change was occurring according to any one theme. Still, that is not a major drawback.

We learn that crimes for women were not of the same shape as crimes for men. Survival, or better yet thriving, was key for both, yet what thriving entailed for women and how they were allowed to pursue it could be distinct. These women stole in order to support friends and lovers so that they might have the relations they fantasized as possible if just a little more time or a bit more money or a bit more heart could be available. They fell prey to unwanted pregnancies, to infanticide, to lives that they tossed forward onto the road in the hope they might know the autonomy which their day told them was the individual's capacity.

These are largely peasant or working class women, frequently without parents or community support. Little in their lives inspired a belief that complacency would yield improvement. In fact the pregnant, or even sexually active, single woman knew her situation was socially volatile and threatened her own survival. These women aimed to manipulate authorities and confidantes alike in the struggle for what they clearly felt was their right, i.e. life itself, and they confirm the independent mindedness of even the most oppressed or officially subordinated members of a society.

A felt sense of gender bias was not absent, though primarily witnessed in the accounts of slightly older women who stole portions of food so that their pay equaled that of males. Unlike wealthier women whose cases I have seen in Cologne, these working class women did not hint at the bogusness of male judicial authority. But both groups showed evidence of not agreeing with the superior position of men whom they saw as their social equals, that is, as men like their own husbands, sons, and fathers, and as men whose ways they felt long familiar with.

Rublack's book attests to the difference that is women's history, but less so to the difference that women made. One of the things which women contributed to history was their assertions before courts. These documented women's ideas; they had an impact upon understandings of the day. Those whom we meet in the book, charged with petty theft, fornication, or infanticide, show every sign of believing they could successfully live according to values or whims which they knew were officially condemned.

In a number of cases families sought to protect daughters from what they felt was an unduly harsh sentence. The work's references to community norms, and the felt need to protect peaceful coexistence at a local level move across the terrain of contemporary tensions between state and communities. Did the trials of women feed resentment about an invasive state? Yet it seems that German communities made way for the advances of an externally based system of expert authority, including the opinions of Tubingen law faculty. The seventeenth century appears a time of less mercy, even to one's kin. Rublack suggests a link between those attitudes and "post-war" social and economic crisis. Also present was a providential cosmology which interpreted social disaster as punishment of a society whose members did not obey God's will.

There are no statistics of incidence in this book or elsewhere for women. Legal records of this sort are sporty for early modern society. However for the sake of representing gender in the society it might have been fruitful to state at the outset of the book more about the relative proportions of female cases out of all trials. The author reminds us that recorded crime was the tip of the iceberg since communities preferred, when possible, to enact their own disciplinary controls. Was that policy more often pursued with female community members?

Early modern regimes aimed to use law and the justice system to apply disciplinary pressure in the search for a more perfect natural order. The legal historian must confront both the drive to create a more rational, categorical system of crimes and punishments, and all the evidence that such was not humanly possible. The fact that the population remained imperfectly convinced and recalcitrant may speak to the construction of memory--i.e., the assertion by many individuals of a code different from the one which sought to punish them. In fact, the challenging voices of many of these women, their often intially bold rebuttals and self-justifications are refreshing in their steely bravado, although they cover a world of anger, fear, and frustration.