The Evolution of Women's Asylums Since 1500.

In this probing book, Sherrill Cohen shows how many modern custodial institutions had their historical roots in the women's asylums of early modern Europe. Cohen argues that the refuges developed to care for problematic women in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Tuscany "laid the groundwork for many of the techniques in correction and social welfare that would subsequently be applied to the populace at large" (3). Her study not only pushes back the chronology of caretaking institutions from the modern era into an earlier period. It also reshapes the debate about the nature of custodial institutions by showing how women's asylums simultaneously embodied progressive policies and social control. The double valence attaching to women's shelters and indeed to women themselves - as respectable or loose living, as transgressors or victims - continues to link the institutions and attitudes of early modern Europe with those of our own day.

The main target for pioneering welfare institutions in early modern Tuscany was the prostitute, whose redemption captured the imagination and energies of citizens and reformers alike. In part one, a useful overview of early modern gender ideology, Cohen situates the prostitute among the other normative female roles of wife and nun which together defined women's options and governed their social behavior. Part two focuses on three refuges for women in early modern Tuscany, each of which represented a different institutional variant. The oldest shelter was the Monastero delle Convertite, founded in Florence circa 1330 as a monastery for repentant prostitutes. Housing between 100-200 women, the Convertite took a traditional, haphazard approach to conversion that emphasized a life of moderation and penitence. By contrast, the Malmaritate, a smaller Florentine institution founded in 1579 to help married prostitutes, approached reform through economic behaviorism, using a system of financial incentives to promote in residents a sense of moral uprightness. A third refuge, Santa Maria Maddalena, took a still different tack. Founded in 1604 in nearby Pistoia as a community for ex-prostitutes, this small, innovative refuge soon became a cloistered convent promoting spiritual activities as the chief means of rehabilitation.

What gave these shelters part of their social force was that they also housed a confused assortment of other anomalous women and girls - rape victims, rebellious girls, abused wives, displaced widows - who were not easily classified as honorable or dishonorable. By caring for a variety of women at risk, asylums played an important role in the continued functioning of the urban social order while giving the gender system some structural elasticity. This mixed clientele only added to the tensions wracking all three institutions. Officials walked a fine and often wavering line between voluntary and compulsory policies, between notions of guardianship and punishment. Cohen concludes that, despite low success rates and the various brakes placed on experimentation, these new foundations did in fact give women a wider range of residential choices and possibilities in the early modern period. Unfortunately these chapters do not explore in any depth how asylums were linked to particular developments in the Tuscan church, state, family, and society, for which the archival sources are extremely rich.

Nevertheless, this section makes a significant contribution to the recovery of women's historical experiences, especially of those lower-class Italian women whose voices are rarely heard. Rendering a nuanced portrait of asylum residents "at work and recreation together" (81), Cohen depicts marginal women as neither heroic nor helpless, but rather as sometimes simple, sometimes savvy individuals whose dreams, abilities, and fates differed as much as did the women themselves.

Part three moves forward in time to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and links institutional developments in Europe and the United States. Cohen identifies the offspring of early modern women s asylums in their recent, specialized incarnations in the realms of correction, education, and housing. Reformatories, hostels, maternity homes, and battered women's shelters all reflect the historical tendency to institutionalize women in order to solve their problems. This opening out into the modern era is both an asset and liability. The connections drawn are stimulating, but the scholarship is thin and lacks focus, and the uneven pacing makes it difficult to plot change over time. Cohen's use of such a broad brush will be provocative to some and unsatisfying to others. Renaissance scholars will surely want more. Yet there is no doubt that in this book Cohen has given us that most powerful of all stories: a usable past.