Working Women of Early Modern Venice. (Reviews).

Monica Chojnacka. Working Women of Early Modern Venice

(The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, 3.) Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. xxii + 188 pp. $32.50. ISBN: 0-8018-6485-2.

Many of us have been waiting for such a book. Monica Chojnacka's monograph Working Women of Early Modern Venice is a nuanced, multifaceted, and imaginative study, which documents the surprising degree of decision-making power and agency middle and lower class women were able to assume in conducting their daily lives. It is based on a wide array of archival sources, beautifully illustrated, and written in an engaging and refreshing manner.

Chojnacka's comprehensive study of census data, the so-called status animarum, spanning the years from 1589 to 1607, is perhaps the most innovative part of her book. It shows, among other things, that the overwhelming majority of married couples (92.7%) chose neo-local residences, that unmarried as well as married men and women were more likely to live with lateral kin than with their parents, and that 16% of all single, i.e. yet-to-be-married, and 60% of all widowed women headed their own households.

This analysis of census data is followed by a chapter on property transactions. It shows that approximately one third of all tax declarations in 1582 were filed by women, most of whom, but by no means all of whom, were widows. Additional data, collected mostly from petitions to the Pien Collegio, support Chojnacka's argument that not only widows, but also married women controlled their own properties -- including their dowries -- as did single women. Moreover, unmarried sisters were able to pool their resources and hold property in common (perhaps in analogy to the Venetian institution of fraternanza?).

The three following chapters document that neighborhoods were important social spaces for women to forge their identities, but that professions or, for newcomers, countries of origin were important markers as well, in addition to marital status. These chapters also show that especially working class women enjoyed a high degree of geographic mobility. They easily moved about the whole city in their daily affairs and changed residences fairly often. In this series of chapters, which are, in addition to the census data mentioned above, based on a close reading of Inquisition trials, Chojnacka furthermore shows how permeable neighborhood communities could be to immigrant women, while mentioning that clustering of foreigners on single streets also occurred.

The final chapter is devoted to an analysis of those institutions which in the sixteenth century were founded to shelter vulnerable spinsters, reformed prostitutes, orphaned or abandoned girls, and badly married women. Here the author argues that as cloister-like as these institutions might have been, they nonetheless connected their boarders to the city at large through the web of charitable donations they disbursed, and because of their explicit task of endowing young girls for marriage. These institutions also helped to foster the creation of all-female communities not based on kinship ties.

Chojnacka's book aims at correcting the pessimistic view of gender relations in early modern Venice others have drawn by focusing on women from the lower classes. The author presents a wide array of evidence to the point. Most impressive is her analysis of residential patterns, which is also an extremely valuable contribution to urban history. Furthermore her analysis of sibling relations is most intriguing, and might stimulate further research on the topic. Less convincing is perhaps her analysis of property relations -- a complex issue, which might have deserved a closer, and more strictly quantitative investigation. I wonder, for example, whether the information stemming from census data could have been corroborated with an analysis of those tax declarations and notarial records which are treated separately in Chojnacka's study? A differentiated treatment of wills and other types of property transactions might also be warranted in order to argue for women's active control of assets -- but these are small p oints compared with the overall value of the book. I wholeheartedly recommend it not only to the small, but growing crowd of Venerianists, but to all early modern historians interested in women's history family history, and urban history.