Women and Material Culture, 1660-1830/Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age

Women and Material Culture, 1660-1830, edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan and Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age by Carolyn Steedman exemplify this transition, attesting to the strengths of archival research and the power of revisionist readings based on evidence. To vivify and rationalize the unique dynamics between this master and servant, Steedman searches for information about the Poor Laws, existing taxation rates on masters for their servants, the material culture of the area with its differing productions of wool and worsted; she invokes the conventional frameworks of education, religion, advice manuals, love and romance - the idiosyncratic coordinates of life as it is lived, both in history and in actuality. [...]reality is no respecter of "mythology." "Adding women in" to historical narratives requires, as the investigators in the two books demonstrate, empirical research that can retrieve female voices, artifacts, and even the whispers of insight for the hard won enterprise of women's history.