ABSTRACT
The history of women continues to be a growth industry. In 1982, when this chapter was conceived, I lamented that relatively little attention had been given by historians to widows and spinsters and that one might go so far as to say that women had been largely examined through their reproductive capacities and their sexuality. The family has been the Atlas upon whose giant shoulders the world of women’s history has reposed. We have echoed Richard Steele when he said that a woman is ‘a Daughter, a Sister, a Wife and a Mother… no other than an additional part of the species’.1 In so far as all women were daughters, a majority became wives and mothers, and many were sisters, one cannot fault Steele. All women lived in societies in which marriage and motherhood were regarded as the norm, spinsterhood and infertility as a blight, and in which the notion of the family economy, of the family as a composite working unit permitting the sustenance of the whole, was axiomatic. Outside the family was apparently some kind of twilight existence for women. Hors de la famille, point de salut was the pithy phrase recently used by Nicole Castan in the conclusion of her brilliant exposé of female criminality in eighteenth-century Languedoc.2 The women with whom she was concerned-thieves, prostitutes and confidence tricksterswere recruited from cohorts of spinsters and widows for the most part outside the protective influence of the family.
