ABSTRACT
Thanks to the emergence and dynamism of new research fields over the past forty years, women and gender historians have been able to (re)define essential concepts and tools of analysis in order to examine women’s past. Some of these findings and observations, however, came mostly from the examination of recent historical events and experiences, and are often wrongly used and applied to other historical periods. Patriarchy is one of them. In early modern Western historiography, patriarchy is usually described as a social organization marked by the supremacy of the father/husband in the family, the legal dependence of wives and children, and the reckoning of descent and inheritance in the male line. But as patriarchy has been theorized in the light of capitalism’s outcomes, this chapter argues that it should not be used as a significant parameter for premodern studies. This chapter proposes, therefore, to revisit the paradigm of patriarchy applied to early modern Europe, with special reference to France. Because it has long been assumed that patriarchy was propped up by a male monopolization of the ‘public’ sphere of market relations, demonstration of prominent female activity in the latter prompt a re-thinking of the reach of patriarchy in real lives. Looking at the lives and experiences of female peasants in eighteenth-century France, mostly to the light of market activities, I highlight the discrepancy between theory—i.e., the written rules, the custom and even the ancient tradition that supported patriarchy—and new social practices and norms that challenged it.
