The Prospect Before Her: A History Of Women In Western Europe, 1500-1800

The great insight of social history is that the record of the lives of Great Men offers a skewed vision of human experience. Similarly women's history seeks to address the unbalanced written record of humanity. Olwen Hufton, the author of several previous studies concerned with women and the history of ideas, has crafted a descriptive history of the lives of a wide variety of women over the 300-year period from 1500 to 1800. Her work is neither an act of prescription nor a narrative written as a means to empowerment. Rather, the details testify to the inequality of women's lives. Hufton seeks no single representative woman whose story conveys the experience of women writ large, but instead offers appropriately complicated interpretations of the diverse women she discusses.