UCLA

"By Choice or By Circumstance: Singlewomen in Early Modern France" concentrates on the social and cultural importance of never-married women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During this period, unmarried women appeared at the center of French social, political, and intellectual debates on issues such as proper gender roles, an imagined population decline, and the apparent degeneration of family values and sexual morals. This study explores how working-class and bourgeois singlewomen navigated heightened criticism as well as their seemingly ambiguous positions in the highly patriarchal, family-oriented society of early modern France. Utilizing sources such as Parisian police, court, and notarial records dating from 1661-1789, this project takes a novel approach to the historical study of unmarried women. Rather than examining their lack of marital bonds, it instead focuses on their alternate social relations, such as those they shared with family, friends, community members, and institutional associates. By examining non-elite singlewomen as connected and connecting individuals rather than marginalized outsiders or aberrant outliers, this study interrogates whether the prescriptions and assumptions articulated by authorities reflected the realities of unmarried women’s lives in the early modern period.

This dissertation reveals that singlewomen were active members of their communities who supported French society far more than they undermined it. While unmarried women faced many challenges, such as economic insecurity and unique social vulnerabilities, they also actively employed strategies to overcome these obstacles. By forming expansive networks, planning for their financial futures, and adopting certain lifestyle choices, such as cohabitation and collaboration, singlewomen were able to negotiate the instabilities of daily life and the rise of new institutions of control during the long eighteenth century. Moreover, they performed multi-faceted roles that allowed them to adapt to changing circumstances while still remaining independent. As sisters, aunts, nieces, friends, laborers, employers, neighbors, and surrogate kin, they engaged in mixed economies of care, interpersonal bonds, and community alliances that offered reciprocal aid and mutual stability for members of French society. By buying life annuities, fostering and raising orphaned children, participating in neighborhood life, and acting as bridges between provincial and Parisian associates, unmarried women were central rather than marginalized members of the early modern French public. Ultimately, this work highlights the importance of voluntary alliances, the prevalence of non-traditional household structures, the existence of alternate forms of kinship, and the ways female agency could be achieved and enacted in Old Regime France.