Sisters Together: Women without Men in Seventeenth-Century French Village Culture

Abstract

It is often assumed that the institution of the family and all that implied in terms of patriarchal power, settlement patterns, and inheritance customs restricted women within village communities. This article sets out to explore the possibility that there were female-centered households in seventeenth-century France, based on sibling relationships, that these households did not require male suzerainty, and that they may have survived in village communities with the support offemale networks operating through the evening spinning bees. The article focuses on texts that represent a legal dispute over a village fire in Normandy toward the end of the seventeenth century and on the complex ways in which male voices in these texts constituted the lives of the female villagers involved.