Amanda E. Herbert. Female Alliances

In this groundbreaking work, Amanda E. Herbert presents an innovative analysis of the range and importance of women's friendship networks in late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century Britain. She offers a fresh methodological approach, drawing on a wide variety of sources, including letters, diaries, account books, recipes, individually and collectively produced material objects, and gendered social practices to create “a series of interlocking microhistorical studies” (p. 16). This approach, coupled with her commitment to presenting women's lived experiences in their own words, yields important new insights into the formation of both gender identity and British national identity during a time of rapid change and growth. Herbert's microhistories focus mainly on elite women, including wealthy Quakers and dissenters, but she closely examines archival and material culture sources to tease out information about these women's interactions with middling and laboring women. In her opening chapter on textual representations of female friendships, for example, she shows how the writings of well-to-do women reflect classical and neoclassical, religious, and medical texts of the time. Skillfully linking key descriptions from scores of women's manuscript letters, she selects telling descriptions that demonstrate the complexity and depth of elite female familial relationships, friendships, and alliances with women of lower social status.

Aesthetics · Art · Elite · Friendship · Identity (music) · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Variety (cybernetics) · Gender Studies · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies